Later that night, after finishing their meal, Kryos asked, “What was all that stuff you told the guards about?”
Leona was wiping their bowls out with some fresh grass she had plucked. She looked at him, and wryly grinned. “I keep forgetting you’re new to Vorunor.”
In their days of travel from Suncrest to where they were now, Kryos had told her parts of the story of his life. He didn't tell Leona everything about his youth, but enough that she knew he only knew of Vorunor, and learned about it from his mom and dad. And thus, in that interim, during the morning and evening when they were putting the wagon into or out of ‘home mode’, Leona would teach him more about the world’s workings from a practical perspective.
Kryos finished tamping out the last of the coals, and as Leona walked past him to put the rest of the mess kits away in the wagon, he said, “New but native, technically.”
Leona popped out of the wagon and said, “Grab the other side of the tarp.” Kryos did so, and as they flipped it up and over the wagon to provide camouflage, she said, “We’re registered and licensed. Guilds can try to operate without the Quest Conclave’s permission, but their Boards aren’t linked and don’t get the benefit of the Quest slips having that magical connection.”
Kryos finished with his side and came around to Leona’s side, and had to suppress a laugh. The short half-sea-elf was struggling with getting the tarp down where a few of the glued-on branches had stuck to the top. “Need some help?”
Leona looked up at him. “Yes, please.” As Kryos took over for her, she continued, “Right, middle-ground. Suncrest had a city guard, but they only really patrolled and kept the peace. They had two Adventuring Guilds that handled more specialized tasks—the Irontrail with monsters and other fighting-focused things, and then the Hearthguard who would do things like find thieves.”
“Is it because Guard is a pretty basic Class?” Kryos asked as he finished getting the tarp in place.
“Yes, but there’s more to it,” Leona said. “Cities don’t own us, but they rely on us. Guards keep drunk idiots from stabbing each other, whereas guilds handle monsters, Rifts, and things normal Classes aren’t built for.” She tugged the tarp corner down. “So if a city lets a registered Guildmaster get robbed in the street while its guards watch, every Guild nearby starts asking why they should risk their necks for that city.”
“Got it,” Kryos replied as he wiped his feet-claws and entered the wagon. “Adventuring Guilds won’t help out places that don’t help them out. It’s one of the ‘I scratch your spine and you scratch my underbelly’ type of situations.”
Leona pulled the tarp down over the door as she shut and barred it. “Well, the expression here is, ‘I scratch your back and you scratch mine’, but yes. Now, where’s the stupid candle?”
Kryos, with his perfect dark vision, grabbed it, lit it, and then handed it on the little bronze stand to her. Leona took it from him, and then the two got into their respective sleeping positions. Kryos, head next to the door, on his bedroll on the bottom of the wagon, and Leona up in her hammock.
“Thanks,” Kryos said. “You kept me from being arrested, or whatever would’ve happened.”
Leona blew out the candle and set the holder down. There was silence for a few moments, and Kryos closed his eyes. Then, she said, “Thank you for saving my life.”
“It’s my job,” Kryos replied without hesitation.
“Silver for your thoughts?”
Kryos chuckled. “Like you’d give up a silver.” He could see Leona peer her head over the edge of the hammock, though he knew she couldn’t see him given the pitch blackness of the wagon.
“I . . . do you . . .” she shook her head and pulled it up. “Nevermind. Goodnight, Kryos.”
“Goodnight.”
The days of travel continued much as they had before, though there were more frequent travelers since there was not a river for trade and rapid transit. The only path to The Crossing was this main, packed dirt road that was wide enough for two large sized wagons to pass one another with a few feet in between. The grasslands to either side were lush and vibrant, colored green with a few patches of browns and reds, with dotted copses of trees that were either green, brown, or in some cases, a light silver hue.
The travel itself was as before: Kryos pulled the wagon, keeping his thoughts to himself as he ruminated upon the conversations of the evening and morning before, where he and Leona would talk for hours. Not just about Vorunor, though that comprised a great deal of their conversation—her telling him about the world, and him asking questions.
His dad came from a very different life than Leona, and so his teachings about how the world worked were also very different. Kryos learned about that world: a world of courts, intrigue, grand adventure, mighty heroes and deeds.
Leona came from the coast, from an on the verge of being a merchant lord family, from a tropical region. She knew a bit of wealth from early childhood, but then her parent’s business was bought out from under them, their investments in the form of shipments wrecked by competitors hiring pirates, and she was given up to an orphanage to avoid a life on the streets. She didn’t come from minor nobility and become an Adventurer out of a sense of wonder and travel, dining in fancy inns and dealing with the middle- and upper-class. No, she came from the mud, dirt, and brine-crusted underbelly of the world.
It was that world that Kryos was learning about every morning and night, and it was that world that he was thinking about during these days of travel. He often glanced back at Leona, and would see her looking off in the distance, toward the east where the coastline lay, but he swore he could see the subtle turn of her head indicating she had cast her gaze away from him moments before.
Interspersed between the verdant grasslands were farming hamlets and villages with no more than a thousand people living there at most. Some people were heading towards The Crossing with goods and livestock, and the few interactions they had resulted in some social interactions that further cemented Kryos’ mother, Kryalis’, words in his mind.
On the evening of the twelfth, they arrived at a town. Leona checked her map, and said, “The place is called Beck’s Gap. Looks like there’s an inn here. Want to see about getting a few rooms?”
The thought of parting with coin stung, but Kryos liked the idea of a warm bath, just like the boiling-hot springs of the Drakemount where he would often play with and have splash-fights with the water serpents and young leviathans who were quite friendly gentle giants. “Sure. Sounds great.” The thought of getting to soak in hot water pushed him on with renewed vigor.
They reached the town as the sun finished setting and the stars finally revealed their splendor. The inn Leona had spoken of was, conveniently enough, directly next to the road. The town appeared to be walled with wooden palisades, and a few towers were erected to keep watch around the inner edge of those walls. The inn, it seemed, functioned as a sort of gatehouse and entry portal.
Kryos pulled the wagon to the still-open doors of the palisades, and stopped at the raised hand of one of four guards holding spears, and let Leona do the talking, as she had received better reactions throughout the last few days.
“Hail,” Leona said. “We’re looking to stay at the inn.”
The guards eyed Kryos with suspicion, and Kryos hiked his thumb at the Quest Board behind him, glittering with the golden word, Dragontrail.
The guards glanced at each other, and one of them waved Kryos through. “The town’s open to you, then. Keep the peace, and there won’t be any trouble.”
“Thanks,” Leona said as Kryos pulled them in, hooked a hard right, and pulled into a hard-packed, dirt lot in front of the two-story inn that was backed up right along the palisade wall. Hanging up the harness, and grabbing his shield and mace, he waited for Leona to unpin and lock the steering column and brakes in place, then gave her a helping hand down. She led the way to the inn door and opened it.
Kryos followed her inside. The room was warm, bright, and cheery. Several townspeople were talking, a few were drunkenly and merrily singing songs, and more were sitting around tables playing cards. None seemed to care about or notice Leona, but the moment Kryos stepped in, having to stay bent over due to his height, everyone’s conversation ceased.
Kryos kept leaning forward as he followed his companion to the bar proper, and the half-sea-elf cleared her throat. “Excuse me.”
The barkeep, a portly older gentleman with an exquisite moustache that was oiled and drawn out in curls to both sides of his lips, turned around and dropped a glass with a shattering crash. His mouth seemed to fail him for a moment before he finally found words; his eyes were locked on Kryos the whole time. “H-how d-do you do? Welcome t-to the Weary T-traveler.”
Leona tapped the bartop. “Do you have rooms available for the night, hot bath for purchase, food and drink?”
The man’s eyes never left Kryos as he pushed the shattered glass away with his foot and replied to Leona. “For you miss? Sure. B-but him? I’m sorry, b-but the stories—” he shook his head. “I d-don’t even t-think we have a r-room big enough.”
Kryos considered his options. I could try and cow him into submission, like mom would advise, but this is a larger town with a standing guard, and this space is confined if we get into a fight. I’d be at a disadvantage. And, I don’t need a hot bath or bed . . . even if I’d really like both.
Leona was about to say something, but Kryos put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he softly said. “Enjoy a good night’s sleep and the amenities. I’ll stay in the wagon.” Kryos turned, kept low, and exited the building. He got to the wagon, unlocked the back, and began going through the routine to drop it down to ‘home mode’, minus the tarp.
Leona slipped into the wagon past him and grabbed the winches.
“What are you doing?” Kryos asked.
Leona looked at him, and her eyes were filled with pride. “If they won’t give you service, I don’t want their service.”
Kryos felt that same sensation of warmth and fluttering in his chest as he did back in the first Rift when he had helped her tend to her wounds. He didn’t reply, simply nodding, and they went about their rapid routine to set up the wagon. Once that was done, he said, “You could probably go in and purchase food and drink. We’d save on our supplies, and have a change of pace.”
Leona looked back at the inn, then back at Kryos. “Giving those hateful bastards money sours my stomach.” She then looked past him and at the ration boxes. “But . . . we’ll have rations and the same fare for a while, and no river nearby for fresh fish. Alright, I convinced myself.” She turned and headed inside.
Once Kryos had worked his way out of his armor, Leona had come back with a wood plate with a full roasted chicken that had been stuffed with herbs, a loaf of bread with butter, and two mugs of a deep, brown liquid that Kryos took two sniffs of then an inquiring sip of. The taste was revolting. “Bleh! What is this?”
Leona cackled and took the mug away from him. “Ale. Never had it?”
“No! I’ve had water and something in the Drakemount called minvinaris, which is like a berry juice.”
Leona looked at him with shock. “You’ve never had alcohol?”
Kryos looked back at her. “No, I haven’t.”
She continued to look at him with disbelief. “Stars above, that’s insane. Right, when we get to a town that isn’t full of breed-bigots, I’m going to get you drunk.”
Kryos shook his head and tore the chicken in half.
The days continued to pass as the green grasslands gave way to more dull, brown lands. Fewer hamlets and villages were scattered about, but, there were occasional caravans of loggers that passed by. They were coming from the place that Dragontrail was heading to—The Oakenlands.
They weren’t just men or women working and transporting the wood; as Leona explained, a family’s primary breadwinner would often sign an employment contract with one of the lumber or timber companies, and their family would go with them to a temporary town. Those towns would then be taken down and moved around the outside edges of the vast forest, picking at the easier, smaller-trunk trees.
And so as these caravans passed, some families were passing by. These people had a wholly different reaction to Kryos. Caravan guards wearing an emblem with a brown log emblazoned on a green field initially glared at Kryos, then saw the glimmering, white Quest Board behind him, the golden name of the Adventuring Guild above Kryos’ head, and then nodded respectfully at the armored half-dragon. It was a sign of one warrior acknowledging another, or perhaps just acknowledging the fact that they were part of a Guild in some way.
More importantly to Kryos, though, he had his first wholly positive interaction since leaving The Crossing. Since families would go on work contracts to The Oakenlands, that meant sometimes children would be born out there, and not see much of civilization until their later years. So, when one of the caravans passed by, Kryos happened to catch a child staring at him. The boy had to be no older than eight years old; some type of half-breed, as he was Human, mixed with something else that had greenish skin and purple eyes with hair that looked to be perpetually on fire, but not harming him.
The boy hopped off the wagon and ran up a few feet from Kryos, then respectfully walked alongside him. “Excuse me, mister.”
“Yes?” Kryos asked as he looked down and sideways at the boy who only came up to his mid-thigh.
“What are you?”
“Half-dragon and a Guildmaster,” Kryos replied as he pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
The boy looked back. “Wow. Half-dragon? Like the big, flying creatures?”
“Yeah, but I can’t fly,” Kryos replied with a light laugh.
“Can I touch one of your horns?”
That request was a little odd to Kryos, but he shrugged and gestured for Leona to pull the brakes. She did so, and Kryos knelt down. “Just don’t grab and yank them in a weird direction, if you please.”
The boy ran a hand along Kryos’ left horn and let out a gasp. “It feels like a ram’s horn! That’s so neat! I would’ve thought it was more . . . well, to be honest, special.”
Kryos couldn’t help but laugh at that, and he pulled his head back to look at the boy. “Mind me asking what you are? I’ve never seen someone with flames for hair. That is astounding, by the way.”
“My mama’s a Spriten, dada’s a Human.”
As if on cue, a man came over from the caravan. “Pardon me, sir.” He looked at his son. “Well, you got to say hi, but you’ll have to run to catch up if you want to keep talking.”
The boy looked up at Kryos. “How do you become an Adventurer?”
Leona interrupted at that, saying, “Go to a System Shrine—the closest one is in Shhiv’s Spear. You look like you’re strong. Want to be like Kryos here?” The boy nodded. “Then ask the Angels who guard it to give you what’s called an Anchor Class. Got it? Then, join up with Baxter’s Breakers—best Adventuring Guild for safe monster killing. It’ll be a good starting point” —she pointedly looked at the dad— “and they keep their young Adventurers safe with veteran Adventurers to guide them.”
The dad looked very upset that Leona was encouraging the dangerous lifestyle, but the boy was absolutely ecstatic. He looked at Kryos. “That’s what you are? An Anchor?”
“Yeah,” Kryos replied as he rapped his knuckle against his armor. “I protect my allies. And, maybe one day, you’ll be strong enough to join Dragontrail. We only take the best of the best, because we take risks that lead to big rewards.”
The dad glared at Leona, then looked at Kryos and dipped his head. “Well, thank you for . . . indulging my boy’s curiosity.” He then put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go. I don’t want to walk to The Crossing.”
The two began walking at a hurried pace after their caravan, and Kryos put himself back into pulling the wagon. There were a good five minutes of silence before Leona said, “That was nice.”
Kryos woke up, gently unlatched the door, got out, and set up the cookfire in under two minutes. He already had breakfast working by the time Leona got up a few minutes later, woken by the morning light eking in through the open door. She shambled over—definitely not a morning person—and after the two ate in silence, they got their equipment together. That process was fast, taking them under ten minutes.
Getting the wagon out of ‘home mode’ and into ‘travel mode’ was going faster as well. Kryos was strong enough with his Strength SAVE stat that he could simply lift the wagon up with his muscles while Leona dropped the wheels and locked them in place. Getting the rest of the rig up and running, removing the tarp, putting the harness on, and setting the steering and brake column into place—all of that took five minutes.
In total, fifteen minutes to get ready to leave, and about the same time to get ready for the end of the day. The duo had vastly improved their routine.
Not only that, but Leona had given Kryos a regimen—one that he absolutely hated but saw the necessity of. She would have him sit across from her in the wagon, over the open vault—his true hoard—and she would pull out one silver coin after another. Then, she would put them into his hand, and pull them out of his hand.
It was diabolical. Kryos could feel the rage bubbling up in his gut every single time Leona took a piece of silver from his precious hoard, and when she gave him a silver piece he clutched it as if it were the only thing that ever mattered to him. When she demanded it back, he would feel a minute amount of pain when he released it to her grasp.
But, over the days, gradually, the pain lessened. The anger remained, simmering, that someone dared take from his hoard . . . but he could tolerate Leona taking from it for the good of the Guild—the good of his Guild. After all, it was his Guild. He was the Guildmaster and the entire company belonged to him.
Yet another exercise that she insisted upon, he saw the wisdom of, and yet still despised having to do, was her hiding his silver in the grass. As she had put it, “You can sense treasure and varying amounts, it seems, but we need to sharpen that so you can hone in on value. So, I’m going to take a bunch of different amounts of silver coins—small stacks—gemstones, and other items from the vault, and hide them around the wagon. You are going to sit in the wagon, door closed, until I come and get you. Then, you’ll sit on top of it, and while you’re up there, you don’t move.”
Kryos frowned and crossed his arms. “How do I hone my treasure sense then?”
“You’ll tell me where to go,” Leona said as she stood to her full height—which thanks to being short meant she could in the confined space of the wagon—and crossed her arms with a cocky smile. “I’ll then follow your direction. Your goal will be to point me to the treasure whose value I tell you. Got it?”
“. . . Okay,” Kryos grumbled as he crossed his arms and sulked.
She patted his cheek. “Good dragon.”
Kryos closed the door, she was gone for a good few minutes, and he could sense not just the treasure going off in all different directions, but the surge of heat in his guts from someone taking it from his vault. Yet, Kryos knew it was a worthwhile temporary discomfort for a skill that would doubtless be useful in the future. Being able to discern gems from silver coins from gold coins would have its use . . . somehow. At least, that’s what Leona insisted.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The door opened, and she popped her head in. “All ready!”
Kryos climbed out and onto the top of the wagon. Closing his eyes, he focused on the sense of heat in his chest. He could feel little prickles on his skin in different directions, as if someone was poking him with teeny-tiny needles that didn’t pierce the skin but were heated and meant to draw his attention—just like a needle drake’s tongue licks. “What value first?”
“I want you to find the emerald necklace!”
Okay then, Kryos thought. Emerald necklace . . . where are you?
He felt the needle prick sensations dull—all but two. One in front of him, and one to his left. The one in front of him was slightly stronger, the one to his left was a little duller. “Uhm, how big is it?”
“Size of an acorn.”
“And how big is that?”
Leona cursed, “Forgot you haven’t seen one of those—okay, size of my thumbnail.”
“And how big is the other gem you hid?”
“That would give away the game.”
Kryos cursed. “Well, I’ve got a fifty-fifty shot then.” He pointed in front of him toward the stronger sensation. “That way.”
“How far?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “What?”
“You heard me,” Leona said as she looked up at him, tapping her foot. “How far?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Kryos asked. “Just . . . start walking and tell me when you found it? When you’ve gotten that far, call out how far you went—then I can figure out how strong the sensation is for distance.”
Leona frowned for a moment, then muttered, “I should’ve thought of that.” She walked away a good thirty feet then held up a ruby ring. “Wrong gem, thirty-two feet!”
Kryos then pointed to his left. “That way, and it's farther, I think, since it’s duller—but let’s try something. How far did you put the emerald?”
“Seventy-five feet.”
“Take the ruby that far away in the same direction you are now.”
Leona held it up above her head and walked away. Kryos closed his eyes and focused on the pinprick sensation. He could feel it receding farther and farther away, and when Leona called out she had reached the distance, he couldn’t discern the difference between it and the emerald.
“Okay,” Kryos said, opening his eyes. “I think I’ve got it. I can determine gem, versus coin, and distance, but not type of gem.”
She came back over to him. “Okay then, let’s try coins. I hid some silver and gold piles around. Let’s repeat our experiment.”
The duo spent a bit of the evening working on that, and into the night, thanks to Kryos’ dark vision, and were able to discern that he could only differentiate gold, silver, and copper coinage, gemstones, and their distances, based upon his treasure sense.
“Tomorrow,” Leona said as they locked up the wagon for the night, “we’ll try different value amounts.” She then grabbed her notebook and did her usual inventory of the vault, and the rest of their supplies.
And so they did. After more testing and training, Kryos was able to figure out how to discern not just different types of coins from gems, but also their values in comparison to one another. A pile of gold that was the same value as a pile of silver, at the same distance from him, felt the same at first, but if he thought about silver, he felt that pile more strongly than the gold pile.
Kryos realized, somewhere between the tenth supply count and the third treasure-sense drill, that Leona was not passing time, she was building habits. She was training him, in a way, so that he would be better prepared, again, for something, but he wasn’t sure what. The inventory of the vault—cross-referencing to confirm with his true hoard information in his SAVE HUD—and taking account of their supplies? That all made sense.
But why was she training him, he wondered? So he could differentiate stuff for her to steal in a city, perhaps? That made the most sense: if she pointed out a bad person, some criminal, he could then detect where their treasure was and deprive them of their ill-gotten gains. That was one fact he appreciated about her—she had only stolen from people who deserved to be stolen from, like those Mudhook people.
On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the duo approached a hamlet that had been built near a large hill, where according to Leona’s map, veins of sulfur had been found. But, it was too far from the Highpeak Mining Company’s distribution network to be deemed as a worthwhile investment, so instead a group of people banded together to test their fortunes.
As they approached, a group of civilians who were out foraging spotted them on the rarely-trod dirt road leading to the clusters of buildings near the hillside mines, and ran ahead of them into town. Kryos let out a sigh as he kept pulling the wagon, knowing that a simple question was about to become an ordeal.
An older woman came out to meet them before the duo reached the first set of buildings. She was missing an eye, had the same type of flaming hair as the one child Kryos had encountered, but she was squat—almost coming up to his calf—and her pointed ears shot out directly horizontally to her nearly oval-shaped head. She crossed her arms. “What’s your business here?”
Kryos began to speak, “We just want to ask about water—”
The woman looked up at Leona and said, “Well?”
“That would be lovely, actually,” Leona replied. “Well water is just fine, thank you.”
Kryos closed his mouth. He was well aware by this point that most folks would rather speak to the less-intimidating Leona over him. And, the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. He looked like a large, strong guy pulling a wagon, while she was this smart-looking half-sea-elf sitting pretty on top of the wagon. She looked like the smart one—she was the brains of the operation after all.
Perhaps my restraint, he thought, me holding back in social situations, and just being here as a visual intimidation factor could be better than trying to start the interactions.
Up until that point, Kryos had been attempting to start up conversations here and there with mixed results.
The woman commented, “Ah, well, we have a well, but it’ll cost you a few copper to fill up.”
“That’s fine,” Leona replied. “Just point the way.”
The duo were led by the short woman around the outskirts of the town, where there was a covered well. Kryos released himself from the harness, went to the back of the wagon, and while Leona paid out a few copper, he grabbed the one semi-empty barrel, lifted it with ease, and moved over to the well.
A few villagers had come to see what the commotion was about, and as Kryos set to drawing up the water to refill the barrel, people were, once again, muttering and saying things. Mostly telling each other how scary Kryos looked, and how half-dragons were evil warmongers.
But Kryos didn’t care much for those words. Valleyview, The Crossing, his experience there hadn’t made him cruel, it made him stop apologizing for being frightening. If people were going to be afraid of him, let them be afraid. Just like his mom told him, he would use that fear to his advantage.
Let them think what they will—what does the dragon care about the opinions of lesser Species?
The thought came too easily. Too warmly. It made Kryos pause for a half-second.
But he kept walking.
The days came and went, and as the duo traveled farther away from The Crossing—which had the nearest Adventuring Guild—and reached regions closer to The Oakenlands, where the lands grew more wild and dangerous as monsters were more likely to roam, the number hamlets became fewer. The number of towns numbering in the high-hundreds to low-thousands grew. These were walled settlements, who were making their own mark on the world, not wanting anything to do with the established cities and existing power structures.
Those places treated Dragontrail far differently than the majority of travelers. Initially, upon seeing Kryos pulling the wagon, there was that fear and suspicion response. But, once the white Quest Board behind and above him came into view—which thanks to his bulk he sometimes covered from the front—they would come rushing up and ask for help with all manner of small problems.
Problems that, after some quick conversing, Leona and Kryos knew were easily solvable with their skillsets, and would be a good start to building their reputation. As Leona put it, “Every time we have the chance to do a Quest, if we think we have the ability to complete it? We'll take it.”
And so as they traveled, they were able to stay in the occasional spare house or tiny two-room inn, picking up Quests that were, to Kryos’ mind, very easy and not really worth the time for the monetary reward of a few coins. But, the reward of supplies kept their stores fresh and full, which for an elongated stay near the forests of the north would be quite valuable.
Some of the Quests were easy—killing off burrowing monsters that threatened crops, for instance, where Kryos was just able to stand in place next to a bait pile, wait for them to pop up, and whack them with his mace for an instant-kill. Sure, they were the size of his foot, but with his Strength stat and Mass Instinct II? It was as easy as picking a mushroom from a cave wall.
Others were such a small effort to accomplish that Kryos almost felt bad for taking any money—recovering a broken cart from a nearby ditch that townsfolk couldn’t wedge it out of, which he was able to almost lift overhead in one piece on his own, for instance.
He still took the money, of course, adding it to the vault.
But, one Quest stood out. A group of bandits were harassing a town and picking off livestock, one sheep, cow, or goat at a time, and sometimes taking bushels’ worth of harvest. The town leadership asked Kryos and Leona to deal with them, but left the interpretation open to them.
Kryos stood there, holding the Quest slip, with the glowing tattoo of an accepted Quest on his wrist. “When you say our interpretation, what do you mean?”
One of the town counselors at the town center replied, “We mean you can kill them, drive them off, do whatever you will. Just get rid of them.”
“They didn’t just take food,” one of the older counselors, a woman in her seventies, added. “They threatened to burn the town’s fields, and took some seed grain.”
Kryos looked at Leona, and she cleared her throat, then addressed the counselors. “We’ll leave our wagon here, locked up—don’t try to get in. We’ll be back once they’re dealt with.” She turned and went to the wagon, and set to locking it down and lowering it to the ground.
Kryos helped her, and whispered low, knowing her sharp hearing would pick up his words. “What’s the plan?”
“We’ll talk once we’re outside of town and I have tried to pick up a trail.”
The duo quickly set the wagon into ‘home mode’ and got outside the wooden walls which were almost a farce, as Kryos could see over them standing on the tips of his claws. The gates were shut, and Leona led them over to where their Quest-givers had indicated the most recent livestock abduction had taken place.
“Killing them would be messy,” Leona said. “And that would give Dragontrail a reputation as butchers. Do we want that?”
“Not particularly,” Kryos replied. “It would play far too much into what people assume about my type of half-dragon at a glance.”
“Agreed. I think we can use that fear you inspire, though. Scare them off. Maybe rough them up. If they’re bandits up here, their weapons can’t be anything really serious.” She glanced up at him, a look of concern on her face. “Are you okay with just having your shield and breaking a few bones? Capture would be the best option.”
Kryos nodded, and turned his gaze forward.
Leona led them to an outlying farmhouse, and after speaking with the owner, was led to the fence line which had been sawed in half and repaired. She looked at it, then at the grass, and led Kryos through the brush.
It took a good two hours, but they ended up near a copse of trees that had a little trail of smoking coming from the top. With silent signals practiced just for occasions like these, the duo made ready—Kryos strapping his shield onto his left arm, Leona pulling out a set of steel knuckles with rounded edges. She used some Skill, and Kryos felt a near-tickling, bubbly sensation under his feet.
What did she call it? He thought. Ah, right, Seafoam Steps. I think she said at her current Rank, she can affect other people around her by spending additional MP.
The duo slipped into the bushes, and Kryos could hear conversation and laughter, along with the ripping and tearing of meat. He smelled the cook on the flesh as well—it was badly burned and charred far past well-done.
They reached the very edge of the fifteen-foot-across clearing, and Kryos counted four of the brigands. They were varying Species: all half-somethings-or-others, and dressed out in layers of simple, homespun and patchwork clothes. They didn’t have real weapons; their armaments consisted of sickles and spades that had been sharpened, and a single bow with four arrows. He could also see the bags of seed grain, and saw that they didn’t just have the remains of one butchered animal—they had several other animals tied up: they had taken far more than they needed to survive.
Leona tapped his shoulder and gestured that she would go around for the archer, and that Kryos was to remain still until she dealt with the ranged combatant. Kryos gave a curt nod and waited, watching her until she vanished into the brush.
He shifted his weight, and a twig snapped under his left foot he hadn’t noticed was there.
“What was that noise?” one of the brigands asked.
Ah, crap.
Kryos activated Pressure Field III, and the area around him was overwhelmed with the increased gravitic aura. The sudden increase caught his foes off guard, and they weren’t able to grab their weapons before Kryos closed the distance with the first of them. His right hand—claws retracted—closed around their left elbow, and with a squeeze, he snapped the joint.
They let out a cry and collapsed to the ground, cradling their injury.
The others were able to react, but the one with the bow was hit from behind and went falling prone, clutching the small of their back and writhing in agony, as Leona had punched them with her knuckles in the spine.
Kryos raised his shield and blocked the spade-stab that came from his left, and used his right hand to grab the second of the two-left-standing’s sickle-hand in mid-air. With a simple twist, he shattered their wrist, and they, too, crumpled to the ground when he released them, clutching their broken limb.
The one who had stabbed him began to turn and flee, but Leona was in front of them, and with a mighty uppercut, amplified by whatever Traits she had that worked in perfect conjunction with Kryos’ Agility reducing area-of-effect, the brigand went down, clutching their jaw as their tongue went flapping out. “Damnit!” she said as she rolled them onto their stomach. “Don’t go onto your back or you’ll choke on your own blood.”
Kryos turned to the remaining brigands who were all injured, prone, and looking at him. Doubtless, he was a terrifying figure: the fire giving off flickering shadows, him dressed in half-plate covered in dragon scales, his own black-scale half-dragon form with the clawed feet and his entire bulk, plus the white horns which most likely reflected the firelight. Kryos knew he was a terrifying foe to behold in that moment.
“Don’t move,” he growled.
All three froze in place.
Kryos turned to Leona. “Is he going to live?”
Leona looked up at Kryos. “He will if he does what I say to do. Get that spade, we’ll cauterize.”
Kryos reached down, grabbed it, tossed it into the fire, and waited. He made sure to glare at each of the brigands who were still prone, cowering before him.
A sense of satisfaction rose up in him. This felt right. It sang to his blood, an ancient melody of a time long gone. This is what his mom had told him his ancestors once did; they were mighty creatures who conquered entire swathes of the world and subjugated people through their raw might and terrifying presence. The amount of respect through fear Kryos felt in that moment—
It was intoxicating.
“Kryos!” Leona shouted.
He snapped his head to her.
“Third time I said your name,” she said, her face set in a stern expression.
Kryos blinked. For a moment, he had forgotten the injured man at her feet was a person and not some conquered . . . thing.
Leona said, “Cauterize.”
“Oh, right,” Kryos replied. He grabbed the spade handle which was charring but didn’t hurt him thanks to his scales, brought it over, and as Leona forced the man’s jaw open, he seared the stump of the tongue. “You barely bit off the end,” Kryos muttered.
Leona tossed the man forward. “He’ll be able to talk.” She flipped her pack around and pulled out some rope. “Now, we bring them back.”
Kryos turned to the still terrified to-be-captives. “You heard the lady. You either come along quietly, or I break your legs and drag you back—the choice is yours.”
After the threat, they were more than willing to be tied together, and Leona led the way back to the town with Kryos at the back, leading the remaining animals and carrying the grain. When they returned with prisoners and stolen items, the Quest givers were absolutely ecstatic.
“Excellent! This is far more than we could have hoped for.”
Leona handed off the rope. “Well, a Quest is done. Thank you for choosing Dragontrail as your Adventuring Guild to complete the task. Please spread the word . . . and if you plan on killing them, make sure you tell folks that we didn’t kill them—we brought them back as prisoners.”
One of the councilors replied, “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure we share that bit. These four are going to have a trial, proper-like.”
Leona looked at Kryos. “Let’s get the wagon up and head out.”
Kryos walked over to the Quest Board and put his wrist with the tattoo up to it. The Board illuminated a bright silver, and then the tattoo vanished. The Board spat out the folded parchment the councilors had registered as the reward. Unfurling it, he walked around to the back of the wagon and handed it to Leona.
It was a map of The Oakenlands that had a lot more information than Leona’s larger map of Sheoldrin. This smaller map also had a few cabins marked out which were treated as waystations that anyone could stay in, as well as hazardous areas where people stayed away from—where monsters lurked in large numbers.
Kryos, 31st of Caldris (Arday), 1675, Evening
As the sun began to set, the duo reached The Oakenlands. The large, two-wagon-wide road narrowed down to one that could allow for one wagon or maybe two carts if the wheels scraped on one another. To either side, old stumps that were once logged lay covered in moss, and new sprouts grew from the centers. Along those sides, newer, dirt roads led around the exterior of the massive forested region. Logging camps and timber fields were constantly on the move, rotating around and skirting the exterior edges, not moving deeper, and Kryos could see why.
The trees on either side of the narrowed road were massive, easily as large as him if he put both arms out to either side. He could see smaller trees within, but it appeared that the huge-trunk trees acted like guards standing watch on the outside edges of the forested region. “No one goes deep to log the land,” one of the townsfolk they had recently spoken to explained, “because it is too difficult to get the wood out of there. Much easier to just skirt the outside and when needed topple the large oaks to get deeper.”
As he kept pulling the cart along the path and towards that forest road, Leona said, “Slow down.”
He did, and she pulled the brake. “Why?” Kryos asked.
She hopped down and went over to the right side of the road. She knelt, and moved her hands across something that he hadn’t seen, but she must’ve from above. She cleared off moss from a flat stone. “Come look at this.”
Kryos got out of the harness and walked over. It was a good five-foot-diameter stone circle, with a single carving that showed a winding streak that wound like a river— “Oh!” Kryos said. “It looks like the map!” He squatted down, lifted the rock, and turned it as he rotated it so the lines matched up with the north-facing map. “See?”
Leona grinned. “Good eye. Maybe it used to stand up next to the road entrance?”
Kryos squatted down and lifted the rock overhead, walked to the entrance to the canopy-lined tunnel of leaves and branches, and set the rock down so that if one were to enter the way they would be entering, they would see the map properly. He then popped a claw out and carved in a compass rose. “There we go,” he said as he walked back to the wagon. “Now anyone coming through will know what it is.”
Leona got up onto the wagon and unlocked the brakes, and the duo went into The Oakenlands themselves.
A few hours passed, and Kryos was enthralled by the environment. It was so different from anything else he had experienced. This wasn’t a mountain cave, though it felt like one, because this was alive. Things scurried overhead, chattering, whistling, chirping, hooting, and everything was making noise.
It wasn’t just the sounds, it was the smells: this wasn’t like the open plains where the wind carried a constant fresh smell of grass with the occasional whiff of something foul or pleasant. This was just earthy, like when Kryos was sitting next to the river bank just out of Suncrest and cooking up food, and happened to get some dirt on his hands and was wiping them clean. He caught a leaf falling down from above and smelled it, but didn’t smell anything. Once he smushed it between his fingers, he could smell a delicate sweetness.
Then, his wrist flared with heat. He let out a little hiss of pain, and looked at his left arm.
A red circle. There was text inside of it.
[Rift detected.]
[Rift classification: Breach.]
[Role designation: Anchor.]
[Direction: ↑ ]
Leona let out a whoop of delight, and he looked back to see a grin on her face. “That means there’s going to be a Mender who hears the Call.”
Kryos felt a giddy excitement. This was exactly why they came to The Oakenlands. Rifts, because rifts meant wealth and Artifacts—which for him meant an immediate increase in his power—but more importantly, to round out their core team for Rifts. A Mender meant that they could really put Leona’s franchise idea to the test. He looked back at the arrow. “Okay, so how does this work?”
“Just go the direction it points!”
Kryos didn’t waste any time. He trucked on ahead, pushing faster than before, almost to a jog, as all pleasantness of the forest was lost in his rush for more loot to add to the vault. After a good thousand feet, the arrow sharply turned right, and he had to stop—Leona barely pulled the brake in time to keep the wagon from bumping into him and running him over. Not that it would actually hurt him, since it would go over him as long as he kept his head down.
Looking to his right, he could see a narrow, but just wide enough path for their wagon to get through. “We can always go backwards, right?” Kryos asked. “Like, I can push us out if we have to back up if we have no way to turn around.”
“Oh yeah,” Leona replied. “Onward, Guildmaster!”
Kryos began pulling them that direction, and his claw-feet dug into the dirt, occasional root, and undergrowth of the forest as he moved their mobile Guild Hall to its next destination. The forest kept going on before them, and thankfully they didn’t have to make many turns—the few they did have to make required a bit of moving back and forth, with some wiggling, but they eventually arrived at a small clearing that was twenty-feet-across on all sides.
A Rift was standing in the center. It was a jagged tear in reality, that was six-feet tall and three-feet wide, with a black center and blue, cerulean edges that flickered and warbled. Kryos pulled the wagon around so that the front would be facing the way they came in case they needed to make a hasty exit, and then he and Leona began putting it into ‘home mode’ with one side next to another large tree trunk to give some defense. They also covered all but the Quest Board part with the tarp.
“Okay,” Leona said, wiping her hands. “I’ll stand on top of the wagon, and keep an eye out for our Mender. You stand next to the rift.”
Kryos walked over next to it, grabbed his shield, slung it onto his arm and fastened it tight. He glanced at the Rift, wanting to go in and find the wealth that would make him more powerful, but he tore his gaze away and looked at Leona.
This was going to be Dragontrail’s first real test.
This isn’t a road job, Kryos thought, or some random Quest from a place we happen to be passing by. This isn’t a fight we can walk away from, even though we could flee the Rift—maybe, unless it's like the other Rift with a collapsing bridge. We have to clear it and shut it.
They would either prove the wagon-based, mobile Adventuring Guild could work, or The Oakenlands would forever hide the idea before anyone of importance learned its name.