"Dead. Bandits." John surprised himself by speaking, and stopped himself short of giving a debriefing, feeling the words already spooling themselves up in his mind. He let them fall away.
His eyes stayed on the old man, ready to drop the staff and leap backwards into a shadow walk if he made any motions. It must be his Mage Mark on the collar, and if his arcana skill dedications didn't lie about the strength of the spell, this man was somebody to reckon with. He'd been a soldier long enough to have learned that you didn't get to be a soldier long if you underestimated magic.
The old man, however, simply looked west and nodded, his face, like a landslide, collapsing into wrinkles. A frown that encompassed the entire face, Jonathon was impressed.
"Figures. You have his gear, so I assume he succeeded, at least. Follow me." The man turned, then halted, shaking his head, and turned back around, bowing slightly. "Zyet, Sage."
John returned the slight bow, which encompassed only the barest incline at the waist, going no deeper. He didn't know who this man was, or what this was about. "Jonathon, Initiate." A Sage. Interesting.
Sages had many dedications of lore, which, if it pleased Tenash, lord of knowledge, would grant inspirations of knowledge, key bits of insight into their specific expertise. Sages were also granted an innate ability to use their souls directly in an attack, bypassing the need for spells. Jonathon's own innate magical resistance would offer some limited protection against it, but it likely wouldn't end in his favor. He was inclined not to offend this man, and had a momentary regret for not bowing perhaps a little bit deeper.
Zyet didn't appear to notice or mind, simply nodding, and spinning in place to limp back away. Jonathon hesitated before following. He had nowhere else to be, and this man seemed to know what he was doing here, which was more than Jonathon could say about himself.
The trip was short, the forest abruptly going dark, as they met the treeline and the much denser brush that grew in the line of light, and then, shoving through the briars, open air. The damned road which Jonathon had been looking for.
A carriage was waiting, no horses to be seen. With a Sage, no surprise; he could likely outpace them with spells to manipulate gravity or create impulses of force. A Mage's Mark wasn't unique to the Focal school, most schools of magic had some way to create one, but the particular characteristics of the Mage's Mark on the mythril collar heavily suggested Focal magic.
Jonathon went through a mental inventory of the few Focal spells he could remember. Telekinesis? No, didn't work on heavy objects. Crush might be employed that way through artifice, but unlikely, the carriage wasn't heavy enough.
Could the man have been made enough to grant the carriage sapience? Zyet motioned for him to get in, and Jonathon did; all the other Focal spells he could remember at the moment wouldn't work on an inanimate object, most of them using sympathetic links of one kind or another to influence other living things at a distance.
Jonathon had barely noticed the exterior of the carriage as he had gotten in, too caught up in the absence of horses; the interior of the carriage, however, got his attention. The floor was smooth and black; the sound of his footsteps on it made it clear it was wood, but he couldn't identify where one plank began or ended. The benches on either side of the carriage rose abruptly from the floor, a sharp ninety degree angle, and then another sharp ninety degree angle from that. Also black, also smooth, no seams to be seen.
The benches met the front and back of the carriage in another square corner. The front and back walls were flat, black, and smooth, rising to the ceiling. Also black, flat, and smooth. The far side of the carriage was also, no windows to be seen. He stepped into what would be, except the benches on either side, a midnight black cube. He turned, blinking at the door that Zyet closed in his face. Hadn't he seen windows on the outside - but no, it was also flat and black, and as the door closed, the light winked out.
Jonathon felt along the wall of the door that had just been closed. No handle, no seams. He had barely finished searched before the carriage suddenly lurched into motion, and Jonathon found himself sprawling backwards, head colliding with the bench.
He pulled himself into it, considering shadow walking out again. But, once he realized that was an option, he relaxed. Well, he mentally relaxed; the bench wasn't comfortable at all. He moved down off of it and sat on the floor of the carriage instead; no much more comfortable, but the bench had been too narrow to sit comfortably upon.
Jonathon focused on the sense of motion, curios to see what manner of impetus drove the carriage. He didn't feel like he was falling forward - indeed, he had sprawled in the opposite direction - so it wasn't a gravity spike. Elemental had a few wind-based options, but he couldn't hear ...
Huh. He couldn't hear anything. It was absolutely silent. That was ... weird. And uncomfortable. So some kind of sound-proofing. Wind was an option; he really couldn't feel any mana. The area around him just felt ... empty, of magic of any kind. John considered for a moment, then attempted to relax.
The trip was boring. He was in a black cube, couldn't guess at how far or fast he was traveling - he at least had an idea of direction, no new impulses of momentum suggesting that they were continuing down a straight road in the direction of the city of Erille.
For lack of anything to do but wait, John practiced meditation. For a self-proclaimed Initiate, he had scant practice at it.
Momentum shifted; they were heading southeast.
Momentum shifted; east again.
A sequence of shifts roused John from his meditation, which had at some point turned into a nap. Another half hour, perhaps, passed, and the door opened, the sudden bright green startling in its brightness. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, squinting as the old man just smiled at him.
"We have arrived. Welcome."
They were on a gravel path, surrounded by a vast, apparently perfectly flat field of manicured grass. The forest was visible in all directions, so distant that when John lifted a hand as far from him as it could reach, the tree line, a dark green boundary between the clear blue sky and the light green grass, was slightly less than the height of his thumbnail.
The road the carriage was on made a straight line back into the trees, up to a wrought iron gate, before which they had halted, perfectly centered in a wrought iron fence with stone foundations. The fence ended, twice John's height up, in simple spikes; the distant corners were made up of gray stone columns, as were the sides of the double gates.
Beyond the gates was a structure of points, swirls, and odd angles, painted in a a wide variety of interpretations of dark gray. Four towers rose, ended in a lighter dark gray conical points, forming a rectangle or square, it was hard to tell. The structure of the rounded towers was built of a particularly dark gray, and the wall stretching before him, dotted at irregular intervals and heights with black squares bounded by slightly less black shutters, was perhaps wood, the lightest of the dark colors.
The upper line of the front wall was not flat, the roof a haphazard jumble of heights, all mostly horizontal but forming jagged teeth of which no two lined up. The roof was occasionally visible through gaps in the teeth, the same lightest shade of dark gray as the conical tips of the towers, made of irregularly sized and shaped tiles of, perhaps, slate.
The large arched double doors of the building looked sized to permit the carriage through, and opened up onto a porch with a multiply-gabled roof, supported by apparently randomly placed support cylindrical columns of yet another shade of dark gray, with no consistency of diameter. The gables themselves had no consistent angle or height, and the porch reached from one tower to the other.
It was ... ugly. And the bedraggled, half-dead columns of trees forming a sort of canopy on either side of the path from the gate to the house didn't help. They, also, weren't of consistent height, as if somebody had only bothered to care for them intermittently and inconsistently, an observation supported by their sorry state. The grass within the gates was patchy and brown, with irregular blotches of dirt visible.
John turned slowly around, his attention only briefly caught by the fact that the carriage doors did, in fact, have windows, and he could see through the damned thing, before it focused on Zyet, who was looking up at the ghastly construction.
"What ... what ... " Leonard looked his way, and back to the estate, lips curving in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Indeed. Welcome, as I said, but not to what, to which I must make hasty amends - welcome, Jonathon Eucole, to the Ingress Estate."
John only looked at him. Had he given the man his family name? The air had developed a chill that had little to do with the setting sun. As they stood there, the gate slowly opened with dual squeals that sounded more like stricken pigs than metal. Hell no. Hell fucking no. He found himself walking forward anyways, compelled to keep up with the old man's strident steps.
The entry hall was enormous; thirty carriages could be parked on the perfectly white floor, polished mirror-smooth, reflecting light from the myriad misplaced mirrors, set at odd intervals and heights, high above them; John looked up at the vaulted roof, from which were suspended dozens of lanterns, all lit with a golden light he couldn't see the source of. Again, none of the damned lanterns were set at the same height, and they weren't set to any recognizable pattern.
But otherwise the interior wasn't actually that bad; the enormous room was made up of light brown wood and what John guessed was white marble, although he'd never seen marble so uniform of shading. It was elegant, to John's eyes, although he knew he had little experience of such things. More the pity about the sensibilities of the architect, for the craftsmen who had apparently followed the orders of the madman had clearly been masters of their own crafts.
The walls were of what was recognizably wood, to his relief, and the planks were even lined up with each other. There was a balcony wrapping around the room on the second, third, and fourth floors, with doors set in the walls at regular intervals. The door frames and balustrade were carved wood, a slightly darker brown than the walls. He couldn't quite make out the carvings of the second floor, but turning in a slow circle to look up at the arched door frame behind him, they appeared to be scenes of people interacting.
His slow circle brought him back around; there were three other doors on the ground floor. Otherwise the room was empty. Zyet stepped beside him, his cane tapping lightly on the floor, smiling around.
"It's nicer inside. Come, I'll show you to your room." John turned to his strange companion, feeling a frown tugging at his lips, and not feeling any desire to suppress it.
"Hold up. What am I doing here, why was Leonard's mission a success?" Zyet's face wrinkled up in what was probably intended as a smile.
"Sir, you are the owner. That was indeed Leonard's mission. I must say he expected to retire afterwards, but, well, that was never in the cards." John tried to imbue his stare with the essence of his first sergeant's skill; that woman could stare a wall into submission. Zyet simply looked back at him. John gave in first.
"Right. I'm the owner. Why not." What did that even mean? Who cleaned this place, anyways? Did he have to pay staff? He could maybe afford his meals for the next week, that wasn't happening. Maybe there was money somewhere in here to pay for that. Wait, this was an estate, he vaguely recalled that estates earned income ... somehow. He hadn't seen any farms in the front of the ... manor? Maybe they were behind it. Right, staff. "Who works here?"
"Me, sir."
"Right, but who else?"
"Me, sir."
John looked back around the hall. He wasn't sweeping this floor. Who needed this much floor? For one room? His mind reached for the dimensions of the place he had seen from the outside, trying to identify how much more room there could be.
"If there will be nothing else, sir, follow me to your rooms." Feeling thoroughly out of sorts and overwhelmed - he'd been comfortably wandering the wilderness just a few hours ago - John followed as Zyet began tapping his way across the wide foyer, towards the door on the right. He'd figure this out after resting a spell.
John suddenly noticed that the Sage's limp was gone, had been gone for some time - but it was just one more thing, and there were currently too many things. He reluctantly let his attention drift on, gaze sweeping around his surroundings.
He followed Zyet down a winding series of too-narrow corridors, through doors apparently at random. The hallways were narrow, but tall, with open windows randomly appearing above them, too high for him to reach, intermixed with the golden lanterns to help light the spaces.
The walls were the same pale planking, and closer, John saw that the wood was richly textured, albeit not in straight lines but whirls and loops. Another oddity in the capital of odd things.
There were paintings scattered on the walls. John barely noticed that they weren't placed at regular heights at this point, but did notice the rich gold plating of their frames. Their subjects were mostly people dressed in finery, but there were some landscapes dotted amongst them. John deliberately stopped paying attention to them the first time he noticed that one of the landscapes featured trees with eyes. Right.
Otherwise, and other than the doors with scenes of people carved into the frames, the corridors were plain. There were no carpets, no other ornamentation, not that there would be room for any ornaments. John stopped tracking the turns they took after the fifth left turn in a row. Right. He didn't open any of the closed doors on the path, suspecting he would regret doing so.
"Here we are, sir." Zyet stopped quite suddenly and turned to him, pushing a door that looked like all the others inward. John looked at him, and stepped into the ordinary-looking room. "Call for me if you need anything." John hadn't finished turning back to Zyet before the door closed in front of him. Right. Okay.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
He turned slowly back around, looking over the furnishings. A four-poster bed, to his right, voluminous and sheer cloth draped around the side of the thing like a cobweb. No, no, they were just privacy curtains, the cobwebs were just his state of mind. What the hell was he doing here?
The bed filled up an alcove in the T-shaped room, again with a tall vaulted ceiling, along with two double-doored armoires of a rich red wood, a material uniform across the furniture here, stationed on either side of it. There were doors to his left and right, with plain frames for a change, and three windows opened to blue skies set high in the flat wall in front of him, which stood out sharply for the the fact that all three were the same height, and spaced exactly evenly. The sight of that made him relax a little, releasing a mental strain he had been unaware of.
The alcove on his left was a ... study, he guessed. A full bookshelf reached nearly to the window, hundreds or thousands of books filling its shelves. The corner away from the windows held a tiered desk, the upper tier an assortment of shelves full of bottles, a cup filled with feathers - quills, he guessed - and neat stacks of paper. The chair in front of the desk was plain, albeit, like all the furniture he examined, made of the same rich red wood as the armoires. There was also an upholstered seat with a side table positioned between the bookshelves and the desk, and a shorter circular table set in front of it. Alright.
The door to the left opened into a square room, whose central feature was a large circular copper bathtub centered in it. There were also benches on either side of the room, above which were hooks suspended from which were white cloth, towels perhaps. The steam rising in wisps from the hot water filling the tub was a little strange, but downright normal compared to everything else. John closed the door and moved to the other.
A privy. Right. The toilet, a white bench set into the wall with a hole, was nice. There were three basins of water on one side for washing up, and another rack of cloth. Alright. Normal.
He closed this door, as well, moving into the room, looking around it again, feeling the strain of the past half hour. This place was, apparently, his. He really didn't want it, right now. The five left turns had really cinched it for him.
He was, however, far more terrified of Zyet's response if John told him he didn't want the place. Something about the man gave him an ache in his jaw, a toothache out of place. John didn't want to deal with any of this, but he wanted to deal with Zyet even less. He'd sneak out later.
A bath sounded nice. At least these rooms felt normal.
The bath was nice. He was appalled to discover that the tears in the cowl and the cape Leonard had left weren't there anymore when he started getting dressed again, and that the bloodstains in his robe were similarly missing. He put the collar on the bed - the Mage's Mark was likely how Zyet had located him in the first place - and opened the door into the passages outside.
There was a door across the hall he was pretty sure hadn't been there before. Also, there were windows above that door, open to the skies. He started trying to judge the distance between these windows, and the windows in his own room, but quickly halted that line of thinking, starting down the hallways.
Three right turns later he came to an open door.
Of course it was his room, the collar still sitting on the bed.
Six more attempts, in different directions, following different turns, and he found himself back at his room six different times. John fell into the upholstered chair in the reading nook, staring around the space. He was dead. He had died, the bandits or wyverns had killed him, and he was trapped in Artra's domain for all eternity.
No, maybe the lord of war had relinquished his soul when he had abandoned the arts of war, and he was in ... whose realm? Elder's? Surely Halei's realm wouldn't be ... this. Tenash's, either, although there were a lot of books on that bookshelf. Maybe Tenash had his soul, and he was being punished for his erstwhile pursuit of knowledge as only the lord of knowledge could punish someone.
Jonathon did not want to open any other doors. He looked at the bed. Tired, but he didn't feel like sleep, either. A book? His gaze flickered over the massive bookshelf. A book. He got up and started examining the selection, relieved to see titles he recognized after a few minutes of searching. Nothing from his studies of invocation, of course, but mundane fiction. He picked out a title he had enjoyed a few years ago, and sat down to read.
He was startled when he reached the last page. He looked to the windows, feeling a vague worry that the shade of blue hadn't changed at all since he had started reading, although he wasn't certain. He wasn't hungry, either, in spite of ... how long had he been reading? He picked up the book, feeling the weight of it in his hand. It had taken him two days to get through the last time he'd read it, back in a war camp, soldiers trading entertainment as if they were the richest gold, but he'd had other things to occupy his time, like the bannerman of the next camp over. He caught himself short of drifting into memories, and shook his head.
Four hours? Six? The sky should have changed. He stared at the windows, trying to decide whether or not the color was different. Maybe it wasn't the sky, maybe somebody had just enchanted it to glow blue, to give the feeling of looking up at the sky? John closed one eye and then the other, trying to get a feel for distance, if it was a surface. No, that was the sky, he was pretty sure.
He tried the hallways again, and was quite surprised when he saw the foyer ahead, moving towards it with a sense of elation that cracked, an avalanche of emotion crushing the momentary joy at the possibility of escape, as he saw the balustrade.
He was on the third floor, looking down at the white floor below him. He circled it slowly with a sinking feeling, confirmed after one loop. The arched door was gone. This was either a different room that looked startlingly similar to the foyer he had entered in, or the door that had led into this terrible construction had disappeared. All the doors were rectangular, there wasn't an arch to be seen.
He turned back to the way he had come in, and wasn't entirely surprised to see a closed door. There had been no door coming here, the hallway had just opened up into the foyer. He opened the door, and moved back into the hallways.
John explored, if you could call it exploring, when he refused to open any doors in the hallways and just walked through the hallways, choosing intersections at random. He occasionally found the foyer - or perhaps a foyer - but none had arched doors. It wasn't terribly surprising, only a little disturbing, that he found himself on different levels each time.
He did find himself on the ground floor once, but each door had opened into hallways. He chose one at random. The bedroom passed occasionally, almost exactly as he had left it. The notable difference was that the towels he had used to dry off after his bath had disappeared from the floor, fresh dry towels hung up to fill each hook.
Shadow walking through the walls terrified him more than opening any more doors. He had considered it once, briefly, before imagining what the space outside the hallway might contain.
He kept walking, until the ringing of a bell behind him sent him to the floor, tripping over his own feet in a sudden need to dash away. John lay there for a few seconds before rolling himself slowly over onto his back.
Zyet stood, expressionless, holding a plate covered in a metal dome in one hand, the other holding the cane vertical against the ground. "Dinner, sir." John didn't see a bell.
John ate at the desk in his room, surprised at how hungry he was. The plate had heaping portions of some kind of mashed yellow vegetable, which was slightly sweet and very salty, a large boiled helping of some kind of bird, to judge by the flavour, and salted boiled leaves interspersed with what John guessed from the texture was salt pork, except it was unexpectedly bland. None of the flavours were exceptional, but it was filling, and John had finished off portions which would have fed him for a day or two on the road.
Setting the fork down on the empty plate, he looked up to the windows again, relieved to see that the sky through them had darkened to gray. It felt like he had spent days in here, his sense of time as utterly defeated as his hope for a quiet escape.
His eyes moved over the room again, halting on the bed. Something was off. He examined the blankets and pillows, plain white. They were fine. The curtains themselves also looked the same. The bed was still made.
Ah. The mythril collar was missing. John looked around the room, and stood, moving to the armoires, checking one, and then the other. They were full of spun silver clothing, and the shelves had black leather boots with silver buckles, polished and well-crafted but otherwise plain. His heart sunk a little bit as he picked up one of the boots, and realized it would fit. Right. He put it back, checking again. The collar was gone.
He closed the armoire door and turned, before a thought occurred to him. He reached up, fingertips quivering. It was on him again. John pulled the curtain aside, and sat in the bed, his mind fuzzy, feeling drained and empty, a single question repeating itself in his thoughts.
What?
He woke with a start, sitting up sharply and reaching to his side for a halberd that hadn't been there for years, his hand only catching soft fabric. Looking around, dazed, at the enormous and comfortable bed, it took his mind a few seconds to catch back up, as he wondered where the camp was, then what had happened to his simple cot, and finally wound through the previous day's events.
What.
He pushed the curtain aside, moving to the privy, although it took two tries, as the first room he tried to go into was the room with the copper bath, water still steaming. Once he was done in the privy, he went back into the room with the copper bath, and stripped again, sliding into the hot water with an utterance at the heat.
This was relaxing, at least. He sank down until the water was just under his chin, trying, and mostly succeeding, not to think. He closed his eyes, and let the heat and water work its subtle magics on him, his myriad unnamed anxieties slowly slipping away.
He woke a second time that morning to the unpleasant sensation of water in his nose, jerking himself back upright after a bit of thrashing to get his bearings, and get a hand on the side of the tub. Right. No sleeping in this absurdly large tub.
John toweled himself off again, dressed again - reluctantly putting the mythril back on, as he found the idea of putting it on far less taxing than it appearing on its own again - and stepped back out into the hallways. Today, he'd investigate the other rooms.
The first door opened up into a library; he had thought himself inured to this place, but he was still taken aback by the vast scope of the room. Perhaps as fourth as large as the foyer, and about as tall, enormous bookshelves rose above him, each possessed of a ladder set into tracks. The bookshelves were of variable height - some reaching nearly to the suspended golden lanterns, others only two or three times taller than himself. Each shelf was more like a tower, and he circled one; it formed a square, each of the four sides holding books and a ladder. The towers were scattered throughout the room, without order; they weren't even aligned to the same angle, and certainly didn't form neat rows.
In the center of the room was a long table, with benches on either side. Unlit candles ran down the center, each burnt to a different height. The shutters over the windows here were closed, light filtering through the wood, illuminating dust that floated in the air, motes of light dancing about above him.
The first title he examined was in a language he didn't recognize, simultaneously too angular and too curved; not merely foreign, but of alien sensibilities. As were the next five. The sixth, he could read. "A Compendium of the Known Offworlder Species". Nope, he wanted nothing to do with this. John replaced the book and left the library, shutting the door very firmly behind him. It barely made a noise as it closed.
Alright. He breathed slowly, in and out. He was a competent person, he had survived battle, he had survived at a school for invocationalists - he could deal with a damned cursed castle, or whatever this accursed place was supposed to be. He stretched out his mind, feeling for ... ah. He shut down his mana sense, hard, which was screaming at him. Nope, he wasn't going to deal with that.
Alright, he had picked up some psionic abilities. Aether Arrows wouldn't be much use without something to kill, but maybe Bend Space would do something. He concentrated; the range of his skill wasn't great, but it cost him nothing but effort. The far end of the hallway, a T-intersection, was suddenly directly in front of him.
Well, that worked. He let the effort go, ignoring the sudden sweat it had produced. He tried again, focusing on the space to the side of his bedroom, the doorway still in front of him, trying to bring it into the hallway.
John picked himself up off the floor, trying to still the shaking of his hands, and the incoherent shouting in his mind. Right. None of that now. He was very glad he hadn't tried to shadow walk through any walls here. His eyes moved down to the pool of - what color was that - liquid at his feet. Not blood. Probably. Maybe. He turned and walked the other direction.
The next door opened into a larger version of the study in his bedroom; the windows here were slightly askew, but closer to the normal of his bedroom than the random placement he had seen in most of the rest of this ... place. The books - the T-shaped room was full of them - were even a normal selection of fiction and history. One of the side rooms here was a storage room, full of bottles of ink and quills, as well as stacks of paper that represented years of his salary as a soldier.
The other side room was bare and empty, gray stone walls which were somewhat startling after the wood paneling everywhere else. The ceiling was low, and also stone. A matched set of circles was embedded in both ceiling and floor, iron rings hammered into a circular groove in the stone. Right. That was more like this place. John moved on.
The next room was a library again, the question of whether it was the same one was something he carefully ignored, then a different bedroom. He knew it was different because it had the skewed windows, and the fabric in this room was green. Even the towels in the bathroom. The bookshelf was also mostly empty.
Another bedroom, this one in blue, and either the same or a different study, and he found himself in the foyer once more, on the second floor. Shadow walking took him down to the ground floor, and he looked around.
Hey. The arched door! John dashed for it, opening it to the blessed sight of the bedraggled trees and wrought iron ... the skies were cloudy. He turned, looking up at the blue skies visible through the window. Right. John closed the door to the manor, and dashed madly down the porch, and then down the path to the gate.
And ... kept running. Trees passed. He watched them pass, carefully tracking one. The gate remained in the distance. Slowing, then halting, he turned, looking at the porch which he was two steps away from. Right. John started walking backwards away from the porch, counting the steps as he moved away from it.
Forty steps away, he stopped. The manor had stopped retreating, trees had stopped passing into his view. He walked back, reluctant to move closer, but wanting to know. Twenty steps. Alright. John turned again, bending space. The gate jumped forward. John stepped through the warped air, and was halfway to the gate. He bent space again, and stepped right up to the gate.
He couldn't bend space past the gate. Not entirely unexpected. John shadow walked through it. Or rather, he shadow walked directly into it, his face colliding with the wrought iron, sending him stumbling backwards, clutching at his eyebrow, which he had somehow led with. No blood, at least, although he expected it to bruise.
John shadow walked upward, instead, halting only at the last instant as he realized that, while he had the range to get up to the top, he'd impale himself on the spikes if he attempted to leap back into mundane space. He fell back to the ground as the power ended, landing in a crouch.
Okay then. Brute force.
The grown opal on the staff had cracked. He had beaten the wrought iron with the enchanted weapon, the enchantment fluffing off it without apparent harm to the gate. He had punched - he could theoretically break rocks with his punches, but had never tested this - kicked, tried to bend the iron. It didn't give.
Mana senses gave him nothing except the uneasy feeling that this wasn't actually a gate, and the fence wasn't actually a fence. He hadn't pressed further on that front for fear of learning something else. He walked past the line of trees into the dead and dying grass, briefly considering digging. Dread of what he'd discover stayed him.
Instead, he walked the perimeter of the fence. Judging by the sun, it took him two or three hours to walk it, returning to the path leading up to the entrance he had started at.
It was a square, and it was a lot larger than it looked. Than it should be. The horizon didn't move properly, and if he watched the grass outside the square, it moved slower than the grass inside. Spacial distortion, not ... entirely surprising, given everything he'd seen. The square enclosed by the fence was bigger on the inside. Much bigger.
On the far side of the manor had been a orchard, the trees all having the same withered, half-dead look that the trees on the path had, but bearing fruit. He'd stopped approaching when the smell of rot had hit him, worse than any battlefield. He also hadn't approached the five or six fields of vegetables, the orchard having put him firmly off exploring the food here.
There had, however, been a pen of large, dumb birds, gray-feathered, and surprisingly ordinary on approach. Perhaps a hundred of the things, pecking and scratching at the bare ground, with a large, rectangular wooden shack, which smelled of mundane foulness. They were fat, not malnourished. The source of the meat, hopefully. He didn't particularly want to think about the vegetables he had eaten.
The sides of the manor had the same piecemeal, mismatched look as the front, but there were statues lining the base of the wall where the porch sat on the front. John had looked at them just long enough to decide he didn't want to examine them any more closely. Too many thumbs for the number of hands.
He sighed, looking at the gate, and back to the manor. He'd decided, on the walk, that it was a manor, if for no other reason than that, apart from the four towers, it didn't actually look like a castle.
Well. Might as well. He started walking back up the path, feeling more resigned than anything else. Not like he had any other plans, after all.