Chapter 28: Refugees & Ruins

Our airborne journey across the Duchy could only be described as surreal and otherworldly. As the Keep disappeared behind and below us, freezing cold wind and darkness swallowed us. The ceiling of stars above felt both unreachable and yet so close you could reach up and touch them. An experience with potential to stir up agoraphobia and claustrophobia both.

Even time felt disjointed. Darkness cloaking any potential visible landmarks, I had no means to judge our progress aside from the stars above and the regular rhythm of flapping wings.

And then there was the experience of falling, the sensation of my stomach pushing up on my diaphragm. We were descending. The rush of wind carrying the smell of wood fires to my nose.

My stomach came down again with a thud as we pulled out of the dive. Scattered flickering orange lights below us told me the ground was much closer now. With them as reference points, I could finally tell how fast we were traveling. It was far too late at night and far too early in the morning for the orange lights to be anything innocent. 

There weren't a lot of fires, but we were still high enough to see that they were scattered across a vast area of land. I could only guess how many were watchfires for different bands of soldiers and how many were pillaged villages and farmsteads.

And there was only more smoke and scattered distant fires below as we continued to fly east, until finally there wasn’t and we were soaring over a black sea of trees. 

Ahead the canopy opened up into a clearing and suddenly the feeling of falling returned as our couriers dived towards it. 

With a jolt the wolf-wyvern’s landed in the grassy clearing at a run bouncing us up and down in the saddle. Curving along the clearing’s circumference their loping run slowly decelerated to a stop, almost completely an entire lap.

When it became time to dismount I had to be helped down from the saddle by one of the knights as back and legs had somehow simultaneously gone stiff and turned to jelly. Our feet and packs had barely hit the grass, before the knights, our chauffeurs had taken off again to return to Santarriral.

Stumbling to where they had unloaded my pack, it was a race to see if I could pull out my bed roll and blankets before my legs gave out.

* * *

I awakened to— 

Ummm, how do I put this?

Ok it wasn’t the noonday Sun above, birds chirping, loud orphans, the shouts of battle, cruel maids, cold air on a foot that had escaped my blankets, someone gently shaking me awake or any other wake up call one could semi reasonably expect. No.

I was awakened by the sensation of being repetitively and none too gently poked in the forehead. Opening my eyes, I found Gael stradling my torso, knees either side as she loomed over me with the noon sun forming a halo around her like an eclipse. 

My heart pounded at my shock awakening and I found myself uncomfortably warm from the noon warmth and the heat of the nearby body.

“Can you quit it?” I grumbled, as I tried to swat at Gael’s face with the hand I’d managed to untangle from my blankets. Only for her to seize it by the wrist, holding it in place as I struggled to pull it free again. I was starting to feel flushed with frustration. Leaning back as she resisted my attempts to free myself, her butt came down to rest on top of my hips, sending a shiver up my spine.

Pursuing her soft pink lips as if in thought, she questioned teasingly, “Can I?” 

Ears twitching, the silver catgirl leaned down until her face was mere inches from mine. “Maaaybe!” she sang, poking me in the forehead once more, before pulling back again and releasing my wrist. Then faster than I could follow, Gael had bounced to her feet and cartwheeled off me back towards her own pack. 

Pushing myself up onto my elbow, I looked around the clearing, to find Roxi sitting with her back against her pack watching on with an amused expression. If we’d had popcorn, she would have been eating it. Poking my tongue out at her, I set to rolling up my blankets and bed roll.

Oddly enough or perhaps not considering the circumstances of my awakening, I was feeling a lot more alive and awake than I would have expected given how tired and fatigued I still felt from yesterday and our flight here. That said, being tired and fatigued was still better than the bone deep exhaustion and muscle pain of the night before.

By the time I had finished rolling up my bed-stuff the others were already sitting around a sizzling iron pan that was resting not on the burning coals of a fire, but a large flat flowing stone. Smoke might be a common enough thing around here, but it seemed Gael was not taking any chances. That or maybe a magic rock was just easier… 

Eating a light breakfast of rations that had been cooked to make them more palatable, we discussed our plans for the journey and given the mistakes we’d made on our way to Santarriral we were more than happy to let Gael’s experience take the lead. Leaning on her time as a mercenary, Gael explained that the roads would be full of refugees, soldiers and militia, not to mention bandits. All of which would serve to slow us down and bring us more trouble than (in her words) a “Darkling peddling pilfered poultry in Paguutum”. Or as she went on to clarify, “a fucking shitload of trouble.”

Her plan was to instead cut across the wilderness until we were much deeper in the Barony and no longer able to avoid roads. Our goal for today however would be to reach the ruins of a former village that had long since been swallowed by the forest, she explained. “Only the village’s Church is still standing in any recognizable fashion, but there is a spring for fresh water and we might be able to light a fire for warmth inside it’s ruins without bringing a fucking army down on top of us.” 

That and she thought the ruins might provide some protection if any forces in the region somehow stumbled across us anyway.

Finishing both our midday breakfast and our discussion, we each returned to where our packs lay to begin preparations to move on. Between having to pack away anything we could lose inflight before we left and the suddenness of our departure from the city without time to make last minute preparations, we each had things to unpack and prepare for our journey.

Roxi had immediately parked herself cross legged with her pack in front of her and the chain of her [Moonsilver Shawl] laying in her lap as she pulled out preloaded enchantment scrolls and applied them one by one to the chain’s links. Meanwhile Gael was unpacking an awe inspiring number of knives and daggers of all types, from throwing blades, to weighty daggers that could catch and hold a sword’s blade, blades narrow enough to slip between armor pieces and many others I could barely guess the purpose of.

Even as she was pulling them from her pack she was also squirreling them away on her person, industriously tucking them away into bandoliers, sheaves sewed into her cloak and breeches, the tops of her boots and down the back of her tunic between her shoulder blades into a sheath that was nestle under the backplate of her cuirass. Evidently you could not have enough knives.

My preparation was less involved, I’d already sneakily applied my [Unencumber] enchantment scroll on my pack before we left last night while Roxi was distracted and when we were in the markets yesterday I’d bought a necklace and two rings which had already been enchanted. There was little need to fuss around with scrolls now.

The necklace was enchanted to provide me five points in Capacity boosting my mana-pool which I figured might save me a visit to the Death Dream and any SAI who might be waiting there, the rings together gave me three points in Endurance and another three in Constitution. Slipping the rings onto my fingers and necklace over my head before tucking it under my cured leather cuirass took less than a minute total.

Next I pulled out the leather holster and harness the Duchess had provided for the casting brush I’d been rewarded with a week ago. Strapping it on, it was hard to ignore the resemblance it bore to the ubiquitous shoulder firearm holster outside the game.

My enforced bedrest earlier in the week had given me time to investigate what benefits the [Rhithiau Brush] gave beyond the vague and flowery description in the Duchess’s letter. The brush gave another five points in both my Urgency and Intricacy on top of strengthening spells that used the Light and Illusion ability component trees. All that left was the crystal butterfly hair clasp that I’d gained as part of my share of the loot from our bandit encounter back before we set out from Spot. Having experienced some difficulty affixing it to my hair by myself with no mirror, I knew I hadn’t done as good a job as Roxi when she first fastened it to my hair.

Chucking a look over my shoulder back towards my travel companions I could see Roxi was tapping away at her UI interface, likely making last minute stat allocations and constructing new skill she’s thought up since she was last online. Gael on the other hand was circling the clearing pulling up a set of warding spikes she must have set after I’d passed out last night and smoothing turf as she did it to limit evidence of our passing.

I’d already done all my stat allocation a week ago and constructed new spells while I was attempting to escape the bedrest induced boredom. However that didn’t prevent me pulling up my stat screen and giving it a final look over before we left to check for passive stat increases such as the Endurance points Roxi was working towards with our heavy packs. 

She was all for trying to acquire passive stat increases.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had likely earned twice as many passive points with my near brush with death via exposure (with three points in both Constitution and Endurance each) than she had earned via hard work.