by Andrew Rowe
I didn’t regret making my offer, though.
Earning Dawnbringer’s trust was more valuable to me than any other treasure I could think of.
Chapter VII –Tales of The Past
Before you ask, yes, I did think about asking Reika to turn herself into her dragon form and fly us to the shrine. But I had read a few books about dragons by that time, and virtually every one that involved a human riding on a dragon involved some kind of romantic relationship between the two.
I also knew Reika was deeply invested in the “traditions” set forth in those books, and asking to ride on her would have been tantamount to propositioning her.
...Which I wasn’t strictly against doing at some point, but I’d only known her for a matter of days, and I didn’t know her well enough to know if I’d be interested. More importantly, it also seemed patently unfair. She’d been living in isolation for decades, and she was incredibly excited to be traveling with Dawn and me. I didn’t want her to feel obligated to be in some sort of romantic relationship with me just so she could stay close to us.
There’s a good argument that I should have just explained that I was asking her to carry us in a very definitely non-romantic way, purely for convenience. I worried that might actually disappoint her, since I’d be ruining the fantasy of taking flight with a romantic interest on her back.
Maybe I was overthinking it. But I didn’t know her very well, and I wasn’t willing to take the risk of making things worse immediately to save a few extra weeks of travel. I didn’t have any reason to think that I needed to hurry, and more time spent traveling to the shrines meant more of a chance for me to learn about the area and practice with Dawnbringer.
So, because of that, and because her dragon form apparently required a lot of food, I decided to default to walking. For the moment, I figured I would leave it up to her to decide if she wanted to offer to fly us for any stretch of the journey.
We left the next morning, just as planned. Reika was a little bleary eyed when we left her cave, and she’d filled her backpack almost entirely with books. That was going to be a resource problem, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her she needed to leave anything else behind.
We exited the cave on the side where I’d first entered. Reika led the way from there, taking us on one of the paths that led east.
“We’re near the south west corner of the Unclaimed Lands. The shrine where people leave sacrifices for me is about ten miles to the south, and the town another ten miles beyond that, right near the train. If we get lost, the safest bet is to just head south until we hit the train tracks, then cross and follow along them. There are forts and tiny villages every hundred miles or so.”
For a dragon, that was probably a short enough distance that she could fly there any time she needed. At a walking pace, though, that meant days between small settlements. If we ran out of water, we’d be in trouble.
I’d trekked across longer distances before, but that was in territory I was familiar with. My lack of knowledge made me feel uncharacteristically vulnerable, so I sought to remedy it as quickly as possible.
“I have some questions. First, what are train tracks?”
Reika blinked at me. “They’re the path that a train uses?”
“Right. What exactly is a ‘train’ in this context?” I felt a little silly, but Kaldwyn had a number of things I was unfamiliar with, and I needed to learn about them as soon as I could.
After a moment, Reika gathered her thoughts. “It’s a form of transportation. Picture a bunch of metal wagons linked together, then pushed along a track.”
Comprehension struck me. “Oh! Like the kind of tracks used for pushing carts of ore in a mine. They use something like that to transport people?”
“Yeah, it’s the main way people get from Valia all the way to Caelford. They apparently have a bunch of them going from city to city, too.”
I’d heard of those countries, but I didn’t have a good idea of where they were. “If they’re attached, it must require something very large to move them. How do they do that? Dragons?”
Reika laughed. “No, no. Dragons are really rare, and we’re not exactly domestic beasts. Trains aren’t pulled by animals like old horse wagons. They have steam engines.”
“Steam? How does that move something?” I shook my head. “Never mind, that’s not what’s important right now. I need to get a better idea of where we’re going. Can I borrow the book with the map?”
“Sure!”
She handed me something called Alterius’ Almanac: Volume 3, which contained dozens of maps of varying regions. I shuffled through and found a large map of the Unclaimed Lands, and Reika helped me find our current location.
We discussed our path as we walked. Reika wanted to avoid human towns for the moment, so we decided to head toward a large body of water — Lake Islyn — which was only about fifty miles off. From there, we could follow the lake itself and some connecting streams for a good half of the journey. We agreed to try to find a town if we ran into any severe food or water shortages.
It seemed simple, so obviously there was no way everything would end up going the way we planned.
***
Most of the day passed without incident. I chatted with Dawn and Reika as we traveled, getting to know them and learn a little bit more about Kaldwyn.
While carrying Dawn was easy enough, I needed to find a more convenient way to deal with her when I needed both hands free. While we walked, I worked on extending my senses into the crystal, trying to reshape it like I would with stone or metal.
My goal was to reshape the section of crystal nearest the hilt to create a couple holes, which would have allowed it to be looped onto my belt like a scabbard. It was inordinately heavy for a scabbard, but I didn’t have anything else I could use on hand. I didn’t know if an ordinary wood or leather scabbard would be able to hold a sacred sword, anyway. I had to keep the Sae’kes in an enchanted scabbard, and I suspected Dawnbringer might require the same.
I debated just burning some holes in the crystal, but my efforts to reshape it were good practice at trying to learn another type of magic, so I kept at it. I never knew when I might need to adjust some other crystals without breaking them.
Dawn still teased me relentlessly as we traveled, but I could tell I’d pleased her by offering to go looking for the amulets. And both Dawn and Reika seemed immensely excited just to be exploring unfamiliar territory.
“Look over there, in the pond!” Reika pointed. “It looks like some sort of chicken-like monster!”
“That’s a duck, Reika.”
She squinted. “You’re sure? Oh, goddess. It’s looking straight at me. Why do I feel like it’s seeing into my soul? Can it do that?”
“Ducks are harmless.”
Reika growled and lowered her stance. “I don’t know. Something about that creature’s stare sets me on edge.” She gasped. “Maybe it’s a cockatrice! Don’t they look like birds? Is it trying to turn me to stone?” She looked down, presumably checking if she was turning to stone.
She obviously wasn’t.
It was a duck.
We eventually circled around the “extremely dangerous legendary beast” and continued on our journey. If I was by myself, I’d have probably made a meal out of the duck and stopped at the pond for water, but we weren’t desperate enough for supplies yet for me to make Reika that uncomfortable.
***
We stopped to eat twice, once around mid-day and then again just after nightfall. Reika didn’t complain, but I could tell she was exhausted. As powerful as she was, she clearly wasn’t used to walking long distances. She’d never had to.
As we dug into our evening meal, I asked Dawn an important question. “So, you’re a sacred sword. What exactly can you do? I’ve read about you in some books, but I don’t know what’s accurate.”
I chuckled. “Yes, clearly I was reading about the Six Sacred Swords so that I could figure out how best to flirt with each of you. I hear Diamantine is a hard one to crack.”
I heard Reika snort, nearly choking on her food in the process.
“Right. Anyway, now that you’ve been thoroughly scandalized by my audacity, can you tell me all your abilities?”
I tried to resist the urge to roll my eyes. I failed. Eyes were rolled.
“Okay, sure. Tell me about one of your abilities, and I’ll tell you about one of mine. Fair?”
Reika leaned over and whispered, “I could just tell you what she can do.”
I gave Reika a sheepish look. “She heard you, and now she’s going to turn into a ghost and haunt you for a thousand years or something.”
“She can haunt me all she wants. I’m a spirit dragon. I can eat ghosts, you know.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You can?”
“Probably.” Reika shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never actually tried, but it seems like a thing I could do.”
“Huh.”
That did help explain why the sprits of the forest didn’t seem too keen on visiting her in their true forms.
I paused for a moment, thinking. “You know, I still don’t really know what your capabilities are, either, Reika. Besides turning into your other form and such.”
“Well,” she waved a hand, which shifted into a claw as she gestured, “I can do some smaller scale shapeshifting, too.”
I nodded. “Noticed that during your fight. How’s it work? Interpolating between your two different forms or something?”
“I don’t actually know the theory behind it, to be honest. It just comes naturally to me.” She frowned. “Maybe I can study it if we get to a major city at some point.”
“That makes sense. I was mostly wondering how much shapeshifting flexibility you had. Can you give yourself characteristics other than dragon ones?”
Reika shook her head. “Nope. Just the dragon stuff. Oh, and my spirit form, obviously.”
“Spirit form...by that, you mean when you went into the state where I was passing right through you, and you were leaking mist?”
“Yeah. I can do that regardless of which body I’m using. It’s really exhausting, though. I can’t maintain it for long, and I’m usually weaker for a while afterward.”
I nodded. It probably expended a tremendous amount of essence to change into a half-corporeal form like that. “And you seem to have some earth magic, like mine? You really surprised me with the door that flew up in my path when I was trying to run past you.”
She shook her head. “Nope. That was an enchantment, I didn’t put that there. I just have a key to open the doorway.” She paused. “Why’d you try to run past me, anyway?”
“Oh, I thought that was obvious. You said your job was guarding the passage. I figured that if I could make it out of that cave, your job would have been done, and I could have bypassed you without a fight.”
Reika snorted. “Really? You were counting on the semantics of my rules to stop me from following you?”
“In fairness, there’s a lot of evidence that your goddess thinks like that. I’ve been reading the scriptures a bit, and she can be very literal. Some of the visages, too. Especially Kerivas.”
“You’re...not wrong.” She sighed. “Is it really that important to you to avoid fighting?”
“I love fighting.” I meant it. Fighting was more exhilarating than anything else I’d ever done. “But what I don’t like is potentially killing or being killed by people I’ve just met as part of some kind of arbitrary test.”
“It’s not arbitrary. It’s part of a sacred tradition.” She folded her arms.
“Sure, but I don’t have the same religion you do. Anyway, we could argue that for hours. Let’s get back to the good stuff. Abilities. How fast can you fly?”
She pondered that. “Probably about three times faster than I can run? Maybe four?”
I was guessing that meant around thirty or forty miles an hour, which sounded pretty significant. I gave her an appreciative nod. “How long can you maintain it?”
“Not very long. Maybe an hour or so before I have to take a break. And then I have to eat. Like, a lot. The food requirements are a big part of why dragons don’t tend to leave their lairs very often, or if they do, why they stick to their human looking forms.”
That was definitely going to be a problem if we wanted to travel long distances quickly in her dragon form, but it didn’t sound insurmountable. “What if you just grew wings in your human form?”
“I can do that, but I can’t fly as fast that way or carry as much. And it still takes quite a bit out of me. Not as much as being in my full dragon form, but more than just walking around.”
I’ll have to figure out more about her flight speed and efficiency later if I’m going stick with her for a long time.
I looked down at Dawnbringer. “Well, my primary form of magic is metal manipulation. I generally use it to shift the weight and dimensions of my sword in the middle of a fight.”
“Hm. I hadn’t considered what it might be like for you. Do you want to test and see if it even works?”
I shrugged. “Probably.”
“I can start with something small.”
I put my hand on her hilt. “Ready?”
I pressed a finger against Dawnbriger’s hilt, closed my eyes, and concentrated.
I could sense the structure of the metal in my mind. The blade and crossguard were different types of metal, and I could feel the core that ran through to the pommel, which was another type of metal.
That was interesting, but not important at the moment.
I concentrated on the blade, sensing the exact dimensions of it. Then I focused on the metal where the hilt and blade connected. There weren’t any runes on that location.
Condense.
The metal in the spot I was focusing on condensed, thinning the blade in that location.
I...definitely hadn’t been thinking about anything like that.
My intent had been to see if I could reshape the blade so I could slip it out of the scabbard without altering the crystal. That seemed like it would be possible, but I didn’t do it immediately because I still wasn’t comfortable altering her blade on that scale.
“How do you feel?”
I rolled my eyes.
Return.
Her metal sprung back into its previous shape.
I nodded at her. “Thanks. That could be very important. What about giving you other properties?”
“I can make you attract or repel objects magnetically.�
�
I grinned. She’d probably find that a lot more impressive once she saw it.
“Nah, I’ve told you enough for now. That’s enough banter. Sword powers. Tell me about them.”
As a form of emphasis, her already glowing form started glowing slightly brighter.
“...”
“...Yeah, that’s, uh...”
“Right. Magic words. What are those?”
That last part sounded a little more useful, if it was actually true. But it also sounded like the kind of story that Reika was prone to telling, so I couldn’t rely on it being accurate.
“I suppose I could tell you a story with a similar level of quality to that power.”
I chuckled, patting her crystal scabbard. “Fine, fine. Glowing definitely can be useful. But I know you just listed that as a ‘power’ to tease me further and hold out on telling me the good stuff.”
I considered calling her out on the fact that she’d been relentlessly teasing me since we met, but from her tone, I suspected she was still just playing with me and wasn’t actually offended.
“Fine, fine. I’ll tell you a story from my homeland. A real one, not a joke.”
