Early on, in the days the merchant and the farmer still formed a sparse caravan of actual wagons, Booth walked toward the back of the train. The farmer, a man out of someplace called Kerian’s Rest, offered for Booth to ride on the cart’s back gate. Booth thanked him kindly but chose to instead walk alongside, matching his footfalls to the steady thump of the farmer’s cart while they traded tales of fields and open skies and all the little rhythms of farm life.

Booth had to alter his stories to eliminate mentions of motors and automation, but the heart of the stories weren’t so different. The talk made Booth happy but also more homesick, not so much for the NPC family waiting in Traton but for his own family and the farm where he’d lived his whole life.

He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the game’s insistence on sending him back to visit his character’s game family, after he’d already lost his brother and left his real parents to die. It seemed like a cruel thing for the System to do. But there was part of him that wanted to go to Traton and finally meet this fictional family. Maybe he even wanted them to look and act like his real family. Because as terrible as that might be, it might also be kind of comforting.

Maybe. Booth couldn’t decide which it would be, wonderful or awful.

In the evenings, around the predictable campfire which felt a lot like the one in the long-ago cinematic and trailer, Booth sometimes talked with the priestess, Lora. Talking with Lora set Booth’s narrator into overtime, since she like to talk about a lot of lore-heavy stuff, especially the gods the two of them followed. Voshell and Mizan were compatible, apparently—Voshell the Matron approved of the maiden Mizan’s harmonious balance-seeking.

Lora herself was by turns completely pragmatic and just plain weird. During one day’s trek, Booth watched as Lora haggled the merchant out of a length of deep red silk and a delicate silver bangle and then added both to her already-extravagant outfit, smiling like a child with her pretty new things. Granted, Mizan’s followers valued physical beauty more than Voshell—or Booth—understood. But the woman’s garb was already an odd combination of practicality and luxury—beaded armor over swirling skirts, musical bracelets and a mace on her hip. Here on the road between cities, it seemed especially odd.

And then there were Lora’s traveling companions, Dorrias and Nildeyr, whom Lora had explained were members of something called the Order of Riddles—a traveling circus of sorts. “They were guests of the Gardens in Diairm. I am escorting them back to Iskian,” was what she’d told Booth. She did keep an eye on the two. Booth caught her more than once watching one or the other with a smile, but a kind of smile that made Booth uneasy, as if she knew something they—or he—didn’t know.

Dorrias, a petite brunette with a longbow, kept her distance, barely speaking to anyone. But Nildeyr, with the rapier and the swagger? So far as Booth could tell, the rogue attempted to engage every single person in the traveling party in conversation at least once, even Karon’s inscrutable bodyguard. Arra had merely stared holes in the Riddle, but Karon had eventually, in a dry and quiet voice, suggested perhaps the enthusiastic young man should simply put on a show instead of nattering about it to everyone.

Nildeyr had dragged Dorrias over to stand beside him. Although obviously uncomfortable, she’d produced a bone flute and played an accompaniment while Nildeyr shifted coins and cards and scarves in a display that was, Booth had to grudgingly admit, not without entertainment value. Even Karon proffered a small smile and tipped the performers.

Booth was thinking about that days later, as he walked with the sole remaining wagon of their little retinue several paces in front of him. The farmers had long turned off to their farms and small villages along the way. The merchant would stop in Contha.

Karon Chanford had taken to riding on the folded-out back gate of the merchant’s wagon, a book open beneath his nose. Booth kept thinking about a question which had occurred to him suddenly a couple of days back. The morning had dawned blustery and sunless, and a cold rain had turned the ground beneath and around the Way’s paving stones sodden and in patches muddy. Even wearing a heavy cloak to ward off the cold and rain, Booth had been miserable. It had been as bad as standing on the sidelines during late season games, watching snow slant through stadium light beams and waiting to take the field.

The merchant had gotten down to lead his horse, leaving the wagon that much lighter to avoid getting stuck. Karon had trudged on foot alongside the rest of them.

Why, though?

Booth had ceased walking for a heartbeat as the oddness struck him. Why would a noble Chanford—title-bearing or not—be choosing to walk all the way from Diairm to Traton instead of hiring a carriage or whatever fancier method of travel rich people might use in this world?

Booth hadn’t asked. Now, walking once more in sunlight, he wondered if it was less important than he’d thought in the moment. The narrator had offered a number of lore-appropriate possible answers to the question—poor road conditions could sometimes make a carriage even less efficient than walking, especially if a wheel broke or the wagon got stuck. Perhaps the man was simply on some kind of pilgrimage, although Booth had yet to hear him mention a final destination, beyond traveling “south.” All kinds of reasons existed why Karon Chanford could have chosen to forgo a carriage, none of them Booth’s business.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But it still bothered him.

“That place creeps me out.” Nildeyr’s voice carried—it always did.

Booth didn’t look to see who Nildeyr was addressing. If it happened to be Booth, then he’d have to either pretend to listen with interest or figure out some way to encourage Nildeyr to go inflict his conversational skills on someone else. Ignoring him from the start had proved the best strategy so far.

“What does? The Grove?” Lora’s musical voice replied.

Booth glanced toward the river to see what had sparked Nildeyr’s remark.

The far bank of the Mindet, which had wandered close and then distant from the near bank as they traveled, had drawn close again. Tall cliffs had given way to a series of jagged hills and broken jumbles of rock. Through the cut in the land, Booth glimpsed hilly slopes and less stern cliffs where the plateau’s top dropped down to a stretch of swampland at the river’s level. Gnarled forest filled the lower ground and spilled out toward the river, where stunted trees grew along the banks. Sparser shrubs and tall grasses spread in patches outward from there, as if the marsh was trying to cross the river and reach the other side.

In the mostly-naked treetops, black shapes flitted from branch to branch. The raucous voices of crows echoed across the water, as if agreeing with Nildeyr and adding their warning that this was not a friendly place.

“The Drowning Grove. As if it doesn’t just look ominous enough, they had to give it that name, too.”

Nildeyr’s remark triggered Booth’s narrator.

The Drowning Grove is a bog in The Meres. It was artificially created by a magically-induced natural disaster which collapsed cliffs into lower ground and formed a swamp.

The narrator provided a few more details in the form of proper noun soup which meant nothing because Booth had no context. He could’ve looked it all up in the codex, but he didn’t honestly care that much. Instead, he waited for Lora to agree with Nildeyr or maybe tell one of the tragic stories about the War of the Shields and the catastrophic actions of some guy named Berwan Dar that the narrator had mentioned.

What Lora said instead was, “It’s not so terrible. I spent some time with the Speakers there, a while back.” She sounded like she was smiling.

The Speakers of the Drowning Grove are associated with Keres, god of death and decay. The Grove and the Speakers are closely tied to the Meres-folk.

Booth’s steps stuttered. He looked in the direction of the two voices he’d thus far just been listening to.

A short distance ahead and to Booth’s right, Nildeyr and Lora strolled side by side. Dorrias walked a few steps ahead of those two, with the wagon carrying Karon and Arra walking alongside that even further ahead. Nildeyr and Dorrias were both looking toward the river and the Grove on the other side. Lora was indeed smiling, but she wasn’t looking at Nildeyr at all. She was looking ahead toward Dorrias.

“You were over there? With the Meres-folk?” The words flew from Booth’s mouth, and he didn’t have time to think of draining from them every bit of contempt he felt.

Booth almost blurted out more words, ones that had to do with how his Origin tutorial had almost killed him with one of those asshole Meres-folk raiders.

Don’t break the OOC rule. That’s all you need.

With heroic effort, Booth held back what he wanted to say and tried to reframe it into something that sounded passably in character.

“But they worship Keres.” He pronounced it like his narrator had and hoped it was close enough. “You belong to Mizan.”

Lora slowed and turned to look back at Booth. Both her eyebrows lifted. That smile of hers faded but didn’t entirely vanish. Wind stirred the deep blue skirts around her legs.

“Belong? I hardly think any of us belong to anyone else. Don’t you think?”

Lora’s tone was, as always, warm and mildly amused. She didn’t say a single thing to rebuke Booth for his rudeness, but he felt rebuked, just the same.

It has been years since raiders from the Meres last attacked Traton. No one ever proved that the raiders came through the Grove, let alone from it. But the Grove is the only known reliable way in and out of the Meres, and if the Speakers don’t rule the swamp, then they at least know everything going on within its bounds.

Booth’s frown wanted to deepen. He breathed against the rising sensation of red that tried to fill him.

Chill. You need this person.

And fraternization with an enemy didn’t mean someone completely sided with them. She could’ve been there as a diplomat or some shit like that.

Booth swallowed his pride and bowed his head in what he hoped Lora would take as an apology. He couldn’t make himself give a spoken one for the moment.

Nildeyr jumped back in, of course. “You visited the Speakers? Oh, you have got to have some stories about that.”

Lora was already shaking her head and waving her hands, in a way that Booth had come to recognize as a sure sign she was about to change the subject to something else. Now, he wondered if that was less humility and more because they were discussing something she didn’t want to talk about.

But she brought it up. It had to be for a reason.

Ahead of Nildeyr and Lora, Dorrias glanced back over her shoulder and at Lora. The furrow of Dorrias’s brow matched the one Booth felt across his own forehead. Dorrias’s gaze flitted toward and met Booth’s. For one electric moment, she stared at him. Then, hurriedly, she faced forward again.

Dorrias’s whole thing so far had been the brooding ranger persona. She actively avoided talking to people. She hung out at the edge of camp and stared out into the darkness. It was all very one-note. But the look on her face just then, the way her eyes widened when she glanced back at Lora and accidentally caught Booth’s eye, that felt more real than any other interaction Booth had experienced since entering Redemption Wars.

She’s not an NPC.

Booth was absolutely sure of it.

He had no idea what to do with that certainty.