Chapter 20

I’m woken up by a bird’s early morning cry and when I open my eyes, I see a pair of lifeless eyes staring back at me. How familiar these eyes are. I stared into this exact pair of eyes quite a few times yesterday. My body doesn’t move the way I want it to and even though my mouth is open, no words are willing to come out, only a soundless groan. I try to calm myself down, I try to convince myself I’m still dreaming, I try to stop feeling the guilt that’s tearing me apart, but nothing works and my breathing quickens until it feels like my heart is about to burst from my chest. I can’t take it anymore and I have to shut my eyes. That was a mistake. I can hear the corpse in front of me screaming at the top of his lungs as if he was being stabbed with a knife. How? I’ve never even heard his voice before and I shouldn’t know what he sounds like but I know in my heart this is his real voice. My ears start to bleed and I can’t take anymore of the screaming, I open my eyes. The lifeless eyes are right in front of mine, closer than ever before, judging me. I don’t know when my voice came back but when I saw those eyes silently blaming me for his death, I forgot about the fear and the pain I felt moments before, and only the guilt remains as I whisper, “I’m sorry.”

I’m woken up by a bird’s early morning cry and when I open my eyes, I see the early morning sky. My body is covered in cold sweat and there are tears in my eyes. Looking over at the remnants of our now extinguished fire, I see Wraine sitting against a boulder, dozing off during his guard shift. Damn him. I’ve never dreamt of anything except the city before and the first time I dream about anything else it’s about my first murder? Fuck. I walk over to a bush for my morning piss and when I’m done, I splash the cold stream water on my face, jolting me fully awake. Staring into the water, I see my green eyes staring back at me, judging me. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it but it happened and I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life. I don’t plan to atone for it, I don’t plan to find out who he was, and I don’t plan to forget what I’ve done even if forgetting would be easier. If I’m stopped here by one innocent death in the middle of nowhere, then my dreams of grabbing ahold of this world were nothing but a child’s fantasies, and that can’t happen. My heart isn’t steady, but it is firm.

I wait until Wraine wakes up and then we continue our journey east. When we stopped yesterday, I made a mark on a tree with Wraine’s knife to remember which direction was east. Our routine for the next week stays pretty consistent. We wake up around dawn, we travel all day until the sun sets, we take breaks whenever one of us needs it, Wraine keeps our food stock pretty full by foraging whatever we come across them, we try to stay close to streams and rivers for water, and we make a small campfire every night for light and warmth. Whenever we came across a village, we’d ask for directions and most of the people we came across were nice about it and pointed out where we needed to go. One of the villagers we talked with even offered to let us stay in their barn for the night and sleep on their hay. About a week after we left Lahrein, we came across a town called Garwengil which we tried entering right away.

The adventurers’ licenses worked their magic once again and the guards let us into the town after we paid 7 copper coins each. The guards checked our clothes and pockets looking for anything illegal we couldn’t bring into the town but they stopped immediately after taking a single look into the sack filled with goblin parts. I don’t blame them. The coins we found in the goblin nest came in handy and both of us were able to get into town. After visiting the town’s adventurers’ guild and having them check our licenses, we were able to sell off all the goblin ears we collected. At a price of 3 copper coins per ear, we sold 26 adult male goblin ears, 13 female goblin ears, and 8 juvenile goblin ears. The staff at the guild are trained pretty well since they could identify and sort the goblin ears by age and gender by just looking at them. Although…Tandy and Lahrein should be burned to the ground. I want to see that old fuck set on fire screaming for his life. Reporting a goblin den and making us anticipate a couple of goblins when there was a whole fucking nest in that cave with 47 goblins inside is beyond incompetent at that point. He was trying to save himself some coins and if this was any other situation than the one we’re in right now, I’d snitch on him so fast to the guild. But I can’t. If I get another chance in the future though… that place is going up in flames.

Overall, we were able to earn ourselves 1 silver and 41 copper coins from turning in all the goblin ears I insisted on collecting. Of course, I made sure Wraine remembered who it was that suggested staying a little longer to cut off the ears. He wasn’t pleased, but I was. Unfortunately, the guild wasn’t willing to buy the goblin eyes I gouged out. They even told me a few of the eyes had started to rot since a week had already passed. They had me head over to the town’s apothecary and luckily for us, he did need a few for his work. He had a pretty good selection to go through and he ended up buying 28 goblin eyes from us for 5 copper coins each for a total of 1 silver and 40 copper. I wanted to argue against the price but he told me they weren’t well kept and I was already lucky he was willing to give me 5 copper per eye.

We left the apothecary’s shop smiling with our goblin sack a bit lighter and our coin pouch a bit heavier. I never really understood the appeal of money before since the coins we… liberated from Gregory were the first coins I’ve ever touched. But using them to buy ourselves new clothes and boots that actually fit us instantly solidified how important they were in my mind. Sleeping on a bed that night at the inn further reinforced the importance of coins for me. Now that we had coins again that we could use, I was excited to see what we could do with them.

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As it turns out, 5 silver and 87 copper isn’t a very large amount of wealth. We asked for directions to the general store because I originally wanted to buy bedrolls we could sleep in at night like I saw other travelers had but they were unreasonably expensive. New linen bedrolls sold for 5 silver and the best ones even reached 9 silver. Disappointed by our lack of coins, we keep looking around the store and find leather packs we could sling on our backs to replace our old, dirty sacks. We don’t have enough to buy two however and we just buy one for 2 silver and 50 copper along with two linen blankets for 1 silver each. They’re not bedrolls but they’ll do. Continuing our store browsing, we found several things we wanted but couldn’t afford like a stick of flint used to start fires and leather tents we could set up at night. We did manage to find a nice little leather waterskin for 40 copper and it fits nicely into the leather sack along with the blankets. It took us an incredible amount of effort and a murder to earn these coins and they’ve already disappeared in just a few minutes.

We left the general store frowning, feeling how light our coin pouch had gotten. We head over to a blacksmith next to sell the sword we took from the cave and to see if we can afford belts for our swords. The blacksmith takes a look at the sword and frowns. Not good. I took a look at the sword after we left Lahrein and I noticed the blade was covered in scratches and cuts. Damn goblins. The blacksmith scratches his beard as he thinks about how much he’ll pay for the sword. After a few seconds, he tells us the sword is ruined and the craftsmanship used to make it wasn’t great either, at most he’ll give us 1 silver and 30 copper coins. I try to persuade him the sword’s not that far gone but he’s not willing to listen to any of my bullshit and we sell the sword for 1 silver and 30 copper. Once that’s done, we look around the store and find some leather sword belts we can wear around our waists. The cheapest belts cost 60 copper coins each and they look little more than leather strips tied together. The more expensive belts have iron buckles, iron studs, and have specific leather strips that can tighten around a sheath. The ones we’re getting just have a simple loop for the blade and since we can’t afford sheaths, we’re planning on tearing up the goblin sack and using those linens to wrap the swords before we put them into the loops. When we leave the blacksmith, we leave Garwengil as well. We only have 1 silver and 7 copper coins remaining which we plan to save for Midriver.

I’d love to spend the night inside the town and sleep on a warm bed again but we both agreed to save the silver coin. Instead, we follow Kapri’s advice and Wraine keeps the silver coin inside his left boot. If we get robbed going to Midriver or inside Midriver itself, we should be fine regardless. The sun was still high above us when we left Garwengil and we kept heading east for the rest of the day. When night fell, we set up camp and this time we had our newly bought blankets. What a great purchase it was. The cool March breeze is pleasant enough during the night but with the blankets, I don’t need to clear out my throat and my nose in the morning as often.

Our journey to Midriver for the next five weeks was uneventful for the most part but I did notice the villagers became increasingly hostile as we got closer to Midriver. People would be suspicious of who we were and oftentimes they would ignore us when we tried talking with them. Wraine thinks it’s because bandits from Midriver would travel to the city’s nearby villages to raid them and as a result, they’ve become wary of outsiders. He might be right because the last village we stopped by before reaching Midriver was burned down. All the houses in the village were burned down and the rubble looked rather old but when we walked inside the village, we saw what kind of evil existed inside the hearts of men.

All the villagers were apparently gathered in the center of the village and many of them had their hands tied with ropes. Some of them were beheaded, some of them had their throats slit, while the majority of them were killed by a blade through the heart. The men were all killed while they were still bound by rope while most of the women weren’t tied up with ropes at all. Instead, many of them had torn and disorderly clothes on, their limbs twisted in pain and fear before they died. What horror, what agony. Wraine and I don’t know for certain who is responsible for this depravity but we have to assume someone from Midriver did this. We’re less than a day’s walk away from the city and the war with Ribieria should be raging on toward the eastern war front far away from here according to the villagers we’ve asked thus far. When we try to figure out why bandits from Midriver would do this, we find out pretty quickly when we can’t find any children or young women among the corpses. We even find horse and wagon tracks leading out of the village heading east towards where Midriver should be. When we realize this, Wraine can’t hold his stomach and vomits onto the nearby burnt rubble. Not only do we think other humans did this, but we suspect it was other Nasaarans as well. Compared to the warm welcome Kapri and even Chester gave us back in Mountain’s Toil just for being born in the same kingdom, this…this is beyond foul. It fills my mouth with bitterness and I have to spit onto the ground. Not even the Ribierian soldiers were this cruel when they burned down the peninsula.

Everyone warned us about this. They all told us to stay away from Midriver and now I know why. But it’s too late. I’m no better than the people who committed this vile act. I’m a murderer just like them and Midriver is where I’ll hide from my crimes from now on.