by Andrew Rowe
“You’re a motion sorcerer.” I sighed. “That’s why it works for you and not for me. You already use motion sorcery.”
“I do?” Reika blinked.
“I realized after our first fight. Your mass in your dragon form is too great for muscle alone to let you move at the speed that you do. And you have a tendency to move forward with huge bursts of momentum. That’s probably motion sorcery, or at least something akin to it.”
“Huh.” Reika twirled the spear around. “I guess it’s just a type of magic I use naturally, like my breath weapon. Neat.”
I considered the now-active spear. “Pass it back to me and see if it works for me now?”
Reika shrugged, handing the Heartlance replica back to me. The glow ceased the moment she took her hand off it. Apparently, it had to be actively powered by someone with motion sorcery.
I tried tapping it on the ground again, just to see if I could make use of any essence she’d left inside it, but nothing happened.
I grunted in annoyance. I’d really been hoping to train with it. I briefly tested if I could benefit from the spear’s magic if both of us held it at the same time, but it only seemed to enhance Reika. I decided I could try to find another work around later, but for the moment, it seemed easier to just let Reika make use of it.
I handed the spear back to her. She tapped it on the ground, and once again thin lines of light spread across the spear and her body. “I could get used to this.”
She swung the spear again, sending a blast of force outward that tossed nearby rocks and knocked over a small tree. “This thing is fun! Can I keep it?”
I pondered that, then gave her a hesitant nod. “Sure, at least for now. I was planning to sell it to buy more supplies.”
Reika’s shoulder slumped.
“...But maybe we can reconsider that, if you like it that much.”
She brightened again, throwing her arms around me. “Thanks, Keras! I’ve never had a magic weapon of my own before.”
<...She had me...>
She considers you family, Dawn. Not an object that she owned.
Aww, were you really that jealous?
Spears are as useful as swords, Dawn. They’re just for different situations.
I heard the sound of a gasp in my mind.
Look, I still like you better than any spear, okay?
<...Any spear? You mean that?>
I do.
I’ll keep that in mind.
Chapter II – Fortress
Days passed.
Each day involved a couple hours in the air to make as much progress as possible, then landing somewhere out of sight at least a few miles away from a town.
Once in town, Reika would gorge herself on food (generally at multiple different restaurants if possible, to avoid too much suspicion), and then we’d move on, walking until we got to a different town to stay the night.
We’d always stop and do a bit of training each day. Reika practiced with the Heartlance replica a bit, but quickly grew tired of it. She preferred just using her claws. I continued practicing with Dawn, but I didn’t discover any new abilities or instantaneous improvements to my abilities. It seemed that after the initial burst of power I’d gotten from the bond, I’d have to improve with her more gradually, at least until I learned if she had more levels of power to unlock like an attunement.
As we got further from the Unclaimed Lands and deeper into Edria proper, our somewhat outlandish appearances seemed to worry people more.
By “outlandish”, I mean that I was wearing a mask and carrying two large swords, and Reika had weird hair and an all-metal spear. We looked like bandits. Very strange bandits.
To remedy that, we worked on adjusting our look a bit.
First, I decided to stop wearing the mask for the moment. That meant the Tails of Orochi could potentially start using divination magic to track us again, but neither Reika nor I thought that they were likely to pursue us all the way into Edria. And even if they did, we were mostly recovered from our injuries and much more capable of defending ourselves than we had been right after fighting Zenkichi.
Second, I inspected the Heartlance replica thoroughly and figured out part of how it worked. There were three crystals hidden inside the metallic core; one in the bladed portion toward the top, one in the center of the shaft, and a third one inside the bottom of the spear. There were three sets of runes on the inside of the metal, and each set was in contact with one of the crystals. Presumably, that meant the crystals were used as power sources for the enchantments on the weapon.
No, I don’t remember what all the runes looked like. Sorry.
Once I knew that, I took the spear apart, breaking it into smaller sections with one crystal each. Then, I reassembled it immediately and had Reika test it again. It still worked.
With that knowledge, I took it back apart and packed it into Reika’s backpack. She could carry it in smaller pieces without looking like a brigand, and then I could reassemble it for her any time she wanted to practice with it.
More days passed as we traveled deeper into Edria. Reika’s endurance for flying improved over time, but we still limited ourselves to a couple hours of flight per day, mostly for my sake. When I say we were “flying”, I mean she was still carrying me under her in her arms. We still hadn’t gotten her a saddle or any means for me to ride atop her, and after an hour or so of being carried, I always felt motion sick.
We avoided getting near any major cities on our route, since they were much more likely to have the capability to spot us from a distance. That was a bit of a disappointment to Reika, but I reassured her that Kassel itself would be a metropolis, and that we’d get to see plenty of people when we got there.
We continued practicing each day, gradually increasing our strength.
The journey took longer than we’d hoped due to our constant need to stop and resupply, but after two and a half weeks, we finally sighted the city of Kassel.
***
When I first heard the name of the city of Kassel, my head went to “Castle”, because that’s what it sounds like in Valian. I never actually dug into the history of the city’s name — though I think Kassel predates the nation of Valia appearing on the continent, so any linguistic connections are dubious at best.
Because of the similarity in the words, I’d been picturing a town surrounded by huge walls, much like Velthryn. Maybe a moat or something.
I’m going to blame Reika for that kind of thinking, at least to some degree. Her storybook assumptions must have been rubbing off on me.
Oddly, it turned out I wasn’t that far off.
Kassel did have an impressive series of walls. I say “series”, because the city had four layers of them — the outermost walls included miles and miles of farmland, and each of the inner walls protected a progressively smaller area.
I was wrong about the moat, but the city did have an impressive body of water nearby — namely the ocean. Kassel was built along a section of ocean that cut deep into the southern side of the continent, serving as a natural border between Edria and Caelford. Massive apparatus on the western coast were used to purify water and pump it into the city.
I couldn’t see those at first, though. The city was simply too large to take in at a distance, even from the air.
Even miles away, though, we could see the Hydra Spire. It was truly colossal, to an extent that I was struck with disbelief at first. I’d been picturing one of the tall sorcerer’s spires that
I’d seen in my homeland. Those got up into the high hundreds of feet. The Hydra Spire was, at my best guess, closer to a mile in height.
And this particular tower had eight different branches, each jutting out at a different part of the main building. I won’t say it actually looked like a hydra itself, but it certainly evoked a similar feeling of dominance. Living in the inner portion of the city meant that at least one of those long neck-like towers was probably extending over you at all times. That had to be unsettling.
I couldn’t fathom the amount of effort that had to go into fashioning a building of that size. At the time, I assumed it had to have taken hundreds or thousands of workers decades to complete, even with magical aid.
Honestly, it didn’t even look structurally sound. There had to be some impressive magic at work just keeping the “necks” from falling off of the main body of the spire. Even knowing magic was involved, it still looked like the kind of place I wouldn’t want to be near during an earthquake.
I shared my sense of sight with Dawn. The response was immediate.
It was even more disturbing once she’d phrased it like that, but I didn’t disagree.
Aside from the tremendously foreboding spire, the city itself looked lovely. From a distance, we could see many patches of color — smaller bodies of water within the city, large public parks, and a few large palace-like structures painted bright white. I later found out that those weren’t actually palaces, but cathedrals.
There was a palace, but it wasn’t visible from my current vantage point and it was built more like a fortress. It was the home of one of the archdukes, not the emperor — Kassel wasn’t the capitol of Edria. The emperor’s seat of power was in another city further to the south, Essen.
We landed on a hillside nearly a full day away to avoid being sighted on our approach. Even then, we couldn’t be certain we weren’t detected — it was plausible there were flying monsters guarding the city, and they might have seen us — but landing any further away would have wasted valuable time.
When we approached the gates, we had to wait in a line to get inside. Fortunately, once we said we were there for the tournament and showed our papers, they greeted us warmly.
“Welcome to Kassel!” One of the guards slapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll be watching for you in the arena!”
I grinned. “I’ll make sure to give you a performance that you’ll never forget.”
***
“There are so many people!”
Reika was looking around with rapt interest as crowds of people moved through Kassel’s streets. It wasn’t even a particularly busy area by my standards, but with dozens of people coming and going, it was probably a new experience to her.
I had to remind myself that Reika had spent most of her life in the same cave where I’d met her. She’d spent some time in a human village, but that was a village, not a metropolis like this.
“There’ll be even more once we get in a bit deeper.” I nudged her. “Want to find something to eat?”
She nodded happily.
“Steak?” I asked, already aware of her probable response.
Reika’s eyes widened and she nodded even more enthusiastically. “Steak! Many steaks!”
I laughed. “Come on, let’s find something nice. We deserve it after all that travel.”
The first high class place we found turned us aside immediately, because we were wearing tattered adventuring clothes and in serious need of a bath. We had been bathing at various towns and inns we’d stopped at when possible (and even a couple random lakes), but it had been a few days, and we hadn’t taken great care of our clothes.
After that, Reika grudgingly accepted that we needed to go clean up first, and we went to go find an inn. Or, more accurately, a hotel.
Kassel wasn’t some small town in the middle of nowhere like the few places we’d stopped on the road. It wasn’t even a major city like the ones back in my homeland. As prosperous as cities like Velthryn were, they simply couldn’t compete with Edrian architecture in terms of vastness of scale.
Everything was bigger than I was used to in Kassel. The houses, the shops, and especially the hotels.
The first time I saw a hotel in Kassel, I mistook it for a noble’s palace. And that was one of the smaller ones.
We wandered the streets for a while in awe. Kassel was a common tourist destination, and with the tournament coming up, we were hardly the only gawking strangers. There were barkers on street corners advertising everything from food to weapons. I couldn’t actually understand the majority of them (although blessedly a few of them went through their announcements in a variety of languages, including Valian), but Reika picked out enough details that she eventually guided us toward a likely destination.
I approved of The Flowing Blade immediately. The towering hotel was roughly T-shaped, with a silvery sheen to the outside windows and walls to make it look like a gigantic sword that had been thrust into the ground. While that might sound garish — and frankly, it was rather garish — it was the kind of hilariously over-the-top theme that I could appreciate.
Dawn was, appropriately, also excited by the concept.
Once inside, we quickly learned that it was a dedicated “adventurer” themed hotel in general, complete with a variety of rooms with various styles reflecting the supposed adventurer life-style.
The entry-level rooms were simply “spire” themed, with an interior structure designed to mirror the usual grey-stone setup of the spires. On the upper floors, things got a little more interesting — elementally themed rooms, for example, and ones designed for specific purposes.
By “specific”, I mean mostly adult purposes, but with an adventurer theme.
After a bit of discussion at the counter in Edrian, Reika passed over an alarming number of coins, and returned to me with a pair of keys. “We’re staying in the dragon’s cave!”
Of course she got us the dragon themed room.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, but only barely.
She leaned a little closer and whispered to me. “Also, I think they think we’re newlyweds. Isn’t that adorable?”
You’re ridiculous.
In point of fact, you are doing that. We’re not getting you a separate room.
I smirked. “Let’s go take a look.”
We headed up a flight of stairs for six floors before we reached our destination and realized that there was an elevator right nearby.
Finally, Reika opened up a room.
“...It’s pink.” She blinked. “Why is my new lair pink?”
In fairness, most of the room did have a fairly convincing cave-like interior. The walls were traditional masonry that had been painted to look like cavern walls, but they’d done a pretty good job with it.
The single bed, however, did have pink covers with a gigantic red heart on them, and the paintings on the walls really diminished from the immersion of the experience.
There were candles, though.
And most importantly? A spa-style bathtub designed to look like a pool of water inside a cavern.
“I’m remodeling.” Reika folded her arms, glaring at the room.
“We’re renting this room, Reika. We didn’t buy it. Don’t break anything.”
“Ugh. Fine. It’s just...not dragony enough.” She sighed.
We stepped in and closed the door behind us. “Maybe we can find you a real cave to spend some time in at some point.”
She waved her hands. “It’s fine. I guess I’m just a little homesick.”
In truth, I was, too.
The city of Kassel was astounding, but I missed Velthryn. The ea
rly morning sword practice with Landen and Velas. The days of giving advice to fresh new recruits. The hours spent in taverns, slipping my purestone into the bottom of a cup and drinking fresh recruits and competitive paladins alike under the table.
I wasn’t usually much for subterfuge, but that was hilarious.
Most of all, I missed my friends. Now that I knew Wrynn was somewhere on the continent, I wanted to find her quickly, but it really wasn’t my skill set. I had to hope that Lydia would arrive and track us both down soon. If she didn’t, I’d have to hire a Diviner, and that would get vastly more complicated.
“I’ma go wash off so we can eat!” Reika headed to the spa.
I let her go first without argument so I could have some time to think. I had some planning to do.
***
An hour later, Reika finally emerged from the bath and turned it over to me.
She quickly instructed me on how to use the water properly. I’d seen mechanical baths before, but this particular one used some sort of heating enchantments that were activated by pressing buttons on the side — a kind of decadence that would have been unimaginable in my homeland.
Magical items weren’t exactly rare back where I came from, but the idea of using magic for something like every bathtub in a hotel of this scale was absolutely mind-boggling. I’d heard about the Enchanter attunements and such by reading books, but seeing something like that in person made it more real to me.
This was a land of magic and wonder. The only problem was the death traps people had to get through in order to earn the right to create and use those luxuries.
I overdid it on heating the water almost immediately, but after some trial and error, I managed to get it to a good temperature and relax for the first time in what felt like ages.
I very nearly fell asleep. That would have been bad.
After I finished washing off, I got dressed. Reika and I washed our clothes in the bath, too, not realizing that there was actually a laundry room on another floor, then I used a bit of flame sorcery to dry them off.
With that, we were finally ready for a night on the town.
