Alistair was surprised when he saw the Dragon’s Head Tavern. His expectation was a rowdy, lower class, rambunctious inn, but in reality, it was remarkably high end.
Like the name suggested, there was a stone statue of a dragon’s head above the entrance. A large torch burned inside its maw, making it look like the dragon was about to breathe its flames down on the incoming patrons.
While the tavern was in the town center, it was off the beaten path, at the top of on the few hills in the valley proper. Inside there was no loud laughter of drunkards, but the serene sounds of stringed instruments and polite discussion.
The restaurant was split into two sections, and upstairs and a downstairs separate by a coiling marble staircase shaped to look like an eastern dragon. At the center of dozens of tables was a small stage where the musicians performed. There was one man and one woman who looked almost identical to each other. The man played an instrument that looked similar to a
pipa, while the woman played something that looked similar to an erhu, contributing to an eastern vibe within the tavern.
Alistair’s face might have given off some of his surprise, since Grag chuckled, commenting, “Don’t ya look so shocked, I’ll have ya know, farmers are quite important har in the Holy Ravine.”
Izalia nodded. “It is true. While the Mother of War is one of our most important goddesses, the Father of Grain cannot be said to be any lesser.”
“Come on, now! Mah family gots tha whole top section reserved. They say that tha Dragon’s Head has tha best food in tha entire valley!”
Grag nodded to one of the servers, who wore a long silk dress that glittered like a jewel. She was beautiful, though Alistair found the large amounts of overly white makeup to be a bit strange. She escorted them up the staircase and to the rest of the wedding party.
“Grag! My cousin, who do we have har!” A burly, drunk man even larger than Alistair sauntered to them from one of the many long tables on the top floor. He looked somewhat similar to Grag, with a deep tan and brown hair, blue eyes, and a sharp, aquiline nose. His eyes didn’t leave Izalia, who gave him a cold glance.
Grag shook his drunken cousin with some urgency. “Hush, ya fool! Ya don’t wanna show disrespect,” he whispered louder than a normal person’s speech. “Lord Fighter Pike, Lady Fighter Izalia, and Lord Fighter Alistair, I apologize for mah cousins’s improper manners.”
“No apology necessary, I can see that he’s having quite the fun time,” Izalia said.
“Like tha lady said! I am having a fun time!” the cousin stated. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was so inebriated he wasn’t understanding Grag. But he made a mistake when he sauntered over to Izalia and put his arm around her shoulder. “What’s yar name again?”
Izalia acted instantaneously, flicking the giant man with her pinkie finger. He went flying in the direction he came, crashing into his seat. “I wouldn’t recommend that.”
The other attendees of the wedding party looked over with concern, but upon seeing what had happened, they seemed to go back to their own things. An older woman hurried over to the scene, bowing over and over to the d’Fortune heir. Grag and his wife, May, also asked for forgiveness.
Izalia looked over at the unconscious man. Alistair wasn’t sure if that was from the blow or the alcohol, maybe both. “I’m more concerned for the poor women of his village than for myself.”
The older woman, perhaps the man’s mother, nodded vigorously. “My deepest apologies, Lady Fighter, Kal is a big ol’ fool. He handles alcohol terribly.”
“Tell him what he did when wakes up and remind him of the old laws,” Izalia said. “That should scare him enough.”
“How merciful,” Pike commented. “We shouldn’t interrupt their fun so much, Izalia.”
“How would you like if one of those women put her arm around you?” she asked.
“I might enjoy it, depending on the woman. For example, if it was your sister’s, I would never object.”
“Leila doesn’t want anything to do with you after you were mysteriously absent for your last date,” Izalia retorted. “Sir.”
“There was an emergency!” Pike protested. “I had to deal with an outpost at the Last River.”
“You could have done it faster.”
Pike shook his head. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. I’d hoped that by training you’d she’d understand I mean well.”
“So you’re only training me to get to my sister? How nefarious. Sir,” she added.
“Master Ko Pao personally assigned me as I am the greatest teacher in the Silver Comet Sect, I take great offense—ah, damn it. You’ve beat me here.”
“Hmph. I might’ve told her you’ve learned to be more humble before that boast.”
Alistair butted in, seeing how the rest of the group look quite uneasily at the exchange between the two martial artists. Pike had said to take their headbands off… but Izalia’s mark as a fighter was literally etched onto her forehead and she refused to remove the silver headband holding her hair down. Anyway, it was obvious that Grag and May would tell everyone no matter what. “Ma’am, thank you for taking care of your… son?”
The woman nodded. Alistair bowed to her. “Please enjoy your party and we will try to stay out of your affairs.”
“T-tthank you Lord Fighter,” she stammered, grabbing May and Grag by the arms and pulling them away.
Alistair turned to his two companions. “Can’t you see you were scaring the living daylights out of those two?”
“I cannot imagine what could be considered frightening about our amicable conversation,” Izalia said with not a hint of shame.
“Neither do I?” Pike looked far too innocent for his actions.
Alistair shook his head. What hopeless martial artists they were, uninitiated into the careful art of sociability. Much unlike him, who was charismatic as a cult leader. Maybe that’s not the best way to describe it.
They met with the bride and groom. Vai, May’s sister, and her husband-to-be, Polomus. Like the rest of the farmers, they seemed to be slightly on edge seeing the warriors that protected the Ravine. Alistair wondered if there was bad blood between them. From what he saw of the sects, they didn’t seem like the type to bully the agriculturalists.
While the martial artists were feared, many of the wedding party guests actually did come up to them. He had the feeling that seeing two high-ranking apostles of a sect was not an everyday occurrence. Pike put back on his red headband with pride after seeing the futility of hiding, while Izalia obviously had her black rectangle visible on her forehead. No bangs allowed for the Kodaidaemin.
In a strange turn of events, Oliver was the most popular of the four of them. Because of his white headband, he must have been seen as more approachable. The attrition rate for white headbands was high—many of the farmers here had sons and daughters who at one point had been white headband equivalents, or they themselves had tried joining a sect in their youth.
Oliver was swamped with questions, almost all by children who wanted to know all about his experience. He looked to Alistair for help, who shook his head, sending a clear message: “You’re on your own with that.”
Overall, the political system of the Silver Comet Sect felt in some ways less insane than those in Earth’s history. With hard work and dedication, you could make it from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy.
Alistair guessed that the high-ranking members of the seven sects were like royalty in ancient times back on Earth. Though he imagined that they were way chiller than Earth nobles or Final Frontier Empire nobles, for that matter. That probably came from their strict discipline and many trainings dedicated to the destruction of the ego.
After they got shopped around with a large amount of clout chasing from Grag, he offered them one of the private rooms they reserved. He kicked out a couple of old grandpas who were playing a game that looked like go.
There were a bunch of private rooms at the back of the second floor, hidden behind a graceful veil hanging from the ceiling. The veil, which had an alluring siren embroidered on it, led to a hallway of rooms.
Alistair closed the paneled sliding door behind the four of them. A single red candle lit the entire room, so the lighting was dim. He peered at the curious candle, admiring the apple red flame. Alistair had never seen a candle burning red before.
The room was large enough to fit ten people, though it had no chairs. Instead, there were mats for them to sit on, surrounding a wooden table that stood only a few centimeters from the floor. There was partially eaten food and drinks on the table and a four-player game of go unfinished on a 23x23 go board built into the wood.
Alistair was no expert at Go, but he had played with his grandparents and parents a number of times over the years. Seeing the game reminded him of Edward Lasker’s famous quote, “If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.” Though the impact of that quote was diminished by the existence of Dao archetypes.
Go was a remarkably simple game for its complexity. In fact, one could argue it was complex because the rules were so simple. Normally it was a two-player game, one person with the black stones and one person with the white stones. They took turns placing down their stones on a grid; the victory being the person who encircled more territory at the end. There were more rules than that, but that was the essence of the game.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The board on the table was larger than he was used to, but that seemed to be because it was multiplayer oriented. There were four colors of stones on the unfinished game board, blue, red, green, and yellow.
“You wanna play?” Alistair asked his three companions.
“You know how?” Izalia raised an eyebrow.
“It looks very similar to a game on my planet called Go,” Alistair said. Though my planet is your planet now.
“We call it War’s Brother,” Pike explained. “It is traditionally played by four people.”
“Ah, interesting,” Alistair said. “It’s slightly different on Earth. It’s mostly a two person game with a slightly smaller board, 19x19.”
“I’ve never played Go before,” Oliver said. “Can you teach me?”
Pike and Izalia explained the rules to Oliver, with Alistair listening in to ascertain the changes. There were slight variations to Go as it was on Earth. Nothing major, but it did change up the game in subtle ways, and the multiplayer element and larger board were new to him. He felt flattered when they offered to play the game the way his people normally did, but he refused, stating, “When in Rome.”
They stared blankly at him. Oops. Alistair forgot how the soul translation system of the Pathfinder AI often struggled at conveying idioms or extremely localized phrases.
“What’s up with the political situation here?” Alistair asked, as he placed down one of his blue stones. Damn, these Holy Raviners were good at Go, or War’s Brother, as they called it. He was getting thrashed, all of his attempts to gain territory failing right away. They weren’t even teaming up on him either—Izalia and Pike were much more concerned with going at each other’s throats than worrying about him, and he was still losing. Oliver was doing his own thing, not a threat to anyone in the slightest, though he was staring at his pieces like they would move with his mental command.
“What do you mean?” Izalia asked. She didn’t even look up at him as she placed a yellow stone down and captured one of Pike’s red stones, to his chagrin.
“Like the relations between the sects,” Alistair said.
“You’re unsealing a bucket of earthworms with that one,” Pike replied. “Hmm. I suppose in order to tell the bigger picture we have to start with the pre-Silvanio age.
“While our legends say that our people have been in the land for time immemorial, our archivists agree that our oldest written records date back a thousand years. A thousand years ago being the time when a group of Moi people fled persecution east of here. They brought both the written word and their system of martial arts. Master Ko Pao is descended from an ancient line of Moi that founded the Silver Comet Sect. All of this was five hundred years before the founding of the Martial League itself. In this entire thousand year period, there have always been the seven sects. Silver Comet, Kodaidaemin, Raging Bull, Viper’s Fangs, Sworn Sisters, Slaves of Shadow, and the Holy Ones. It is said that seven brave men and women founded these sects to eternally defend the Holy Ravine against the Wasted Realm.”
Alistair butted in with a question. “I’ve heard you people speak about the Wasted Realm a lot, and not in a positive light. Are they your enemies?”
Izalia snorted, replying to Oliver’s amateur move with a slicing maneuver that cut his territory in twain. “The Wasted Realm is the home to the immortal enemy of all mankind. Darkness forever lies over their lands, for the gods have cursed them for their immorality, so sayeth the Book of Songs, chapter 1, verse 35. They have maintained their lands west of the Akolian Mountains and east of the Poen Sea since the eldest days. Inhuman corpses that never tire and never sleep lie in the earth waiting for flesh to consume. The Martial League is the only thing that stands between them and complete domination of mankind.”
“When you say corpse, you really mean corpse?” Alistair asked. “Like a zombie?”
“Zom-bie?” Izalia sounded out the word. “I don’t know what this means. But they take the dead of the places they conquer and add them to their army. Every single one of their troops we have ever encountered has been one of our dead ancestors or those of neighboring lands. The Dread King is their leader, but he never leaves the Palace of Night at the center of their kingdom. The last expedition sent by a Grandmaster of the Martial League was over a hundred years ago. A specialized strike team of some of the most renowned martial artists in the realm, including one who was almost as glorified as Red Harmonia. They tore through the land with their ruthless march, making it to the Dread City in two months. Then all communications abruptly cut off. Not one man or woman on that expedition returned. To this day, the Martial League is recovering from our losses sustained in the aftermath of that foolish journey, and the Wasted Realm has the most land it has had in a thousand years.”
“Adding to what Izalia said,” Pike added. “The Holy Ravine almost borders the Wasted Realm. You could make it there in a day’s journey by foot if you really pushed it. Despite almost all our neighbors falling to the Wasted Realm and having to be recaptured at one point, not once have we suffered defeat.”
Alistair could hear the pride for his homeland oozing out of Pike’s words. Well, from what Alistair had seen, the Holy Ravine was pretty awesome.
“Back to your original question, though,” Pike continued, “not one of the seven sects dominated the other. Of course, there were periods of one coming to the forefront and others receding, but the balance of power was relatively stable. In the years before Silvanio, the Silver Comet Sect was the most powerful, under the champion Jo Ran, that large old man you’ve seen a couple times. Silvanio changed everything. His first ally was the Sworn Sisters. The Silver Comet Sect and the Sworn Sisters have always had icy relations as the only two single sex sects. But they were quickly joined by the Raging Bull Sect and Viper’s Fangs Sect. Those four are the core power of Silvanio—each of their leaders is wedded at the hip to the man. The Slaves of Shadow have remained neutral in all affairs, though practically that means they’re siding with the Holy Ones. While the Silver Comet has always been their most vocal opponent, Kodaidaemin also vigorously opposes the domination of the Holy Ones.”
“I take umbrage with that characterization,” Izalia huffed. “Leila is the only one in our age cohort to have beaten Elerie in any match whatsoever. Something not even you could accomplish.”
“Don’t go rubbing it in.”
Alistair understood in that moment that the relationship between Izalia’s sister and Pike was more delicate than a silly fling. As the two strongest members of their respective sects in the younger generation, their relationship could be the biggest boon or the worst disaster.
“Your world is so hard for me to understand,” Alistair said. “You barely had Mana or the Dao yet there was a zombie horde. Any other magic stuff?”
Izalia looked up in thought. “I never would have found it odd until talking to your people, but the people of the Drakonian Empire have scaly skin and horns and stand a full head taller than humans. We think the reason we developed such developed martial arts is to stand a chance against them. They’re way stronger than normal humans. You could pass as a fourth dragonborn with those eyes of yours.”
My eyes? Alistair thought. He looked at himself in one of the clean silver plates the other group left behind. Sure enough, his pupils were taller and narrower than before. Like a dragon’s. They weren’t complete slits, but more like halfway in-between that of a human and a dragon. He sure hoped that he wouldn’t keep taking on draconic characteristics the more he upgraded his bloodline.
A waitress knocked on the door, taking away the food of the guys who got kicked out and replacing it with freshly made dishes.
Alistair’s mouth watered as he saw the new food. The sect fed them properly, but not these kinds of delicacies.
The waitress brought fried dumplings, crusted and stuck to each other, so you had to break each one off. They still sizzled with the oil used to cook them, filled with minced bamboo shoots, black truffle, ground beef, ginger, garlic, and more vegetables and spices that Alistair wasn’t even sure existed on Earth. This was topped with a divine dipping sauce that incorporated soy, ginger, and a hint of white truffle oil, but not too much to overpower the flavor.
With that came a mouthwatering soup that looked as immaculate as it tasted. The broth was crystal clear, filled with wispy spirals of dragonfruit essence. There were julienned vegetables soaked in the limpid liquid, which only enhanced their flavor. The broth was something Alistair had never seen before, a fusion between sweet and spicy that danced between the two in a fashion impossible to Earth cuisine, like it was a living, dynamic dish designed to attack one’s credulity of something tasting that good.
But that wasn’t even the main course. With those two above dishes that came from the top of her cart, the two dishes below blew Alistair’s palate away. It was somehow even better than the food on Faxor, better than his [Carmela’s Happy Pies]. Lisorte was some planet, that was for sure. It didn’t have that much of a higher Dao concentration or Mana than Earth, but still had such incredible things.
The first main dish was beef tenderloin coated in a five-spice rub, wrapped to perfection in a flaky puff pastry. The way the outside of the savory and buttered pastry crunched and the inner layers were chewy created the most sublime eating experience, combined with how the umami flavors of the meat saturated into the bread. It was lightly sauced with a red wine reduction, and there were garlic-infused mashed potatoes for a side.
Alistair couldn’t say the second main dish was better than the first, but it was in no way worse. Grilled salmon fillet glazed with a shiny and colorful sauce made from fresh mango, ginger, soy, and honey. The sweetness was counterbalanced with a hefty sprinkling of sea salt, and it was garnished with sesame seeds and served on top a fragrant jasmine rice pilaf.
The group devoured the food. Alistair couldn’t name of favorite out of the four dishes. He loved them all. Yet despite wanting to scarf down the food like a starving man recently rescued from a desert island, he somehow stopped himself. The reason was because it was even superior to slowly eat the food. It was so delicious his body overrided his natural desire to eat faster, and instead he ate particularly slowly, savoring each and every bite like it was his last.
“This is way better than that underground place in the Holy Ones’ church,” Alistair said as he licked the remains of the mashed potatoes off his spoon.
“No doubt,” Pike responded, his mouth containing two dumplings at once. “I’ve heard Silvano has tried to poach the head chef of Dragon’s Head multiple times, offering him even triple the pay he makes here. He refused every time. His father’s father’s father cooked here, and he’ll be damned if he leaves.”
“I must pay my respects to the chef,” Alistair announced. “What an upright, amazing man! What a shining star for his community! We need a lot more of that in this world.”
“Cheers to that!” Pike switched over to a beef pastry, soaking it in the red wine reduction. “Here’s to more loyal chefs who stay with their ancestral restaurant even after greedy, conspiring men who want to take over Holy Ravine try to poach them!”
“Here, here!” Alistair roared in response. There was something inside him that needed this whimsical outing. His life had been fighting and training for what felt like a lifetime. The challenges of the future were deadly and not to be underestimated, but if he never had fun, would he even be a human by the time he reached the peak? He looked over at Oliver, who was laughing. He couldn’t even imagine that frightened and antisocial young man act like this. No matter how serious Alistair became, and no matter how dire the threats were, he promised to never forget to enjoy the small moments of life.
“You’re drunk,” Izalia dryly noted. “The red wine reduction uses a special grape whose alcohol content barely gets burned off when turned into a sauce. You too, Pike. But you have no excuse since you already knew that.”
Oliver looked at his pastry suspiciously. “You didn’t tell us earlier?”
“This is betrayal,” Alistair accused. His head was spinning and when he saw his reflection in his spotty clean plate, he saw that his cheeks were flushed. He hadn’t been drunk in over five months, since before the initiation. He had even blocked the psychedelic mist when he went to that club in Port Locasta.
“Lighten up, Izalia,” Pike said, his massive scar looking far less menacing with the genuine smile plastered over his face. “Your sister knows how to have fun better than you.”
“A true martial artist remains alert at all times,” Izalia recited as if reading from a creed. “His mind remains sharp and his fists remain deadly. At any moment, his enemies could strike and his people could fall. The world is his battlefield.”
“And who would dare oppose the top disciple of the Silver Comet and the fifth disciple of Kodaidaemin?”
There was a sharp knock on their door. A feminine voice called out from behind. “Keep it down in there!”
“I’ll take care of that,” Pike said, sauntering over to the paneled door. It had a wooden frame with a canvas center, reminding Alistair of a traditional Japanese-style entrance, though these were more attached to the wall. Sound traveled easily through them.
Pike opened the door. “Fuck.”
Standing outside their entertainment room was Elerie Apostolos, the heir of the Church of the Holy Ones.