The next morning, I woke to a knock on the door. When I went to the door, I found a massive pile of fruits. My friend was standing there with a smile.
“The glade wanted to do something for you as well if you place the fruit in your pantry, you will find it does not go bad. Once you are done with that, I will show you the last secret I have for you” he says sadly.
I can tell how he feels as I am overcome by an intense feeling of loneliness. I know he is sad that I am leaving more so because he has been alone for so long. I know now that he sees his expansion as a great error. It made him impossible to reach by the people of this planet. To be honest, if I had not been trapped deep in his forest, I might not have come myself. Plus, the large size of his forest made it a target for the incursions which makes it even more dangerous. The only thing was that he could not have fought his nature, and for forests, that nature is to grow and expand. He had not done so previously because of outside factors. Once those factors were removed, he followed his nature. If one were willing to try the journey you could hike across the continent from one ocean to the other without leaving the forest. For most, though that trip would be suicide it would be difficult even for me.
I load all of the fruit into the pantry and exit the house. When I think about how I am going to shrink the cottage to take it with me I get a prompt. When I select yes, the cottage shrinks down to the size of one of my camping stones and places itself into the storage space that was created for it.
Once I am done packing so to speak the avatar leads me in a direction we have not been before. We walk for a few hours to the edge of the glade on a side I had not thought to explore before. It is a shame since I have been here so long. Though most of that time I have been unconscious. This part of the glade and surrounding forest are much darker and have an eerie quality to them. I begin to notice as we walk there is more stone and what seems to be ruins in this area.
As we walk, I begin to see a lone megalith standing among the trees. As we begin to get closer to it, I realize that it is where we are headed. I also begin to understand that it is not an artificial structure. While it is smaller than the current one, I can tell that what we are headed to is the remains of a guardian tree. What we are walking towards is the petrified base of a massive tree.
“That is what is left of my forebearer. The seed I came from is directly tied to it. I don’t know what happened to it but I do know that it was ancient and stood for hundreds of thousands of arcs. It was old in a way that makes my time seem like a snap of the fingers” he says solemnly.
He walks me to the edge of his glade which is just outside of the area the petrified ancient is in. He walks over to a clear area and sits in his strangely awkward way. While he is sitting, he draws a symbol that I understand immediately. It is the symbol for doorways, I know I know this because of my linguistics skill.
“Walk until you see this symbol on the trunk. When you do feed the symbol some mana and a passage will open that will lead you under it. There used to be three working portals. There were once more but they don’t function anymore. No one has been down there in some time, so I am not sure that all the portals are still functioning. If they are the three that were there will put you on the edges of my forest. Two of them lead to alvairan holdings, one a larger alvairan city the other a smaller town. The third will take you to a large demios town. Either way, it will save you moons of travel time. It will also aid you if you wish to return” he says watching me.
“I do not like saying goodbye so, I will say till we meet again.”
He nods as I step out of his glade for the first time since I arrived. I walked towards the petrified tree stump. I look back shortly and see that he is still standing there. There is a bit of a shimmer between us which I guess is the border of the glade. I get back on the defensive as I remember that I am back out in the wilds and anything can happen out here.
“Do not worry about him” a feminine voice says from nowhere in general. The only one who can now hear it is the avatar. “In fact, you should worry about the others. He is an unpredictable one and with his power, well let’s just hope they don’t end up on his bad side” the voice says with a sharp laugh. The avatar just stands there unmoving until his only living friend is out of sight.
I walk for a few hours the process takes longer because I don’t know how far the symbol is from the glade. I find it because of the ruins around the trunk of the remnants of the great tree. It makes sense though to put a settlement around a guardian like that though. The glade comes with the protection of a guardian plus the fact that inhabitants would not be able to attack each other. Makes it a very good location to homestead. If you could get adventurers to your town, you could make money as well. The portals would make sense to move people. The ruins around the base are sprawling. The town must have been quite large at one point.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
When I get close to the center of the ruins there are the remnants of a large stone building that have the symbol on them. When I walk up to the symbol, I see the match on the trunk as well. I move up and put my hand on the symbol. Feeding it mana is not hard I just move a drop of mana from my hand to the symbol and it opens a doorway.
The door opens up to a corridor with softly glowing lights at the end. The hallway is old and dusty and the air is stale the room has not been opened to the outside for some time. I am on heightened alert though since the gamer on me says this would be the perfect time and place for an ambush. My paranoia is unfounded though as I reach the portal room, nothing is present. Like he said there are three undamaged portals in the room. It looks as though there were as many as twelve at one point.
I take the time to go over the room. The three working portals are in good shape. They are obviously older than they seem but time seems to have not harmed them much. The room is in very good shape. But that cannot be said for everything. Two portals are completely demolished. It is obvious that those portals were intentionally destroyed. Three of the other portals are damaged but the damage is more intentional. The other four portals are just inert.
The room is interesting as well as I take the time to remove some of the dust gently. The same words are set into the floor and the walls and they all glow softly. I recognize the words as home tree, that must have been what this place was called. I decided to thoroughly investigate this place for any information that I can get. The words in the wall and floor all seem to be powered and have mana running to them from somewhere. I can also tell the words are runes or glyphs of some sort. Only my linguistics skill translates them for me. I also find the remnants of some alvairan writing on the active portals. These must have been Rogul’s attempt at documenting where each portal went. Two of the portals had alvairan names the last was a name that was clearly a different language. That one would have to be the demios town.
While I was at it, I decided to look at the portals themselves. Each of the portals has different runes on it. After reviewing each portal, even the dead ones there was a common pattern. Each set of runes follows the same pattern. There is a rune for space, which I determine is how it is powered. Then there is one from the home tree to another location. Last, there is a rune for transit. So, the process seems to break down to three things how do you intend to power something. What is it doing, and what is its action? Now that I understand this I go back over the dead portals. The three that are damaged all have the actions chiseled off of them. That could mean anything from the locations being hostile now to them being compromised. As I looked at all of the portals thoroughly, I could see markings that a number of them had been carved several times. That meant that the locations had been changed before. That showed a level of flexibility that was not apparent initially. I took out some paper and took sketches of the whole chamber and the runes. I wrote down the meaning of the runes in English next to the original writing.
With that done I had a choice to make! Where do I go? Both options hold intrigue. So, it came down to who should I visit first the Alvair or the Demios? I had to mull the decision carefully, both had been allies to humans at one point. Though the alvair had betrayed humanity over jealousy. The demios had done the same the difference was that outside of a select few the demios had been tricked. I think, in the end, that was what did it for me. I would of course find the alvair but for my first interaction, I would rather it be with the demios. That came down to two things it was less likely that they would be hostile. If they did end up being hostile there was a high likelihood that I could overpower them easily. There was a low likelihood they would be able to keep me from escaping if it came to that. Of the remaining “friendly” factions the demios had been the weakest. It would be a good guess to believe that not much had changed at this point.
I choose the portal with the obvious demios name written next to it. I feed the runes some mana and watch the portal pool into existence. Once the portal is fully formed, I send Akurra through and step through. The other side of the portal is similar to the one I just left. The walls are covered with a different set of runes in the same positions. I copy these runes as well the interesting thing is that this room has different active portals. I take down all of the active runes and exit the room. Like the other location, the room is hidden in a decrepit ruin this building is so damaged that only bits and pieces of the symbol are present. I cut an “X” in a spot that I would look for, and then remember I can mark the location on my map. I also find the location I left from still on my map and mark it as well.
As I begin to move, I am reminded that the forest is still dangerous as we are attacked. I am ready for it this time and this time the attack is different. The dire rats that attack show fear after their initial attack. It’s as if they realized their mistake. Once we are done with that group, we go the rest of the day without an attack. I am watching my map, and before where something would go out of its way to attack the same beasts are working to avoid me. As the sun begins to set, we find a safe location and I deploy the cottage for the night.