As the day gave way to the arms of night, a hush descended on the thick, ancient forest. It was a beautiful place to be despite my unusual circumstances. The golden orange hues of dusk bled through the dense canopy, painting the air with an ethereal glow, rolling over gnarled twists of bark and silhouetting the individual needles of each and every pine. Shadows stretched long and strange, creating a patchwork quilt of fading light and encroaching darkness on the forest floor. Every rustle of the leaves paired with the scritching of waking crickets, a sound I hadn’t actually heard since I’d lived out in the country as a boy.
Over my bare torso I now had a tunic and over that swayed light chain links, an armor given me by the centaur with the Earth name, Jon. No words, just a quick hand off and walk away. The stats read:
Armor Type: Thin Chain Shirt, Defensive Rating: 4, Weight: light
Unlock the power of mobility and style with our latest and greatest: The Thin Chain Shirt! Crafted on the move, this fashionable piece of impromptu armor blends impeccable protection with effortless charm. Designed to keep you agile on the battlefield and dashing at the tavern, it's the ultimate in medieval chic! Say goodbye to clunky, restrictive armor and hello to a new era of combat comfort.
Special Properties:
Flexibility: The thin chain shirt is highly flexible, allowing the wearer to maintain agility in combat. It doesn't impose any penalties on movement or agility-related actions.
Enhanced Stealth: The interlocking chains create minimal noise, granting the wearer a +2 bonus to Stealth checks when attempting to move silently or hide.
Durability: While lighter than many other armors, the thin chain shirt offers solid protection against slashing and piercing attacks, reducing incoming damage from these sources by 25%.
Weight Advantage: Due to its lightweight design, wearing a thin chain shirt does not encumber the wearer, taking up 0 inventory slots.
The armor felt like nothing at all, and I moved in it comfortably while Ike walked next to me, entirely cloaked in shadows from his place near my right knee cap. He gaped at the reddening sun, the yellow of his teeth giving away his awed disposition.
“Never a dull thing, sunset,” he whispered just loud enough for me to catch it. “They say that it’s the egg of a giant dragon, to crack open in a billion years and raise us all up to divinity.”
I grunted, not at all surprised at how strange it was. “Sounds like one of those things that are great on paper and suck in reality.”
Jeldorain roared with laughter inside of me. I ignored him.
Ike nodded. “Yeah. It definitely wouldn’t be fun to be here when it happens. And no one can say what the divinity part means exactly. I like to think that it means we’d all be gods. But I’ve lived long enough to know that the gods we have now wouldn’t allow it. They’re like everyone else. They want hierarchy. They need to be better than others.”
“So what else could divinity mean,” I asked, intrigued.
“When I was growing up in our warren, just a couple jumps away from a human village and their garbage pit, our shaman used to tell us that it meant energy. Food. Manna. Whatever it is that the gods use to stay alive and be gods. But that’s kobolds for ya. We ain’t optimists.”
I was silent after that, my thoughts turned up to the sky and the beings that existed there. Surely there were good ones mixed with the bad ones? That was how the game pantheons usually worked. But in Earth's history so many of the ancient society gods were merciless, greedy, and selfish to the extreme. Which made sense. The kobolds almost certainly had it right.
I glanced over at the shadows of the rest of my colleagues. All of us were in a tactical near-silence, just the chance murmur heard here and there as the tiniest of small talks went on between them. Our armor was covered with light skins of hide, the perfect blend for the environment.
As the last of the sun went down over the horizon, a perfect blackness engulfed us.
“Finally,” a voice rasped. It was deep, a baritone, but it lilted as if unused to the language it was speaking. “That infernal orb is gone. It felt like it was never going to leave.”
“Pipe it down, Kevinar,” another voice said. This one had a hint of whinny to it, the feeling that it could at any moment break into snorting and neighing. “Whining in front of the new guy? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
There followed snickers, including one from Ike himself, and I realized that this was a normal contest of the night. Something this group did traditionally, perhaps to keep back the stress of their lives.
“Your mom should be ashamed of what she did last night,” the satyr Brandosyeus lilted at them. The man was a tenor, I noticed, a honeyed melody clinging to his words. “Though, in many other ways, she should not.”
Ike actually laughed out loud at that one, clapping applause. “We’ve got virgin ears over here, boys. Let’s cap it up and bring it in. Low fire, Kevinar on backtrack,” he barked. I switched over to my heat vision and saw him standing close, his red-orange hands cupped over scaly lips. “Actually, Kevinar and Schustak. Goblin hasn’t had night duty in a week as far as I can remember.”
“Yeah. Not a problem,” came the goblin’s voice. His was more like that of the whiny kid from the back of class who was always asking questions to the teacher. “Miss Becca,” I could hear from the back of my mind, “It says here that the President lives in the White House. Does that mean that the President lives in the White House?”
The thought and the comparison made me bust out laughing, my deep-throated giggles and squawks bouncing off the trunks, trees and boulders that surrounded us.
“Scratch that,” Ike said. “New guy, you’re with Kevinar. It might be camp time, but that’s no excuse to scream our position to everyone in a ten-kilometer radius.”
The guys chuckled and I nodded, expecting that the kobold could see me just fine with heat vision of his own. Peering around the cluttered forest, I spotted the figure of a lithe elf slinking off back the way we’d come, and I hurried to join him.
Behind us, there was the shuffle and clatter of equipment being taken out, and small tents being erected. It actually wasn’t bad to get away from that work—unless there was some innate game skill inside of me, I wasn’t sure I could deal with the peculiarities of medieval camp.
Coming up to his flank and matching his speed, I kept my weapon out at the ready. I saw the elf turn to me and nod, before increasing his long-legged pace. I kept up and soon we were well out of sight and hearing range of the little camp. Here we slowed down to a walk, spying through the many trees for any hint of residual heat.
“There are spells that can clear up heat. Special abilities too,” the elf whispered. “So it’s not a bad idea for one of us to use normal vision and look around for light.”
I nodded again, switching off the heat vision and exploring the night. The trees weren’t as thick here, and the light of the moon was falling down upon us, casting silver rays through gaps in the canopy. It made the forest look skeletal, prognostications of doom rising to mind as I realized how many times I’d seen similar scenes in horror movies with my wife Casey.
I gulped, throttling the sudden heaviness inside of me. I’d see her again. This wasn’t going to be a permanent thing. I’d get back to my body and my family.
“Something wrong?” Kevinar asked. I stared at him, uncomprehending and confused, the emotions making a tangle of my mind. My eyes traced his pointy ears, the unnatural shine of his ebony skin, the glowing purple irises set into eyes curved upwards, and I stuttered.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’m not going to run this patrol any farther til I know what in the hells is wrong with you.”
He was gesturing at a stump, and I took it despite not knowing if the rotted timber could take the full weight of my infernal body. There was a tang to my lungs and I could feel an overwhelming sadness rising up.
Not the place for it, boy, Jeldorain said. You can cry your heart out when you get an actual rest and regain us our powers. Just keep it in.
I stiffened my body, shoving all of that feeling down as deep as I could, staring up at the sky to keep from breaking down. Prepared, I faced Kevinar again.
“It’s my family. They’re gone and I’m going to get them back. It just hurts sometimes to think about it.”
Kevinar sighed. “I know the feeling. My wife was taken and made into a drider. That’s a half-elf, half-spider. One of the horrors of the deep. All because she’d backed the wrong house. Or so they said. I’m rather sure she didn’t back any house at all.”
I gaped at him. I knew about driders somewhat from the games I played at home. But I never thought about what they really meant. The trauma attached to such a process. The people who would have been left behind from each and every time one was created.
“I – I’m so sorry,” I started, my own worries suddenly taking a back seat to what I’d just heard.
“Don’t even. In my culture it is supposed to be considered an honor. The first words out of their mouths when they told me was that she’d ascended. That’s what they called it. She’d ascended, and because we no longer had a female head of family, my son was taken into the military academy.”
I put up a hand and he placed his own on top, pushing it down.
“No. I don’t do sorry. This is life, what we have. I lost everything and I came up here and got something. I left my home in The Underground and spent my time working merc jobs for this group or that til I fell in with this lot. There’s no point in feeling sorry, you know. It’s just a thing that happens and then you move on.”
He looked up at the moon, and his eyes twinkled and glowed. “When I first came up here, that light there, it burned me. It hurt my eyes. But now I kinda like it.” He looked me up and down, and I realized he’d turned off his own heat vision. “I knew you were something big and bizarre, but seeing the real you, I gotta say that I’m impressed. I look forward to seeing you in combat.”
An owl hooted overhead, and I turned away from him. His life, it had the dark feeling of divination to it. As if I’d just been given a glimpse of my future. And if this was what was waiting for me, I’d rather die now.
The thought of their memories fading and their names becoming something of the past was too much to bear. I blinked my eyes several times, but despite my efforts, a tear slid down my face.
“You stay here,” Kevinar said after a moment. “Just watch the area. I’ll be back in a slide of the moon.”
