“It took time to draw it,” she said still trying to convince me because I hadn’t yet said anything.
“I agree with you,” I said, “I think you’re right.”
“But you don’t like it,” she said.
“I love that you are intelligent,” I said, “and willing to push when you think you are right and I am wrong.”
She was blushing.
“I meant, you don’t like that we have to take the longer path.”
“No you didn’t,” I said with a smile, “and yes, I don’t like the longer path, but getting there is the first priority, getting there fast is second.”
I offered her the last piece of the roll. Or was it a biscuit? It didn’t rise as much as bread, making it far more sturdy.
The creature on the map could be a bear. It was a small detail. Like the individual tree, or the six hornets that were scattered around the map in other locations. It might mean nothing, but she was probably right in that it was significant.
“I can pull first,” I suggested.
Her chewing paused before continuing again as she nodded. We both knew I didn’t have to pull at all. She could pull the whole day, as she’d done yesterday, without any issues except the blow to my pride.
I hauled until my legs burned and I began to slow. Pride or not, there were lives on the line.
We switched and she ran for the rest of the day as I stared at the supplies she had stolen. There was almost nothing left of the food she’d managed to bring.
I should have eaten less. She’s doing all the work anyway. I make a mental note, before once again realizing that there won’t be another loop in which to correct this mistakes.
That feeling of iron bands tightening around my chest starts up again.
I can breathe.
I can breathe.
Damn it!
The panic is beginning to overwhelm me. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and then open them. The branches overhead flow by.
Still I can only take shallow gulping breaths.
Better to pass out that make her stop and deal with this!
I try to hold my breath, but my lungs are already burning.
I suck air down in a long inhale and then breathe normally, if quickly, for a while.
We cross the first of the three streams on the map, stopping just after the third like we’d planned.
The water is cool but not cold.
I think temperature is one of the major differences between being human and whatever I am now. Humans feel chilly in the morning, hot at midday and back to chilly at night. The temperature ranges for comfort here are much wider.
She was looked at the map and then to the sky and back as I collected a few dead branches we might be able to use as clubs or spears.
“I think we can make the border by nightfall,” she said when I joined her.
“Does this look close to this hill?” she asked.
As I looked she continued.
“I think Splitrock is on the top of that hill, in a safe depth, but likely higher in elevation. Which mens not only do we have to run through the shallows, but up hill as well.”
The twin dots of the road did run up the single curve that looked like a hill with what looked like two hands held together in prayer at the top.
The glyphs for Split, and Rock were marked there, as well as a tiny house symbol. The same symbol at the other towns on this map.
In one of the loops I learned about Nightfyre. The towns settled near the borders of the shallows. Much of their technology needed mana to operate. Mana came from people, or it came from essence pearls and cysts, which came from monsters.
Once you took a class, the mana that you gathered to yourself from your environment increased.
If a couple of silver ranked adventures lived in the safe lands far from the shallows they’d kill the land by robbing it of mana. They called it the blight when a monster did it.
It was apparently uncomfortable as well. So people settled on the fringes and farmed in the safe lands. They either delved down into the depths or stuck to the surface shallows to hunt and gather monster parts.
Several other towns were started first, but Nightfyre had the advantage of a wide plain on which to farm. The issue was the winds. The first settlers actually build homes on the plains. But two years later their farms were destroyed by storm winds. There were no survivors.
But the tilled land was still viable and the next settlers built in the ravine, which was free from the wind, and farmed the land above.
The shallow depths made a pockmarked pattern on the map that I had taken to be topographical lines. Instead the lines indicated where the safe lands transitioned into the shallows. Where a mana depth of zero became one. The lines were not continuous, which I took to mean that their borders had not been verified everywhere, only at the places where they were mapped.
This map wasn’t that large. Splitrock was on edge of the map and Lark was on the other edge. Nightfyre was closer to Lark than Splitrock, but not by much.
We soaked the blankets in the stream again, but we had a few more hours to go before we rested for the night and started out in the morning. That was a long time for the blankets to dry out.
We kept them folded up, in the hopes that less exposed cloth would mean less evaporation.
Riding in the cart as she pulled gave me a lot of time to think. Most of my efforts were spent trying not to think of things that would send me into a panic. Occasionally I had a few useful thoughts.
Pi could be different in this universe. The very idea of it warped my mind.
Could mana be pumped and moved around or only converted from solid items like cysts and pearls?
Did they have ways of creating motion or motive force from mana. Crude engines and the like?
The road, like everything we’d we’d been on so far, was more treeless route than road.
How it was explained to me was that tree carvings or carved signs hung from trees was the norm. In the grassy areas stone piles acted as markers. People would pull up trees that grew in the road.
Jackson, the young man from the wagon train, had that job. Those with earth or stone magic tended to shape the roads as well. Since I arrived we only spent a single afternoon doing that. Some of the workers hauled rocks and stones while one of the guards used magic to compact them at a washed out portion of the path.
This road was more forested path than road, and it took a bit longer on this stretch to reach the border into the shallows.
She did a loop and ran backward about half a mile before we stopped.
It was already dark and the blankets were wet.
I’d collected a lot of wood though.
She dug a hole with a stick and her hand and then dropped a ball of kindling in. It was a pile of pine needles and smaller sticks.
She reached her hands out to cup the softball sized amount and it smoked and then burst into flames.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“More wood!” she said as she pushed herself off her knees.
I rushed some over and we got it burning.
“I have to wait two hours before I can do it again,” she said once the fire was no longer in danger of burning out.
“It’s a bonus from a Class.”
“Which?” I asked.
“Scullion,” she said with a shrug, “I rarely switch back to it but some of the bonuses are useful. Starting fires is nice. There is also a passive heat resistance on my hands,” she put her open palm into the flame and I reached out and pulled her arm by instinctually.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said coving my hand on her wrist with her other hand, “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s fine,” I said letting go and going back for more wood.
I hauled it all out and stacked it near the fire.
I’d gotten too many smaller pieces I realized, but that was okay. We weren’t really cold, so much as chilled.
“What’s your most useful class?”
“They are all useful in their own way,” she said seriously.
“Okay what one did you switch away from to bundle Scullion?”
She laughed a bit then smiled.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Wife.”
“Wife?”
“Oh yes,” she said seriously, “It grants bonuses to patience, endurance, and fatigue. Doubly so if someone with the Husband class is near.”
“Really?”
She giggled and I smiled.
“I was running with Milkmaid. It grants a bonus to strength and constitution which raise my health and defense stats and makes it easier to run without getting tired out to the point of exhaustion.”
“What’s your favorite class?”
“They are all good for different things.”
“Of course,” I said, “but if you were a princess-” I paused realizing the word was real so they had those here, “and all your needs were met and you could choose anything you wished of what you had.”
“Teacher,” she said with a smile that lit up her face.
“It helps me understand things, and explain things. I solve problems better and there are bonuses to understanding when people aren’t telling me the truth. Not any sort of lie detection like an Inspector might get but when I’m a Teacher I can tell if someone really understands or is just saying they do.”
“Thank you for hauling me around today,” I said.
“You’re welcome. We do have a big decision. Do we eat dinner or breakfast, we don’t have enough food for both.”
“You’re doing all the work,” I said, “I think you should eat dinner and breakfast and I should just lay here and watch.
“Breakfast it is,” she said, refusing to get up.
We did get up later to collect the makeshift weapons from the cart in case we needed them in the night and to relieve ourselves.
I’ve gotten used to it at this point, but basically here no one wipes their ass. Shit isn’t a continuously log your but cuts up like some sort of demonic play-doh set. It’s not deer pellets either but it’s sort of a mix. And it’s drier, and quick. I remember sitting on the toilet for ten to twenty minutes browsing reddit on Earth as a normal daily thing.
Here you found a spot, leaned your back against a tree, dropped your pants to your knees, leaned against the tree, and in two minutes you’d dropped out a collection of turds and were done.
Pissing too was different. I think they just had larger bladders because I rarely had the need to pee, only did so when convenient or after I shit. I did end up pissing for much longer when I did go, but that seemed to be the trade off.
Doing both at the same time was taboo, even for women. There were two different toilets, one for solid waste and one for liquid. Even in the mines where we weren’t given beds there had been two toilets.
Once again I only really noticed the insect noise when I tried to sleep. It was everywhere though there didn’t seem to be that many insects on the ground ever.
“Do all the insects fly?” I asked realizing that pretty much all the insects I’d come across on this planet did fly. Even on my vacations at the river when I left the wagon train to mentally recover a bit and explore the world.
“Not all,” she said rolling up on her side to look at me.
“Why are you asking about insects?”
“I was just noting that there aren’t many on the ground.”
“Oh,” she said with a small laugh, “those ones don’t survive the slimes,” she said as if it made perfect sense.
And maybe it did. It’s not like evolution favors wings. That’s a lot of energy drain if you don’t need them. But if you can fly and land on trees or get away from slimes you can breed.
“Can slimes climb trees?”
“Sort of,” she said continuing her roll so she was laying with one leg over mine and her head on my chest. I brought a hand up to rub her back.
“They sort of stretch upwards and elongate, but they don’t like leaving the ground. There are academics that have trained them to move across elevated obstacle courses, but for the most part they stay on the ground and away from water.”
“They don’t like water?”
“In the shallows flies are the most dangerous because they are faster than you can run, and monsters spawn on the ground. So if there are enough in the air more spawn beneath them. Eventually the swarms are large enough the create a blight and the monsters need more mana. That means pushing out. When there is a blight the area might have a depth of one and a half, but so many monsters it has a real depth of say zero point eight. So that zero point nine just over the border has more mana and the starving fliers seek it.
“So on the surface everyone fears fliers. Also we have boats and can avoid the water by staying on land. Any aquatic monsters tend to very avoidable. In the deeps though the most dangerous monsters are in the water, where they can breathe and we can’t. Some scholars think the slimes know that. Other’s think they just don’t like water. Even a moat a few fingers deep and a few fingers wide will keep them trapped unless they are starving or driven from something like fire. They won’t even stretch out over it until starving, and that takes weeks for most of them.
“Their size limit is fairly uniform. I guess it gets larger the deeper you go but it’s never bigger than a person is tall, even though one that size outweighs a person eight or ten times over. Those can bridge huge gaps and yet won’t even try to cross water.”
I felt her shrug.
“But put one next to a tree and surround it with water and it will choose to climb the tree after a while instead of crossing the water.”
Didn’t Earth folktales have witches that couldn’t cross running water? Or was that vampires? Did the water melt some of them?
“Are other monsters afraid of water? Can a moat be used for protection?”
“Oh no,” she said with a chuckle, “most other monsters can see and will jump a moat or cross it at speed. Slimes are so slow that no one ever considers them a danger. You leave someone on watch for the real threats. Whatever you have that will kill the real monsters will kill slimes.
“I’ve switched back,” she said, “so I’m going to sleep.”
I rubbed her back in response.
She had several Class Skills. Bundling five made a class with various pros and cons. Further bundling four more class skills would let her choose from a tier two class. She only had one tier two Class Skill.
After switching to a tier one class you had to wait a certain amount of time before you could switch classes again. Switching out of a tier one took an hour or so. She said it varied from person to person and was one of those things scholars were still trying to sort out. No one had yet figured out a formula for the time requirement for changing classes. It was about an hour, then about four, then twenty one hours for tier three. Tier four was something like nine days, but no one in the wagon train even knew someone first hand who was tier four. Most surface dwellers were happy to have multiple tier two classes.
She slept easily while I stared at the planetary rings through the tree branches that covered most of the sky.
In the summer the nights were much brighter as the rings reflected light down. In the winter the sun hit the rings from the other side and the night was darker.
The seasons affected the mana as well, shifting it by about half a point. It was why we were safe only a half mile from the marker, which would be placed permanently only in the winter and with a depth gauge.
During the last crossing we had a long distance until monsters were visible. That had more to do with the depth from summer than anything else.
I wish I knew more about planetary mechanics. Did it have to do with summer and winter or did it have to do with the planets relative distance to the sun. Was the planetary tilt lined up in such a way that at the closest place in the orbit the tilt was also the closest. Was that one of those weird things with gravity making patterns. Like the gaps in a planetary ring being there because of a moon’s orbital gravity and some sort of weird harmonics. Or the fact that moons rotated at multiples of two to each other, or something like five thirds.
They didn’t have airships or anything else. Not that they didn’t have things that flew. Apparently that was a major branch of science on this world. The issue was that mana density was tied to depth in odd ways.
A flat plane might have a depth of zero at one end and three at the other, but several hundred strides up everything was zero. Carrying vessels that contained mana, be they alchemical glass, or natural like essence pearls, high enough caused the mana to break down. So essence pearls would implode and create a cloud of essence. And clouds of essence contained in alchemical glass would dissipate into the material of the universe.
The mana cost of repelling the ground was high, but there were carriages in the old world that floated instead of riding on wheels. It was a testament to one’s wealth to own and operate one.
There were also fixed wings of a sort. Gliding from on high was a common enough occurrence though it was often down with class augments that lowered one’s weight, cards, or Class bonuses. Propulsion and fixed wings had also been done, though no one had known any details. Spells or enchanted plates heated the air in what I assumed was some sort of ram jet style engine as it ran with only heat.
Again the costs were so substantial that no one would consider powered flight more than curiosity.
Mrs. Kine wasn’t even strong as that sort of thing went. She was just awakened, and had attributes. Most people could arrange their Class Skills in such a way to get one with a bonus to strength or to some specific task like lifting or hauling.
When necessity was the mother of invention you didn’t really invent things if you didn’t need them. And most people on this planet didn’t seem to have issues in their day to day lives that required machines to fix.
When they did have problems they had a different set of tools to solve them. Plants were grown with alchemical fertilizer on slow farms or with magic or skills on quick farms where plants might mature a month’s worth of time in a few hours.
Dimensional storage was still rare in the new world. But on the other continent, the one they called the old world, it was everywhere. And most could shunt time which meant food didn’t rot at the very least.
The common practice concerning meals was to spend a day a month doing nothing but cooking and plating meals, then storing them hot and ready to serve.
A single Chef could cook for several large houses and all the assorted staff by cooking a months worth of meals for each every few days.
Homes had award winning meals stored and ready to share like Earth’s rich stored wine.
Magic solved heating and cooling issues and magical healing solved most medical issues though there were a few diseases that magic couldn’t fix. Those with those diseases often died in childhood.
They had no need for dentists.
Broken bones were one of the more dangerous injures because the bones could set incorrectly. Sometimes before the people were even brought to a healer if their current class had bonuses to healing rates.
Need to get cargo from A to B fast? Hire someone with a class that has bonuses to speed and endurance. Couriers and the like had bonuses to hauling and even personal dimensional storage spaces. The classes were often taken specifically for the dimensional storage.
The truly rich had other means. An ancestor’s finger bone or forearm bone might be enchanted and replaced. Healing potions would be used to heal after surgery and suddenly the ultra-wealthy had the ability to touch something and store it.
Normally it took a vessel of some sort. A chest or cupboard or trunk.
What necessity was there for proper roads when a courier could run sixty miles per hour over rough terrain for hours, carrying hundreds of pounds of cargo.
A huge bird passed overhead. If it was just beyond the tree tops is was massive, but I suspected it was one of the truely huge eagles, the ones the size of cows.
If I slept, it was briefly and without dreams. I was awake when the sun spread color across the sky.
I woke Mrs. Kine and we ate breakfast. I ate and she pretended not to notice that I did so slowly so she had a majority of the food.
She got in the yoke and I stood there with the blankets that were now only damp.
Once those were in place I gave her a light kiss and got in the cart.
We began as we had before, with a walk.
There were slimes at first, and nothing else for most of the passage through the shallows.
There were imps at the end but perhaps for only a quarter mile.
She kept running afterward, and sure enough we were headed up hill. We’d been heading up hill for a while when she called out, “Marker,” and pointed at the stone marker that said we were free of the shallows.
I thought we were out for a while. There hadn’t even been slimes on this side.
I wondered if there were like, mud flats. Perhaps in the winter the area we’d just run through was just over one, and now it was mostly under one so that in the summer only the barest hint of the passage in the center was above one.
She stopped and I took the blankets off and then adjusted the axle with the wheel that moved it forwards and backwards. She started running and we kept adjusting until she like the feel of the yoke.
Ideally it neither pushed her down or lifted her up, only pulled backward on her.
She ran with the brake line in hand and just as she was talking about taking a break we rounded a curve to see Splitrock.
It was literally a vertical split in the stone. There were a few never-dark torches running up either side and a few men visible on the other side of the split.
The rock itself was a few hundred strides away and by the time we got there someone had jogged through the split to speak to us.
The message was quick and we were led through the split rock and then up another tight curve and back. There were buildings standing three or four stores in stone with an upper floor of wood.
There were people here and most of the doors on the buildings stood open.
People glanced at us but no one stared or pointed.
By the time we got Mrs. Kine out of the yoke a man with a beard and a big belly was waiting for us.
“I’m the mayor,” he said, “what’s this about an attack.”
I told him quickly what his brother had said about Lark and the fur trapper from Menkle. Then I told him what I knew of Nightfyre and how many of the gang were already dead.
“I don’t know how many more they have or when exactly this happened,” I finished.’
We headed inside a building that had to an inn or tavern. We were seated at the table while the mayor gave orders to a few men and food and water was brought out.
We ate while the mayor spoke to an older man who had returned from a visit to Nightfyre recently.
“I do remember the Viceroy’s men being there when we arrived. We were there for two nights and there were no problems.”
“When was this?” the mayor asked.
They worked the days out and we had arrived at Nightfyre only six days after the old man had left. Which meant the people we’d killed on our way hadn’t been a part of the attack.