Josh was currently sitting on a bed in an inn—an actual bed in a genuine inn—and practicing his skill that made feathers glow.

This was more like how adventurers should live, he decided. Camping out in the wilderness was hugely overrated.

He had managed to evade the remnants of Varian’s gang in the mist, and walked through the night and most of the next day until he was stumbling and weary with exhaustion. By that point he had been out of the woods and travelling through farmland, but he had been too tired even to look for a farmhouse, and in any case had assumed he was too scruffy and demented-looking to receive friendly treatment from farmers. He had instead found a thicket that seemed safe to sleep in, and the next morning he had woken to find the Glow skill applied to his character sheet.

By late afternoon that same day, Josh had come across a small market town with the aforementioned inn. And a market in progress.

A shopping spree had commenced. Two weeks of tramping about the woods had resulted in dirty, ripped clothing, and the shoes the Havenites had given him had been all but falling off his feet. The first thing Josh had done was find some market stalls that sold second-hand clothes, and bought himself a new outfit. There hadn’t been a great deal of choice, but he had unearthed a couple of vaguely white shirts, a padded coat of faded orange, two pairs of darned britches, some long woollen stockings, a pair of soft leather boots that were only a little too big, and a brown hat with a bedraggled feather in it. Josh had no idea what you called that kind of hat, but it looked like the sort of thing Robin Hood might have worn.

Then he had gone to the inn and found that it had a bathhouse attached to the side of it, one that was actually for washing in, not a euphemism for anything else. There, he had paid a small fee to soak gloriously in hot, soapy water for the better part of an hour.

It had almost been a religiously transcendent experience.

He had tried not to inspect the colour of the water too closely when he got out. Following that, while wearing his new clothes, he had paid a copper to a barber to shave the fuzz off his face. The barber had given him a haircut too, cropped a little more closely than Josh would have chosen, but it meant he would fit in and look like a local, not a traveller from twenty-first century Earth.

Now, when Josh looked in the little circle of polished bronze which the inn had provided by way of a mirror, he almost recognised himself.

He glowed with health, actually, for someone who had been living rough for three weeks. His skin had never been better—maybe it was all the vegetables he’d been eating and the lack of processed food—and he could see that all the physical exercise he was getting had made a difference to his figure and his muscle tone.

He had also paid a whole silver for his own room for the night, so he wouldn’t have to share.

Tonight, Josh was going to sleep in a bed. He had fallen onto it the moment the inn servant had shown him the bedchamber, and spread his arms out with utter bliss. The sheets smelled like fresh air and sunshine, the blanket of quilted woollen squares was soft and warm, and the pillow was stuffed with feathers. Josh’s head had sunk into it as if he was being caressed by a cloud.

The innkeeper had promised him a dinner of mutton and gravy with potatoes and asparagus. Josh was looking forward to sampling that shortly.

He had already decided he would stay here another night. There were only three silvers left in his money belt, but it was still heavy with coppers. Once he went back on the road he would be more cautious with Rob’s largesse, even if it meant sleeping in haylofts.

At this point, he felt he deserved every single luxury he could afford to heap on himself.

Now he held a feather between his thumb and forefinger, and infused it with Glow. For a moment nothing happened, and then, slowly, the feather looked as if it was pulling in magical pixie dust from the air, a thousand tiny glowing springles of glitter landing and nestling within the feather’s barbs. It was beautiful.

Josh felt sure the Fey Queen would have liked her bracelet much better if it had glowed like that.

In some ways, though, Glow was disappointing. The feather didn’t shine brightly enough to give off a lot of illumination, so Josh couldn’t use it instead of a candle, and, like the sigil spells, it only lasted an hour or so. It was more like fluorescence than light. Presumably at some point, when he got better at the skill, he would be able to make the effect brighter or more permanent.

He would keep practicing and see what happened.

He had gained 100 experience for making his first feather glow, which he had immediately applied. He had also received 867 experience as an assist for killing Shuriken. It was less than he had received previously, either because there were diminishing returns for killing the same player more than once, or because the moth haunt had done all the work. Or a mixture of both. He had applied that too. It had been easier the second time. Both bonuses had left him at level 9.

He had received 2,548 experience for killing Mistrz, and he still felt sick whenever he had a flashback of his arrow thudding into Mistrz’ arm. From the way Mistrz’s body had disappeared, Josh knew that in a week or two he would resurrect somewhere, and could only hope that the rest of Varian’s gang would focus on going into the mirror world, where maybe something bad would happen to them, instead of lying in wait for Mistrz at the most likely resurrection shrine.

Josh hadn’t really killed Mistrz. He’d saved him. He had to keep telling himself that.

He was still relieved that he couldn’t apply the experience for Mistrz because it would take him to level 10. It would have felt wrong to profit from it.

He tried not to think too hard about it, and instead put his glowing feather aside, and went downstairs for dinner. The inn had what it called a taproom, where local men and women drank ale, and a private parlour across the hall, where the more refined travellers dined. Josh found a small table in the taproom while he waited for his dinner, and looked around curiously. He wanted to attune his ear to the local accent as much as possible.

The town itself was full of half-timbered houses with thatched roofs, and roads that had originally been paved with cobblestones, but had long been obscured by a layer of compacted dirt and horse droppings. Earlier, the whole place had smelled strongly of horses, woodsmoke and manure, as well as cooking steam from the various food stalls, which sold roasted nuts, or pies, or sugar-glazed fruit.

After weeks alone in the peace and quiet of the woods, it had also been incredibly noisy. Every market trader had seemed to be having a conversation at the top of their voice with a customer, and those that weren't marketed their wares aggressively, catching the eyes of passersby and inviting them to inspect the goods laid out on the stalls, or remarking in an oily tone of voice about how this hat would look marvellous upon the young sir, so it would, all the ladies would faint at the sight if he would just but try it on. That had been the Robin Hood hat, and Josh had to admit, it did look pretty cool.

In amongst all this it there had been gangs of kids just running around, either scampering past with the pinched, serious faces of errand runners, or darting in between the crowds and playing games of tag and follow-my-leader, and none of the adults paying any of them a blind bit of notice.

Josh had felt safely anonymous in the crowd, but also weirdly lonely. No-one had turned around and pointed a finger at him to expose him as an outlander, though, so he must be fitting in.

At least the food at the inn was tasty. He’d assumed that mutton would be tough, but it was so tender it was falling off the bone. It was smothered in a meaty onion gravy, and served with new potatoes steamed in their jackets with springs of mint, bright green spears of asparagus, and a thick slab of bread spread with yellow butter. The meal came on an actual plate, and Josh realised it was the first plate he had come across since he had been here.

He felt it was a sign that he was getting closer towards civilisation.

After Josh had eaten, he felt suddenly uncharacteristically shy and too sleepy to fall into conversation with his fellow diners, so he made his way up to his room.

They might be advanced enough to use plates here, but apparently no-one had yet invented toothbrushes or toothpaste, so he was still going to have to clean his teeth with the chewed end of a twig and a pinch of salt, the way the Havenites had showed him.

Before dinner he’d opened his pack and spread everything around the room, to air it all out after its damp sojourn in the woods. There had been black mildew on the inside of the pack itself, so he had turned it inside out and hung it on the back of the door to dry. He checked it now, to see if he could brush the mildew off, but it was nowhere to be seen.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

That was odd.

Now that he thought about it, the black mildew had been suspiciously similar to the flattened shapes of the moths that had coated the surface of the druid’s ruined library.

Oh shit, he thought. The moth haunt.

He’d mistaken it for mildew back then too. Could a moth haunt survive if there were just a few moths left of the swarm? Would it remember its previous incarnation as Queen Halina? Would it lay book moth eggs in someone’s library and breed a new swarm?

Josh didn’t want to be responsible for a new moth haunt, particularly not in a small market town with nary an adventurer in sight, not counting himself. Maybe he could feed it a nice children’s book about cute animals or something to stop it trying to kill people.

He searched the room from top to bottom but couldn’t see any book moths. Had they escaped out of the door? After a while, he gave up, and collapsed at last into his beautifully soft, comfortable bed.

It took him a surprisingly long time to fall asleep. Part of that was the noise—the taproom was directly below his bedroom, and he could hear the voices of men carousing, as well as horses clip clopping up and down the lane, and other guests moving about the corridors. On top of that some kind of bell would strike every hour and jerk him awake just as he was ready to drop off.

When he did sleep, his dream centred on a sinkhole or cenote of some sort, one of those deep, round, bottomless pools of utter darkness, into which he was dragged willy nilly by the Fey Queen, who peremptorily ordered him to follow her, but when he tried he kept losing sight of her, and all the while there was some vast, shadowy shape, like a giant shark, that chased him wherever he went.

When he floundered out of the dream in the morning, he was wreathed in sweat, and it was a relief to wake up. Despite the late night, and the uneasy dreams, however, he felt refreshed in a way that he never had while sleeping out in the open.

He had a whole day while he didn’t have to walk anywhere if he didn’t want to. What glorious bliss.

The bell that had clanged so inconsiderately all night, he discovered, belonged to a monkish order with a monastery in the main square who, the chambermaid serving breakfast informed him, were ever so learned and had a library with nearly a hundred books in it! Fancy that! Did you ever hear of so many books in one place? But those monks was all hunched over on account of all that reading, which just went to show how unhealthy it was. On being asked, she disclosed that they were called the Order of the Paragon.

She explained all this while piling Josh’s plate high with fried bread, slivers of bacon, mushrooms, and scrambled eggs, and although afterwards Josh could hardly move, he resolved to pay a visit to the monks later on.

Maybe their shelf of a hundred books would include information about the Dreamer.

Josh hoped that the Paragon Order had nothing to do with the Church of the Common Covenant, and he also prayed that the moth haunt was still in his room somewhere and hadn’t winged its way over to the monastery to start munching on religious texts, because there was no possible way for that to end well.

Before that, though, Josh had some spell testing to do. He spent more of his precious, limited coppers on paper and ink, then returned to his room and carved himself an incredibly fine quill pen from one of his enchanted feathers.

First test—how small could he make the sigils and still have them work? Did they have to be the same size? Did the thickness of the pen matter?

He found that, as long as the penwork was fine enough, the only limit to the size of the sigil was how small he could accurately draw. The thickness of the lines did matter to an extent, but only in relation to the sigil as a whole. The size and strength of the effect must come from the elements of the sigil itself. Later, he would have to experiment with seeing how distorted he could make it. Was it just individual elements within the sigil that had to be the same relative size and thickness, or could he spread it out into its constituent parts?

Being able to draw the sigils small meant he could save a huge amount on paper, and also, he thought with intense delight, make himself the tiniest spellbook in the world. He would prick out perforations with a pin on each page so that he would be able to tear out each spell individually in order to cast it. He could hardly wait to get started, although he wasn’t sure what he would use for a cover, as they didn’t seem to have card here. Maybe little sheets of very thin wood covered in embroidered cloth? Or little scraps of leather?

Maybe he could make lots of tiny little spellbooks and sell them?

Before that, though, he needed to work out what the last two sigils did. To this end, he had acquired some pebbles, some chips of wood, some scraps of cloth, and some more feathers, and now he proceeded to cast the two unknown spells on each material type to see if he could work out what it did.

The first one he worked out was Strength. It seemed to make no difference to the pebble or the wood, but when he cast it on the cloth and the feather, both suddenly became stiffer, and refused to tear.

That was huge. Josh could make armour with that. And what would happen if he cast Strength on a knife or an arrow point?

Casting test sigils to see how small he could make them, and then Strength four times in a row in quick succession, had rendered Josh dizzy with Chi exhaustion, and by the time he had worked out the spell effect he was seeing coloured spots in front of his eyes. He made himself rest, but he had only been lying there for half an hour or so before he got bored, and decided to try casting the last spell anyway.

It was only because he had cast so much magic earlier that he realised what was happening. The last spell seemed to use no Chi, and caused no additional feelings of exhaustion. It just gave his hand a warm tingle when he used it on the second set of materials—the pebble, the wood chip, the cloth scrap and the feather. But when he tried casting it on the pebble that had already been imbued with Strength, he got a sudden rush of energy that made his hand tingle, as if he’d been given an electric shock.

He yelped and jumped, and shook his hand until the feeling went away. He tried it again, cautiously, on the strengthened scrap of cloth, and nearly whooped in joy when the cloth slumped, now stripped of its Strength imbuement, and he got the same rush in his hand again.

The last spell was Chi Siphon.

It was giving him back Chi.

That was probably the best spell yet! If he could work out how to make Strength last longer, like a day or two, he could precast it onto multiple pebbles, and then use them as Chi batteries.

That was amazing!

Josh got up and did a little dance around the room.

It had all been worth it—the week stumbling around the woods, defeating the moth haunt, the run in with Varian’s gang, the most uncomfortable few hours of his life ever lying half-submerged in water under a walkway, his desperate flight away from the sacrificial marsh.

Now he had spells, actual spells he could utilise to protect himself, and not just a skill to make feathers look pretty.

It was time to hit the library.

The monastery was one of the few stone-built properties in the market square. It had an imposing wall across the front, in which was set a stone arch over a heavy wooden gate, but the doors stood open, revealing a courtyard lined with stone benches, and decorated with bushes in planters.

Several monks stood there, dressed in the sort of brown, homespun robes that Josh would have associated with monks, and chatted with locals.

Josh hesitated, just outside the archway, but the monks had mild, friendly-looking faces and most of them had adopted a courteous listening posture towards the people they were conversing with, so Josh was emboldened to step through the gate.

The locals seemed to be asking for advice. It looked like Josh’s visit had coincided during a period when the monks made themselves available to petitioners. One local, with the ruddy skin of a man who worked out of doors, was having an intense discussion about weather patterns and crop yields, which Josh immediately zoned out of. A woman not far off was talking about whether she should allow her daughter to marry a young lad from the next village.

“So long as your families both bless the young couple, why should they not marry?” the monk speaking to her asked, smiling gently.

“Because they’re half brother and sister and they don’t know!” the woman wailed, a little too loudly. “I don’t know what to do!”

The monk started, looked around him to see who in earshot, then put a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“Oh … yes … I can see how that would pose a problem,” he said hastily. “Ah, perhaps we should go inside and discuss this further.”

And he shepherded the woman away.

“Are you here to ease your heart, lad?” a voice near him asked. It was Josh’s turn to be startled, and he turned to see a tall, slender monk standing beside him, with an amiable face, and his hands folded inside his robe.

“Um,” Josh said. “Not exactly?” He hesitated. “I was hoping to learn something.”

“Ah,” the monk broke into a beaming smile. “A scholar?”

That was a brilliant cover story. Why hadn’t Josh thought of that before?

“Yes!” he said. “Or at least, I hope to be.”

“Seeking a position at university?” the monk asked.

That was also a really good cover story.

“Yes,” Josh agreed. “I haven’t applied yet, but…” his voice trailed off.

“You don’t have a patron,” the monk guessed.

Wow, this guy was doing all the work for him.

“Not at this stage,” Josh said, trying to adopt the optimistic expression of a young scholar-to-be with potential, who would doubtless shortly have dozens of patrons queuing to offer him sponsorship.

“What is your area of study?”

Ulp, Josh thought.

“History,” he said. “From before the time of the Seven Heroes.” He had absorbed quite a lot of lore in Spiralia online. He could probably fake it.

The monk’s eyes lit up.

“Ah,” he said. “A much-neglected period in these times.”

“Yes,” said Josh. “Everyone is so obsessed with the Seven Heroes and the scourge and everything these days.” He added hastily, “I mean, that’s understandable, of course.”

The monk sighed.

“Yes,” he said. “But I feel quite strongly that we should not ignore the lessons of older times.”

“Actually,” Josh said reluctantly. “My reason for being here today isn’t to do with the pre-Heroic age. I’m afraid you will be very disappointed with my question.”

The monk twinkled.

“I will endeavour to reserve my disapproval.”

Josh launched into his prepared explanation.

“While I was travelling north, I stayed at a village where the elder told a story in a way I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t know if it was a standard telling in these parts, or if it was unique to that village. I wanted to find out more about it.”

“And what was that story, young man?”

“It was about the Dreamer,” Josh said. “And how he was the link between our world and the world of the scourge.”

The monk’s eyebrows rose.

“You should have care with your research matter, my dear boy. The Church does not look kindly upon those who seek to follow in the shoes of Tylas the Undying.”

“Oh.” Josh’s heart sank. “I’m not trying to do that, obviously! Er … because my question was really …” he hesitated again. “Has anyone ever tried to send the scourge back?”