“Well, that’s another place we can’t visit again. Didn’t you also get kicked out of Yari?” Adra asked with a slight smirk once we got to serious conversation over breakfast.

“Yes, we did. Not that it matters; I have no desire to go back there, ever again. And speaking of going back, is there anything we need to do before we head further south?” I asked, mainly Ylva and Lenore. Ylva had that feud with the black wolves, ever since they had attacked her pack and Lenore had expressed interest in the mountain and the wind raptors, we had fought some of them but I was not sure if she had achieved whatever she had wanted to achieve.

“I have what I needed from the Wind Raptors. Not that I gained much; I will need something else to cross the first divide.” Lenore explained, and I felt her apprehension about that ‘something’ she spoke off. I made a mental note to ask her about it, once she was back in her Hallow and we could communicate directly.

“I will follow you, Master.” Rai stated, conviction clear in his voice.

“We can head further south. There is nothing we can do in this area.” Ylva growled before retreating into her Hallow. I had a feeling that she’d love to go against the black wolves but that she was realistic enough that we would just die if we tried. We had managed to fight off one pack of them but everything we had heard told us that there were more, far more of them out there. And we had heard one of them invoking the names of Odin’s hounds, Freki and Geri. If that was truly who lead the black wolves, then I was very much on board with Ylva’s decision to let sleeping dogs lie, so to say.

Another thing that made me want to leave the area as fast as possible was that both the wolves and the wind raptors had good reason to go after us in general and me in particular. Fighting them all would be suicide, pure and simple. It rakled a little, to run away, but there simply was no reason to stay and fight them, sacrificing not only myself but more important Sigmir in the process. No, in this case discretion was the better part of valour.

In the end, we agreed that travelling south would be the best choice in general and that staying in the forest for a day or two before travelling openly on the old imperial road was a sound plan.

So, for the next two days we kept going south-ward, staying close to the road but far enough away from it so that anything preying on travellers would not come across us. Humorously, it wasn’t bandits we were worried about, our collective wisdom told us that even the old imperial road was not having enough traffic in winter for any bandit to make a living, our worries were more addressed towards the rather smart and cunning beasts that roamed these forests. I had no doubt that a being as smart as Ylva or Lenore would be able to formulate a plan to lay ambushes on the roads, just like bandits would.

Nothing really happened during those two days, I mostly focused on restoring my hand which took a lot of focus. The rest of my time was taken up by mothering from Sigmir who had taken the rather significant and obviously problematic injury I had incurred almost as a personal insult. So, as if to make up for her perceived failure, she went into an overprotective, mothering mode, that threatened to drive me insane. Or, more insane, depending on whom you ask.

But when I wanted to set her straight, to make her understand that I was not a fragile doll, we clashed a little. My independence and stubbornness clashed against her protective instincts and pride. It was a tense moment, but at the end of the day, I lost the clash. Or, maybe I won, depending on your perspective. I lost because I accepted her taking care of me and promised that if something like that ever happened again, I would let her take care of me, again. But, I also won because her argument was less an argument and more a heartfelt plea that she hated to see me hurt and that it pained her to see me hurt and she needed to know that I was taken care of. The sheer emotion in her eyes made me concede my struggle and I let myself be spoon fed another day. If mothering me, made her feel better and lessened her undeserved guilt, I felt it the least I could do to let her.

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After all, I was at fault for causing her grief, even if I was unsure if there had been a better way out of Yaksha.

I did manage to quiz Lenore on her needs to cross the first Divide, learning that she would need to harvest the energies left after the departure of souls, not what we absorbed as EXP but something else, something lingering. One such place would be the Barrow Den but Lenore joked that the Grandmother would smite us if we tried to destabilize her dungeon, another might be the ancient Kingdom formerly ruled by the Ice Queen, Sally. Sadly, we had no idea where that Kingdom actually had been or if it was even still there. We would have to look somewhere else for the haunting, lingering energies set free by massive loss of life.

And the events in Yaksha made a couple more waves, as there had been another Traveller in the crowd who had published the recording of me, cowing the whole crowd, complete with a evocative description of the emotions felt during the time I had been visible. Adding to that was the video and a bit of description from the Ghost-nouns of Lenore coming down from the skies to lay a smackdown onto them, which they easily attributed to me and things got a little spicy online.

As if the previous nonsense hadn’t been bad enough, the new videos and descriptions just as the old ones were slowly leaving the front page was akin to pouring gasoline into a fire, it was as if someone had thrown fresh meat into the troll-cage.

The replies ranged from the normal-concerned to the simply ridiculous, spanning every facet of intelligence between those extremes.

The most normal ones were those who thought the threats I had made against Yaksha, realistic threats even without the strange magic artifact I was holding, were ill-boding for a living world if any relatively new character had the ability to threaten a town with the implacable wrath of an undying threat, a threat that could not be killed and would come back to haunt them again and again, it would pose a significant problem for the NPC-population.

Those concerns were mostly assuaged once someone explained that a character trying to do something like that was taking a slow route to perma-death, thanks to the way death-penalties worked. The penalties were harsh and, more important, they were partially permanent. It was one of the rare cases of a developer appearing and actually explaining how the death-penalties worked, that a part of them was recoverable, unless one died again before doing so, and only a portion was permanently lost on the first death. That meant that while it was possible for a Traveller to commit to revenge on a large scale, it also meant throwing away one's character. The developer in question even alluded that there was a mechanic for natives to do something similar by dedicating themselves to a particular deity, being unable to die before their vengeance was fulfilled, but dying once it was.

But those concerns were the ones I could understand and emphasize with.

And then there were those who, once again, called me a cheater, a hacker, a developer-plant and what-not. They claimed that Lenore was some sort of exploit, or rather my ability to speak and cast magic through her, others claimed that the artifact I was using was the result of me hacking the game. That last one caused me to chuckle, I could code a little, there had been a few classes in university but that just meant I was able to write myself a simple calculator-program, if I so wanted. Hacking into something like Road to Purgatory was so far out of that ball-park, it wasn’t even in the same solar-system anymore.

Anyway, I read the strange theories as long as they amused me before trying to find a map of the area we were heading towards. Sadly, the amount of maps for the world of Mundus was very much limited so other than a rough map with all of two cities within a few hundred kilometers of my estimation of our position, they helped very little.There were a few marks that I could not identify on the map, one of them about three days ride south of our position but other than that, I was unable to find anything useful.

We would just have to see what waited for us beyond the horizon, what was beyond the next bend in the road and hidden behind the next hill. Somehow, that not-knowing gave me a huge thrill and made me look forward to the journey so much more.