I no longer remember the faces of the two little men I met last night, but I do remember they told me they'd passed a man of Eduard's description a day ago and which way he was travelling. For lack of a better lead, I start off in that direction.

The morning is beautifully sunny.

The going’s good.

The hills roll before me like waves upon a grassy green sea, the illusion broken only slightly by the occasional copse [of trees (for the sake of clarity and in my admitted ignorance of whether a copse may be of anything else,)] fence and domesticated, non-rabid animal.

I pass pastures and fields, sheepdogs and distant herds. I hear mooing and barking and bleating and farm labour.

From one field I steal a few vegetables, and an hour later in an orchard illicitly pick a few apples, wondering if actions like these affect my alignment. They must—mustn’t they? I am thieving. (The word fills me with excitement; not, I hope, because I yearn to be a thief but because in some small way I’m transgressing, rebelling, like any good teenager should.) Or is it only if I'm caught that my alignment is affected? No, there must exist some sort of omniscient being devoted to the task, an Alignment God who sees all and fiddles with values accordingly. I hope He doesn't mind me taking those apples too much. Probably, he doesn’t mind one way or another. He’s not the God of Right & Wrong. Taking a bite of one of the stolen apples, I decide that any potential hit against my alignment is worth it. I’m hungry and the apples taste delicious.

Then the grasses begin to turn yellow and brown, the dirt becomes harder, drier. There appear holes in the fences surrounding the pastures, and the fields through which I pass are increasingly empty, cropless. I witness: gaunt livestock, sometimes a broken tool or two. No people. The sheepdogs eye me with a famished disinterest. There are still copses, but their leafless trees stand jagged-limbed against a dulled sky whose sunshine is colder and milder than before. I feel as though I have crossed not only several miles but a season: from summer to autumn, and not a nice colourful autumn, but an autumn already fearing the gloom of a long and hungry winter.

In the distance, I see silhouetted against the sky a gargantuan structure that I cannot identify.

It crosses my mind I may have entered an afflicted place—by drought, disease or who knows what other misfortune—but if this is where Eduard has gone, through it, I, too, must go, and, bravely, I press on.

Randy is unusually silent. (I expected him to make a nasty comment about my self-professed bravery.) If I didn't still feel him trembling on my finger I would have thought I'd lost him, which I guess would be a victory—seeing as he's my enemy and aims to make me insane—but also kind of sad—because he's the closest thing I have to a companion on this quest. That elven ring (or was it the bread that was elven? Or was the bread leavened? My memory of that entire evening feels like fog.) must have been very bad for its mere sight to have shaken Randy this deeply. I do hope he's OK. He was polite to me yesterday; he even said please. And he wanted to meet that other ring so much. Maybe Randy's not such a bad item at all. Maybe his sarcasm is a mask, his confidence an act, his desire to drive me insane an acceptably-malicious excuse to be around me, to get to know me. Maybe he really is lonely. After all, I have no idea how long he went without a wearer before I put him on. Metals endure for centuries. Wouldn’t it just be the saddest story in the world if all Randy truly wanted, ever since he was forged, was to have a friend? Or perhaps he did have one, a best friend (let's call her Gertrude) and she was sold to an uncaring stepmother, never to be seen by Randy again. Of course, this is all speculation (would likely have been my next thought if I didn't—at that very moment—have a sack thrown over my head and a blow delivered to my temples which deprived me most fully of my naturally sharp alertness.

(Admission: I stole that last bit from Manhilde of Koranth.)

I come to in a barn. Bound.

It smells of horses and there is a horse in it, swimming before my eyes at first before solidifying into a meagre brown skin-and-bonesiness. The horse has seen better days. So has the woman standing in front of me, her face uncomfortably close to mine, as if she’s searching me for lice. She’s snapping her skinny fingers and saying, “He’s waking up, he’s waking up.” From that I deduce that there are others here—others I cannot see: ghosts, phantoms, men of invisibility, I further reason, or simply someone outside my field of blurry vision. I may not be much for combat, but I can think pretty darn good for someone with an intelligence stat of 1! (You know it’s true.) I put that thinking to use by thinking of a way of not being killed in this barn, by which I mean I put myself at greater ease by deciding that if these kidnappers wanted me dead, I’d already be dead.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

“Greetings,” the woman says to me.

“Hello,” I say.

“We know who you are.” For a second that puts her at a distinct advantage over me because I don’t know who I am, but then I remember that I’m Grom, young adventurer and retriever of short swords, and the playing field is level once more.

“And who are you?” I ask.

She introduces herself as Tabatha from the village of Thask.

“Is that where we are right now, Thask?”

“Yes.”

“In a barn?” I say.

Another voice whispers from somewhere behind me: “I told you he was smart.”

“Yes,” says Tabatha of Thask.

“May I know what you want from me—why you ambushed me in the countryside and kidnapped me?”

“Because we require your services,” she answers [and here launches into a very ponderously told bit of local history that mercifully I will synopsize for you:]

Once upon a time, there was a village called Thask. It was a farming village. Most people were farmers, and the ones who weren’t relied on the farmers to feed them. Then there came a dreadful and barren summer. The crops did not grow, the farmers went poor and the other people had nothing to eat and most of them left. In response, the remaining villagers tried praying to all the Gods and deities they knew, but they didn’t know many and the ones they did know did not respond to their prayers. So they hastily carved a small idol from a nearby rock, named it the Godhead (because their carving skills were limited, they’d carved only a head) and prayed to the Godhead for aid. To their surprise, the Godhead answered their prayers (witnesses were split between whether the answer was “Sure!” or “Why not?”) and soon there followed rain and sun and a bountiful harvest. The villagers installed the Godhead in a shrine, thanked Him and made offerings to Him, which He gratefully accepted. Then the villagers noticed something odd. The Godhead began to grow. At first only a little, but over the centuries more and more, until His physical representation loomed over the village. But the larger the Godhead grew, the taller He was and the more of the world He could see. He became interested in the world outside Thask. Although the Godhead was now too large to be moved, the villagers took to telling Him stories about faraway places. The Godhead enjoyed the stories and took a particular liking to sad ones. For a time everything was harmonious. The villagers told the Godhead sad stories and the Godhead granted them bountiful harvests in the form of magical tears that replenished the soil. Then, one day, a villager ascended to the Godhead (via stairs they had, at some point, carved into Him, to be able to reach the representations of his ears) but returned to the village despondent. The Godhead had listened to his story and rejected it on the basis that it wasn’t sad enough. The Godhead, it was discovered, had developed a tolerance to sadness. He had become desensitized. And without sad stories, he refused to grant bountiful harvests. To avoid catastrophe, the villagers began sending out advertisements (i.e. people wearing painted signs) in an attempt to find the best storytellers in the land. This proved successful. The stories these storytellers told were sufficiently sad and the Godhead was happy. His tears fell and the harvests were good. Until last year—when even the greatest storyteller in the land, Harpsichordion, failed to elicit the Godhead’s tears. For the first time since they’d carved the Godhead, the village of Thask failed to have a bountiful harvest. And now it was late summer of the year after that and the situation was grim.

(Yes, that's the short version. The much longer original went into great detail about the weather and who was present at the key events, and even had mental footnotes, some of which had footnotes themselves [toenotes?]. Later, I'll learn that Tabatha of Thask is an amateur historian, which explains her horribly detailed verbosity, but I'll probably edit that part out because it's boring, so I'm telling you now.)

When Tabatha of Thask is finished recounting, I say, “I'm sorry for the fate of your village, but I don't see how that has anything to do with me.”

“We’ve been following you since you crossed into Thask. We heard you narrating. We’re not idiots. We know you're a master storyteller, and we know you have in your narrative repertoire the saddest story in the world: the tragedy of Randy and Gertrude.”

“I don't know what—oh.” Now I remember what I had been thinking before I was kidnapped. “That's not actually a story. It was just a little bit of speculation about a ring I'm wearing. A flight of fancy. I’m sorry to tell you that this is all one big misunderstanding. I’m not a master storyteller and I can’t make the Godhead cry.”

“There's no use denying it,” says Tabatha of Thask. “We need your help—and we have the pitchforks to poke the story out of you if you don't agree to tell it willingly. Help us save Thask. Ascend to the ear of the Godhead and perform your tale.”

> QUEST: Tell the Godhead a sad story and cause Him to cry.

Whoa! A second quest?

But it’s one I can’t possibly complete. How could I, mere Grom, succeed where Harpsichordion himself had failed? (This is where Randy would normally say: you’re not gonna find the sword short either yet you took that quest.) I’m also not sure what happens if I fail the quest. “Hey,” I ask, “what if I tell the story but the Godhead doesn’t like it?”

“We’ll all starve to death and the thousand-year history of Thask shall come to a dark end,” says Tabatha of Thask.”

“I meant happen to me,” I say—before realizing how callous that sounds.

Tabatha of Thask blinks. “To you? Nothing.”

She’s not a bad person, I decide. Yes, my head aches from the blunt force applied to it, and she’s threatened me with pitchforks, but she did it for a good cause: to save her village and her fellow villagers. Wouldn’t I do the same? (Actually, I don’t know if I would, but I should and I want to be the type of person who woulds what he shoulds.) Manhilde of Koranth would. My dad probably would too. “OK, I’ll try,” I say, and:

> QUEST ACCEPTED: Tell the Godhead a sad story and cause Him to cry.

Now, who was Gertrude again?