“If we don't have a place for nature in our heart, how can we expect nature to have a place for us.”

  ― Abhijit Naskar,

  It was spring when Lios discovered a not so secret held by the Guard. See, every year they held a small ceremony, or hazing ritual depending on who you asked, for the new recruits. This ritual was also the first dose of Lios’s new reality. Seeing magic at those festivals over the years had given him a romanticized view, this, however, was much more impactful.

  He and his mother were, as they often were, tending the garden when things went wrong. Zeke had gone off to work in the morning, and it was turning toward evening, the second sun just about to crest over the trees to the west. It was still early, just coming out of winter, and was nearing the boy's third birthday.

  Technically, the guard recruited throughout the year, but the first real “Rites” occurred in the spring. When the temperature rose, the Liko bees grew more active. The new guards were sent out each year to purge a few hives, under supervision of course. Lios knew nothing about any of this.

  He learned of this only after the fact.

  As it was, he was peacefully helping his mother with weeding. He had gotten much better at moving, understanding his physical limits, and with speaking. It had been just over a year and a half since the temple visit, after which he had gone a few more times with his mother on their way back from the river. He enjoyed the small history and religious lessons the priest gave him, and Hammod enjoyed having someone to teach. The priest was often helping other worshippers but would always take time out to teach Lios.

  Despite his obvious improvements his mother - wisely perhaps - still refused to let the almost three-year-old hold shears, instead she let him pull up the most egregious weeds, those who needed to have their roots pulled; she trimmed all of her plants, pruning them to aid in their growth.

  The boy was still clumsy. His body didn’t always act how he wanted, and his muscles were still those of a child. As he sat in the garden, he gradually covered himself with dirt, much to his own chagrin, but the pile of weeds was steadily growing. So focused was he on his task that he nearly missed the cries and screams that came from the forest.

  Their house sat beyond the walls of Arborton, between the woods and the southern edge of the forest. There were a few hundred feet before the woods. His mother often took him for walks through it, where she would collect herbs and berries. There wasn’t much that could harm her in those woods, thanks to the efforts of the guard.

  The guard who was now running through the woods to get away from a hives worth of bees the size of one's fist.

  They broke through the woods, branches breaking underfoot and across their chests. They were covered in scratches from whipping branches, with small trickles of blood dripping down their arms and faces. Their armor caught the brunt of it.

  Behind them came a buzzing, a fierce sound that reminded Lios vaguely of TV static. An obnoxiously loud static. The three guardlings hardly made it fifty feet from the forest edge when dozens of baseball-sized bees burst from the treeline chasing them. The three boys were wide-eyed, empty-handed and shrieking as they rushed towards the boys’ house.

  “Those damn idiots, what are they thinking!” Elaine muttered as she got up, her eyes narrowing. She turned to watch as the three teenagers sprinted breathlessly toward her, whimpering as the large bees chased them.

  Lios turned to watch them too, curious, and saw each of them had been stung at least once if the swelling was anything to go by. He heard his mother sigh as she stepped forward, picking up a rake. She did a quick stretch, eyes still narrowed, then casually started walking toward the boys.

  They seemed relieved before they realized she wasn’t a guard; she wasn’t even holding a weapon, they thought. They tried to call out to her to move back, tried to warn her away, but she wasn’t having it. The bees caught up with them despite their best efforts. The one on the right — a pudgy boy with a round face — fell first. He got stung in the back and let out a howl of pain as the stinger somehow broke past his chain mail, or perhaps the stinger avoided the rings.

  He curled up in the grass, whimpering as he covered his face, protecting it from the inches long stingers of those red and white bees. Another boy collapsed a few feet ahead of him, having been stung in the back of the thigh. He yelped like a kicked puppy as he fell, his pimply face crashing hard into the dirt.

  Elaine picked up the pace, though Lios had an idea that she could move far faster if she wanted to. The boys were not in any real danger, at least not yet. With a curse, she got close enough to them and swung her rake, broadside crashing into the large bees. Four of them went flying in one go, blood exploding as they were slammed by metal fingers and thrown twenty feet away, somehow still buzzing.

  She let out a growl and slapped another batch of them off of the chubby kid. It seemed she put a bit more force into this swing because instead of flying away they burst, viscera flying everywhere. Now Lios bore wide eyes like the teens.

  She let out a yelp. The boy was shaken from his reverie as he watched her get stung. Not once or twice, either, but half a dozen times as she slapped bees away with her metal rake. One boy, seeing the aggression of the bees turning to her, made to continue fleeing. The other two had worried looks on their faces as they got up and made to leave. After a second to think, however, they raised their fists and tried to punch the large bees.

  A majority of their attacks were dodged. Despite their size, they were still fast flyers, but they served as a distraction. Lios felt a pang of worry as some bees slipped past the young guards to attack and surround his mother. Despite the one sound at the start, she hadn’t made any noise as they stung her.

  She kept swinging her rake, taking out a few bees at a time even as more came from the woods. The boys swung their fists wildly, taking one out for every four she culled. The bees let out odd screeches as they were struck, a sound similar to a metal nail scraping against sheet metal.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Even with reinforcements coming, it didn't take all that long for the trio to eliminate the bees. The majority were being killed in the woods by the rest of the young guards. Just as Elaine smashed the last two with her rake, catching one of them with a tine and piercing it, impaling it, Ezekiel burst from the forest with his sword in hand, looking about frantically.

  The boys were panting hard from the exertion, stingers embedded in their skin and blood tinged green from the poison carried by the bees dripping down their bodies. It wasn’t a ton of blood, nor had they been stung a terrible amount, but each of the boys sported a dozen or so swollen, bleeding bumps. Elaine had fared better, only having three or four bumps.

  Upon seeing Ezekiel, a wild look entered her eyes. She frowned at him as he started jogging up, taking in the scene. The broken bee bodies, the bloodied rake, his wife covered in bee gore and stings. The two boys with one of his charges nowhere to be found. His son playing in the garden, not two hundred feet away.

  “Zeke, dear, might be you need to train your recruits. Care to tell me why half a nest’s worth of liko bees just chased these three ragamuffins and why I had to save them?” She dropped the rake and put her hands on her hips, not showing a hint of tiredness despite the bumps on her skin or the trickling blood.

  “Elaine! Are you okay? Were you hurt?” Zeke immediately refocused on his wife. “Victor, Harry, where is Aaron?” Zeke barked out the question, seemingly both confused and furious.

  “I.. I’m not sure, Sir...” one boy, the pudgy one with curly golden hair and freckles, stammered out. From where Lios sat, it looked like he had recovered from his elevated heart-rate. His face was slowly turning from a terrified red to a softer pink color, though when Ezekiel asked his question the red deepened for a moment.

  “He ran, sir, toward the town.” The other boy replied, his face covered in bee stings and swollen beyond recognition, but somehow he still spoke.

  “And why did you three decide to break rank?” Ezekiel asked, walking past Elaine and approaching them.

  There came a rustle from the forest; a few more of the older guards emerged from the brush. They each bore serious expressions. Trailing them were another half dozen young men covered in stings and bumps. Lios recognized Max from the first festival he went to, when his father had challenged the man to a duel.

  “Z, we can get the rundown in the training grounds.” The older man called out, leaving no room for negotiation in his tone. “Elaine, do ya need any medical treatment? We’ll take you to the temple; the healer should be able to help with those stings.”

  “I’m quite alright, thank you, Vice Captain. A couple of stings like this won't be the end of me, plus I must tend the garden.”

  After that, the motley crew of guards and guard-lings departed. Lios learned that day that even mundane things, things he was used to being fairly inconsequential, could be a danger here on Ravos. He wasn’t exactly scared of the bees after seeing them, but it put an inkling of an idea of how this world worked into his head.

  He also learned that his gentle mother was ferocious in her own right.

  __________________________________________

  The boy was playing in his garden when he heard it. His mother was inside the house with the door open, preparing supper. He was content to listen to her humming and the sound of the knife coming down on the wooden cutting board while tugging weeds, or even trimming some plants. Elaine still refused to let the boy use shears or a knife, something about him still being too young.

  Alexilios was still miffed about it. He was a very responsible child.

  At first he thought nothing of this new sound, the one that appeared while he was weeding. He thought maybe his mother’s voice had cracked, maybe she was talking to herself, maybe it was the creak of a rusted hinge or something like that. But then he heard it a second, a third time. A soft yelp. A whimper coming from far, bouncing off the trees in the forest.

  The boy bit his lip, concerned about the sound. It sounded as if something was hurting.

  Yip. yip-yip yip.

  The sound carried on the wind, landing in the boy's ears. Warily he rose to his feet, his hands and knees covered in dirt. He took a glance behind him, toward the open door where his mother was. Should I get her? She’s busy right- the yip sounded again, a touch louder than before. In the end, his curiosity won out over caution. Plus, he was fairly certain his mother would try to convince him not to go.

  Gulping, he turned toward the forest. The memory of the bees that were bigger than normal bees entered his mind. He picked up a hoe, figured it was better than going empty-handed, and wrapped a drying piece of clothes around his left arm in case the yipper wasn’t friendly. Feeling prepared and brave, or foolish, he jogged toward the forest edge, aiming to enter it to the left of whatever made that sound.

  He steeled himself, pushing through the trees as cautiously as possible. The only times he had been in the forest, he had been with his mother, and they mostly followed a footpath that led to a variety of herbs and berries that grew on the forest floor. He had tried his best to remember which ones were safe.

  He followed the sound of the whimpering and yipping, ducking beneath branches and hopping over twisting roots. There was a gently buzzing of insects, the whispering of the trees as the breeze shifted the leaves. The forest was positively alive with noise, some of the creaking and rustling spooking the boy.

  He flinched as a squirrel burst from one branch above him to rush higher up the tree, away from the strange creature approaching. His heart was thudding deep in his chest, eyes flicking back and forth. He wasn’t afraid of the creatures here, but he was well aware they could be more aggressive, more dangerous, than those he remembered from Earth. But he wasn’t really afraid.

  All he could feel was excitement, and a touch of nerves. This was his first adventure since coming to this world. To be honest, so far his experience had been boring. He was coddled by his parents, which made sense considering he was still a child, but he still had the mental acuity of a fully grown adult. As of late, he had taken to filling some of the quiet, boring moments with exercise. Nothing crazy, just pushups and situps. Just something to fill the void that reading, video games, and TV left behind from his previous life.

  Of course, he tried to play with the other kids too at times, but it was... it was strange and difficult. It wasn’t easy to act young, to act like he was five. It wasn’t easy to play childish games with them. Mostly he kept to himself, to his little family. Most of the other kids lived in the city proper, while he was outside the walls. He didn’t mind; it meant they were less likely to come by, less likely to drag him into their games. Instead, he saw them when he went with his mother into the city, interacted with them while she was washing down by the river or working.

  But now, for the first time, he could get a glimpse of freedom. Of adventure and exploration. He wouldn’t go far, of course; this world, these woods were still dangerous. But he would at least go far enough to discover what made that noise. The whimpering, the crying.

  And he was getting close now. The sound was growing louder. The creature's tone was growing weaker, however, and Lios rushed forward. He was aware of it even as he made the racket, the fact that this could be some trap, this could be a foolish endeavor. He ignored those thoughts, though, his heart going out to whatever injured animal there might be.

  Then he broke through, and he saw it. A fox with brown and tan fur, whimpered and let out pained yowls every few seconds. It was breathing hard, blood dripping from its hind legs. Both of them. Yet it was still dragging itself through the dirt, pushing itself up on shaking limbs, a trail of crimson mixing with the soil behind it.