Chapter 16
After a night of celebrating at the Golden Dew, the party woke in the morning with travel on their minds. First they had to collect Riakon’s silvered addition to his hammer. The blacksmith had done great work creating the thing to Riakon’s specifications. It covered one side of the hammer with a plate of silver.
On the other side was a metal spike that Jehb had forged in steel and then had finished it by silver plating the steel. A pair of thick metal bars held the two sides in place on the top and bottom of the hammer’s head. When attached to the hammer and locked in place to the shaft it didn’t even budge when Riakon swung it around.
Payment was exchanged and Jehb informed them their Opal Steel items would be ready in about a week and to stop back around then. Roden made sure they topped up their food and water supply before they left the merchant district of Coastall. By midmorning, the group had everything they needed to head out to track down a werewolf.
It didn’t take long for the men to grow comfortable while trekking across the vast meadows to the northwest of Coastall. Roden hadn’t noticed it before, but his companions both seemed to have relaxed significantly since leaving the city.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
It made sense when he put some thought to it. They had both grown up in a mountain monastery with little contact to other places of civilization and definitely nothing as vast or populated as Coastall.
It was moments like these where Roden found it easy to get caught up in this place. Watching Errrkkkk glide gently through the air instead of walking, or seeing Riakon toss an entire strip of jerky into his toothy maw and chomp it down like a komodo dragon in a nature documentary only reinforced the sureness of this world.
Roden had a realization while plodding along. He felt a bit dumb for not having realized it before, but this was their life. Since arriving, he had always had a sense that this was all a game. That while it all felt real, it couldn’t actually be real. Yet, here he was, having spent a month in this world with the sole goal of survival.
He had moments where he could forget and just live in that moment, but if he was being honest with himself it always felt like there was a barrier between him and the world around him. If he was going to get through this he needed to live as they lived. He needed to enjoy the little things and treat this world as real as the one that held his other life.
A thought crossed his mind. Perhaps this experience was supposed to teach him something. Perhaps his wish was more than satisfying a whim. He loved his life back home. He had a fulfilling job, amazing friends, a solid family, and a beautiful wife who filled in all the gaps left by everything else in life.
In his mind he wasn’t running from anything nor did he ever feel like he wanted to run from his life. Things weren’t always that way especially when he was younger, but he had worked hard and built a life he was proud of. Maybe that was it. Maybe, he needed to do the same here.
Maybe, he needed to build a life as Roden. Except this wasn’t a comedy, he knew he was in a tragic story. There was no happy ending in the cards for Errrkkkk and Riakon. Maybe, he could change that.