Chapter 14: Beginning To Blend Part 2

Lester walked in a smooth and controlled manner with still some minor effort in his new body. The road to the capital had been uneventful in his mind as he gleaned as much as he could from the humans around them during the journey. The soldiers had been helpful to a young, curious boy who was awkward at conversations with adults.

In their minds, a little boy showing interest in soldiers was proper. Why shouldn’t they entertain him with stories and light training on how swords and battle worked? Most little boys enjoyed that kind of thing.

They all remembered finding the ultimate sword of power and destiny conveniently discarded below a tree in all of its knobbly wooden glory, and what soldier worth their salt wouldn’t want to help a fellow true chosen one in beginning their journey?

They remembered the fascination that some grownups lent to their professions and could always use more little soldiers to help with the nonsense chores that leadership seemed to have an endless supply of. Harmless education for the next generation, that’s all it was.

Lester had almost torn the eyes out of the man who had hoisted him up onto his shoulders before he realized what was going on the second day of their travel. Two soldiers were facing off against Lester and the man who had accosted him, one sitting astride the other like a wobble toy he would have given one of the dibbuns back at the settlement.

The treatment perturbed Lester. The Goom wasn’t a sack of potatoes and should not be juggled callously.

The soldiers facing them had a combative and playful stance, with the smaller of the two sitting atop the shoulders of the other. The rider had a long, sticky lance couched under one arm. Lester assumed sticky was the correct adjective as it was indeed a stick.

Lester suspected the men facing off against them were meant to be enemy knights challenging himself and his unwelcome steed. He had been handed a smaller stick as his weapon, and the jousting began.

He thoroughly enjoyed bonking his opponent more viciously than he should have. Even the mild scolding from one of the older soldiers about restraint was tolerated well as Lester gleefully watched his opponent nursing the lump on his head with a resentful expression.

The soldiers had delighted in such a young boy showing such talent for causing injury against trained men of war. Mocking laughter from whoever wasn’t facing off against the tiny tornado of sticky fury was a typical sound in the evenings after that first exciting exchange of blows.

Lester found the skills he had acquired with his chosen weapon, the small mace he had used for most of his life, translating adequately into the “training” of sword use he was being shown. There was more stabbing and slashing, but swords were more about cutting and poking, so they would demand a different approach. Lester much preferred bonking.

The goom was less gleeful about the training when some more experienced men showed little mercy to the young boy he was pretending to be. He had to be careful with those. Too much skill, and he would out himself as a not-so-innocent little monster instead. Too little and actual injury might have become a problem. The corporals having a word with that pair had encouraged them to use a little more restraint, and Lester settled for bruising their shins quite badly while getting a few new lumps on his head.

The farmer who had accompanied the party looked at the events with a strange expression. Lester was unsure if a human could look disdainful and amused simultaneously, but the man gave it a shot as he observed. Despite Lester’s impression the farmer disapproved of the mock violence, the man had spent some time with him in the evening going over plants Lester already had different names for. Lester had enjoyed these “lessons” less than covertly beating the other humans vigorously. He resigned himself to the lessons and decided to treat it as snack time for the roots and berries the farmer showed him “for the first time.”

Lester suspected the corporals tolerated the training as it kept their troops from being too bored and out of what little trouble there could have been found on the road. So, the random nonsense of soldiers playing and interacting with the socially and physically awkward but curious boy during the two evenings the party camped on the side of the road was ignored as harmless.

Lester had been unsettled by the scribe who had silently followed the party, scribbling in a book as the party traveled toward Purpolis. The man had looked familiar, and Lester was disturbed by any human who paid him too much attention. The scribe never talked to anyone and was ignored by all, so Lester did his best to put the red-haired man out of his mind.

This was made easier when they arrived at Purpolis or started to arrive as they saw the signs of how the city was supported well before a clear view of the city was had. The god of ominous sights was particularly proud of the scene they found before them. Kevin, a minor deity who worked with various deities but was friends with Dennis, polished his nails in pleasure at the effect he had helped create.

In the fading light of dusk before arrival at the city, a shadowy mass loomed in the distance over what seemed endless plots of cultivated land. Lester found gatherings of humans ominous in general, and the implications of this much farmland lent an ominous feeling to his observations. Every few plots was a farmhouse appearing from a distance as a grumpy custodian of their territory. Jealously guarding the tastiest of crops.

In Lester’s eyes, as far as one could see in the dusky gloom, the treeline's abrupt break into settled farms smacked the party members in the face like unwelcome spaghetti noodles of uncomfortable remembrance that he was alone in an enormous world. Johansen and the luciloo didn’t mind as they had seen the approach before, and their spaghetti reminder was a comforting knowledge that they were not alone against the world’s monsters.

From where the party stood amidst the treeline, farmer Jenkins could spy tens of different crops in the closest farms only a few hundred yards away. He suspected the hundreds of farms being the logistical nightmare of food production supporting the populous of their destination. He couldn’t help marveling at the amount of work being done to feed what would be a number of people he could not calculate.

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Jenkins was not dumb. After all, he had his letters and numbers, but a farmer’s math skills stopped at introductory algebra. The mysteries of the god trig were for those pesky engineers who wanted so much money for their services and tax men to confuse the small folk. And the assholes like that Castellan, Joclyn.

The farmer gazed with experienced, jaded romance at the amount of well-tended farmland ready for harvest soon by his eye. He knew this much work would be well rewarded with a bountiful harvest. He wouldn’t know if any of the fields suffered from hidden blight at this distance but suspected the entire work to be a tribute to Clod, the god of farming, and marveled at the magnificence of the effort. That calm, trudging figure of hard work and the frugal joy of repetitive tasks would not allow such effort to be slighted by pestilence or a plague of vermin.

A wide road meandered throughout the mass of cultivation, leading toward a shadowy mass on the horizon. Its undulating path avoided running through the more extensive waterways carved through the fields to provide irrigation to so many growing crops with only a few bridges. Jenkins did wonder at the arcing ring of cottage-sized boulders spaced every few hundred yards throughout the fields nearest the tree line.

The goom in the party was horrified by the vast tracts of land that the humans had cannibalized to feed the pestilence that was their existence. Lester did not see a thriving and vibrant example of humans providing for their own, but showing how his enemies would force even their fellows to slave away at taming what should be lived with in harmony to satisfy their needs.

The goom had farms sometimes in their settlements. Small ones they could maintain underground, mainly of mushrooms that were easier to hide from observation. It was a custom that once a settlement of goom grew too large, it would be split, and they would move elsewhere to keep the toll of their existence light on the nature around them. To his knowledge, the goom as a people had only attempted something on a larger scale once.

His settlement had made the attempt. It was among many other mistakes championed by Gomm’s now-deceased parents. The brief sojourn into blatant manipulation of their environment had given them experience in discovering that humans were jealous of any bounty they did not possess. Lester pulled his thoughts away from darker times.

Lester assumed the shadowy mass in the distance was a mountain range they were approaching before overheard excited chatter from some of the younger soldiers told him this was not a natural terrain feature. He didn’t know how he should feel about approaching his destination. Excited rage would possibly fit what he was experiencing, perhaps anxiously anticipated vengeance.

Jenkins was intimidated when he learned what the ominous shadow they approached was. A life in a county with a sparse population had not prepared him for the concept of something this large.

That following morning, the party continued their approach toward Purpolis in a mixing bowl of emotions some would describe as an eclectic and unique blending of the gamut living creatures are capable of feeling. The gods and realists would call it an inefficient mess, a hair’s breadth from contaminating each other and exploding. The realists would also be screaming something about the monster amid the humans if they knew about it.

The shadowy form grew taller and broader as the party approached. Lester’s first impression and clear view of the mass in the distance was that of an enormously scaled-up bucket with a pattern of spikes streaking into the sky from within. It was challenging to understand the scale Lester was looking at as he had no reference for something made to be this large. The walls loomed higher than the width of the city in an insult to the laws of engineering, or at least pleasing aesthetics. Both were unknown to the small woodland critter named Lester.

The city walls had impressed even the inhuman little boy of the party. Private Johansen had an apprehensive expression on his face, while the Lucilloo were apparently bored by the site of the towering walls. Lester had seen human settlements before, but none this large. Even the city of humans near his old settlement hadn’t been to this scale.

The taller buildings within the walls spiked into the sky in what Lester interpreted as a childish challenge to storms and the human gods. The towering structures formed a vague pattern that was impossible to see fully from his vantage below the walls. Humans were more flamboyant and exuberant in their ambitions.

Lester didn’t understand what purpose such large or numerous structures could serve. Many were even so similar as to be identical from this distance. He wondered why the humans had put such obvious labor and resources into creating this place. It was an obvious sign that the ambition of the humans was just as dangerous as always.

The Goom mixing too closely with the humans had a history of ending badly. Lester had loved his siblings, and he had learned from that first debacle that loving someone did not mean you couldn’t hate them for poor choices that had negative consequences for others. The more recent tragedy had reinforced the lesson and led him to the conclusion that they needed to be eradicated.

If Gomm’s parents had been more cautious, Lester suspected the last settlement would not have ended with the goom having to flee the area. Or some of the colony being killed, burn scars covering his body, or Gomm not having his parents to help him through life.

If the colony had learned better lessons from that first disaster, they would not have settled so near them again. Rationalizations by Choch that access to human farms and a much lower population would make it safe this time had made history repeat itself, albeit with fewer natural disasters. Lester’s thoughts must have leaked into his expression as the farmer had clapped a startling hand onto the goom’s shoulder.

“Cheer up, Robby. It may be new, but we’ll handle it well enough.”

Lester gave the man a sickly smile instead of biting off his fingers. Soon, Lester would be able to start saving his family…if he could find them. The city was enormous. A steady stream of humanity was approaching the gates of the wall facing their party.

Lester saw only one entrance to the city in the unbroken grey stones of the wall the party faced after their long approach. He could no longer see the top of the wall from this close. He had no clue how the humans kept the wall from collapsing under the weight of the mountain of human-sized stones stacked into the sky. The gate was easily three stories tall and dwarfed by the wall. The stones surrounding it stacked into an apparent infinity above them.

For a monster pretending to be a little boy, his plan to infiltrate the city, rescue his family, and start the extinction of humanity seemed a goal more akin to kicking the man on the moon in the crotch. A deed worthy of legendary tales being sung to the ages. His resolve hardened as he gazed at the flow of people moving into the city ahead of them.

Lester shuffled forward in the line the party had joined. The Luciloo had already departed through a shorter line to one side of the gate. A hand fell heavily onto his shoulder, gripping tight.

“Oi! What’s this one about then?”