Chapter 10: Pyre, Campfire, Whisky.

I met her eyes again, we’d built up a solid bonfire and laid Ruthax within it, now all we needed was to light the fire.

“I know it’s a terrible time but I’m not lying, the demoness wants to get on your mother’s good side because she’s being chased by demon hunters.”

Luna crinkled her nose at that. “Hunters… they always bring trouble. Mother says they're a group of inept god-botherers, bringing demons into our world just so they can kill them. Never seemed sporting to me.”

I shrugged. “I didn't get off on the right foot with them either. Honestly, I only found you because one of their targets got free, found out you were missing and set out to find you"

Luna looked around, eyeing the trees as if the demoness could be watching us from the branches right now. "I feel bad for the demons getting slaughtered but I don't know if talking to one is a good idea. You know they literally eat souls to gain power right?"

I thought Merri might have said something along those lines but it had seemed kind of chill at the time, really hadn't set off any alarm bells. I wondered if she'd cast a spell on me. Seemed more than likely.

"Yeah, she didn't talk about the soul-eating thing much. Personally I don't really want anything to do with her, I just want to go on adventures and get a small house to make spell components in so that I’m not useless. Feels like I owe her a chance though”

I didn’t want to admit what those components were, I didn’t think she realised the candle had been necessary to the one and only attack I’d gotten off underground. So I guess I was a liar, even if I was only just doing it because of embarrassment rather than political manoeuvring. Luna looked me over. “I don’t know how far away you came from but houses are cheap on the frontier so you've ended up in the right place”

Houses might be cheap but they probably weren’t cheap enough for me, all I had on me was the coins I’d taken off the dead hunters, 10 gold and 15 silver. Although I had a feeling I might have a reward on the way if I brought Luna home safely.

The conversation petered out and I grabbed a few more armfuls of dead leaves while Luna stripped dried bark from logs and brought it over as tinder.

With that done I struck my firelighter and touched the flame to the dried leaves, holding it there until I saw the flames begin to catch on the bark above. After that we stood in silence, watching the flames consume the corpse inside and occasionally adding logs and branches. I didn’t say a word until Luna broke the silence. “She gave me a chance, took me on even though I had just awakened my class a few months ago and was only 2nd level. She taught me how to spot mechanical traps, Scorpion Jim was teaching me about herbs, Max was showing me how to shoot a bow and Raina was going to teach me a bit of magic if I had the aptitude. I don't have much interest in magic, but I though it would be cool to one-up my big sister."

I grinned at that, I'd had some siblings back home and they were a pain in the ass alright. Luna saw my expression and grinned back a little before wrapping up her little eulogy speech.

"I didn’t know them for long but they all seemed like good people and they really didn't deserve to die that way, I wish we hadn't left their bodies behind.”

I didn’t know what to say so I held out an arm and this time she did lean on me. She still smelled of lilac and some sort of flower I didn’t recognize. We stayed like that for a while longer, watching the bonfire begin to burn through the logs, collapsing inwards on itself, covering the corpse entirely. A short time later Luna looked over at me, only a few inches from my face and asked.

“Hey, what kind of mage are you?”

Ah, here we go then, I thought.

First I deflected the question by offering a place to rest instead. Luna didn’t let me get away so easily and I brushed the question off yet again by acting mysterious which just made Luna roll her eyes at me.

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“Huh, I forgot Merrilax asked me to make a fire.”

Luna cocked an eyebrow, making the little scar whiten and stand out as she did so. “You really have a demon?”

I shook my head pedantically. “She’s a Demoness actually and I certainly don’t have her. In all honesty she might have a bit of me honestly, I think she can hypnotize me when she wants to”

Luna stepped away, putting me at arms length, not worried enough to put a hand on her sword, but sceptical enough keep her distance until I explained a little more.

“Well, I think she did something to make me a little more accepting of her… ripping demon hunters into bloody shreds in front of me”

Luna looked like she was about to punch me in the arm for a second, but she restrained herself. “Fair enough, so instead of going home to my mother you think I’m going to sit down in the woods and wait with a man I’ve never met because he says a murderous demoness sent him to find me in a cave and now she wants to meet me so she can use me as leverage against my mother?”

I nodded nonchalantly, keeping my face as straight as possible. Luna grinned mischievously. “Fine, I’ll wait but only if you come and meet my mum afterward, you’ve got a shabby look that will really get to her.”

I cocked an eyebrow “You reckon she’ll let me into that chateau of yours?”

Luna laughed. “Oh, she’ll hate it but she’ll let you in the gates. She’ll have to thank you for rescuing me after all.”

That sounded like fun, I hoped I’d get to see Luna a bit more afterwards though, hopefully on better terms and in better times.

Dismissing the thoughts of things that hadn’t happened yet I promised to come meet her mother and took Luna to my trolley-wagon. Then we walked along for a while with me pushing the wagon until we reached a little clearing far enough away from the dungeon to make a new, corpse-less fire as the sun began to set.

Once again the young noble demonstrated her willingness to help, collecting half of the firewood to show she was happy to get her own hands dirty and not let other people do things for her. She did have a bit too much fun with it at my expense though and I had to try real hard not to pay too much attention to how tight her leather trousers were, or how she’d very conspicuously pulled the laces just that little bit tighter before bending over right in front of me to pick up a comically small piece of firewood and placing it on the pile like it had been completely necessary for her to collect it.

“You done?” I tried to look unaffected out of sheer stubbornness but Luna had only to glance down to show me the lie in that act. “I’m done” She sat down on a log across from me and we shared a mix of my canned food and the bread rations that she’d brought with her. Remembering the regenerating bottle I asked Luna if she had any spare waterskins and she produced an empty whisky flask that I added the Fireball whisky to.

Once the bottle was empty I screwed the cap onto the little iron flask, handed it back to her and placed the bottle into a pocket of my greatcoat for safekeeping.

“You can hang onto that, it’s a… I guess it’s a spiced liquor from my homecountry, the bottle replenishes daily so I’m going to make sure to get as much out of it as possible.”

Luna unscrewed the cap and gently tipped the flask back until a few drops got past her lips. “That’s interesting, what do you take it with?”

I didn’t have an answer for that right away, I vaguely remembered that I had intended to drink it with Sprite or an energy drink and then play video games until I blacked out. “Milk, Coffee, and lemon-water are pretty good choices”. I improvised, hoping this world had equivalents of those things.

Luna eyed me curiously. “Where have you had coffee before? Sounds like it was common where you came from?”

Oh shit, they didn’t have coffee around here?.

“It was actually, even the lowest of peasants could have as much as they wanted to in a day, it was very cheap.”

Luna nodded her head slowly. “Interesting, we don’t really have time for luxury crops out here on the frontiers. I’ve only ever had it when the dignitary from the core is visiting us. What else do your people have?”

It turns out a lot, not all of it good. In our back and forth conversation I learned that the people of the Delacroft region had access to free medicine while a large portion of my people paid 50 percent of their wages every week for basic potions like insulin. The people of Delacroft did not typically have land of their own but they could choose to work on land owned by the Nobility in exchange for a portion of any profits, it was a situation where feudalism was better than homelessness and I couldn’t argue with that. Back and forth we went, at one point I tried to explain cars and she asked how we were using electricity on machines without causing the natural mana reaction that would normally occur, I turned that around and a little bit of questioning revealed that in this world most machines I took for granted would detonate and kill a room full of people if I tried to recreate them.

Realising I couldn't explain that I played dumb instead. “I don’t really understand the physics of it all I’m afraid.”

Luna shook her head. “Now you're lying, come on, I had to be around nobles most of my life and I spent the rest around scoundrels whenever I could. I know a lie when I see one.”

I was about to come clean about earth and the pathetic life I lead back home, when a burst of pink light caused us both to cover our eyes momentarily. The glare faded as quickly as it came and we saw that Merri had seemingly stepped out of a tree to our right. “That’s adorable, a young couple sharing liquor around a fire, getting to know each other under the stars, truly a storybook occurrence.”