The Healing Spring

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Ferris waited idly in a small, green pasture, watching his squad lounge in the shade of the trees along the large creek on the eastern border of the field. The sky was cloudless; he looked up at the sun, and judged that it was close enough to straight overhead to meet the specifications of his orders. They weren’t typical orders, but they were his to carry out, and so he needed to tell his men it was time for action, that their unusual assignment, one that had taken them away from the routine life on their regular army base, would finally produce some results. It had only been a few days prior that his squad had been detached without explanation from the main army in the capital and sent on the week-long journey to reach the Forest Wardens, who had explained the role that Ferris and his men were now assigned to carry out.

It didn’t seem like an extraordinary assignment to Ferris, not one that really called for a squad to be sent all the way across the small, proud nation of Hydrotaz to perform, but he was trained to follow orders, and as far as these orders went, there seemed to be no challenge at all. The major in charge of the Forest Wardens had assured him that it was an easy assignment before he had sent Ferris’s squad up to the specified location, the pasture next to the forest. So Ferris and his men had left the Wardens the previous afternoon, and marched north to their position, then camped out of sight of the forest, and waited until mid-morning to move towards the tree line.

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