The last few weeks passed and it was the day of departure. Jace would have been lying if he said he wasn’t excided to leave. The stale air, the permanent stench of pitch. The cramped rooms. He half suspected he spent so much time training the sword because it was the only room apart from the mess hall that didn’t feel like a coffin. He didn’t get a chance to talk to the mages about their impression of the Glyph they wanted him to study. So he wasn’t sure how far along he was compared to where they wanted him to be. This made him a bit nervous. That said, his progress with the sword jumped forward by leaps and bounds. He even started training with real blades, just to get used to having to fight/spar against someone who could kill him. He had taken a few cuts in those fights, most of which were minor and did not require healing. Of course they left scars on his body.
The exit turned out to be a teleportation portal. They were transported to a nondescript stable on the edge of a city. It was night, no there was some light on the horizon. It felt like dawn. The light was pale blue in color. From what he knew of the curse this probably meant he was not subject to it. One concern down.
He stared at the night sky breathing deeply the clean air. It was cool, it was clean. Blessedly clean. He was surprised to feel a tear roll down his face. He never expected to be this moved by clean air. Yet here he was nearly sobbing with joy. In the light of the false dawn the ragged and filthy state of the humans looked more like some sort of demonic invasion from hell, here to taint the pure clean surface of this world. The night sky was illuminated by a breathtaking starry sky, there was even a white splay of light drawing across the sky. It took him almost 3 minutes staring at it before he realized he was looking at was most likely a ring of asteroids which surrounded this world. Two small moons were in the sky; he had heard of those. They looked about 1/5 the size of earth’s moon, the pair of moons apparently spun around each other, beyond the belt of light. The locals called the rings "god’s tears" because they were supposed to have been formed by a god’s tears. He couldn’t recall what god supposedly cried so much that they left this trail of light. But he was pretty sure now that he saw it illuminated by the sun beyond the horizon, that it was a ring of asteroids.
This might explain the prevalence in the histories he read, about stars falling to the ground being a common augury of prophecy, disaster or war. With a whole belt of those stones surrounding the planet, he wasn’t surprised meteor showers and asteroids falling to the ground would become common omens.
The small group of 20 people loaded into carriages which were waiting for them, the guards took mounts that looked like reptilian bears. He really had no other way to explain what they were. He knew the locals called them Harkan, but they looked like a giant lizard crossed with a bear no matter how he looked at it. Frankly he thought they looked terrifying. He almost wished the men were riding bears.
Soon they started moving down the road just as the sun started to crest. What greeted his eyes was an alien world. The sun was more white than yellow, it also felt a LOT hotter than the one on earth. It was smaller in the sky too. The sky was blue, nothing strange about that or the clouds. The landscape however. Blues, purples, reds. Unlike on earth where green was the predominant color blues, reds and purples were here. The fauna was odd. He didn’t see anything like a tree as he knew it. The plants looked like giant ferns, purple and red ferns. He was starting to wonder where the “wood” came from until they passed some slaves working as woodsmen. They were cutting down the giant ferns, when you cut away the branches and skinned the furry and colorful bark off of them the inner core was a wood-like material.
There were flying lizard looking creatures of all shapes and sizes. He called them lizard like because they had leathery skin not feathers, and long tails. The colors of the membranes that made up their wings were gorgeous. Some even had comb like colorful skins on their heads. He had heard that there were some lesser dragons which were big enough to eat children, but he never saw one during their week long trek.
There also were ground worms. At least that’s what the locals called them. He wasn’t sure why they were called worms. They looked like giant monitor lizards; if someone said they were land dragons he probably would have believed them. However, when he asked Sam if they were related to dragons she simply laughed. Dragons were smart. Those land worms were dumb.
5 months underground had an unintended side effect for him. His skin had become rather pale in all that time. As a result, he suffered from serious sunburn at the end of the first day. He also was sun sick, which puzzled the humans, they thought he was poisoned by a plant. He had to explain to them about sunburn and sun sickness, and while they were dubious, they took his word. One of the wizards healed the burns for him. His skin started to darken pretty drastically under the harsh sun. That was always the way with his skin. He often would get one bad burn early in summer, then his burn would fade into a deep tan. This was no different as his skin took on a healthy bronze.
The others were fascinated to no end by this transformation. The never heard of such a thing as a sun tan, fairies were nocturnal, and humans… needless to say they found his efforts to get an even tan rather funny. Sam on the other hand kept looking at his bronzed skin with hungry eyes and running her hand along his skin as if expecting it to feel different. Apparently tanned skin was attractive to her. The wizards however got more and more excited by his tanning skin, and explanations about it. It seemed to be taken as physical verification that he was immune to the curse.
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On the road he got to see a free fairy for the first time. They were similar to the one who was a slave, though the clothing was more regal, and almost ethereal. Tall and thin, with pointed ears and big eyes, impossible hair and eye color as well. They wore whimsically impractical clothing and in the sunlight he thought he could see faint wings behind them. The males and females were almost impossible to tell apart. He had heard that the fairies were the most populous people on this continent. Though the fact they were a tribal people who stuck close to others of the same bloodline prevented them from ruling the continent, mostly their control of the continent rarely spread beyond the walls of their cities, leaving the world a fragmented feudal mess.
Looking at them they reminded him more of Tolkien style elves as depicted by Peter Jackson then tinker bell. Well apart from the wings anyway. From what Sam told him the wings of a fairy were far more visible at night under direct moonlight then they were during the daytime.
Another strange thing he noted was that daylight and nighttime were almost symmetrical. According to what Sam told him this was the case year around. He thought he noticed it when he was underground but now that he was above ground he was sure of it. He was pretty sure this planet had more mass then the earth, as it felt like gravity was a bit heavier here. It wasn’t enough to really inconvenience him; he had been living with it for months now. It was just enough to make you feel a little bit heavier. To make objects weight just a bit more then they looked like they should.
He noticed in the fields and farmlands all the work being done by small grey and brown people who were enslaved. No humans were ever seen in the fields. From what he had heard if a human so much as touched a cultivated crop, every single grain within 100 yards would wither. The small grey and brown people were apparently a type of Rock Gnome. They were intelligent, and rarely seen on the surface. However, since the Fairy’s don’t farm, and humans no longer could, a very vibrant slave trade started up between the rock gnome kingdoms and the fairy kingdoms. Rock Gnomes apparently are excellent with plants, and rather tireless. Even if humans could cultivate plants, from what he heard about a rock gnome’s agricultural skills he thought it likely the gnomes would still be enslaved to do the work.
When Sam was explaining to him about Gnome agricultural skills he actually started to laugh. He tried to explain about garden gnomes on earth and while she was attentive to his explanation she didn’t seem to find it as amusing as he did. It made him feel a bit lonely.
The state of the free humans was deplorable; if anything they lived in a worse squalor then he expected. They lived in horrid squalid little shacks. Little better then animals. The crushing poverty was painful to see. The squalid animalistic lifestyle had reduced the people to little more than rutting animals. He saw a young woman, probably a girl, but she was so ragged looking it was impossible to tell her age. She had a baby with her either way, forced down in the middle of the street by an old sack of bones of a man. She simply stared at the sky ignoring her child’s screams next to her while he pumped away between her legs. He was stopped from jumping out, to stop the obvious rape, by several people. Somehow the sage had guessed he might act like that. He wasn’t sure how much Sam told him about him. But the old man seemed to guess a lot about him.
After the 8th time he saw such a scene he stopped paying attention like everyone else. Even if he wanted to stop this there was too much of it going on. This was simply how life was lived in the slums amongst the “free” humans. The Fairy rulers of the land seemed to have zero interest in keeping law and order in the slums. He realized quickly it was the guards that kept their small convoy traveling through the edge of the slums without being attacked viciously by the wild bands of criminals.
Despite all of this, He found his mood starting to soar. It was amazing how depressing living in a dark cave was all day every day for weeks and months on end. Of course the locals didn’t measure time quite the same as he did, to them it was 10 days in a week. There were no months, just weeks. 35 weeks added up to be a year. He wondered about the years being shorter then earth, but he figured the days might actually be longer here. So a year here might not be that much different from a year on earth. When he was in the cave day and night were actually marked by the meals. He didn’t know how they knew what time it was outside, but he figured it probably was timed in some way.
In this way they made their way steadily west. He asked one of the mages why they didn't just teleport straight to their destination and the mage started to get into a long winded explanation about ley lines, seasons and moon and star positions, which made his head spin. Basically it sounded like teleportation portals could only be opened at certain times to certain places depending on the date and location without huge expenditures of effort.
It sounded like he was shining him on, but in the end Jace just nodded his head and accepted the explanation as if it was true. He would find out more about this in due time anyway.