The Way Ahead

As they drew closer to the city, Edwin began to notice more and more side roads connecting to their main path. Then again, it wasn’t all that surprising on further reflection. There was no way the single, unswerving main road managed to connect every minor settlement in the area, and the supplementary paths weren’t quite as straight as the cobbled street they currently were on, instead curving in to gradually join in with their current direction of travel.

It seemed likely that they were built in such a way that it would be relatively easy to get from Sheraith to wherever the roads led or vice versa, but they were very much optimized for travel to or from the nearest large city.

Rather clever, all told.

Of course, the increased road quantity also increased the amount of traffic they encountered. Sure, there were still the daily couriers running back and forth and travelers making long-distance treks, but now they were joined by local farmers hauling in their harvests to the city, small groups of individuals on their way to and way from laden with more manufactured goods… there was apparently a market of some form going on.

The density of nearby buildings increased as well. Here, Edwin saw way more wooden structures than stone ones, and that led to significantly different architecture than he’d normally been seeing in the stone-dominated Vinstead. Whereas there wood was only used for internals and a bit of structure, here it made up nearly all of nearly every building.

“Oh yeah, what was up with the lack of wood in Vinstead?” Edwin asked Lefi, “There was a massive forest right there, why did everyone choose to use stone as their building material? Was there a fire at some point or something?”

“What do you know of the Verdant, and of Rhothos in general?”

Edwin shrugged, “Not a whole lot. I know that Vinstead is ancient, though, like predating the Empire old. And the Verdant is this big magical forest with lots of crazy stuff when you go further in, lots of great magical plants.”

“I see! Well, the Verdant is the nigh-literal heart of the southern half of the continent. It overflows with life and magic, only kept from encroaching upon and swallowing much of the continent in impenetrable woodlands by a mighty magical boundary. It took centuries to drive back the trees as far as they are now, and none wish to invite them back!”

Edwin frowned, “So… what, there’s a superstition that if people use wood in construction, it’ll weaken the boundaries of the Verdant’s containment? Not to insult anyone, but that seems… kind of stupid. Stone has to be way harder to get and work with than wood.”

Lefi shook his head, “It is no mere superstition, my friend. It has happened thrice over in history that whereupon too much wood was used in Vinstead, the Verdant leaked and caused a multitude of wild creatures to be birthed within the city.”

“Wait, what? Like… it just summoned bears or whatever?”

“The houses sprouted limbs and began to grow a canopy, birds claimed their roosts in those branches, and beasts and monsters began their hunt in the streets. Thus, wooden buildings are strictly limited.” Lefi nodded in explanation.

“You think they’d have learned after the second time,” Edwin remarked.

“Ah, but why would they pay heed to such a baseless superstition?” the adventurer winked back at him, forcing Edwin to nod in concession.

“How do you know all this stuff, anyway?” Edwin had to ask, “I thought you ran away from home when you were Yathal’s age or whatever. How’d you learn so much history?”

“Ah, you are mistaken in a pair of ways, you see? While I was still an Exceptional youth, my parents saw within me the greatness I was destined for and always encouraged me to fully realize myself- once it was clear that I was already free of the Management and wouldn’t be able to rejoin regardless of what efforts they might endeavor to undertake.

“Alas, one day bandits set upon my village and burned it to the ground. I escaped the destruction on account of my exceptionalism yet swore my revenge upon the perpetrators. To this day, I continue to stalk the land in search of their leader in the hopes of getting my revenge.”

“Wait, really? I’m so sorry, I had no…” Edwin immediately felt bad, though a part of him still whispered, protagonist syndrome.

“Ha! No, I merely proved far too Exceptional for my peers and thus the village head deemed that I was too much of a disturbance. He drove me out and thus began my true calling as an adventurer!”

“Are you… messing with me again?”

“Not in this case, no. That is… near enough to my history as to be sufficiently enlightening, however! Though in truth I was as eager to leave as they were to get rid of me- I was off on a treasure hunt, you see.”

“Treasure hunt?”

“There was a great bounty to be found and I sought to claim it. Powerful magical beasts may maraude the country at times, and if you can kill them before the Enforcer is called out their hides and meat can fetch truly wondrous prices!”

“That’s… interesting, and it’s strange that they would allow that sort of behavior to happen. Doesn’t that kill lots of people?”

Lefi shrugged, “I do not know that they care. Such activities are seen as exceptionally reckless and that said deaths would be inevitable so it matters not whether they die by a manticore’s venom or an oversized hole in the ground.”

“Is that in reference to something specific?”

“Manticore venom? Truly nasty stuff, it is! Completely incurable and is more potent the more Skills you have- particularly those meant to resist its effects. Never fought one and I hope I never have to, one scratch and you’re as good as dead.”

“No, I meant the... oh, never mind. How do you know all of this stuff anyway? Like some of it I’d understand, you just picked up a random bit of trivia here and there in your years of travel, but the thing about Vinstead? How’d you learn that?”

“Historical Recall! Such a marvelous evolution of the simple Recall skill, as it allows me to Recall things I had never learned akin to Common Knowledge. The two function together marvelously, I shall say.”

“You really do have a Skill for everything, don’t you?”

“Every little thing!”

“Other than Stamina Manipulation,” Edwin teased.

“Oh, you little! You’ll pay for that!”

Edwin managed to dodge the good-natured cuff, his training sessions with Lefi not wholly worthless, but found himself suddenly drenched in cold water.

“Hey!” he yelled at Inion, who had snuck up behind him with a bucket.

“Gotta watch out for danger from everywhere! No safety!” she called back.

Edwin narrowed his eyes. Oh, if she wanted a tussle, he could provide.

Edwin lay pleasantly tired next to Inion. She had won, of course. Edwin couldn’t win a fight if…

Oi! Snap out of it.

It had been a fun diversion as they approached Sheraith. Curiously, unlike Vinstead, the main road didn’t run straight to the city’s gates, but ran to the side of it. Connecting them was a road that split off, quite wide and in almost as good of condition as the primary thoroughfare. There was a bit of a backup while they waited for the guards to clear their wagon, made even slower by the apparent presence of a market and correspondingly large amounts of merchants. If it had just been Edwin, he could have joined the rest of the walkers, but thanks to his new carriage, he was stuck in an absolutely massive traffic jam.

In any case, it gave them enough time to figure out what to do with Inion, which turned out to be a more involved conversation than Edwin had really anticipated.

“You know, I think we probably could get you in. Like…” he turned to Lefi, “Common Knowledge or whatever doesn’t say she’s a fey, right?”

“It could if they looked,” the adventurer replied, “Though it is as always about asking the right questions.”

“But would they be likely to?”

“Not particularly, no.

“Okay, so then you should be fine!”

“Hmm… nah. I don’t wanna risk it!

“What is it with you and cities? Do you just not like being around so many people away from nature or whatever?”

“No! No, of course not. Cities are fine. Remember when I tried to get into Vinstead with you? I like cities. I just don’t like the guards is all, ya? Ya. It’ll be fine! You go do your stuff and then we’ll get me in later.”

“Are you… scared of the guards after that one threw you down the street like a ragdoll?” Edwin realized, “Ha!”

She glared at him, “No. Of course not. They caught me off-guard is all. Had I know what they could do I wouldn’t have been so much as budged!”

“Sure…” Edwin teased her, “So then what is it?”

“Look, you go in and do your stuff, I’ll go commune with the river for a while, and I can give you new knowledge about the rivers here tomorrow when you sneak me in!”

“I’d be more likely to believe you if you ever actually provided any actual information other than how much fun you had. All the functional difference here is that I’ll be sneaking you in… You just want to sneak in, don’t you?” Edwin sighed, “Like you don’t actually care about whether or not you’d be allowed in normally, you just want to do things a different way?”

She didn’t respond so Edwin continued, “So what, should I meet you out here tomorrow? What are you going to actually be doing? Please don’t be something that can be traced back to me.”

“Oh, you’re not going to tell me to not get in trouble?” she teased.

“No. If I asked you to do that, you’d make sure to get in trouble just to be contrary.”

“And you’re not worried about that now?”

“I hope that it would at the very least be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“We’ll see…” she stroked her chin in pretend thought, “We’ll see…”

The spread of buildings outside of Sheraith’s walls was significantly less sprawling than at Vinstead. Farmland dominated most of the landscape, with the few accompanying structures being very nice farmhouses and the like. For a while, Edwin was really confused by the presence of enormous fields of what looked like wheat, but only the stalks. Any grains that might have been growing were totally gone.

He didn’t have to wonder about what might have caused them for long, though. One field was being harvested as they passed, and Edwin watched in awe as a single man hefted what looked like a combination of bucket and scythe, swinging it in a massive arc at approximately waist height.

There was a blur of silver and the massive flash of a greenish-brown Skill.

In a single motion, a huge swath of the field was cut just short of the head, the stalks bobbing back and forth from the sudden motion and accompanying gust of wind. Edwin could even see the farmer empty a truly staggering amount of wheat heads from the bucket mounted on his ‘scythe’ into a sack sitting on the ground next to him. The sack didn’t seem to fill up at all from what must have been enough grain to feed a small town for a month, and the farmer barely seemed weighed down as he picked up the bag and started walking to another section of the massive field.

Nobody else commented about the utterly absurd stunt, so Edwin just quietly shook his head and carried on.

As the line slowly progressed, a few more buildings started popping up. A couple inn-looking places with stables off to the side, a couple of dedicated stables, and then at last a ring of buildings built right outside of the walls, a miniature town unto itself.

Most people on foot were allowed free passage through the gates, the logic being that anyone without a pack was local enough as to not need questioning, but the moment you had so much as a backpack people were pulled off to one of the sides of the gate.

The gate itself was massive and imposing. The stone seemed to be a single enormous monolith but with Outsider’s Almanac Edwin was able to tell they were secretly at least seventeen different stones held together with such precision that their seams were utterly invisible. Honestly, it was in some ways more impressive than just carving it all from a single rock, discounting the effects of Skills. After all, a single large mass didn’t play nice with most object-based Skills like Rock Sculpting, meaning only the highest-leveled, and thus most expensive, sculptors and masons would be able to work with enormous stone blocks.

The gateway itself was approximately arch-shaped, depicting a pair of blue rainbows cascading from a massive thundercloud. Or maybe they were waterfalls? They were probably waterfalls, actually. With that concept in mind he was very easily able to pick out the stylizations of flowing water and he almost felt stupid for thinking they were a blue rainbow of all things. Well whatever. He was the only one who knew about that little mistake.

…he’d still be obsessing over it for the next five years though. He didn’t reminisce about his stupidity from back home for whatever reason, but did he ever have a ‘greatest hits’ of every stupid thing he’d done in the last nearly two years.

The gates themselves were thick, solid wood made from some kind of tree they didn’t have on Earth but he had hesitantly called 'ironwood', and while he could only see the interior of the door, they were reinforced in as much a decorative manner as a structural one depicting some very abstract and stylized picture Edwin wasn’t quite able to parse. Behind the gate there was a small hallway before opening into the streets of Sheraith itself.

He wasn’t quite able to access the city itself yet. First, they had to get past thethree armored figures conducting the inspection of any group with a beast of burden or cart.

Junior City Guard

City Guardian

Experienced Lirasian Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper looked at them- Identify flickering in concert with a couple of other Skills- and nodded. The one who seemed to be in charge of their inspection turned to Lefi, currently showing as an Adventurer-Mage. He made some gestures on a tablet- a literal tablet, not a computer. Just a slab of granite with some carvings on it- and started in with a set of questions.

“Place of birth?”

“Riverbend,” there was a hint of a laugh in Lefi’s voice, but the guard didn’t seem amused, “Rhothos,” he finished, and the Gatekeeper nodded.

“Current Registrar?”

“Rizzali of Vinstead.”

“Reason and date for leaving?”

“Desire to travel, visiting a friend and providing mentorship. Been on the road for two months or so.”

“Most recent stop?”

“Ashglen.”

“Family and given name?”

“Lefi Forolova.”

There was a crack in the guard’s otherwise stoic façade and Edwin could have sworn the man glared at Lefi a bit behind his glimmer of recognition, “Right. Reason and duration of visit?”

“Visiting a friend, possibly a month or two. The kid needs a helping hand and she can provide.”

The guard pointed at Yathal, “He yours, then?”

“As far as it matters.”

“Good enough. Planned location of stay?”

“Rented room, or also possible with friend.”

“Who’s this friend?”

“Adventurer Rillah.”

That got the guard to finally look up from his tablet, “The daywasr?”

Polyglot didn’t translate the word, but given the man’s tone it didn’t sound complimentary, so Edwin didn’t poke at it. He had a good enough idea, he felt.

“Yes, her. Is that a problem?”

The man snorted, “Not one of mine. Seven or twelve.”

“Me and the kid or just me?”

“Both, but not the alchemist.”

“Twelve?”

“Twelve. You’re free to go elsewhere, Adventurer.”

“Twelve,” Lefi agreed with a sigh and pulled out a small handful of silver. He dropped a number- Numeracy let Edwin cheat and count twelve- into the guard’s waiting palm. A curt nod later, the two spear-wielders withdrew and allowed Lefi, Yathal, and Kyni through. They slipped into the crowd, but Edwin saw a string of two Skills play- namely, Whispering and Yelling- as they passed through and whispered into his ear with Lefi’s voice.

“We’ll be nearby and find you once you get through.”

Fortunately, he knew basically what to do. It was the job of the Gatekeeper to ensure that only productive individuals would be let into the city- they assessed the potential value and risks they brought with them and set an entry price accordingly. Those who were sick or known troublemakers were usually refused outright, but Adventurers would usually get away with just a ridiculously high entry fee. He wasn’t entirely sure why the man had listed two prices, but no real matter. He was hopeful he’d be able to escape without one regardless.

“Place of birth?” the Gatekeeper asked once again.

“I, uh… think I’m supposed to just show this in response? I don’t think I should say much more than that.” Edwin asked, pulling out a small token- his adventurer license, which had apparently at some point been updated to show his Ally of the Empire status according to Lefi. How the adventurer knew that… he didn’t know.

No, ‘he has everything’ or ‘he has all of the Skills’ don’t count as explanations.

At first the gatekeeper didn’t seem to pay too much to him, finishing up some sort of Skill-based interaction with his tablet before finally looking to study the small trinket, “If you think that’s supposed to… Oh, now that is interesting. Step to the side, my lieutenant will be with you shortly.”

“What about my stuff?”

“It will go with you. Now, move.”

“Alright, alright,” Edwin caved easily, mentally preparing himself for an Important meeting.