Oncoming frigid winds pressed the rough fabric of Dimitry’s hood against his cheek when he glanced back at voluminous clouds of smoke expanding into a dark sky behind him. They rose from a settlement with shoddily repaired walls.
Her Majesty’s iron mines.
Although they appeared small now, they were anything but. Hundreds of underdressed laborers trudged through sub-zero temperatures while hauling cargo, pumping bellows, or shoveling charcoal in a facility more massive than four villages put together.
Size, however, was its only redeeming feature. Unlike the iron mines’ compact vol counterpart, its infrastructure was battered. Disorderly. Collapsing.
Several water wheels no longer lifted elevators from mine shafts, forcing miners to pull heavy carts topped with lustrous gray stones up narrow walkways. Once they reached the surface, they would leave their ore at a station where men in wet clothes would wash and crush it in a machine powered by sluice gates and horses. The only ones worse off than drenched workers trying to stave off hypothermia were those lugging sacks of charcoal over their shoulders, rushing to feed ten-foot-tall blast furnaces before the flames burnt out.
Their efforts weren’t always successful.
Fuel was difficult to get. According to Saphiria, many charcoal burners fled south, seeking safety from heathens. Replacing them was an endless struggle that would eventually choke this country’s metal industry—its primary source of income.
Eager to help, Dimitry attempted to recall knowledge from a thermodynamics course he took one and a half decades ago. He knew how a theoretical steam engine functioned, but what metals should he use to build one? How thick did the walls have to be? Could smiths produce the required parts? Would it be plausible to discard contraptions with well-known functionalities in favor of ones that could break down at any moment without a soul to repair them?
He didn’t know.
It was a task that would consume time and effort Dimitry couldn’t afford to spend. His best course of action was to focus on what he came here to do. He pulled back on his horse’s reins to slow the animal to a trot, then raised his right arm.
Like a blue homing beacon glowing amongst a dark sky, the knight emblem on his wrist tugged forward with more force than it had all night. It insisted he race past fields and villages, which grew in size and density as they approached Amphurt, towards its goal.
A cache containing an unknown relic.
Horseshoes rhythmically clomping in twos against frozen dirt caught up to Dimitry. Their source was a pure white horse carrying a girl whose raven black hair glistened in a waning moon’s weak light. “Are we going the right way?”
“We should be there soon.” Dimitry tucked his hand under his cloak to shield it from freezing winds.
“In Estoria, you told me it led you to a cathedral with a shrine.” Saphiria pointed ahead at a townscape built onto a distant hillside. “There’s one in Amphurt, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The cathedral there is bigger than the one in Malten.”
That was strange. Why would the Church erect a bigger cathedral in a town than it did in a neighboring city? “Can you take me there?”
Saphiria nodded and, her expression one of contemplation, turned her gaze to Dorothy’s white mane. “May I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“I don’t wish to burden you with difficult questions, but I’ve been wondering about it ever since we escaped from Ravenfall.” Saphiria glanced up at him with curious indigo eyes. “Why do you have that mark on your wrist? Is it your means for casting strange magics?”
Even though Dimitry trusted her, he couldn’t give a satisfying response to an inquiry he couldn’t answer himself. He provided her with a simplified version. “A man gave it to me.”
“A man?” Saphiria looked forward, bracing herself as Dorothy leaped over a tree stump. “What does it do?”
“Aside from leading me to shrines, I don’t think it does much—”
The distant sound of shattering wood, as if by overwhelming force, broke Dimitry’s concentration.
Then a loud horn, yelling, and stomping.
Dimitry’s head twisted towards the commotion—a cluster of cottages to his left. “What the hell is that?”
“Crawling devil,” Saphiria said, her face emotionless.
Precious turned under Dimitry’s hood, her wings tickling his neck. “What’s with all the noise?” She yawned. “Are we in Malten yet?”
“Does it sound like we’re in Malten? Crawling devils are attacking a village.”
“Heathens in the middle of the month?” Precious’s ponytail brushed against his ear as she peeked out of his hood, her golden hair blowing in the wind. “Unlucky. Must suck to be those guys.”
“Why does it matter?” Dimitry asked. “I know more of them like to attack on nights of repentance, but do their numbers fluctuate throughout the month as well?”
“Yes,” Saphiria said. “Although we’re close to a town, it’s rare for them to strike now.”
Were heathens the reason people used lunar calendars to tell time? He saw one in Malten’s castle before. A year comprised fourteen months, each separated by roughly twenty-eight days. It made sense for the moon to receive special attention in a world where it hung large and bright in the sky, produced mysterious green sparkles on nights of repentance, and predicted the behavior of deadly stone creatures.
Creatures that intrigued Dimitry.
He glanced at Saphiria. “I want to get a closer look.”
She stared at him, baffled. Then, after an extended pause, nodded.
“Are you out of your mind?” Precious pinched his earlobe with small and cold fingers. “Do you want to die?”
Dimitry understood the faerie’s concerns. Although his actions would put all of them in danger, observing a heathen on land would teach him how the mysterious giants moved, how they covered their victims in corrosive blood, and, most importantly, how they died. Lessons he could use to train and arm his ‘ambulances’ to prevent unnecessary casualties during the heathen invasion at the end of the month.
Or perhaps someone lay dying right now, less than a hundred meters away. Dimitry preferred to live knowing that he didn’t abandon a patient who suffered as heathen’s blood liquefied his skin and organs into a purple soup.
“We won’t get too close,” he said, pulling his horse’s reins in the village’s direction. “If anything happens, I’ll cast accelall on us.”
Saphiria followed his lead. “Okay.”
Precious exhaled a weary breath. “Maybe you two really are insane.”
As they approached the uproar, the ground’s rumbling intensified. A heathen’s stone legs, knees, and round core peeked out over cottages’ thatched roofs, bolting from one to the next. It wasn’t long before the whole creature came into view. Towering over eight men pelting it with bolts and arrows, the crawling devil gave chase to someone wearing only braies and a shirt.
The hastily dressed man dashed through the village’s streets. “Fucking kill it already!”
“Shut up and keep running!” yelled a man wielding a bow taller than himself. He shot an arrow at the heathen. “If you die, I’m marrying your daughter!”
One stood on his crossbow’s glowing limbs, cocking the weapon by pulling back on its string. “And keep that damn thing away from my house!”
Dimitry’s polka-dotted horse exhaled a loud and frightened snort, then came to a halt. It took several steps back. Dimitry watched open-mouth as the nightmarish scene played out less than fifty meters away from him.
Out of the many projectiles targeting the heathen, only three pierced its central, rounded core. Blue blood poured from newly formed chinks, etching a glowing trail on frozen mud wherever the heathen’s six legs took it.
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If nine men struggled to fell one crawling devil, how many were necessary to kill two? Three? Dozens marching, joined by flying and carapaced devils as they rushed towards a damaged city’s walls all at once?
And with numbers that increased every month.
Bows and rock hammers weren’t enough. They were too weak. Too risky. The only alternatives were sorceresses, who required decades to train and fortunes to maintain, and voltech weaponry. Both consumed vol—a precious resource whose use attracted further attention from heathens.
This world needed powerful weapons: guns, cannons, explosives. Ones that didn’t rely on vol or sacrifice.
Ones that Dimitry couldn’t provide.
He knew little about manufacturing weapons, preparing munitions, or chemicals that corroded stone. Most of his non-professional knowledge vanished long ago, victim to the sands of time.
“It’s almost dead, keep shooting!” The archer nocked another arrow.
“I said, stay away from my house!”
“I… I can’t!” The running man scrammed into a denser residential area. “There’s nowhere else to fucking go!” He glanced back at the crawling devil trailing him.
Propped up by four hind legs, the heathen rotated its front two limbs sideways and swiped them as if they were mandibles. The running man dodged the attack by turning a corner. Forward momentum, however, didn’t allow the stone monster to do the same. It rammed into a cottage no larger than the living room in Dimitry’s condominium back on Earth.
Blue blood soaked the building’s collapsed thatch roof, the excess spilling from the wreckage down makeshift steps and into a narrow ditch running through a frozen dirt road. The heathen remained buried under timber beams, unmoving.
The man who ran for his life now lay on the street, looking up at a dark sky leaking dawn’s first light. “Celeste… guide… me…” he uttered through heaved breaths.
“Donat,” the longbow wielder said as he approached his comrade. “You a’right?”
“Yeah… might need to change my braies, though. Knew I shoulda used the bedpan before going to sleep.”
“Good thing it was just Caspar’s home.” A man swung a timber beam into the dead crawling devil’s core, scattering its blue guts further. “Damn traitor left south days ago.”
“Who cares? Let’s celebrate. I have fresh and cold ale in my cellar.”
“You mean the strong stuff your wife makes?”
“Promise ya won’t be disappointed.”
Dimitry watched the laughing men trudge away, not taking part in their merriment. He knew something they didn’t. That Einheart and Volmer would collapse soon, leaving heathens nowhere to go but Malten. Tonight’s fiasco would become commonplace.
Unless someone did something soon, this kingdom was doomed. But who could solve—
“Dimitry!” Saphiria’s panicked call woke him from his musings. She knelt beside a wailing pig. Heathen’s blood coated the limping animal’s hind leg, coaxing blisters from its inflamed epidermis.
“Right.” He jumped off of his polka-dotted horse and reached for his leather bag. “Hold it still.” Dimitry poured water onto his patient’s swollen wound.
Even if humans weren’t among tonight’s casualties, it seemed that there would always be one.
----------------------------------------
Timber-framed buildings flanked narrow roads of flattened dirt. Illuminated by the scant light of dawn, it was still too early for people to trudge down their frozen surfaces. The only ones keeping them company were the few refugees huddled in alleyways and patrolling militia, who scanned the horizon for oncoming threats. Strapped to their backs were crossbows or mailbox-sized rock hammers.
One weapon for people. The other for heathens.
Neither, however, was this town’s biggest threat.
Dimitry looked down from atop his polka-dotted horse, focusing on a pair of faintly purple legs sticking out from under a thin blanket. Then, he examined a homeless man with pale skin slumbering in an alleyway. Most people were asymptomatic or in the early stages of infection.
The plague hadn’t consumed Amphurt yet.
Unlike Malten, this town’s modest population density prevented bacterial infections from spreading uncontrolled. A beneficial state of affairs that wouldn’t last forever.
Not that it mattered.
Dimitry had a plan in mind to contain the outbreak before it threatened the populace. With his position as court doctor, he would coerce the queen into setting up plague-curing outposts armed with modified preservia blankets throughout the countryside. Facilities that would save countless lives and decrease the number of patients that traveled to his hospital for treatment, freeing up space for other injuries.
Convinced of his initiative’s inevitable success, Dimitry turned his gaze towards the only eye-catching sight in the entire town—a giant cathedral dwarfing every surrounding building. Its height outclassed the one in Malten by a whole floor, just like Saphiria said it did.
But she failed to mention its most absurd feature—the pointed end of a massive jet-black monolith jutting out from the building’s roof.
Contrasting an early morning’s dark sky, light blue sparkles trickled down the alien construct’s sides, thinning before they vanished into the wind. This cache’s volume must have been a dozen, no, a hundred times larger than the one in Estoria.
Was its sole purpose to house an ominous orb?
Dimitry sought to find out.
He reached the cathedral, which dominated the town’s central market square and dismounted his horse. After Saphiria alighted from Dorothy, they passed through the structure’s arched entrance into a spacious inner sanctum. Spacious, except for the base of a massive shrine stood in the middle.
Its pyramidal base rose from the ground and past the second floor. However, unlike the monolith’s sleek appearance, the rest of the building was anything but. Blood coated pillars and marble floors. Broken windows lined the walls with shattered stained glass fragments, each reflecting the shrine’s alien blue light.
What the hell happened here?
Saphiria reached for the sheath strapped to her leg to retrieve a dagger with a sapphire engraved into its hilt. She gave him a nod.
Dimitry took a vol pellet out from his cloak and tapped the back of his hood.
“Yeah?” a sleepy voice asked.
“Do you sense anyone?”
Precious yawned. “I think there are some people upstairs, but their emotions are all over the place. Probably sleeping.”
“Thanks.” Dimitry glanced at Saphiria. “People above, maybe sleeping.”
She nodded. One careful step after another, the glass under her leather boots popped as she crept towards a blood-smeared marble staircase. Saphiria hid in a nearby nook. Like a weathered assassin ready to silence any approaching troublemaker, her indigo eyes discarded all emotion. All except curiosity. Her gaze tracked Dimitry as he approached the jet-black monolith.
His wrist’s emblem thrusting him forward with increasing force the closer he got, Dimitry kicked aside extinguished candles, withering flowers, and broken arrow shafts until he reached the shrine’s base. He examined its surface.
Strange.
Unlike the monolith in Estoria, which had a single monitor, this cache had five. The center one displayed a light-blue bishop, and the two flanking it on either side took on the shape of right hands. He touched one with a fingertip. Nothing. Then he tried his palm. Nothing.
Were they meant for someone else?
“Come out.” Dimitry tapped on his hood and beckoned Saphiria over. “I want both of you to put your hands on the shrine.”
“Yuck,” Precious muttered as she climbed past his ear. “Zeran trash.”
“Are we doing a coming of age ceremony?” Saphiria asked.
“Even if I wasn’t a corrupted creature, I’m three centuries too late for that.”
Dimitry stroked his chin. “Why? Does the shrine do something during a ceremony?”
“Yes,” Saphiria said as she fit her palms into two grooves, one of them mismatching her left hand. “If you’re fourteen years old, you become an adult.”
Dimitry sighed. Her answer wasn’t what he expected to hear. “I see.”
Precious held out her tiny arms. “Mine are way too small.”
“That might not be our only problem,” he said. “I think we need five people, but let’s try anyway. Be ready for anything.” Dimitry relaxed his arm, allowing the knight emblem on his wrist to drift up and align with the monitor displaying a bishop.
Like last time, three-dimensional geometric shapes leaked out of the monolith. They rose into the air and fused to form the characters of an alien language.
Saphiria jumped back. She looked on with bewildered indigo eyes.
“What the—” Precious darted away.
Dimitry raised a hand to signal to his companions that it was safe, then read the message.
‘Knight C27E957, your courage has paved the way to your second cache.’
‘You have yet to attain the hope required to challenge this trial or the relic within.’
Dimitry slowly retracted his hand, unable to decide if he was disappointed or upset. Was his rank of ‘knight’ unworthy of accessing a ‘bishop’ shrine? How could he attain hope? And what did it mean by trial? This cryptic bullshit was getting on his—
The words twisted into new ones.
‘For reaching a cache beyond your tier, you may reattune your imprint.’
‘Choose the class of knowledge you desire your future relics to contain.’
‘May your decision assure your victory.’
‘Board Cartography’
‘Opponent Information’
‘Homeworld Expertise’
Mouth agape, Dimitry took a step back. He didn’t expect there to be more. There wasn’t last time.
Precious drifted closer, poking her golden fingernail into floating holographic characters. “Do Zeran shrines always do this?”
“No.” Saphiria walked behind Dimitry, her cautious, sideways steps crunching the glass beneath her boots. “I’ve never seen those symbols before.”
Dimitry’s hand reached to stroke his chin. As far as he could tell, the monument gave him three options. However, for some reason, one was more vibrant than the others: Opponent Information.
It was sensible to assume he had an opponent given rampant chess references. But who was it? A member of the Church? A gigantic Heathen? An aquatic demon? Or perhaps it was one of those mysterious algae monsters he saw in the relic he received in Estoria.
The monolith mentioned that he could reattune his imprint, meaning that it was already attuned. Is that why one choice stood out? Was his knight emblem configured to receive relics containing ‘Opponent Information’? If so, he already had an orb revealing who his enemy was. Not that he was sure they even existed.
“Dumitry, what is this?”
“One second.”
“One second?” Precious landed on his shoulder and put her hands on her hips. “What does a second do?”
Ignoring the faerie, Dimitry massaged his forehead, considering his options once more. What did ‘Board Cartography’ mean? Would a relic attuned to it give him geographic knowledge? If so, it was useless. He didn’t plan to leave Malten for the foreseeable future.
The last choice, however, intrigued him.
What was ‘Homeworld Expertise’? Did it refer to Earth? If so, what kind of expertise could it possibly contain?
It didn’t matter.
Any skill from Earth was invaluable in this world. Carpentry, agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, civil engineering. Each topic contained centuries of pioneering and wisdom that could improve the lives of everyone in Malten, including Dimitry. Hell, even something specific like lens-making or cross-breeding could reforge society.
Humanity could really use the help.
Dimitry came to a decision. “Homewor—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the floating characters faded into nothingness. Then, his knight emblem burned, its color condensing into a darker shade of blue. It no longer pulled towards Amphurt’s shrine.
To ease the bone-searing pain of a sudden metamorphosis, Dimitry shook his wrist.
Saphiria approached, one hesitant step after another. “Are you all right?”
“I hope so.”
“You’re not going to squirm your way out of this one.” Precious tugged on his earlobe. “What was that all about?”
Dimitry shrugged. “Unfortunately, that’s something only time could tell.”