by Eric Ugland
A veritable haul.
Which meant it was time for me to start hauling it out of the cave-lair. I carried the stuff to the edge of the pool, got in, cursed at how cold it was, and then swam it up to the surface to shove at Yuri. Repeat. Over and over again, until we got everything I could see of value out of the cave. I left the bones behind, after taking a quick peek through them to make sure there were no gems hidden in them.
On the final trip, I swam all the way to the bottom, just because I was curious. I wanted to know what was down there. Mainly mud, a bunch of plants trying really hard to reach the surface, and a single leather pouch small enough that it practically disappeared when I made a fist. Must have been something that the big glaumdrang missed.
I swam back to the surface and found Yuri sorting through the treasure, putting it in various piles. He had a jeweler’s loupe out, and was peering at objects with it, then making notes in a dark leather notebook. I really considered just keeping the pouch for myself, but, well, I was trying to be a better person. I tossed it on the ground next to him.
“All the way on the bottom of the lake,” I said.
He looked over at the small pouch, and picked it up. He hefted it a time or two, then peeked inside.
“More trouble than it’s worth,” he said, tossing the pouch to the side.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Invitation to a quest, most likely.”
“What?”
“Pick it up, find out. But do not say I did not warn you.”
The curiosity was overwhelming. You know I had to take it.
I snatched the pouch up and peeked inside. A coin. One single coin about the size of a coaster. Rocking it back and forth in the pouch, I could tell there were carvings on either side, but I couldn’t make anything out. There were also letters carved into the side of the coin. It wasn’t a language I knew. But I could probably figure it out, when the time was right. And if there was some super secret cool quest involved, all the better. Because I couldn’t just not take a quest. What if it led to ancient treasure? Or grand magical items? On the other hand, considering how things seemed to be going in Vuldranni, it could just as easily unleash a horde of maniacal demons onto the world. Seemingly even odds.
“You are going to take it?” Yuri asked.
“Can’t resist,” I replied.
“Daredevil?”
“All too often.”
He gave me a rogueish grin and shook his head, his mane shivering in majestic ripples. It made me wish I’d chosen to come into this world as whatever this dude was. Big mane like that, boss.
Yuri came to his feet, and gazed out at the horizon.
“I appreciate, greatly, your help in this matter,” he finally said.
“But you can’t come with me.”
“For whatever it has done against me, this land is still my home. And I cannot leave.”
“I get it.”
“Thank you. For understanding. And for saving my life.”
“Happy to do it. Where are you headed?”
He pointed east. “Long walk that way,” he said. “Turn in this kill for the bounty from the caravaner’s guild. Find some frontier town in need of a monster-killer. Make a new life that way.”
I nodded. “You’re leaving the chests behind?”
“I am out of room to carry them,” he said, pointing to the magic bag on his belt. “My bag only holds organic items. I also left half the coins behind. Figured we can split it even.”
“Sounds fair to me,” I replied.
I pulled my remaining rations out of my bag, and passed them over.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A little food to get you back to civilization,” I replied.
“But you will--“
“I’ve got my own means. Consider it a parting gift so you’ll remember us Imperial types fondly.”
“I hope we are able to meet again, when our nations are not at war. When our rulers are not so blind to the damage they cause for their petty vanity.”
“Lords — nothing but a bunch of assholes.”
“As long as we are out here in the middle of nowhere, let me say how much I agree with you.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, and then slipped my rations into his pouch.
“I know not which direction you intend to go, but be wary. The army is not far off, and last I heard, they are moving west with speed.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering what that army could be doing. Where it might be headed.
Yuri nodded once, and started walking east.
Chapter Eighteen
I watched him go for a minute. There was something relaxing about watching the lion man walk, this lone figure moving through a waving sea of grass. But then I realized it’d be kind of weird if he turned around and saw me staring at him. Besides, I had my own long walk to get uh, walking.
Yuri left behind four chests. One big one that had plenty of toothmarks from the glaumdrang, and three smaller golden ones that were just a shade under shoebox sized. Didn’t seem right to leave those behind. My first instinct was to tie the chest to my chest and just pull it behind me. Make it a de facto sled. However, that seemed prone to problems, such as leaving an easy-to-follow trail, and also getting stuck on each and every root I came across. Though, not sure I would come across that many roots until I got to the other side of the plains. I looked over at the mountains to the south, once again debating if it would be worth going over them in the middle. Just to get back to the Empire, to see where I was, and how far I had left to go to home.
Not yet, I thought. I still wanted to see what was around Mahrduhm. I wanted to know what was going on there, and if they were going to become my enemy as well.
Still, those were big thoughts. The little thoughts were all about getting the damn chests onto my person with the big fuck-off Typhon egg. While going through the remnants of Yuri’s left-behind belongings, I saw a sword laying in the grass. The greenskins’ bane blade stabbed through a small piece of parchment with a few lines of text written on it:
If you’re going west, you’ll need this.
I looked back over my shoulder, and I thought I could just make out the retreating form of the lion man. Probably just my imagination, but I thanked him all the same.
It took a bit of rope, but eventually I got the large chest on my back horizontally, with the three small chests tied to the larger chest to form a “U”. I nestled the egg in the middle of said “U.” All of that, I wore like a backpack. And, as you can probably imagine, it was remarkably uncomfortable. However bizarrely, though, it was reasonably stable. I could walk with it on. Or, as it may have been, I could hike.
A little before the sun hit the middle of the sky, I resumed my trip home. One foot in front of the other, like there was nothing I’d rather be doing. Hiking had never been an activity I looked forward to, because it always felt a bit silly. I hiked to get to things, not just to be hiking. But here, I didn’t even really have a destination planned for the night. Or the week. It could be months before I got to Coggeshall. Or, you know, I’d completely miss Coggeshall because there might not even be a way for me to get to Coggeshall, being that my holding was on the other side of a giant mountain range.
“A pox on my curiosity!” I shouted at the sky.
Luckily, nothing shouted back.
I was alone.
Fantastically alone. It felt kind of nice. And I won’t lie — I considered just striking out on my own. Trying to make a different way in the world. If we were being honest, I was ill-suited for the tasks I had been dealt. And walking under the warm autumn sun, a delicate breeze blowing the endless grass in relaxing waves, I thought maybe I had found something I was good at. I thought, perhaps, it would be better for me to run after Yuri the lion man and ask to join him on his journey. I was damn good at killing monsters. I should just go and kill monsters. I even stopped, full on in my tracks, and stood there, thinking I was going to turn around and hike east
.
And I knew if I did turn around, I would run after Yuri. I would go and just be a monster-killer.
I shook my head.
That wasn’t a choice I could make. That wasn’t a choice the new me could make. Old me, fat me, human me, I’d run after Yuri. I’d hide from all the difficult choices and the unpleasant tasks, and I’d go bask in violence and hedonism. Not that Yuri was a guy who screamed ‘hedonistic lifestyle,’ somewhat the opposite actually, but I knew that if I let myself slide back, that’s where I’d be headed.
Fuck.
Fuck being the good guy. Fuck being responsible. Being responsible sucked.
Fuck.
I put my head down, and kept on heading west.
Chapter Nineteen
The day passed along with my footsteps. There was an odd dichotomy at work within the plains. On the one hand, it was immensely relaxing — the sun, the breeze, the grass. And yet, it was also terrifying. There was so much of the world hidden away. I knew there had to be animals about, but I saw nearly no signs of life. Just an occasional bird flitting about here and there. And basically no trees. I could see one off in the distance, northwest of my current position, and one way back to the east, which was the giant tree where I’d met Yuri. Roughly speaking, that was it as far as trees were concerned. Everything else was grass/ There were a few spots where the grasses were a little higher or a little lower, but otherwise, it was just flat brown grass as far as my eyes could see.
On and on the hike went. As the sun started to go down, I paused, wondering what my plan for the night should be. Take a chance and set up a camp? Or just keep going, walking through the night?
I felt like I’d wasted more time than I should have helping out Yuri, and that it would be best if I got right home. So I decided I was going to just keep on hiking. Not exactly like there was going to be a massive difference between night and day for someone with darkvision and unlimited stamina.
Just then, something gave me pause. I grabbed the sword at my side and began pulling it from the sheath. And just as I did so, a creature with big teeth launched itself out of the grass at the general area of my face.
You can call it luck if you want — that’s certainly what I’d call it — but I managed to accelerate the draw of the sword, bringing it hard across. It caught the creature through the jaw, and bisected its head.
It still slammed into me, but there was nothing to its hit, not really. Just a whole lot of blood pouring out across me.
I looked down at the creature, and immediately let my tremorsense out.
Some little things were digging around a few feet below me. Something tiny was bouncing up and down on four little feet. But I could sense no other large predators about.
Except, wait... there was something. A few somethings. Moving with nearly preternatural slowness. They had big hearts thumping in big chests, which had to be the only reason I even detected them to begin with. Two creatures, moving to flank me from either side. They were definitely being careful, which meant, to me at least, they were hunting me, but had seen what’d happened to the first attacker. They were going to ambush from the side.
I kept the sword out, but I straightened up and appeared relaxed. I looked down at the corpse laying across my feet.
Orange with black stripes, and a big cat. So there were tigers in the grass! I always liked tigers in the old world. As a kid, it’d been my dream to have a pet tiger. Especially after I saw the relationship between Jasmine and Rajah. Of course, then my world fell apart the first time, and those foolish dreams of giant pets fell to the wayside as I dropped into dreams of whole families and safe sleeping spots.
I shook my head, clearing the reverie and forcing myself back to the present. I was being hunted, and it probably wasn’t the best idea to slip into idle daydreams about a reality that no longer existed.
“Now isn’t this one dead cat,” I said loudly. And I picked the dead tiger up by the tail, and slung him over my shoulder, and continued walking.
As I hoped, the casual display of violence kept the other hunters in their place, at least as far as I could feel. I kept the tremorsense active as long as I could, but it was an exhausting way to exist. There were so many creatures moving around that I couldn’t see, but I could feel. Trying to sort through everything was actual mental exercise. And having to keep my other senses in the forefront as well. Using my eyes, my ears, and tremorsense was overwhelming. I wondered if it was a product of being given the extra sense later in life. Relatively speaking, of course. If there were creatures who were born with extra senses, could they use them all at once with no downsides? I decided from now I would spend time using every sense I had at once, to get used to it and to make sure it wasn’t so onerous a task.
After the corpse started to stink, I dropped it, and kept walking. Oddly enough, it seemed like the creatures were no longer willing to tangle with me. I wanted to eat something, but since I’d been the nice stupid guy and gave away my rations, I just tightened the figurative belt, and plodded on.
As the night wore on, the winds coming off the mountains found a whole new gear, blowing across the plains as if they had something to prove. It got very cold, very fast, and the stars above were simply unreal. I nearly lost myself several times over the course of the night, just staring up into the vastness of space. The moons were waning, all having various bits missing from them, and it felt like the stars were putting out just about as much light as the moons.
Great colonies of bats flitted through the sky, looking like frenetic clouds. Somewhere in the middle of the night, clouds covered the sky in a heartbeat, and a cold rain slammed down against the plains. It was quick and hard and I got soaked. Blerg.
A bonus effect of the wetness was that some very large animals came out of the ground, and moved about in the distance. I couldn’t see them clearly, but they were reminiscent of worms. Great big worms coming out of the ground and crawling along the surface for a spell before disappearing back beneath. I did not mind that I wasn’t closer to those big fucks. The rain, well, that I could have done without.
I did stop for the sunrise. It was pretty impressive. Not as good as seeing the sun come up from over water, but still, a sight to behold. A vast array of colors spilled across the sky, and the clouds turned pink and orange. A good moment of beauty in a world that was increasingly harsh. At least from my perspective.
Day two of hiking was better than day one. Still perpetually flat. Still only the occasional trees. This time, however, I walked from tree to tree. Each one stood over a body of water. Nothing as grand, deep, or dangerous as the first, but that seemed to be a thing here. Lake and tree going together. No rivers came forth, it seemed that these were somehow sticking to their shores. Which didn’t make much sense from an earth science perspective, but when did physics interfere with how this weird world wanted to exist?
I finally decided to stop at one of the trees, to climb up and take a nap safe above ground. I woke up in the middle of the night, did a little stretching, got my stupid chest backpack rig on, and resumed the hike.
Chapter Twenty
Once again, there was a brief but heavy rain in the middle of the night. Once again, the giant worms came up to the surface, but once again they kept their distance from me. I wondered if that was a conscious choice on their part. Were the worms capable of conscious thought?
When the sun came up, I saw something new in the distance. Smoke. Not the wild and crazy smoke of a brush fire — the grass was too damp for that at any rate — but the smoke of a thousand or more small fires. It was north-northwest of me, and the curiosity was too great. I wanted to know what was over there. I figured that it was west enough that I could do it without feeling that I was going off-course.
I didn’t really change my rate — I just kinda angled differently. But it was amazing how much having a destination made my hike better. It was no longer this ceaseless thing, but there was a potential end in sight. Sure, it was still quite the sight awa
y, but not impossible.
Maybe two hours or so of walking, and I had a better view of what was ahead. Sort of. I could see individual smoke plumes now, and it gave me a better count of who might be up there. Thousands of campfires was correct. It was insane. And huge. Spread out over a vast distance.
After another hour, I could see motion in the grass coming my way. A great disturbance, as it were. It didn’t take long for me to get a clear picture: a group of riders galloping through the grass, very obviously using me as their target. For the barest of moments, I glanced around, seeing if there was anything I could do. Any chance that in the last two days, I’d somehow missed an obvious way to hide on a vast plain.
Nope. And, besides, it was pretty clear they’d seen me already. Running now would be a bad idea. Especially since they had horses.
Instead, I stood there, and put a dumb look on my face. I was good at that.
The riders approached quickly, riding their mounts hard, which I thought was a bit stupid considering how easy it’d be for a horse to step in a hole and break their leg. But these riders didn’t seem to care a whit.
They had black uniforms on, and from a distance seemed to be wearing lighter armor. Chainmail at most. They had long spears held upright, with little black pennants whipping back and forth in the wind. I thought they looked a bit silly, but they had beautiful horses and sat tall in their saddles.
Expertly, they came at me full speed, surrounding me and stopping as one unit. The spears were still up in the air, but it was pretty clear they could come down and impale me at a moment’s notice. The rider facing me had a red plume coming out of her helm. I could see her eyes through the slit, and she looked me up and down a few times. Then, she pulled her helm off, and shook out a tangle of blonde hair.
