When the two undead adventurers left the guild house the third bell of the day began to toll, its powerful chime rumbling in the distance long after the bell had ceased.
The streets of Oriripol were calm, Iris didn't know if the busyness of previous days was caused by the incoming snowfall or rather today's calmness was the product of the ankle-deep blanket of snow around them. Regardless of what it was, she felt glad being able to walk freely through the streets leading into the city's heart without having to be weaving through the traffic.
The fluffy snow under their feet made a crunching noise as the two walked, the pure snow clinging to their leather shoes. They paraded through the main street passing further gates of the massive city. When they were roughly halfway inside the middle city, squeezed between the outer and inner walls dividing Oriripol in three, they saw a party of humans working. They wore linen tunics and were armed with wooden spades which clacked against the cobbled road. Around them, armed s casually talked occasionally glancing at their chained wards but otherwise showing no other associations with them. The working men split, making way for the inhabitants of the city who continued their daily routine paying no mind to their fellow humans.
Behind the slaves, the road had been cleared of most of the snow allowing carts to safely roll through the streets without the snow being turned into a slippery slurry from the constant foot traffic.
The smell of charcoal permeated the air and from the tall chimneys even taller stalks of grey smoke billowed out as people tried to ward off the cold. The elf used the shops as a guide on where to go. Usually shops and workshops closer to the seats of power dealt in increasingly more luxurious and rare merchandise. Without a central fortified keep to grasp attention, it was difficult to assess where she was inside the city. In addition, the city didn't radiate from a central point with its borders being confined by the Demiurge Bay in the south and the marshy bank of Vitas in the west, it was hard to even asses if someone was going toward the inner city in the first place.
After passing a gate of the inner circle guarded by many soldiers, Iris was greeted by a sight of opulence. The streets narrowed significantly and rarely branched off as each building had something the elf saw only in the country or in kingly palaces. Behind iron gates each mansion-like building possessed a garden but no matter how hard the elf tried she couldn't spot any signs which would suggest that anything other than flowers grew there.
They passed a tall cloth house with large clear glass windows without any reinforcements, behind which beautiful clothes were displayed on wooden mannequins. The elf felt the urge to admire the glimmering dresses in front of her. She began to imagine herself wearing the sapphire dress in front of her but the images floating in her mind felt odd.
The short-lived womenly glee faded away as her unfitting body faded from her own imagination leaving a blank silhouette wearing the sapphire dress.
"I don't like how you stare at me." The porcelain doll ready for risen's mind to play with spoiled her flawless complexion as she frowned.
"Why is that, Kia?"
"It's annoying," The necromancer responded, trying to break the strange spell fallen upon her creation by tugging on the elf's hand she held. "I don't understand, we have better quality clothes in every sense of that word."
"I know but these are for fighting aren't they?"
"What do you mean?" The girl looked down to look at her priest-like dress.
"What I'm trying to say, is that it is strange for us to only have one set of clothing. We really should have another set of clothes for different occasions, walking around in armour while we are in a city isn't really normal." The elf tugged on her brown jacket which was technically as strong as adamantite mail. Ordinarily what that jacket had gone through should have reduced even the heaviest sets of armour to a bunch of scrap or at best caused it to be so worn out and damaged that the armour would be stuck in a talented workshop for the better part of the year. But thanks to the mind troubling amount of enchantments which characterised everything the ancient owned the humble-looking jacket still looked like on the day Iris received it.
"Suspicious." The snow white girl's eyes squinted as they glanced between Iris, her silver embroidered dress and the mannequin wearing a dress fit for a ball and not the cobbled road.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Look who is talking." The elf retorted as she playfully jabbed the undead's humble chest with her finger causing her hood to fall off. "We will think about shopping later, first let's get you to the Academy."
"Do they have books?"
"I would assume so. I knew a mage who liked giving me books from there to translate."
"What were they about?" Kia asked, her raised brows expressing more curiosity than even her words.
"They were about the ancient empires and the meaning of certain words the scholars of this city were able to decipher, or thought they could."
"Was it interesting?"
"The books?" The girl nodded clarifying her question. "At the time I was translating the books? No, not really. I had schedules to observe, see dungeons get conquered and monsters being slayed, watch blood flow like river while trying to not anger my then masters." When Iris finished speaking, after almost five years worth of anguish unconsciously followed each word she uttered. The ghostly white girl listening closely offering no consoling words nor showing any pity for her creation, simply nodding along recording each word she spoke. Even though the girl was not an undead, in the sense people used that word for. The ancient still possessed that sort of cold emotionless edge expected from an undead.
Iris wondered if that was because of Kia's race or if was it something more complicated. In her previous life, she wouldn't have ever said it since she only experienced life as an elf but race seemed to alter how a person looked upon life. She had experienced that directly, her thinking had slowed down not in the sense of speed but in the sense of feeling no need to hurry. Her undead race damping feelings like fear and introducing a calculating factor to her thinking, was sliding closer to the enemy and slitting his throat worth the HP and other questions like that no living would think about appearing in her mind on regular. Although she wasn't sure about all this, maybe that portion of her mind was always there simply buried under fear she no longer felt as much. She still needed to polish her theory but she felt that being granted new life by Kia and becoming an undead did change her. Would she change further as the time goes on?
Iris turned her head toward Kia, she wanted to ask her about these questions but she felt like her problems were of a sort that the ancient undead and all her knowledge couldn't help. Not only was Kia undead her entire life or unlife but everyday alien tendrils brushed against the risen's mortal mind. She was sure her gentle kitten didn't mean it but these brief moments where she felt that their minds truly touched made her unable to ask as she doubted the undead viewed things the same way as she did.
The tall hoplite felt her foot stub against a curb causing her to look down . She found her foot not pressing against the curb of a sidewalk but a step of a tall staircase which hugged a wall. She turned around to make sure she hadn't missed their destination and was currently staring at an entrance to a watch tower but that was not it as the battlements of the inner wall were behind her.
"Halt," A guard stationed at the top of the stairs called out, guarding the heavily reinforced door beside him. The scene resembled what Iris saw when entering Oriripol but the soldier had a collection of wands on his belt making the elf think they were somehow about to enter another nation. "Why are you approaching?" He asked dumbfounded.
The man was completely engulfed in scale armour and wearing a pointy metal helmet with a mail coif resembling a thick metal scarf around his neck. If not for his visible eyes and his bare hands the elf would have mistaken the man for a golem or an enchanted set of armour.
In his hands he cuddled a stone which resembled a beehive with concentric rings carved out of it, the stone glowed in a warm reddish-yellow colour. It was odd to see a single soldier possessing a Heatstone, usually, they were given one for a squad or more and only for elite units causing the elf to carefully asses the man without inspecting him.
"We are looking for the Oriripol Academy," Iris raised her voice so she was heard. "Do you know where it is?"
Instead of answering immediately the man carefully examined the tall women. After nodding to himself, content with what he found, the man then shouted. "Get out of my sight adventurer. The House of Wisdom and Magic is only for those who know the difference between front and back. Shoo, kaffars shoo."
"Kaffars?" The elf heard the term used by the soldiers from Oriripol but they used it so frequently that Iris regarded it as a miracle that it hadn't lost all meaning.
"It means you two are the dirt beneath my shoe, you magicless vermin. Your only purpose in life is to serve and die." The man slowly articulated his answer as if to a child.
The elf felt Kia's freezing aura begin to leak out and she quickly grabbed the necromancer's left hand partially preventing the girl from casting a spell and hoping that was enough to avoid an incident before she could whisper into her ear.
"What's happening here?" A voice came from behind the two undead and a moment later a woman carrying herself like a noble emerged from behind. Unlike the ordinary soldiers in the city, the guard didn't bow his body in half but simply nodded his head.
"These kaffars here wanted me to explain what that word means so I did." The noble woman's sea green eyes scanned the Iris, her hair in the colour of wheat falling from her shoulder as she leaned forward.
"You called a scion of a noble house kaffar?" The noble women asked.
"Huh? Why would you say that?"
The elf's frown lessened slightly from surprise as the noblewoman nodded to her, silently asking her if was it proper for her to approach before gingerly approaching them like they were some sort of alluring but dangerous animals.
"..." The noblewoman paused and stared blankly at Kia's hand which Iris had grabbed, taking a step back before a smile the elf had seen hundreds of times before appeared on the woman's face. It was a friendly courteous smile that nobles made when talking to one another. "Did you come from the north?" She asked Kia.
The ancient who was grumbling terrible curses against humans just a moment before tilted her body backwards as both she and Iris were surprised by the woman's words.
The elf contemplated their options and what the noble had in mind and why she called Kia a noble scion and for what purpose.
"No." Iris's protective instincts kicked in and she began to turn around, ready to return to the guild then fall into some sort of trap.
"Wait! I shouldn't have doubted you. I would like to apologise on behalf of the Academy even when I do not have such powers to do so that the guard here had made a terrible mistake and he will pay for it, Lady Blackworm." The blonde noble said causing the elf to stop, her eyes tracking where the sea-green eyes had meandered on their bodies.
On Kia's ring finger, a signet ring gleamed like a star in the sunlight and on its dark body, a worm coiled around a sword with two roses at its feet greeted the elf.