Tamsin weaved her way through the room to stand uncomfortably close to her brother, unnoticed, as he checked in with the rest of their friends.
“Good news,” Tobias said, sliding into the booth next to Morgan. “I got the information you asked for.”
“Awesome,” Morgan said. Jack gave them both a quizzical look. “I asked him to learn more about the gods, since I’m a cleric and…”
“And none of us know anything about the gods here,” Jack said. “Good call. But you sent him?”
“Why do you say that with such disdain?” Tobias said.
“Because you’re… you,” Jack said. “You’re not who I’d send on a quest for subtle inquiries.”
“I really didn’t have to be subtle,” Tobias said. “I’m me. People just sort of tell me things when I ask. It’s one of my bard powers I think.”
Jack waved his hand, making a face of vague agreement.
“What did you find out?” Morgan said.
“Okay, so you’re a priest of Theana,” Tobias said.
“I knew that much.”
“Right. I’m starting from the beginning,” Tobias said. “She’s the goddess of wisdom and ‘just’ war, which I think is another oxymoron. Her priests believe in peace, but also in raising arms to defend the helpless or to defeat true evil. They don’t participate in the wars of men over territory or whatever, but you’ll always find priests of Theana when the really terrible stuff bubbles up. Undead, dragons, whatever.”
“I think I like this goddess,” Morgan said.
“Could be a lot worse,” Eriko said. “You could be a like, devil priest or cleric of some asshole war god who just wants to fight everybody.”
“Yeah, she’s well-liked,” Tobias said.
“Where’d you learn all this, anyway?” Morgan asked.
“Did you know there’s a temple in town? Or, well, it’s more of a chapel,” Tobias said. “But it’s a thing.”
“For Theana?” Morgan said. “That’s not good. What if I was supposed to check in or something?”
“No, it’s dedicated to the goddess of the harvest,” Tobias said. “Totally different goddess.”
“The goddess of the harvest got a name?” Cordelia said, suddenly interested in participating in the conversation.
“Glutenia,” Tobias said.
“Shut up,” Eriko said.
“I’m just kidding. She’s Aeterna, the Mother,” Tobias said. “I’ve been kind of dating one of the priestesses there.”
“Kind of dating?” Jack said. “Weren’t you also kind of dating that guard?”
“Look, there’s no dating apps here,” Tobias said. “Also, I’m incredibly popular. I have groupies. I’m not that strong-willed. Sidebar: I can’t really get too serious with the priestess. They have vows.”
“You’re… helping a priestess of the Mother goddess break her vows,” Morgan said, a growing dread in his voice.
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” Tobias said. “Also, in case you’re about to freak out, there are no vows for Theana’s battle priests, by the way. In case you meet someone.”
“I have no intention of dating fictional people in a fictional world,” Morgan said. “I had enough trouble dating back home.”
“Um,” Jack said.
“You, of all people, shall offer no dating advice,” Morgan said. “I’ve met furniture that have a better dating track record than you do.”
“No, no, hang on,” Jack said. “Malcolm, the guy I met today. He said the people here are… more real than we know? I think that’s how he said it.”
“You’re not making me feel better about whether Tobias should be Moderate Expectations’ most eligible bachelor,” Morgan said.
“I mean, I think he was saying we should be respectful,” Jack said. “That we might see them as NPCs, but they have real feelings.”
“Shit,” Tobias said.
“What did you do,” Eriko said.
“Nothing,” Tobias said. “I’m just… I’ll avoid ghosting on people. Is it okay to break up by text here? How do I text here? Parchment? Do I slide parchment under their door?”
“I cannot believe we’re having this conversation,” Morgan said.
“I can absolutely believe we’re having this conversation,” Eriko said.
“Forget about my dating life,” Tobias said. “Where is my sister?”
Tamsin immediately gave her brother a wet willy. Shocked and horrified, Tobias spastically kicked his feet out, slamming one knee into the table from below, knocking over his lute with a horrible, yet musical, clang, nearly spilling Morgan’s beer, and letting out a birdlike screech in surprise.
“Hi, Toby,” Tamsin said, dropping her invisibility spell.
“I hate you,” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
“You are going to teach me how to do that spell,” he said.
“Only if you behave,” Tamsin said.
“Anything else I should know about this goddess I’m allegedly representing?” Morgan said, nudging the conversation back on track as Tamsin sat down at the booth.
“Oh!” Tobias said. “My priestess friend gave me a book.”
He pulled a heavy, simple, but sturdy tome from his backpack and handed it over.
“The Thirteen: Religion and Mythology of Revery,” Morgan read out loud.
“What’s Revery?” Tamsin said.
“Oh! Best part of this whole conversation I had today,” Tobias said. “You know how all along we’ve felt like there was no way to ask what the hell this world we’re actually trapped in is called?”
“You didn’t,” Eriko said.
“I didn’t have to! Just came up in casual conversation. We’re in Revery.”
“So this world is basically named… daydream,” Eriko said. “I think I’m in love.”
Morgan and Tobias both gave Eriko a long, questioning stare.
“What?” she said. “I can be a romantic sometimes. Don’t look at me like that. Anyway. Tell us more, Tobias.”
“Well, Moderate Expectations is in the unclaimed country,” Tobias continued. “It’s not part of any larger empire or kingdom, though there’s some concern we’ll be annexed by the Ruby Imperium in a few years.”
“The Ruby Imperium sounds hot,” Eriko said.
“I know, right?” Tobias said.
“You find anything else out we should know about?” Jack said.
“Oh, a bunch. I’ll jot it all down and we can decompress,” Tobias said. “I also learned that if someone offers you some Basilisk’s Breath, you should say no.”
“You learned that from a priestess?” Tamsin said. “Wait. No. Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know.”
“It’s a drug, Tam,” Tobias said.
“I said I didn’t want to know!”
“I didn’t take it! I just learned you shouldn’t use it,” Tobias said.
“You’re turning into a fountain of useful and useless information, Tobias,” Jack said. “Thanks for this.”
“Hey, what can I say. I’m all ears,” Tobias said, wiggling his pointed elven ears.
Tamsin gave him another wet willy.
“What! Why?” he said.
“I’m trying to discourage more bad puns,” Tamsin said.
Chapter 6: Smoke on the horizon
Morgan woke up the next morning as he had for the past three weeks, forgetting where he was. The others seemed to be adjusting more readily, or at least faking it. For Morgan, every day began with the startling realization they were still here. He sat up in bed, a bed far too comfortable for a medieval setting, he knew. Which was part of the charm of this fictional world, with its comfortable bedding, good dental hygiene, lack of overwhelming body odor, and other quirks that both broke the immersion but made the environment far more livable.
The group had been renting three rooms at the Hungry Lion, each with two beds, but they kept their adjoining doors open, for the most part. No one said it out
loud, but they were all still too disoriented, too homesick, to want a room of their own.
Tamsin and Tobias tended to bunk down in one room, and Eriko and Jack, both chronic insomniacs, would crash in another where they could talk in the infuriating darkness without bothering the others. Morgan’s usual roommate was Cordelia, which worked well, both of them heavy sleepers and early risers. Today, though, Cordelia had awoken even earlier, and stood in her patchwork leather armor, staring out the window.
“You okay, Cordie?” Morgan asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Something’s burning,” Cordelia said, not turning away from the window.
Morgan slid from bed, pulling a rough tunic over his head, to join her by the window. Their rooms were several stories up in the inn, high enough to see over the wooden wall surrounding Moderate Expectations. The sky to the east was filled with black smoke.
“What the hell is that,” Morgan said. “We should go check it out. Are the others awake yet?”
“I’m up,” Jack said from the doorway between the rooms, yawning and looking like he’d lost a fight, as he did every morning. “What’s going on?”
Cordelia pointed out the window. Jack swore.
“I’ll get my stuff,” he said.
As Morgan began to pull his armor on, a knock came at the door. Cordelia opened it. Outside, the striking, iron-haired Mayor Miriam stood flanked by two members of the town’s professional, if not particularly intimidating, guard.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” the mayor said.
“You didn’t,” Morgan said, buckling on his chest piece. “I assume you’re here about…”
Morgan thumbed at the window behind him.
“We’re sending some of our guards out there to investigate, but if it’s some sort of attack, we don’t want to leave ourselves undefended,” Miriam said. “If you could…?”
“We’ll go,” Morgan said. “We were practically on our way already.”
“Thank you,” Miriam said. “And don’t worry, there will be payment.”
Cordelia waved her hand dismissively.
“We can talk about that later,” Cordelia said. “I just want to make sure nobody’s hurt out there.”
Jack, standing alone by the window tying on his green cloak, muttered softly, mostly to himself.
“From what I can see from here, it’s less a question of if people are hurt but how many.”
***
After rousing the others—Tamsin was up and getting ready the minute Morgan said “fire,” though Eriko and Tobias required some aggressive cajoling back to consciousness—the group headed out of town through the east gate on borrowed horses along with a half-dozen of the town’s guards.
Outside the town proper to the east, north, and south, Moderate Expectations quickly turned into farmland, part of the town itself but apart from it. They’d traveled past the farms and the families who ran them often in their time here, sometimes stopping to talk or buy food, but mostly to get a feeling for the people they protected as they worked for Miriam and her colleagues. These were the people most at risk from ogres and bogeymen, after all, outside the comfort of the town’s walls, away from the watchful eye of the guards.
It didn’t take long to find the first burning farmhouse. Livestock had been sloppily slaughtered and left to rot, supplies ransacked, crops slashed and torn down. Morgan lowered his eyes when he saw what was clearly a human body lying in a field. He was certain if they moved closer he’d discover he knew the person.
They passed two more farms, each with survivors sitting shocked and shaken outside. The guard captain leading the expedition silently ordered a pair of his soldiers to split from the group to check on the farmers as the rest of the group continued on. After the fourth burning farm, Jack dismounted and walked toward the smoldering wreckage.
Eriko and Morgan exchanged a look, then Eriko slid from her horse as well, tossing the reins to Morgan, and followed their ranger. Morgan and the others joined them, though remaining on horseback.
They found Jack hunched over, examining the ground.
“Tracks,” Jack said. He looked up at his friends, then to the guard captains, then to Morgan specifically. “Three toes. Big. Heavy, whatever it was. I don’t recognize the tracks though. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Trogs,” an unfamiliar voice said. Morgan whipped his head around to find the owner.
Of all the stereotypical fantasy tropes they’d encountered so far, it surprised Morgan that this was the first dwarf they’d seen. The stout man leaned on a shovel, his arms bare and covered in blood and soot, his face and gray beard stained with both as well. Bald on top, he wore what was left of his hair in a braid in the back. A heavy leather apron covered his chest. He looked as though he walked out of a storybook.
“Been on the surface forty years, and I’ve never seen a trog beneath the open sky until last night,” the dwarf said.
“I’m sorry,” Morgan said. “I’m, um, Father Bastion. These are my companions. We…”
“I know who you are,” the old dwarf said. “Small town, a bunch of fame-seeking adventurers are hard to miss.”
“We don’t seek fame,” Morgan said.
“I do,” Tobias said, sliding awkwardly from his horse. “What’s a trog?”
“Troglodytes. Y’see them more often back home,” the dwarf said. “Word is they once were men, like you folk. But they retreated below the surface and, well, like so many things that hide in the darkness, the darkness had its way with them.”
“These creatures attacked you?” Eriko said.
“Yep,” the dwarf said. “Too many of ‘em to count. Used the darkness to hide their numbers. Clever like animals, they are.”
“Is this your farm?” Cordelia said.
The dwarf eyed Cordelia’s half-orc face with suspicion, but answered.
“Nah. My forge is on the other side of the field. Was, rather. It’s a pile of ash now.”
“I didn’t catch your name, friend,” Jack said.
“I didn’t give it,” the dwarf said, sizing Jack up. “Ingo. Ingo Hammerhand.”
The dwarf sighed, taking in the carnage around them again.
“Bastards,” he said. “I’m just glad my wife didn’t live to see the day. Trogs under an open sky.”
“Do you know where they came from?” Morgan asked.
“Why, you thinking of going after them? You might be crazier than you look,” Ingo said. “There was a commotion at the mine last night. Woke me from a sound sleep. I assumed they had another cave in—the owner’s been skimping on safety for years. But then…”
Ingo opened his arms as if to present the carnage all around them.
Morgan and his group looked back and forth, silently planning. Cordelia nodded to him.
“Can you point us to the mine?” he said.
The dwarf laughed.
“I’ll do you one better. Let me grab my coat and I’ll show you there myself.”
Chapter 7: One big medieval OSHA violation
The sky rumbled with the threat of a thunderstorm, and Tobias felt his heart sink. They’d been caught in so many storms on their recent adventures he bought a protective carrier for his lute, a sort of waterproof leather case, padded on the inside to keep it from getting jostled too badly. He’d never been a musician in the real world—a singer, sure, but he had not an ounce of talent no matter what instrument he’d tried to learn—but it didn’t take long here in the game for him to become protective of the tools of his trade.
Tools, plural, Tobias mused. He learned last week he could also play the fiddle and flute, though he only owned the latter, borrowing the former from a traveling minstrel for a jam session. He also learned that day that “jam session” was not a term the people here in this world understood.
Tobias felt a single drop of rain hit his nose. He was about to start complaining when the group arrived at the mine, and he immediately realized he would prefer to be rained on than go in
to said mine.
“That place is one big medieval OSHA violation,” he said out loud. A few of the town guards accompanying him looked at him askance—the default reaction, he had quickly discovered, to any anachronism he said publicly—and he caught his sister sighing at him out of the corner of his eye.
Ingo marched right up to the entrance of the mine, a beautifully crafted battle axe slung across his back. Cordelia and Morgan followed close behind while Jack hopped off his horse and began scanning the ground. Tobias caught Ingo giving Cordelia serious side-eye.
“Hey,” Tobias stage-whispered to Eriko, who leaned lazily on the pommel of her saddle. “Did you catch that? I think the old dwarf is totally racist toward Cordelia.”
“Well, we’re in a classic fantasy setting,” Eriko said. “Dwarves and orcs, man.”
“Still. Sort of a dick move,” Tobias said.
“I’m not defending it,” Eriko said. “I’m just saying I’m not surprised.”
“They definitely came back this way,” Jack said, interrupting. “Tracks everywhere.”
“Did they walk single file to hide their numbers?” Tobias joked. He was supremely happy to see Jack, who had been Captain Emo for weeks, bark out an involuntary laugh.
“Not funny,” Jack said.
“I thought it was funny,” Tobias said.
“What happened here?” Cordelia said, picking up a bloody pickaxe from the ground then tossing it aside.
“Folly is what happened here,” a new voice said. An older man, clearly a miner by his clothing, hobbled toward them, cradling one arm in the other.
The town guards drew their weapons. Morgan held up a hand as if to calm the soldiers.
“It’s just Horace,” Ingo said. “Calm yourselves, lads. He’s the foreman.”
The newcomer, Horace, nodded at the dwarf.
“Glad to see they didn’t get you, old-timer.”
“You as well,” Ingo said.
“What do you mean, folly happened here?” Tamsin said, her voice all business.
Horace sat down on a broken cart, groaning as if his entire body hurt.
Lost in Revery Page 11
