The carriage was even less comfortable than the last one she rode on to Korna, with the other Flester refugees. Every bump rattled the carriage, and the hard wooden bench she sat on shook, threatening to almost come off the wall with an impact just the slightest bit harsher.
But Zoe enjoyed it regardless. The first few days were rough as she met everybody and learned about them, but as everybody became more comfortable with her Zoe even found herself being dragged around from carriage to carriage each day so people could pester her with questions.
The children in particular — of which there were three more, were so interested in the stories she had to share. The dungeons she’d explored, the cities she visited. And Zoe was just as interested in theirs.
They grew up in a small nomadic village it seemed, from Zoe’s understanding. Not quite so nomadic as to be always on the move, but through Gerda’s forty year life they’d torn down their homes and moved seven times. The caravan was the entire village, all twenty nine people who lived in it, and they planned to settle down somewhere closer to Korna for the foreseeable future, since the kids were interested in seeing the city and trade had slowed since Flester’s fall anyway.
As much as Foizo had grown in the years since they began, it just didn’t have the same scale as Flester once had. It didn’t have the same connections, the same routines and traderoutes. Zoe knew that Joe and the rest of the council were trying to repair it as much as they could — if only for Foizo’s continued prosperity, but a small village of a few dozen people? As harsh as it sounded, Zoe understood that they just wouldn’t make a high priority, if they were even remembered by somebody in the first place.
None of the villagers had magic, at least not particularly capable magic. They were warriors and workers, all of them — and just as capable in their own more physical way, but the children were excited to see Zoe’s magic. Balls of frost and earth that floated around her, pools of water that she summoned from nothing and bursts of flames that lit their nightly campfires.
The hunters were incredibly good at their jobs, given their levels. When they ran out of food every other day, a new group of two would run out into the forest only to show up again a minute later hauling another load of meat. Birds and deer, and even a bear on one occasion.
Zoe wasn’t sure if she would be able to replicate the same feat with such consistency, without teleporting. Tracking animals just took time, she needed to find the tracks to begin with and then follow them to wherever they went. And that could be just a few dozen meters away, or it could be several kilometers away if she was unlucky.
But it seemed for these folk, it was second nature. They ran out into the forest at a breakneck speed and found their food before Zoe even realized they left sometimes. It was an incredible display of how good somebody could be at something, if they dedicated their life to it. These were hunters, they were passionate about hunting, they knew hunting. And even with all of Zoe’s advantages, she couldn’t see herself outperforming them at that one thing.
Before she knew it, the walls of Korna appeared in the distance and excitement raced through the caravan. A sense of peace, and calm washed over the subtle anxiety that had hidden beneath everybody’s calm exterior.
Zoe said her goodbyes to the family and wished them well, then carried back on down the road towards the capital by foot. It was only a couple short weeks spent with a friendly and welcoming family, but she found she felt so much better than she did weeks earlier. There was just something so beautiful about seeing people excited to see Korna on the horizon, or children to be thrilled watching her frost drift across their hands.
The things she’d been taking for granted mattered so much to those people. Somewhere along the line she’d forgotten how incredible it is to just exist. To just sit back and take in the moment, to stop and smell the roses. The beauty that lay in the magic she wielded.
Had the power corrupted her, she wondered? Her aspirations too great, her goals too grandiose? Zoe chuckled as she walked down the road, Korna’s walls slowly vanishing in the distance behind her. She owned a dungeon on the moon, and somehow she ended up being disappointed in how little use it truly had to her.
What a ridiculous proposition. The Zoe of twenty years earlier would have slapped her. She had a dungeon on the moon, who cares how useful it is to her. Who cares if it doesn’t give her some great insight into the system. It was hers, and she couldn’t appreciate what that meant. How amazing that was, how exciting and fun it could be.
Not to mention that she did learn a great deal from it, regardless. What happened to her, she wondered. When had she become so cynical, so pulled away from reality? After the encounter with the wanderer, perhaps? Or even earlier, with her frustrations of not being able to travel through space as freely as she wanted?
Maybe even earlier than that, she thought. She couldn’t put a pin in it, point to any specific moment when she’d changed. It was just a gradual shift in her priorities, pushing her towards more dangerous things, towards more extravagant experiments.
Slowing down was a wonderful decision, she was finding. Having the time to process her thoughts in a safe way, being able to take the time to enjoy the world for what it was, now. It was a wonderful feeling. There was no grand adventure to go on, no deep valleys filled with darkness to haunt her nightmares.
Just a casual stroll through the kingdom where she would meet new people, learn about their cultures and maybe even learn something new about herself along the way.
The time flew by in a flash as Zoe wandered down the road, southwest towards the capital. By horse, it would be several months away from Foizo. By casual stroll? Zoe had no idea, but not a day came and went without something catching her eye. A tree she’d never noticed, bearing fruits she’d never seen. Vibrant leaves sprouting from an old animal carcass, and more winding trails through the forest than she could shake a fist at.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
She wandered down almost every trail she noticed, eager to see where they led. Most led back to the same road — frequent hunting trails, or perhaps game trails? Desire paths of some sort or another, she imagined. Others led to caves with nothing of interest beside some damaged mining equipment. Broken pickaxes tossed aside on piles of torn bags covered in dirt and dust.
Some of the trails led to villages, and Zoe made a point to stop in and meet the people who lived in them, spend a day or two seeing how they lived. Most were simple, filled with capable hunters and maybe a healer or two on a good day. Others weren’t so simple. The most interesting was a small village called Gron, filled with mages.
Their homes were made from magic, their hunters floated through the forests leaving not a print behind as they pursued their prey. The farms were the bit that Zoe found the most interesting though. Where most villages used an abundance of land just for their crops — vegetables for the people, and even more crops for any animals they kept, Gron used just a tiny fraction of the space. Mages paced back and forth up the small land growing crops for hours every day, turning out even more produce than the much larger farms Zoe saw elsewhere.
It made Zoe wonder if the other villages would be interested in learning how to do that. If they could cut down the amount of crop land they needed to protect, and how many workers they needed to harvest and process all of them then they could put more resources into bettering themselves elsewhere. Better defenses against the wilderness, better products to trade with any merchants who stop by.
But perhaps those villages chose their lifestyle because they liked it? Was magical growth the objective best decision? All of those farmers had classes of their own that helped them grow crops too. They may not have had magic to accelerate the crops growth, but they had their own skills an abilities that improved yield.
Would replacing that passion and pride with magic make them feel any better about themselves? Zoe wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure what her purpose would be either. Would she be the first person to walk to the villages and tell them about magic? That would be a ridiculous thought.
Surely all of those villages — or most of them at least, knew about magic. They knew what they could be capable of. But they liked how they lived. If they wanted more, they would have just moved to one of the larger cities anyway, Zoe imagined.
She hopped on a few more caravans as she travelled, stopping in at the smaller villages and cities along the road to the capital. They were an almost even split between merchants peddling their wares and lower levelled individuals joining a larger caravan to travel the roads. A few turned her request to join down, but most were friendly all the same and Zoe met more people than she’d be able to remember.
There were three more cities on the road to the capital, Zoe discovered. The first was Lorn, a smaller city that took a certain pride in their food. Restaurants made up almost every other building it seemed, and the food in even the most rundown buildings was nothing short of exceptional.
The second city Zoe stopped in was Barli, another smaller city filled with painters and artists. Every building was covered in art — depictions of magnificent battles, or equally as beautiful paintings of a romantic dinner on the side of a restaurant. A beautiful city, Zoe found. The artwork seemed to come to live at times, begging her to watch the world within unfold.
And the last city Zoe stopped at was Shorst, a mining city. A — to the citizens of Shorst at least, massive ravine cut through the centre of the city. Wooden bridges stretched across from wall to wall, with heavy machines set in the bottom of the ravine carving holes into the sides to harvest the various metals embedded into the rock.
It reminded Zoe of that first city she stayed in down in the true ravines of Abyllan after she stalked James for a few days. But without the sickening darkness and the constant anxiety as night fell. The ravine was well lit, even into the night and the wooden bridges that stretched across were well made and sturdy.
The next stop would be the capital. Zoe had hopped on to another three carriage caravan lead by a merchant named Gorlon. One of the carriages was for people — Gorlon and his wife Aislene, as well as the two guards he kept named Kim and Forn. The guards were both just over level two hundred dark blue, with Kim being a mage and Forn a warrior. Gorlon and his wife were much lower, with Gorlon being a dark red one thirty eight worker and Aislene a one seventeen worker.
Gorlon drove the lead carriage, while Kim and Forn drove the two rear carriages, which were enchanted for additional storage space. He was coming all the way from Darpi, stopping off at each of the towns along the way to trade, and was returning home to bring back his haul to his main store in the capital.
According to Aislene, the capital was only another three days away at the pace they were keeping, and Zoe found her excitement kept growing. The capital was somewhere she’d wanted to visit for years and years, but never managed to find the motivation to actually do. Yet, here she was. Just a mere few days away from seeing it.
She’d tried to keep herself from being spoiled on the city, but many of the people she joined along the way were more than happy to talk about their experiences in the city. It seemed to Zoe that the city would be massive. Larger than Korna, larger than Flester. Larger than the two of them smashed together into one super city.
The walls surrounding the city would be almost overbearing, and the presence of the royal guard in the city would feel like walking through a fantasy world where light reds were a common sight. The royal castle, and the noble villas surrounding it were supposed to be awe inspiring works of art that Zoe would find herself gawking at.
Zoe wasn’t sure which of it was hyperbole and which of it was true, but she couldn’t wait to see for herself. Just knowing there was a royal castle was exciting — even if it wasn’t going to be as magnificent as the stories made it seem, she would see a real, actual castle. Not an old fort from hundreds of years ago, but a real, functional castle. The actual, active fortification that the royal family of an entire kingdom lived in.
Would they have tours, Zoe wondered? Probably not, she imagined. That seemed like too much of a security risk, given the royal family still lived there. Or did they? The king spoke with Foizo’s council through some powerful magic. If Zoe were in their shoes, she’d just have all of her communications through that magic and then live somewhere very far away from where anybody thought she was.
Maybe the capital was just for show. Maybe they lived in one of the villages Zoe stopped by and just ran the kingdom with a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Though the people would probably want some public appearance from time to time, too. She shook her head. It didn’t really matter where the king lived, the castle still existed, and whether for show or for a purpose, the castle would be active and functional and she couldn’t wait to see it.