--- RUNESIGHT ---
There was a story I remembered from when I was a child, the type my mother would tell when I wouldn’t leave her alone. It wasn’t the type of story with a happy ending, but if you opened a book with the words bound inside and flipped through to the end, you might think it was happy when you got to the last line.
A boy lived in what is now Aulous, the country named after the everhigh mountains that bordered the dragonlands. At the time of the story though, it wasn’t a country yet, it was right after the rise of Yeran power and all the human tribes were too busy squabbling with each other to appoint a king or write a social contract.
The boy loved to look at those mountains that reached beyond the sky, he loved to watch when sometimes a dragon would fly overhead, off to business that the boy would never know. He learned to paint so he could capture their beauty, he learned to hunt so he could traverse their feet.
One day the boy became a man, he decided to map the mountains that he loved, but in order to do that he had to find the top. The young man gathered together supplies, pages of maps, rations for the journey, and his bow for hunting. He bade his family farewell, but they knew better than he did, for they said goodbye tearfully and supposed that the young man would never return.
The young man drew as he went, mapping the crags in the rock, the distance between each peak, and the routes of the animals that called it home. One day he came across a cave hollowed out in the icy peaks. He still couldn’t see the top, but he took shelter there for the night, deciding it was a lovely cave for such a place.
When he woke, he crept farther into the cave, exploring the branches and shapes that formed its belly. He mapped these as well. He came into a room near the end and stopped in surprise. Before him, sitting silently on a ledge, three enormous blue eggs shimmered in the torchlight.
His greed spoke before his wisdom.
The eggs were gone by the time their mother returned, she searched high and low for them, scouring the mountains for the culprit. When she found the young man he didn’t live long, but neither did her eggs. They shattered upon the rocks below her cave during the scuffle, and the dragoness’s scream of fury could be heard for hours afterward. She destroyed several human villages, seeking vengeance. The other dragons joined in soon, vowing to remove the human plague from the land.
The villages weren’t idle though, they hiked the mountains and found nests when they couldn’t take the attacks anymore, destroying more eggs in retribution, killing dragons when they could. The tribes of Aulous joined together to fight this, rising up against the threat. They were victorious in the end, destroying any dragon that dared to attack them.
The dragons never stopped looking for revenge, and the humans never stopped having to rebuild their cities. But no one remembers how a circle of pain begins, and no one thinks ‘hey, we should stop this, I think the revenge we got is enough now.’
That, I believe, is exactly how Niun felt when he stared at the map, trying to figure out how to get Jeref where he needed to go.
--- NIUN ---
He scratched the zombie behind the ears absently. It had been three days since Eliax had given him the map, three days of anxiety, confusion, and not a little depression. He’d tried putting Jeref in an abandoned house, Nasei knows there were plenty of those in the city lately. But Jeref didn’t like the idea and ended up breaking a Jeref-shaped hole in the wall so he could track down Niun again.
If he could go back in time and tell his past self that summoning a zombie wasn’t worth it, he would most definitely do that. Nevermind the anger that burrowed into his soul whenever he thought about Jiuhen, nevermind the fact that the empath had known that Niun liked the same girl. Yet all he’d gotten was a laugh of pity from him. It was like Jiuhen saw him as lesser, like simply apologizing or helping him out with getting any girl was completely beneath his notice.
Niun knew there was more to it, but he couldn’t find it within himself to care. Somehow though, the longer that revenge plot had festered, the more Niun was sure it wasn’t actually worth it.
He sighed, “I need to kill something…”
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Jeref perked up at this, sitting up as Niun got to his feet, it seemed like a question, where are we going?
“You’re staying here.”
The tree-wolf whimpered and lay back down in search of pity, but Niun simply shook his head, “Tough luck.” He held up the map, “I’m just going to find out where this is, I’ll come back for you and then we’ll figure out how to get you out of the city.”
Jeref seemed happier at that idea and snuggled into the blankets below him contentedly.
--
Niun dodged to the side at the swipe, something grazed his arm as he turned on his heel into a fighting stance.
The giant spider hissed at him and skittered backward, apparently more of an ambush predator than anything. It stayed within view though, hissing at him every so often and shooting some webbing.
Niun examined the creature, but it didn’t have anything valuable even if he could sell it without getting fully kicked out of Starsbane. So Niun tossed a knife at the spider, which hit true. It let out a screech and skittered backward farther, before deciding this meal wasn’t worth it and leaving entirely. Niun wouldn’t be getting the knife back, but it was a minor loss if the creature would leave him alone in the end.
After a moment, Niun took out the map again and frowned at it; he’d headed south, because that’s what he figured the map was telling him to do. At some point he’d completely lost the coast though since the cliffs of silverside got in the way. They were really eye-catching cliffs, rising up out of the ground like a wall made by some powerful earth mage or maybe a god. No one could really scale them, and while it was possible to find your way through, more people died trying to do that than to dragons each year.
Was this beach on the other side of the cliffs?
Niun glanced up and squinted at the horizon, before deciding he’d somehow managed to lose the cliffs at some point too. Such a way to go about life… he turned the map this way and that, but having lost all the landmarks in the first five minutes, Niun was almost completely sure it was useless by this point.
With a shrug, Niun folded up the map and pocketed it, continuing forward.
--
By the time the sun was starting to set, Niun was completely lost.
He wandered around in the wilderness, occasionally finding a path, or running into the coast and following it. He squinted down at the map, trying to retrace his steps, and tripped on a root that was hidden in the lengthening shadows.
Niun found himself on the ground, grunting at the impact and picking himself up.
He tried to find the road a few times, but the only time he’d seen it was way back before he’d even found cliffs. Occasionally he would see the massive thing in the distance, but then he’d get chased by a monster or find a trail that looked promising, and next thing he knew, they were out of sight again.
Suffice it to say, Niun did not have a good sense of direction.
After exhausting all possible avenues and deciding there wasn’t anything else to try, Niun finally sat down in the middle of a field and started drawing up a circle.
It took about twenty minutes, but he’d memorized the diagram with as much precision as he could manage, down to even the subtle angle of an offshooting arrow. It wasn’t a perfect replication, but it didn’t have to be.
After looking over the circle for a bit, Niun stepped inside and faced the direction -he believed- Reiaran was. He pushed his mana into the circle and spoke quietly, “Loyal to the core, bring me the wolf.”
The circle started glowing and Niun felt his energy drain away immediately. If the spell didn’t work, there was no way he could walk all the way home without collapsing. The circle pulsed to an unknown beat before darkness materialized out of the ground, it looked like a seed at first, but it coalesced faster with every passing moment, eventually leaving the shape of a happy looking Jeref behind.
After a moment, the glow stopped and the tree-wolf pounced on Niun, wagging his tail fast enough to decapitate someone.
Niun laughed, somehow feeling quite a bit better. “Glad to see you too, buddy.”
--
The two of them walked tiredly onto the beach two hours later, only proving that Jeref was smarter than his master.
Somehow, Niun had thought the map was telling him south but even right there it said north. He shook his head and examined the area before turning toward his summon, “Alright, you get to stay here for a couple of weeks, Jeref! I’ll come visit every week, so behave! There’s a farm not too far out, but I’m trusting you to not go over there, okay?”
Jeref seemed to understand. He started rolling in the sand and Niun smiled pleasantly. The sharp scent of sandfrost spores was concerning, but if Eliax thought the zombie would be alright here, then he would trust her a lot more than he could apparently trust his own sense of direction.
He eventually left the zombie there, making his way back along the coast, glad that the silverside cliffs were to the south of the city and that he wouldn’t have to go around them again. His feet were tired, his nerves were spent, and he couldn’t wait to collapse into a warm bed.