The road to Lankford was both straight and flat, with a surface of fine reddish gravel that crunched pleasantly beneath my boots. I dug my pipe out of my pocket, loaded up a bowl of sweet tobacco, then, belatedly, recalled that I was out of matches. Shit. I’d meant to buy some before leaving town…

  I actually stopped in my tracks, turned around, and looked back down the road the way I’d come. It couldn’t be more than a mile or two… But no. I knew myself too well for that. If I went back to town now I would end up stopping at a tavern for lunch and just one beer — or so I would convince myself. But then I’d stick around to have a second beer — strictly for digestive purposes — and then I’d get to talking with the yokels, and before long I’d end up ordering just one more and then — presto.

  It would be midnight and I’d stumble out into the street and look up at the moon and see not one, but two moons — three, if I had really overdone it — and I would squint at them and try to squeeze them back together into one coherent image, but they’d just keep slithering and hopping all over the sky and then eventually I would think, fuck it, and go pass out in an alley.

  …Which was pretty much my plan for when I got to Lankford anyway, the crucial difference being that I actually get to Lankford.

  So. I had no choice but to press on.

  But. There would be no more walking without nicotine.

  I stood there, in the middle of the empty road, chewing on my unlit pipe, considering. It had been several months since I’d attempted any magic. Usually (meaning always), it was both easier and safer to accomplish what needed accomplishing without calling upon supernatural forces. I was nervous.

  And. For good reason.

  But. I had no matches.

  So. It would be magic after all.

  I cleared my throat. I took the pipe out of my mouth and glared at it, refocusing. I spoke an incantation. Nothing. And nothing on the second try either. On the third try, I succeeded in burning my thumb rather badly.

  There is no God, I decided.

  On the seventeenth try, I managed to get an ember going. I puffed greedily to keep it stoked, then took a deep inhale, savoring the feeling of that thick blue smoke coating the insides of my lungs. Perhaps I’d been overly critical of God. I blew a couple smoke rings.

  Life wasn’t so bad.

  For one thing, I could scarcely have imagined better walking weather.

  It was that sublime, transitionary season which is neither still late summer, nor yet early autumn. Warm in the sun, cool in the shade. The sky was palest turquoise with a scattering of wooly clouds, the landscape dappled by their bean-shaped shadows.

  Ditches along either shoulder of the road ran high with irrigation water. And beyond the ditches — wheat. Golden winter wheat from one horizon to the other. It was like an ocean… of wheat. Best I could tell, wheat was the only crop anyone bothered with around here. I wondered idly if the folk ate anything but bread.

  As the day wore on, a few small wagons rattled past me. Although the drivers tipped their hats, they didn’t slow to offer me a ride — not even when I shouted and chased after them. And so, I walked. And as I walked, I smoked. And as I smoked, I reminisced upon my misspent youth and all the wasted opportunities.

  In fact, there was a lot I couldn’t reminisce about because, quite frankly, I did not remember it. Eleven years’ worth of relentless fieldwork hadn’t exactly done my brain-cells any favors. Not that I was a complete cognitive goldfish, but my memories tended to have a certain… fuzziness around the edges, and I never could be fully certain which were real and which dreams, and which hallucinations or mere mental fabrications.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Sheesh.

  Had I really been on this quest for eleven years? The thought was staggering. Thousands of days and nights. Gone. Poof. Like money spent. Like drinks poured down the drain.

  I was thirty-three years old, and it did not seem possible.

  I felt too young to be so old, and yet… too old to be so young… When I looked in a mirror I could still find traces of the idiotic twenty-two-year-old I’d been when I dropped out of the Collegium Miraculum. It was my eyes, mostly. The whites had now gone permanently bloodshot, but my irises were still the same light shade of blue that sometimes looked like gray under the right light. It was as if a younger Otis peered out through a thick layer of stage-makeup.

  When I looked in the mirror, I saw every late night, every terrible decision etched into my face.

◊ 

My ruminations were beginning to give me a headache, so I stopped in the next patch of shade I came to and sat down to see what sustenance could be scrounged from the dark recesses of my rucksack. This was the selfsame pack my father gave me when I first left home, at the age of fourteen, to begin my studies in the occult arts at the Collegium Miraculum. To my knowledge, it had never been completely empty since. I couldn’t remember when I'd last been able to see all the way down to the bottom.

  The items I used regularly always floated near the surface of the miscellanea. I valued my hands too much to risk digging through those unseeable fathoms. Who knew what could be down there? Not me, even though, presumably, I'd been the one to put that shit there in the first place.

  My rucksack consisted of one cavernous main-pocket and approximately seven-jillion smaller pockets, the contents of which I could not begin to guess. During my years at the Collegium, I’d customized the pack much, adding a secret pocket here, a secret pocket there, some secret pockets within secret pockets, pockets that required passwords to be opened, pockets that only existed at the full moon, decoy pockets full of toxic powders that would melt the flesh right off your fingers… I really should have written it all down... But if I’d had the sense to do that, I would not be Otis Bolerjack, now would I?

  As it was, I found a pouch of salted nuts, a strip of jerky with the taste and texture of an old bootstrap, and — oh bliss, oh joy — my hip flask, which had been “lost” in my rucksack for almost a month.

  I eagerly unscrewed the cap and brought it to my nose. Yes. It was still three-quarters full of that terrific brandy I’d picked up in… somewhere town place… Didn’t matter. I took a restrained sip, just to taste that lovely burn. Yes yes. It made me feel totally awake for the first time that day.

  I ambled on, crunching my nuts and gnawing at my jerky.

  I allowed myself another sip of brandy after lunch, and then relit my pipe, pleased that it only took me four attempts this time.

  Time…

  Time…

  Eleven years devoted to a cure for crapulence. A full third of my life.

  Of course, much of that time had been frittered away on sidequests and recovering from sidequests, which was why I’d had to swear-off sidequesting forever. No distractions. That was my new policy. One motherfucking quest at a motherfucking time, motherfucker...

  I noticed that, with a wheat field to my left and another to my right, and nothing but the flat, straight road and the blue sky in front of me, the view was perfectly bilaterally symmetrical. Surreal. And so what?

I had run out of important things to think about and I was bored. The boredom caused my hand to wander toward my hip flask. Pace yourself, I warned myself. That gave me an idea.

  I began to count my steps. Each time I reached a thousand I would take a slug and start over at zero. It was a terrific game. The brandy heartened me. And the promise of more brandy put hustle in my stride.

◊

  Eventually, my road entered a forest. I was grateful for the change of scenery, although it was equally monotonous: an endless corridor of green.

  Seven-hundred-thirteen… Seven-hundred-fourteen…. Seven-hundred-fifteen… Seven — I froze.

  I took a tentative step backward, then another.

  There.

  A stone’s throw off the road, something was glinting in the underbrush. Instinctively, I moved toward it. Then I hesitated.

  Did this count as a sidequest? No, surely not… It was more of an… unnecessary errand. Yes, that was all. Just to satisfy my curiosity.

  ...A soup spoon. That was what the shiny thing turned out to be. Silver, by the look of it, and wrought with ornate filigree. It was the sort of utensil I would expect to find at the sort of restaurant I could not afford to eat at.

  Yet, here it was, sticking upright in the loamy soil as if someone had intentionally put it there. And it hadn't been here long either, or else it would have been more tarnished. I glanced around but saw no remnants of a campsite.

  Oh yes, there was a story here, of that much I was certain. How I longed to investigate the matter further! But, unfortunately, doing so would have pushed me into official sidequest territory.

  No. For once, I would do the responsible thing, which was to take this spoon and use it to finance a night of lavish drunkenness in Lankford.

  Thusly resolved, I squatted down and reached a hand out to grasp the spoon. At which point, a goblin bit my pinky off.