Day 2, 5:30 AM
Every world has its quirks. Some have chicken, some do not. Some have griffons, some do not. Some apparently have perpetual rain.
“You mean it never stops?” I ask, and turn away from Edna, preparing breakfast. Things she is using, and things she is doing to them will take some getting used to.
“How could the rain stop?” The shock in her voice is amusing and concerning at the same time. How does a world and life evolve if the rain always falls? For one, there is no chicken and human skin is so pale it is nearly translucent. I have noticed it before, but refrained from commenting, Edna’s hair is incredibly greasy, and I think the same was true with everyone around the pyre.
“It gets weaker during summer,” she continues, “and traveling during winter, when the rainfall is at its strongest, can be dangerous, but there is always rain.”
“How did you invent fire when everything is wet? Why bother getting out on land?”
“Fire is the first magic. The beacon in the dark which gathered people and gave power to the first mages. Also, what does getting out on land mean?”
They obviously have no clue what evolution is and how it works, but that tidbit is irrelevant. I glance around her tiny hut again. The building is made of dry, leathery leaves, much thicker than any other I’ve seen. It has hardly enough room for the two of us. Its sole chamber is everything, a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, and probably much more that I cannot perceive at the moment.
“You do not seem to have a flock of minions to do your bidding,” I point out the obvious, and she scoffs.
“Things were different when I was young. Mages and magae were respected by their communities, the descendants and students of protectors who imprisoned the wormlords, but a century and a half ago the Church of Holiness rose to prominence. They have existed for centuries, baiting the weak with the promise of an afterlife and threats of what happened upon death if you did not follow their orders. Our ancestors ignored them, but somehow their cult exploded with believers, sweeping through the countryside, riding on the tide of monstrous worms.”
At some point, I must have turned around to watch her, my gaze glued to her face, staying away from what she’s doing with her hands. She looks up, staring into my eyes with those irises so light blue, they were almost white.
“I don’t mean they were actually riding the worms, but they used the chance as the last surviving wormlord attacked. Their numbers swelled as mages left to combat the danger for almost a decade at a bloody front, which decimated us. I was a nurse, near the horrors, but not quite there to see them.”
A haunted shadow flashed in her eyes, the look of someone recalling best forgotten. A survivor from a meat grinder.
“When we returned, the priests had whipped the people into a frenzy. They had captured our weaker students and—” she trails off, but I understand what had happened. Rebellions and coups almost always rely on severing the old ruling bloodline without mercy. Otherwise, the risk of failure and reemergence of the old regimen is too high.
“Some left, vowing never again to help the fools who betrayed them, others took more direct measures against the zealots. A lot of people died, and now mages and magae are witches, persecuted by the church for slaughtering the faithful.”
“Is that why they burned Fyoor in the middle of a field?”
Edna nods, then shakes her head. “Yes and no. People have been living in bastions of stone for over a hundred years, sending out gatherers to bring food and resources from the dungeons in which the wormlords are imprisoned. Fyoor was one such gatherer when he was young, but he saw the truth, that the people were enslaved through fear and lack of options, that they live to serve the priesthood and nothing else.”
Her words slow and stop as she lowers her gaze and focuses on the grub. She kneads something over and over until the crunching stops and she turns it into something resembling dough.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“He was a friend,” she whispers. “Fyoor, I mean. The inquisitors do not allow anyone to live outside the settlements, and they burn such people as heretics. I could fight them, but they would keep coming until they got me. It’s wiser to leave.”
“But you remain here because?”
“Because my mother’s grave is here. Father told me to take care of her, two days before an elder abomination tore him to shreds.” Her voice shakes, and I stay quiet. Whatever an elder abomination was, it must have been horrible. Especially given what they consider food and eat without flinching.
She keeps kneading, probably with more force than necessary and much longer than she should have, since the yellowish dough’s texture remains the same even as minutes pass.
“Both your parents would have wanted you to leave this place and lead a happy life,” I break the silence. “I can tell you have no children, but I have had some. Trust me, parents don’t want their kids sticking around a withered skeleton or a slab of stone or whatnot. We are the happiest when you are out there making babies of your own.”
I clamp my mouth shut. Damn Blunt strikes again.
At least she stopped kneading, and she is glaring at me with her mouth cracked open.
“You do know you are speaking from my friend’s corpse.”
“My body is not a corpse, you have confirmed that before healing my burns, and the arrhythmia is almost completely gone as well. I just need to rest and eat a bit, and I will be in top shape, better than Fyoor ever was in fact.”
Her face turns sour. Yet again, I allowed my tongue to gallop ahead of my thoughts, and as much as I would like to, this time I cannot blame Blunt on my nonsense.
Manny told me to think before I speak and to think better thoughts. I thought I had changed, and I certainly have improved, but I guess it will take years or eons before I conquer myself and become what I can be. What she believed I should become.
“Sorry about that.” I should at least try to fix any unintentional slights I have made. “I’m sorry for the loss of your dear friend, and if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”
“After breakfast, you will prove to me that you can level up at will.” She recovered way too quickly from a sudden bout of sorrow. That and she is patient enough to delay her experiments until after eating. She is cold and calculating, and I may have fallen for her trick. Then again, leveling is also in my interest, but unlike my past life, I am going to put points into physical attributes, or maybe I could hoard them and exercise to improve my body first?
“How do attributes change over time?” With her sorrowful reminiscence and possibly pretense over, I can ask about things that interest me.
“They drop as your body grows weaker. But you can increase them through delving into the wormlords’ dungeons, exercise, and leveling. There are also certain elixirs grandmaster alchemists can supposedly make, but I don’t know what happened with the entire alchemist caste since the church took over. Given the church’s overall tendencies, the only alchemists around are people like me, living in the wilds, beyond the inquisitors’ reach.”
I nod, analyzing Edna’s words, but we keep going round in circles around the subject without getting a clear definition, even though it’s tickling my imagination the most. Since indirect questions have failed, I shall be blunt.
“What are dungeons? Prisons for wormlords, but they seem to be more.”
“Dungeons are a powerful magic, the most powerful magic. They keep the wormlords bound, yes, but they do much more. They slowly sap their incredible vitality to produce flora and fauna unique to dungeons. Dungeons also bestow the Guide to people who enter them, but from what you said, the Guide might exist in everyone in a dormant state.”
Edna wraps her tormented dough in some leaves and buries the parcel under the shimmering coals using a metal shovel with a bizarrely long and thin handle.
“You know, that kind of makes sense,” she continues after piling the coals in a conical shape she found adequate. “Everyone believed the Guide was an incredibly powerful magic, which altered the fabric of reality, but if it simply lets you see what is already there, then it’s both greater and lesser than we thought of it.”
She has no idea how great it is, especially if…
“What happens when you level up?” I ask, thinking about that message the BSD always shows when I level up.
“The Guide appears and informs you that you have leveled up. You have twenty seconds to select one of two skills or you get one at random, and you get an attribute point you can invest in any one of your attributes whenever you want.”
I gulp. “Whoever made your Guide was a genius. BSD gives you a minute to pick your skill and assigns one at random if you do not make a choice yourself.”
Being able to choose, focus, and specialize would give a huge advantage to those with a Guide, and if my guess is correct, people without it can’t assign their attribute points, which makes it an even more powerful tool.