Chapter 33 – Glory Road

It took five days for Shaelith to realize she was bored, and then a few more moments before she realized that this was, in fact, an almost unheard-of luxury.

Not too long ago, but still right in the middle of the then ongoing war, when they had been on their way north, the land they had traveled through had still been gripped by a grim atmosphere and they had to be constantly on guard.

Now it feels more like a country outing.

That morning, they had passed the first returnees. A handful of families with carts full of household goods were on their way back to their burned-out villages, from which the war had driven them. Some were rebuilding collapsed walls, and others were gathering wood for new roof beams and barns to replace those that had been burned down.

The return of the people to the war-torn land had also made the wildlife more cautious again, which had become quite bold in recent years. Benderast hadn’t found a single boar in the last few days that he could have hunted for XP. The land had become much more tame again.

“ADVENTURE!” Honor proclaimed from the pole Grimbart had built for him, which he now seemed to regret a little. “Do you see how this adventure paves the way to undying fame in front of us?”

“What, the field track?” Mirrsoss asked curiously.

“Field track? A GLORY ROAD!”

Benderast smiled a bit wryly. At first, he had practically beamed under the incessant pep talk and Honor’s praise, but by now he often looked a bit exhausted, as if he were walking a very enthusiastic and very bark-happy dog all the time.

Grimbart muttered a few unsavory dwarven curses about the banner into his beard, but even Honor couldn’t diminish his relief at being able to walk the ground on his own two feet instead of having to race through the air on a Shaeravyn grasshopper.

Thaelon, on the other hand, had truly blossomed. The Sylvyn, who had looked like a hibernating plant forgotten in the dark for too long all those weeks down in Myzelemaerlazin, was barely recognizable. He moved with a spring in his step, his face was constantly turned toward the open sky, and along the way he whistled to the birds, who answered cheerfully.

Mirrsoss meanwhile never stayed in one place for long. She fluttered back and forth, gathering all sorts of things along the way. Here a beautiful white pebble with veins of quartz, there a discarded bronze buckle, or a colorful feather. She also gathered plenty of berries for them.

And the further northwest they went, the more the landscape changed. The scarred, depopulated border region with its burned-down farms gave way to orderly fields with neatly trimmed boundary hedges when they moved toward Tulvian territory.

At the crossroads, well-maintained signposts with inscriptions appeared and it became clear that they were entering a cultivated land with rules and laws.

The diplomatic side of Shaelith’s mind came back to life. Of everyone here, she was probably the best prepared for what awaited them in Tulvia, which was why it was probably best for her to take the lead a little. Which, of course, meant first and foremost that it was her job to find some kind of solution to Benderast’s loose tongue.

She glanced at him. He was in the middle of a heated argument with Honor.

“Believe me, it’s pronounced ‘epic.'”

“Of course it’s pronounced ‘épique’ instead, but don’t worry, noble Benderast, a hero doesn’t have to be a scholar.”

“Did you just call me stupid?”

A problem for later. But definitely a problem.

In the afternoon, they passed a hillside where the forest had been cleared. Fresh stumps, black burn scars, and behind them, the first straight furrows had been plowed for more of the sprawling fields that dominated the landscape. Thaelon stopped.

“This,” he said, nodding toward the fields, “will cause them trouble someday.”

“For the farmers?” Shaelith asked.

“For the land. But yes, for the farmers too. It’s so hilly here. If they keep clearing at this rate and just plant fields there, they’ll leach the soil and the ground will lose its stability. Someday, in fifty or a hundred years, a rainstorm big enough will come to wash away all the land here. And the good topsoil will be lost eventually too.”

“I see. But look, for you this is a real danger,” Shaelith said slowly. “Not for the people who live here.”

Thaelon looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t it be a problem for them? They live here.”

“Yes, but for a human, that’s beyond their time horizon,” she continued. “Beyond a single lifetime, I mean. If something like that last happened fifty years ago, then most of the people who experienced it are probably already dead. I guess many of them have never seen such a violent storm, or a major landslide themselves, they only maybe heard about it. But those fields they’re planting over there will put food on their tables for three generations every day, food with which they can feed their children.”

She thought of the years she had lived on Earth, the twenty years she had now lived in this body, and the few hundred years that still lay ahead of her, barring any unfortunate turn of events.

It does something to you when you realize that the long-term consequences for yourself are actually medium-term at most.

“The short-lived,” she said, more to herself, “can afford to lend the future. We cannot.”

Thaelon nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think that’s why humans are so crazy about their laws and institutions? Is that their attempt to compensate for their short-lived individual memories?”

“You know what,” Shaelith said, raising her eyebrows. “There might be something to that.”

She was glad that she got along quite well with Thaelon by now. There had been a bit of strife and bad blood between the Shaeravyn and the Sylvyn in the past. It was only the war that had turned the two cousin peoples into allies, but allies weren’t automatically friends, of course.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you guys,” said Benderast, who had strolled over and had only been half-listening. “You’ve got to develop the land, expand the territories and so on, you know what I mean. Progress and all that.”

Thaelon looked at him for a long time, then shook his head. “Yeah,” he finally muttered. “Progress and all that.”

~

The next day, it happened to her for the first time in daylight.

Until then, the visions had always come only in her sleep. The immense web of mycelium stretching through something that was not space, and the sleeping, immense presence within it that had at some point started to notice her in some way. But as soon as she woke up, the images faded, remaining in the realm of dreams.

Until now, at least.

It was just before noon, and she wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular when it hit her right in the middle of taking a step, causing her to stumble. As if someone were gently pulling on a string tied in a knot right behind her sternum.

And it pulled her in a very specific direction that, once again, made no real three-dimensional sense. It pulled her somewhere beside the things, beyond west, east, up, and down, and yet so clearly that her whole body wanted to align itself with it, as if she were a compass needle.

“Shaelith?” Mirrsoss had whirred to her side in a flash, her antennae pointing straight forward and trembling.

Benderast turned to her as well. “You okay? That was wild… it looked like you’d lagged.”

Lagged. She had to stifle a laugh.

Her first instinct was to wave it off, but they likely had months of travel ahead of them. How often would this happen? She probably wouldn’t always be able to pretend nothing had happened.

Maybe I shouldn’t lie, or rather, keep things secret any more than I already do.

“Let’s take a break and sit down,” she said with a sigh. “There’s something I should tell you.”

They found spots on a low stone wall under a pear tree by the side of the road. Benderast leaned the pole with Honor against the tree, amid the banner’s loud protests.

She found it difficult to confide in them at all, but the trust that had grown between them all by now warranted at least a partial truth. After all, she had already stood with them in life-and-death battles.

So Shaelith told them about the visions, about the presence of the sleeping, ancient, gigantic mycelial something within her dreams, about the pull, and about how she could now even feel that pull during the day.

“And I think,” she concluded thoughtfully, “that Dalibor’s half-finished drawing is a picture of that, and not of the Story Engine.”

“Maybe this Story Engine and that thing you’re dreaming about are the same thing?” asked Grimbart.

Shaelith shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. I can’t prove it to you, Grimbart, maybe I can’t even explain it properly. But I am a Shaeravyn, a sorceress, and I am initiated into the most secret sorcery and the most forbidden glyphs of my house. I have a magical sense for this. This isn’t… the Story Engine Dalibor was talking about. It’s something organic, something that has grown.”

Of course, she couldn’t tell them that another reason she was so certain was the fact that she did indeed have access to a Story Engine UI, albeit a limited one. And what she could see in the UI felt radically different from these visions.

Benderast looked surprised. “But if you feel a pull, then maybe you have a tracker,” he said excitedly. “Like my quest markers! Maybe it’s showing you where you need to go next, only that-“

She shook her head. “It’s something else, believe me.”

Benderast and Grimbart didn’t look convinced yet and were already opening their mouths to press the issue, but Thaelon unexpectedly spoke up before them.

“You two should trust her on this,” the Sylvyn said. “I don’t know much about Shaeravyn sorcery and their mushrooms, but if a Sylvyn druid told me that he… I don’t know, had a vision of a forest and felt that the forest had nothing to do with this Story Engine, I’d believe him without hesitation.”

“It would be easier for me to believe her if her argument weren’t just based on vibes.” Benderast still didn’t seem convinced.

Thaelon just shrugged. “Vibes have meaning.”

Mirrsoss’s antennae twitched excitedly. “By the way, I sensed it before,” she confessed. “With my antennae, I mean. A few times in your sleep, I picked up the same turbulence from you as just now. I thought it might be rude to ask. I didn’t know what it could be, because I thought maybe it was-“

“AN OMEN!” Honor boomed so loudly that they all flinched. “A sleeping power calls my bearer’s noble wife to a hidden destiny! Oh, truly, GREAT things await us! This is the stuff songs are made of!”

Shaelith rolled her eyes. “No one is being called to any hidden destiny, Honor, it’s probably just-“

“YOUR FATE TO BECOME-“

“You’re taking a break for now,” Benderast said irritably, rolling up the banner amid muffled protests.

~

Two days later, they approached a slender watchtower of pale stone, which stood on the horizon reflecting the afternoon light like a warning finger raised up toward the sky. At its top fluttered a blue-and-red flag bearing a golden, crowned griffin.

From there, six horsemen in polished armor rode toward them. Their armor was so colorful that it was downright painful to look at. Red, blue, and green enamel with gold and silver fittings, and plume-adorned helmets in every color of the rainbow, bobbing up and down in the wind.

When the formation reached them, the leader raised a gloved hand and eyed the group suspiciously and with some apparent astonishment. A violet-skinned Dusk Elf with glyphs painted on her skin, a bearded dwarf with a Chronosteel arm, a winged moth-like creature with compound eyes that regarded the riders’ plumes with undisguised interest, a stoic Wood Elf, and then a real hulk of a human to boot.

Shaelith had to admit that this was probably not a traveling party that inspired confidence at first glance.

“Halt,” said the leader, his hand dropping toward the hilt of his sword without quite touching it. “State your business, and-“

Then his gaze fell on the banner, which chose that very moment to puff itself up on the pole.

Immediately his hand dropped from the sword, he sat up straight, and his chest swelled to an almost ridiculous size. When he opened his helmet visor a bit wider, awe was written all over his face.

“That is-” he began, but then broke off. He dismounted from his horse, and his five companions hastily followed suit. “Mine Honor Is My Life, Both Grow in One.”

Honor took his time, creating a long, dramatic moment, and unfurled in all his splendor.

“YES, IT IS I!” proclaimed the banner, and six Tulvian knights sank to one knee in the street dust. “Rise, brave sons of Tulvia, flower of the realm! Your loyalty is the foundation of the future, proud knights!”

Maybe we underestimated just a tiny bit how seriously they take this banner.