YOUNG BLOOD SAGA (869)
Arc XII: The Forest of Bones
Chapter XIII: A Cauldron Three Hundred Years in the Making
Big Domi spent the morning showing them the parts of Sky-Steppe that hadn't been involved in revolution, war, or the crew's various indignities — the upper grazing pastures where cloud-sheep drifted in slow herds, the lightning forges where giant smiths captured raw storm energy and pressed it into glass, a quiet overlook where you could see, on a clear day, the curve of the cloud-ocean stretching to a horizon that bent, very slightly, in a way that suggested the whole sky-world was round.
It was, by every measure, a good day. Recovery from the war. A last warm gesture from a friend.
"And that," Domi said, near the end of the tour, pointing toward a dark, distant smudge on the horizon that looked, even from a distance, fundamentally wrong against the bright cloud-scape around it, "is the Forest of Bones. Don't go there."
"Why not," Jesper asked, with the particular tone of someone who had learned, the hard way, that things described as forbidden on this journey tended to become extremely relevant.
"Old magic," Domi said. "Older than the giants, older than Markolab's storms. Something lives there that predates our whole civilization. People who go in don't always come back the same."
"Noted," Jens said.
"There's also the Deep Mountains," Domi added, gesturing at a different, equally ominous landmark. "Also don't go there. Bottomless crevasses, things that hunt in the dark, a general sense of dread that the giants who've explored it describe, collectively, as 'don't.'"
"Also noted," Sam said.
The crew nodded, agreed, and meant it, every one of them, in the moment.
The next morning, Milos was gone.
I. The Forest
Nobody asked where.
Jens looked at the empty space on the deck where Milos usually slept, looked at the distant dark smudge of the Forest of Bones, visible even from the harbor, and said, simply: "Forest."
"Forest," the rest of the crew agreed, in the specific weary unison of people who had stopped being surprised by this particular pattern months ago.
"Why would he—" Sven started, and then stopped himself, because he already knew the answer, because everyone already knew the answer, because the answer was, simply: because it was the one thing he was told not to do, and Milos's entire relationship with prohibition had always been more curiosity than defiance.
"We need to find him before he finds whatever's actually dangerous in there," Tijjani said, already moving toward the dock.
"He's probably already found it," Jesper said.
He had.
II. Baba Yaga
The Forest of Bones lived up to its name with a thoroughness that made even Jens, who had fought through Mordrek's necropolis and a village built from decades of compounded grief, slow his pace as they entered it.
Giant skeletons — actual giants, fallen long before Domi's people had ever settled Sky-Steppe, their bones bleached white and grown over with strange luminous moss — formed the bones of the forest itself, ribcages large enough to walk through serving as archways between groves of trees that had grown twisted and grey, their bark scaled like something reptilian rather than something rooted. Bone houses, small and crude, dotted the forest floor at irregular intervals, and from somewhere in the dark canopy above, a constant low whisper drifted, words in no language any of the crew recognized, never quite resolving into anything you could understand.
"This is," Sven said, quietly, "the worst place we've visited, and that includes the place that was already aware we were already dead."
"At least that place was honest about being a trap," Jesper said.
They found Milos roughly an hour in, and the relief of finding him alive lasted exactly as long as it took to see what he was standing inside of.
A clearing, deep in the forest's heart, held a structure unlike anything else they'd seen — a hut, genuinely a hut, small and crooked, standing not on a foundation but on a pair of enormous, scaled chicken legs, currently folded beneath it in a posture that suggested rest. A fence surrounded the clearing, made entirely of human bones, each post topped with a skull whose eye sockets glowed with a faint, malevolent orange light.
And inside the fence, surrounded by shattered pottery and a spilled, faintly glowing liquid that was rapidly soaking into the bone-white soil, stood Milos, looking, for one of the few times in his life, genuinely uncertain about what he had just done.
"...hey," he said, when he saw them approaching.
"Milos," Jens said, with the specific flatness of a man who already knew this was going to be bad and was simply waiting to confirm exactly how bad.
"I didn't mean to break it."
"Break what."
"That," Milos said, pointing at the shattered remains of what had clearly once been an enormous cauldron, ornate and ancient, now lying in pieces across the clearing.
A sound came from the hut — the creak of old wood and the heavy, deliberate footsteps of something with legs that shouldn't exist supporting a structure that shouldn't move — and the door swung open.
The woman who emerged was old in a way that defied easy assessment — she could have been sixty or she could have been six hundred, her face a landscape of deep lines, her eyes sharp and black and entirely, terrifyingly aware. She wore layers of dark cloth that seemed, in the dim forest light, to move slightly even when she was still, and in one gnarled hand she carried a long stone pestle that she set, with deliberate menace, against the threshold of her hut.
"WHO," she said, in a voice that carried the weight of centuries, "BROKE MY CAULDRON."
"That would be him," Sam said, immediately, pointing at Milos with the swift, decisive honesty of a man who had learned, the hard way, that defending Milos's actions before understanding their full scope was a mistake he intended never to repeat.
"I was just LOOKING," Milos said. "It was sitting right there, and there were these little stone pieces, and they looked like they'd fit together in a more interesting way than they currently were—"
"DO YOU KNOW," Baba Yaga said, her voice rising, the glowing skulls along her fence flaring brighter in apparent sympathy with her fury, "WHAT THAT CAULDRON COST ME? THREE HUNDRED YEARS. Three hundred years of gathering moonflower ash from a flower that bloomed once a century. Marrow from a giant who'd been dead a thousand winters. The tears of a creature that no longer exists anywhere in this world or any other, because I used the last of its kind to weep them. THREE HUNDRED YEARS, and a small idiot with sticky fingers wandered into my home and SHATTERED it because the pieces 'LOOKED LIKE THEY'D FIT BETTER.'"
"In my defense," Milos said, "they kind of did."
"MILOS," the entire crew said, simultaneously.
"SO," Baba Yaga said, drawing the word out with terrible satisfaction, "YOU HAVE CHOSEN DEATH."
The bone fence around the clearing rattled, the skulls' glowing eyes flaring in unison, and before anyone could fully process what was happening, the ground beneath Milos's feet split open and a cage of interlocked bones rose around him, snapping shut with a sound like a closing trap.
"WAIT—" Milos said, from inside it, testing the bars with both hands and finding them, to his evident dismay, entirely solid.
The crew, as one, let out the longest, most defeated sigh any of them had produced in the entire journey.
"Of course," Jesper said.
"Of course," Jens agreed.
"We just won a war," Sven said, to nobody in particular, with the particular weariness of a man who had hoped, perhaps unreasonably, for at least one day of peace before the next disaster.
III. Sam Tries Money
Sam, recovering first, stepped forward with the easy confidence of a man who had successfully negotiated with cat kings and grain monopolists and an entire economic underworld, and approached Baba Yaga with his most reasonable, most generous opening offer.
"We can pay for the damage," he said. "Gold. Silver. We have trade contracts that could secure rare materials for you — moonflower ash, you said? I know merchants who travel routes that might—"
"I don't want your peasant money," Baba Yaga said, with the flat, total dismissal of someone who had heard every version of this offer for centuries and found all of them equally beneath consideration.
"It's not peasant money, it's—"
"It's metal," she said. "Shiny, useless metal. I have lived longer than your entire bloodline has existed. What would I want with silver?"
Sam's eyeballs, the crew would later agree, visibly shook with the specific outrage of a merchant being told, definitively, that his primary tool had no value whatsoever.
"THIS OLD—" he started, and caught himself, barely, the word dying somewhere in his throat before it could fully form.
"Finish that sentence," Baba Yaga said, with terrible interest.
"...This venerable woman," Sam said instead, "has clearly given this matter careful thought, and I respect that, and would like to propose alternative compensation."
"There is no compensation for what was broken," Baba Yaga said. "There is only what I require in its place."
"Which is?" Tijjani asked, already bracing for an answer he suspected he wasn't going to like.
IV. The Demand
"His youth," Baba Yaga said, looking directly at Milos in his bone cage. "His vitality. His future. That particular, foolish, fearless soul of his — burning, chaotic, the kind that runs at five men because it has never once considered that it might lose. I will grind it into my mortar, and from it, I will make an elixir that will keep me young for another three hundred years. It is, in fact, a fitting price. Berserker souls are rare. His is exceptional."
A silence fell over the clearing.
"No," Jens said.
"You don't have a say in this," Baba Yaga said. "The cauldron was broken on my property, by your crewmate, and the price for that is his to pay."
"No," Jens said again, louder, the Thunder Axe already coming off his back.
"NO," Sven agreed, his shield already raised, his usual gentleness replaced, for once, with the immovable fury of a man who had spent the whole journey believing that kindness and strength weren't opposites and had just been handed the clearest possible reason to prove it.
"He's an idiot," Sam said, "genuinely, sometimes a real liability — but he's OUR idiot, and you are not having him."
"That's surprisingly kind of you, Sam," Milos said, from his cage.
"Don't get used to it," Sam said.
Baba Yaga looked at the assembled crew — seven exhausted, recently-triumphant, deeply unwilling-to-negotiate-further strangers, standing between her and the price she had decided was owed her — and her expression, slowly, settled into something that promised exactly the kind of violence the crew had, by now, learned to recognize as inevitable.
"Then," she said, "war."
V. The Horsemen
The forest itself seemed to answer her summons. The whispers that had followed the crew since they entered solidified, gathering into shapes, and from three different directions, three riders emerged, mounted on horses that seemed woven from something other than flesh.
The White Horseman rode a pale horse whose every hoofbeat brought a flash of harsh daylight to a forest that had, until now, existed in permanent dim twilight — Day, given form, riding to meet them with a lance that seemed to shed light like a wound.
The Red Horseman's mount burned, literally, flame licking up from its hooves with every step, the rider himself radiating heat that the crew felt from thirty feet away — Sun, furious and overwhelming, drawing a blade that glowed like a forge.
And the Black Horseman, last and quietest, rode a horse that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, the dark around him deepening wherever he passed — Night, patient and watchful, in no apparent hurry, which made him, somehow, the most unsettling of the three.
"Three of them," Milos said, from his cage, with the particular wistfulness of a man forced to watch a fight he desperately wanted to join. "That seems like a lot."
"You're in a cage, Milos," Tijjani said. "Stay focused on that."
The fight that followed consumed the entire clearing and a good portion of the forest beyond it.
Jens met the White Horseman head-on, the Thunder Axe meeting the lance of daylight in an exchange that lit the forest in brief, blinding flashes, and the fight, while brutal, felt, for once, almost ordinary — strength against strength, the kind of contest Jens understood in his bones.
Sven and Tijjani together took the Red Horseman, Sven's shield absorbing blow after furious blow while Tijjani's shadow spear, dark as the void, found gaps in the burning rider's guard with a precision that contrasted sharply against the Horseman's overwhelming, undisciplined fury.
Sam, Yuki, and Jesper turned toward the Black Horseman, the quiet one, the patient one, and found, almost immediately, that patience made him significantly harder to predict than either of his blazing companions.
Baba Yaga herself, meanwhile, did not wait politely for her summoned horsemen to finish the work. She launched herself into the clearing aboard her enormous stone mortar, steering it with the pestle in sweeping, violent arcs, the vessel moving with a speed that defied its apparent weight, and brought the pestle down against the forest floor with a force that shattered an entire stone ridge at the clearing's edge, sending shockwaves rippling outward that knocked half the crew briefly off their feet.
"SHE'S USING THE PESTLE LIKE A WEAPON," Sven shouted, ducking a second swing that turned a cluster of bone-trees into splinters.
"IT IS A WEAPON," Baba Yaga said, delighted, swinging again, the pestle cutting the air with a sound like tearing fabric, the shockwave alone nearly dislodging Jens's footing.
The glowing skulls along her fence, meanwhile, had begun firing concentrated beams of fire and blinding light into the clearing at irregular intervals, forcing the crew to fight not just the Horsemen and Baba Yaga directly but the entire weaponized geography of the forest itself, skeletal trees twisting and lunging at exposed flanks whenever Baba Yaga willed it.
"SHE CONTROLS THE TREES," Jesper shouted, narrowly avoiding a bone-branch that lunged for his throat. "THE WHOLE FOREST IS A WEAPON—"
"THAT TRACKS," Sam shouted back, ducking a fence-skull's fire beam, "GIVEN EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT TODAY—"
It was, by every measure, the most chaotic, sustained, multi-front combat the crew had yet experienced — worse than the Hel-Wolves, worse than the Sky-Steppe war's largest engagements, because here there was no clean battlefield, no clear lines, just an entire forest weaponized against seven exhausted people who had genuinely believed, that morning, that they were due a quiet day.
They were winning.
Barely.
VI. The Black Horseman's Target
It was during the fight's second hour, with the White Horseman finally broken and fading back into ordinary daylight and the Red Horseman badly wounded but still burning, that the Black Horseman made his move — and the move was not random.
He had been watching. Patient, quiet, the way Night always watched, and what he had seen, across an hour of combat, was a pattern that mattered more than raw strength: the small, fast figure with the curved blades, directing flanking maneuvers, calling out enemy weaknesses, the one whose absence, if it could be arranged, would unravel the crew's coordination far more effectively than killing the largest or the loudest among them.
He went for Jesper.
Not because Jesper was weakest. Because Jesper was load-bearing — the navigator, the strategist's second voice, the fast and difficult-to-predict piece that the rest of the crew's rhythm depended on without fully realizing it.
The strike, when it came, came from the dark itself, a blade materializing from shadow at an angle Jesper hadn't fully accounted for, his attention split between three different threats at once, and it connected — clean, deep, devastating, a blow meant to end something rather than simply wound it.
Jesper went down.
He did not get up.
For one terrible, suspended second, the entire battlefield seemed to stop — Sam's breath catching mid-shout, Sven's shield arm freezing mid-block, Tijjani's spear faltering in a thrust that had been, half a second earlier, perfectly aimed.
Silence, in the middle of the loudest fight of their lives.
Then Jens saw it.
VII. What Jens Became
Something in Jens, watching Jesper hit the ground and not move, simply ceased to be Jens in any recognizable sense.
It wasn't rage, exactly — rage was loud, performative, something you could see building. This was quieter and far more total, a complete absence of everything that had governed his fighting up to this point: strategy, restraint, the careful management of his own enormous strength that he'd practiced since he was twelve years old breaking village gates and learning, slowly, painfully, to control himself.
All of it simply stopped mattering.
He turned from the White Horseman's fading remains and walked toward the Red Horseman — still burning, still formidable, the survivor of Sven and Tijjani's combined assault — and the Red Horseman, seeing him coming, made the catastrophic mistake of believing this was simply another phase of the same fight he'd already been winning a measure of.
It was not the same fight.
Jens hit him with the Thunder Axe in a strike that didn't carry any of the calculated force the crew had watched him use against the Iron Jarl, against Mordrek, against every enemy he'd ever measured himself against. This was something closer to pure, total transfer of everything he had, no held-back reserve, no concern for his own exposure, and the Red Horseman's burning form simply came apart under it, the flame guttering out as the figure it animated was obliterated in a single, devastating exchange.
The ground beneath the strike cracked.
Jens didn't slow down. He turned, immediately, toward the Black Horseman, who had, until this moment, been the most controlled and patient of Baba Yaga's three summoned riders, and found, for the first time since his creation, something that made even Night hesitate.
"You hit him," Jens said, and his voice had gone very quiet, very flat, more frightening in its quiet than any roar could have been. "You hit Jesper."
The Black Horseman, perhaps sensibly, perhaps too late, attempted to retreat into shadow.
Jens followed him into it.
What happened in the dark that followed was something none of the crew, fighting their own battles elsewhere in the clearing, fully witnessed — only the sounds, the impacts, the way the dark itself seemed to flicker and strain under whatever was happening inside it, and when Jens emerged, the Black Horseman did not emerge with him, because the Black Horseman no longer existed in any form capable of emerging from anything.
The battlefield, by this point, had genuinely begun to break — bone-trees splintered for thirty feet in every direction, the stone ridge Baba Yaga had shattered now further fractured by the shockwaves of Jens's unrestrained fighting, the forest floor cratered in places where his strikes had simply continued past their targets into the earth itself.
Baba Yaga, watching from her mortar, her pestle raised for another devastating swing, paused.
"Ah," she said.
The pestle lowered, slightly.
"That one," she said, with the careful, recalculating tone of someone who had survived for centuries specifically by recognizing exactly when a fight had stopped being winnable, "is dangerous."
VIII. The End of It
Jens did not stop.
This was, in its own way, the most frightening part — not the violence itself, which the crew had witnessed in various forms before, but the absence of any sign that it would end on its own, that Jens, somewhere underneath the rage, was still tracking the difference between enemy defeated and threat addressed.
It was Tijjani, finally, who got close enough to do anything about it, putting himself directly in Jens's path with the specific courage of a man who understood, intellectually, that this might genuinely be dangerous and decided the risk was necessary anyway.
"Jens," he said, sharp, cutting through whatever fog had consumed him. "JENS. He's still breathing. I checked. Jesper is still breathing. You need to stop, because if you don't stop, you're going to bring this whole clearing down, and we need to get him out of here, and we can't do that while you're still—"
Something in the words landed.
Jens stopped.
The Thunder Axe, mid-swing toward a bone-tree that had simply been in his vicinity rather than actively attacking him, lowered, slowly, and Jens stood in the middle of a cratered, splintered, devastated clearing, breathing hard, his eyes finding Tijjani's with something that was, finally, recognizably himself again, underneath the residual fury.
"He's breathing," Jens said.
"He's breathing," Tijjani confirmed. "Now help me get him to safety, before you knock down anything else."
Baba Yaga, watching all of this from her mortar, made a decision that centuries of survival had taught her to make quickly when the calculation shifted.
"Enough," she said. "The cauldron's price is paid in other coin today. I have no interest in losing whatever remains of my forest to that one's grief."
"You're letting him go," Sam said, warily, from the bone cage's edge, where he'd been working, throughout the entire battle, on the lock.
"I am recognizing," Baba Yaga said, "that some debts are not worth collecting. Take your idiot. Take your dangerous one too, before he decides my forest owes him something further."
The bone cage around Milos dissolved, the bars sinking back into the cratered earth, and Milos, free at last, looked around at the devastation — the splintered trees, the shattered ridge, the entire battlefield rearranged by something that had, very clearly, happened because of him — and found, for the first time since the war on Sky-Steppe, that he had absolutely nothing to say.
IX. Jesper
Jens carried him out of the forest the same way he'd carried him out of the feast hall, months ago, in Frankia, except this time there was no dramatic teasing afterward, no Tijjani offering knowing comments, just Jens, walking through a forest that had nearly killed his crew, holding Jesper's body with a care that bordered on desperate, checking, every few steps, for the rise and fall of breathing that Tijjani had already confirmed and that Jens needed to confirm again, and again, because once apparently wasn't enough.
The wound, once they got him back to the Bubbly and properly examined it, turned out to be serious but survivable — deep, painful, the kind that would need days of careful rest, but not, as the long terrible moment of silence in the clearing had suggested, fatal.
Jesper woke that evening, groggy, pale, immediately irritated by his own condition in exactly the way the crew had come to expect.
"What happened," he said, his voice rough.
"You got hit," Sven said, gently. "Badly. We thought—" he stopped, glancing at Jens, who was standing very close, very still, his expression doing something he clearly didn't want examined. "We were worried."
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine," Jens said, immediately. "You were unconscious for six hours."
"I'm conscious now."
"Drink this." Jens produced water, and then, when Jesper hesitated, held it directly to his mouth with the same wordless insistence he'd used on Sky-Steppe.
"I can drink my own water, Jens."
"You're going to anyway. This is just faster."
Jesper looked at him — at the particular fierce, barely-contained focus in his face, the kind that hadn't fully faded since the forest — and something in his expression softened.
"Were you scared," he asked, quietly.
"No," Jens said, immediately, denying it with the speed of a man who had clearly already prepared this denial in advance.
"You were."
"I wasn't scared. I was assessing the situation."
"You leveled half a forest, Jens."
"The forest was structurally compromised already."
"By you."
"That's not the point."
Jesper looked at him for a long moment, and something passed between them that neither was ready to name directly — the specific, terrifying weight of what Jens had become, briefly, in that clearing, and what it had been for.
"Thank you," Jesper said, finally, quietly.
"You don't need to thank me for not letting you die."
"I think I do, actually," Jesper said. "Given what it apparently cost you to manage it."
Jens didn't answer that. He simply made sure Jesper drank the rest of the water, and then made sure he ate something, and then sat beside him, closer than strictly necessary, for the rest of the evening, and denied, when Sam asked, that any of it meant anything in particular.
X. The Quiet After
They left Sky-Steppe at sunrise, after a proper goodbye to Big Domi, who had heard the broad strokes of what happened in the Forest of Bones and asked no further questions, sensing, correctly, that the crew needed to leave it behind rather than relive it.
Jesper was, within a day, mostly himself — the wound healing well enough that he was back to complaining about the food and offering unsolicited commentary on Jens's navigation decisions, and Jens's face had relaxed, slowly, from the tight, controlled tension it had carried since the forest.
Sam and Tijjani were arguing again, loudly, about something involving giant economic theory that nobody else fully understood or wanted explained.
Sven was happy again, in his particular bottomless way, sitting with Yuki at the rudder, the two of them exchanging the kind of minimal, sufficient words that had become, over the journey, its own complete language.
But the mood, underneath all of it, was wrong.
Too quiet, in a way that had nothing to do with volume.
Because everybody knew, without anyone saying it, what Jens had nearly become in that clearing — what he would have become, fully, completely, irreversibly, if Jesper hadn't survived. Everybody knew, too, without anyone saying it, exactly why the forest had needed surviving in the first place.
Nobody said Milos's name in connection with any of it. Not Jens. Not Sam. Not Jesper. Not Sven.
The silence around it was its own kind of accusation, heavier for being unspoken, and Sam and Tijjani's loud, deliberate arguing about giant economics felt, to anyone paying close attention, less like genuine disagreement and more like an active effort to fill a silence that would otherwise have settled into something nobody wanted to sit inside.
Jens hovered over Jesper with a focus that had become, since the forest, almost compulsive — checking whether he was eating, whether he was drinking enough water, whether the wound was paining him, and denying, every single time anyone commented on it, that any of this hovering meant anything beyond basic crew maintenance.
"I'm checking on everyone," he said, when Tijjani raised an eyebrow at the third water-check of the morning.
"You've checked on Jesper three times. You've checked on the rest of us zero times."
"The rest of you weren't unconscious for six hours."
"Milos has been quiet for two days and you haven't checked on him once."
Something in Jens's face did a complicated thing at that, a flicker of something that might have been guilt, quickly suppressed.
"Milos is fine," he said.
"Is he, though," Tijjani said, quietly, and didn't push further, because some conversations needed to wait for the right moment, and this clearly wasn't it.
XI. Milos, Alone
For the first time since the crew had formed, on a dock in Hedeby almost two years ago, Milos sat by himself.
Not sulking, exactly — he didn't have the language for sulking, had never once in his life retreated into wounded silence as a strategy. This was something quieter and more genuine: the simple, exhausted weight of understanding, with total clarity, exactly what his curiosity had nearly cost.
He sat at the ship's stern, away from the others, watching the cloud-ocean of Sky-Steppe shrink behind them, and thought about the long silence in the clearing when Jesper hadn't gotten up. About Jens's face, after, when he'd carried him out. About the specific, total devastation of the forest, the splintered trees and the cratered ground, all of it the direct result of his own inability to leave a broken pot alone.
He thought about the conversation with Jens, days earlier, on Sky-Steppe — it would be nice, sometimes, to be asked first, instead of just being assumed — and understood, with bitter clarity, that he had just spent his entire credibility, the small fragile trust the war had finally started to build, on confirming every single assumption the crew had ever made about him.
Nobody had said anything directly to him about it. That was, somehow, worse than if they had.
He sat alone, and did not climb anything, and did not touch anything, and did not say anything either, and the rest of the crew, busy performing normalcy around Sam and Tijjani's deliberate arguing and Jens's compulsive caretaking, did not, for once, notice that the loudest, most fearless member of their crew had gone, entirely, quiet.
Bjarni, eventually, padded over and sat beside him, the way the dog always seemed to know when someone needed company more than space, and Milos put a hand on his head, absently, and stared out at the water.
"I didn't mean for it to be this bad," he said, quietly, to the dog, because the dog was the only thing currently willing to listen without judgment.
Bjarni, predictably, said nothing back.
But he stayed, pressed against Milos's side, for the rest of the long, quiet sail away from Sky-Steppe, and that, at least, was something.