Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  “Hello,” she said uncertainly. A cool tingle passed over me. “Initiates. Nice to see you. Is everything alright? I assure you that father — um, my father, that is — has paid the Collective in full.”

  Paid for what? I shook my head. “I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.” I fished in my pack and retrieved 5 gold coins. I thought that wasn’t an insultingly low amount of money, but I knew it was enough for a hearty meal and she looked a little thin. “Sorry, I wish I could spare more right now but I can’t.”

  Congratulations! Deception has reached Level 2!

  Fucking game!

  I pulled out 5 more gold. “Here,” I said, and handed her the 10 pieces. Gellert and Ryken watched me from a few paces away with levels of confusion and blind hatred, respectively.

  She accepted the coins at the last second, before I accidentally let them tumble onto the dirt in front of her, and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Is this … a rebate from the Collective?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “Sorry?”

  “Did we do something wrong?”

  I frowned. “No, like I said, you bandaged me up when I was hurt. I’m just thanking you. Dunno what else I could give you but that. Is that … OK with you?” I had no idea how she was feeling about the gift.

  “This is just for me?” she clarified, and to my alarm her eyes were welling with tears. Suddenly her face betrayed her age: she couldn’t have been older than eighteen.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Thank you so much, I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, sniffling and hurrying to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand, clearly embarrassed. “Sorry, I just … thank you.”

  Well … now I felt like shit somehow, after giving the poor girl some cash. “Is everything OK?” I asked. “Is your farm doing OK? Your father?”

  She looked scared again. “Are you asking on behalf of the—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I’m asking for me, the man you helped yesterday.”

  “Oh.” She paused, looking at the other members behind me.

  “Don’t worry about them either,” I told her.

  “The rent payments are too much,” she finally said, and reading her lips allowed me to hear her where her voice became too quiet. “I’m not ungrateful, I swear! We’re so glad the Father let us move to this farmland that isn’t affected by the Blight, but every coin we make, right now, we hand straight over to the Collective. There’s nothing left for us. We’re eating our own profit to stay alive, and working twice as much as our bodies can handle…” She seemed to catch herself and then shook her head and politely smiled. “But we are grateful we can farm here, Initiates.”

  “Call me Matt,” I said. “How can I help?”

  She gave a suspicious half-shrug. “If you were to promise not to mention our names, you could … ask the Father to charge less in rent. We will have to move back to Blighted land if the payments remain the same. My parents deny it but it has to be the case. We’ll die if we return to where we came from.” She gave another small sniff and then closed her hand over the coins as if scared I would ask for them back.

  New Quest!

  A Farmer’s Plea

  Anka Widdicombe wishes that you would ask the Father to charge the farmers outside the gates less in weekly fees. If not, they will have to flee and likely die of starvation. The Father will not take kindly to this.

  Reward: Unknown Item(s)

  Reputation Boost: Dawnspire’s Lower Classes

  100 EXP

  Accept/Deny

  I read it over and then accepted it. Of course I had to. Let them die because I was afraid of an old man? I was, I was terrified of him and his pet griffin, but I’d figure something out. There was surely a time limit on this quest too, but I would have to think about it on the way back from my active quest.

  “Good luck,” I told her. “I will do my best to resolve this in a couple of days when I return.” Her eyes lit up, which made me smile. “Come on,” I said, gesturing to my awkwardly hovering companions and spectral wolf.

  “The mutt,” Ryken said, “does it fight yet?”

  “Um,” I replied, looking blankly at Moro who was sticking tight to my heel. “I don’t know, she hasn’t done anything yet.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You have to learn the Spectral Magic skill before she can fight.”

  “Oh, to do spells?”

  “Yes, genius.”

  I glanced at Gellert, who was simply smiling and looking up at the clouds. “But until she learns some spells she can probably just bite and stuff if we want her to,” I said.

  Ryken pinched the bridge of his nose like I had hit him in the face. “You … I can’t deal with how fucking stupid you are, I swear. Touch the wolf.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Touch the fucking wolf, genius. Stroke her soft fur.”

  Feeling like a complete idiot but desperate to know why, I leaned down and patted Moro on the head. My hand went straight through her. I straightened up again. “Ohh,” I said, as it clicked. “She can’t fight, only do magic?”

  This time it was Gellert’s turn to laugh at me. “We inspected her. You’ve got a spectre of Votorius-Khan. That’s actually pretty rare as far as we know.”

  I looked from Gellert to Ryken’s hard face back to Gellert. They were a ‘we’ now? And I was the moron? Great. Well, they still had to listen to me on this quest, so … yeah.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means,” I admitted, bristling as I said it and waiting for the laughter to begin. Ryken made a disgusted noise but Gellert understood why I knew nothing and actually tried to explain it to me.

  “Votorius-Khan, Flaira, Rax. Those are the titans all the spectres in the Collective currently are under, though there are twelve titans in total,” he began. “Legends say that the titans ruled the land of Pax while the gods went away to have sordid affairs with one another and rest, but the titans got too interested in fighting each other and levelled many areas with their warring.” I waited patiently for him to get to the bit that explained how to make my wolf useful. “When the gods returned and saw carnage, they punished the titans by transferring them up to the sky in the form of stars. Now, if someone is born under a certain constellation they are said to receive power from the corresponding titan. Your birth titan appears to be the Warrior: Votorius-Khan.”

  “Men under the Warrior don’t often join the Collective,” Ryken added, and I waited for an insult to come. “They get a lot of Flaira and Yara members. So I guess your wolf is pretty unique, since there are so few spectres around anymore anyway.” He paused. “Fucker.”

  “Hey, you were doing so well,” I said with a click of my tongue. He shot me a filthy look.

  “Should be me,” he muttered. “Was supposed to be mine.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “So how do I unlock and level up Spectral Magic?” I asked. “And how does she learn spells?”

  Gellert stepped in just as Ryken was opening his mouth to tell me exactly what he thought of me. Again. “Not entirely sure,” he said. “The guides told us that Spectral Magic was only learnable by those with spectres, which you have — lucky — and that to learn it had something to do with introspection. I remember it mentioning that not all of those with a spectre would be able to ever learn magic.” He shrugged. “I’m sure you will, though.”

  “Yeah, how come?”

  “Would be a pretty crappy game feature if a player couldn’t,” he said.

  “I don’t think the game works like that,” I said, then cursed myself internally for breaking my own rule. Ryken was about to speak so this time I interrupted him. “Sorry, life. I don’t think life works like that here.” I paused. “Or anywhere.” Gellert nodded, a little sadly. Clearly he had been hoping for metagame thinking to save his hide here and there, and I admit I was thinking about this as a game as well. That was how I had known I would find something cool in that chest, after all, but maybe it wasn’t always a reliable way to approach li
fe here.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I discover anything more about it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. As we’d been walking and talking I noticed that we had passed the last of the farmland a little while ago, and we’d been walking through wide grassy plains to rejoin the dirt path that would take us east. By cutting the corner we had saved several hours of walking, and I couldn’t see any downsides, like wild animals, just yet anyway.

  What I could see, though, was that blocking our way in the distance seemed to be some kind of a campsite with maybe twenty to thirty people sitting around fires or pitching up fur-lined tents. It was just past lunchtime, judging by the sun in the sky, but there was a slight chill in the air that I would be feeling if it wasn’t for my fairly thick new clothes.

  Were they bandits?

  They wouldn’t have spotted us just yet, as there were a couple of trees dotted about and they were quite far away, but if we wanted to get past unnoticed it would mean going back the way we came, or veering even further to the left before going the long way around them, which would add several hours onto the journey.

  “Should we go see what those people are up to?” I asked my comrades. “Or should we avoid them?”

  Gellert looked surprised at the question. “Do you think they’re dangerous? There are rather a lot of them.”

  “They look weak,” Ryken said gruffly. I looked over at the kid, who was playing with his slingshot, stretching out the cable and shutting one eye.

  “How do you figure that?”

  He glared at me. “They’re wearing rags and stick thin.”

  I squinted, trying to see if I could manage to inspect one, but I could just about make out their brown clothes and not much else. “You making that up?”

  He clenched his fists. “It’s an ability,” he said simply. “My Sling level is high.”

  I wanted to press him further but I didn’t want to drive the kid to a tantrum when stuff had been going fine so far. “That’s useful,” was all I said, instead.

  “Yes,” he said under his breath, and I caught him rolling his eyes. Remind me never to have kids, I thought. The urge to scold him was almost unbearable.

  “So … you think they won’t be a danger if we just keep going past them?”

  “If they’re starving, they might attack us, but I wouldn’t be too scared of that. They are low level and weak.”

  “Low level? That ability lets you inspect them too?”

  He nodded once, and I was satisfied. I was tempted now to learn to use a sling, but there were probably better weapons out there with better abilities, even though zoomed in vision was pretty cool.

  “Ryken,” Gellert said thoughtfully, pulling the bow off his back and squinting past it, “any chance you could teach me that ability?”

  “If you’re level 6 in Archery I can give it a try,” he said. What the hell? Where were all the insults? The kid really hated me more than anything else, didn’t he? I gave a sideways glance to the wolf at my heels, sure that she was the reason why — and not sure why I even cared.

  “Ah, no, I just about managed to get to level 2,” he said. Ryken gave a simple one-shouldered shrug.

  “I, uh, managed to unlock Smithing earlier today,” I said conversationally.

  “Who the fuck asked?” Ryken snapped. Clearly he’d reached his limits of my attempts to chat already, which didn’t bode well just a couple of hours into a potentially two-day journey.

  It took quite a while for us to actually reach the campsite. The flat emptiness of the land ahead of us had made it look like they were a little more in reach, but when we finally got to them, Gellert and I decided we would stop to have one of our meals and find out who they were.

  “Hello,” I greeted with a palm up, trying to look as non-threatening as I could.

  Now that we were close I could see what Ryken had presumably seen a mile off. There were just over twenty people: a mixture of men, women and children. There was also a tall, well-muscled man in dull, scuffed plate mail among them, who stood and stepped quickly to us as we approached. He didn’t look unfriendly, but he looked careful. I noticed a large amount of blood on his torso, hands and scabbard, and then I noticed a medium-sized, curved sword at his waist. At a guess I would have said a scimitar.

  Lucius the Brave

  Level 26 Human

  Warrior

  Neutral

  Just ‘Warrior’, and a high-levelled one at that. I figured that meant he wasn’t aligned with any factions, which was good — it probably meant that these people weren’t a gang of criminals.

  “Hello,” he said, and though he was polite, his stance was powerful and alert. “Does the Collective have business with us? We are happily outside your jurisdiction, if you would like to measure the distance.”

  People outside the organisation itself really were not fans of my faction, were they? “We are on Collective business, but it doesn’t concern you,” I said.

  “Wonderful. How can I help you gentlemen?”

  “My name is Matthew,” I said, hoping to establish some kind of rapport. “We were walking past and wondered if we could sit by your fires while we ate.”

  The man, Lucius, swallowed visibly and then gestured for us to back off so he could talk to us out of earshot of the others. We stepped back a few paces and he lowered his voice. “You want to sit down and eat a full meal in front of a horde of starved people?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess I didn’t think of that.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said testily. “Unless you have enough for all of these people to share, I suggest you keep moving.” His eyes widened. “I mean that with respect, Initiates. I apologise. I haven’t eaten myself in over a day.”

  Well now I felt terrible for even bringing up the topic of food. “I’m so sorry, Lucius,” I said, using his name though he hadn’t introduced himself. I had to find out the etiquette here for doing that. Was it rude? Lucius didn’t seem to notice anyway.

  “Please, it’s quite alright. Those with shouldn’t go without out of solidarity.” He paused. “Advice I would give myself a week ago.”

  “Can’t you eat the wild animals around here?” Gellert blurted from my side. Lucius looked at him with surprise.

  “No,” he said. “They may be Blighted.”

  “What does that actually mean?” I asked. “Crops get the Blight, right? How does a wolf get the Blight? And what does it do?”

  Lucius rubbed his eyes at my words. “My, the questions of the privileged,” he muttered. “Again, that isn’t your fault, you shouldn’t feel guilt for what you can’t prevent.” He looked up and realised that all three of us seemed to be waiting on his answer anyway; I was glad to know that Ryken didn’t know the answer either, so he couldn’t call me an idiot.

  “The Blight is a disease that systematically wiped the crops all over south east Ilyria over the last year. It’s creeping towards Dawnspire but is still a way away. Blighted crops, when eaten, will turn a man or beast mad. Feral. If eaten over a long period of time, the body degrades and death follows swiftly. There have been accounts of livestock eating Blighted crops, and being slaughtered to feed a family who quickly succumbs too. That’s why we’re all starving. Not because we cannot hunt or cannot farm, but because starving to death is preferable to the madness and then the uncontrollable bleeding.”

  We all listened to Lucius speak in silence, and I felt my mouth fall open slightly as he got to the end. This world was pretty brutal. I wondered what would happen if a player ate Blighted food. Probably a significant debuff and then death. But, if he was right, the area I had found myself in was not yet affected.

  “Who are all these people then?” I asked. “People escaping Blighted farmlands and coming west?”

  “Exactly,” Lucius said with a nod. He eyed Moro at my side as if seeing her for the first time. He looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. At least he didn’t seem to feel as strongly about the spectre as th
e hooded man had, but he didn’t look happy either. He looked back up at me. “They are all that’s left of a village to the northeast. Oakhaven.”

  Wow. I glanced back at the weak, huddled people in rags, and tried to picture what they had looked like before they’d had to escape their homes. A village reduced to twenty people. What could possibly have happened? How could it have been prevented?

  “So why are you here with them?” Gellert asked. “You don’t exactly look like you’re the in the same boat as they are.”

  Lucius let his face stretch into a weary smile. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I came across them at random, when they were double the number and being attacked by a large number of wolves. It took me some time but I managed to hack all of the beasts to bits.” He gestured at his bloodied plate mail. “I have been travelling with them, but now we’re on the edge of the land run by the Collective. Ahem. By you. We have nowhere else to go. We are safest here.”

  “Wouldn’t you be safest inside the city gates?” I asked, and then immediately I realised that that was a dumb question.

  “Yes … obviously,” he said. “But your people won’t let any refugees in.”

  “Why not?” I asked, mostly turning to my two companions to shed some light on this.

  “Because Dawnspire is full,” Ryken said quietly. “It’s not a pleasant truth, but it is the truth. I have plenty that I would willingly argue with the Collective over, but that’s not one of them. They let in many refugees early on during the Blight, but the slums are packed to the rafters with poor people, many of them sick. It’s disgusting.”

  I was surprised to hear that; in my very limited time in Dawnspire I wasn’t sure that I had seen a single person who looked to be down on their luck. They all must have stuck to these slums that Ryken mentioned, which I hadn’t visited.

  “And they won’t let you closer to the gates where all the guards are?” I pushed.

  “No, otherwise we’d have to pay a weekly fee to stay in the farmlands.” Lucius rubbed at his face again. “Honestly, I just see no way out.” He was speaking in hushed tones to us again, making sure that the innocent townspeople nearby, who were all staring, couldn’t hear his depressing revelation. “I don’t know what to do.”