Chapter 6
A commotion from the outside woke Alsen up. No light outside save for the moon, but a whole lot of noise. People shouted, screamed, and some doors slammed open.
He got out of bed, happy for the sleeping robe he bought yesterday, and walked to the window.
Everyone outside was pointing towards the sky. He looked up.
In the sky shone a tight formation of six stars.
The same one that announced the extinction of magic on his home world. The same one he saw on the spiral.
Well, fuck.
He closed the window and went back to sleep. The noise made falling asleep annoying, but he had a few meditations to help with that, the first one of which solved the issue.
Morning found him still asleep when Luna landed back in the room. Right, he’d forgotten she slept on the roof. He didn’t lock the window, so she just needed to push it in, which she had clearly managed. “Morning!” she almost shouted.
He rubbed his eyes. Ah, damn it, sleeping in bed was so much better than anything else. Also, having a roof above his head helped with not getting woken up by sunlight. He grunted a greeting.
“It was quite the ruckus last night, wasn’t it?”
With another grunt, he rolled on the bed, reaching for a fresh set of clothes. He did somewhat wash the old clothes in the cauldron last night, though having no detergent ensured he couldn’t succeed all that much.
Luna just rolled up her sleeping bag and fixed it to the top of her backpack. She put it on, watching Alsen get ready.
He didn’t hurry. “So, now comes the question,” he said. “We have enough money to travel separately, should we desire to. Would you prefer to travel alone or with me?”
Her smile vanished from her face. “Depends. What do you want to travel for?”
“The six-star formation that shone in the sky last night was the same as in the temple, and—”
“I recognized that.”
“And from what reportedly happened in my world. About fifty years after that, magic started disappearing from our world. A century after that, almost nothing remained. The stars announce, for whatever reason, the end of magic in the world that sees them. Last time, I wasn’t born when it happened.
This time, I will investigate it, see what it means and why precisely it announces the end, and see if I can do anything to stop it. ”
Luna’s smile returned. “Why? If it takes fifty years, we’ll both be old geezers by the time anything starts happening. Why bother?”
He snorted. A practical approach. “There was this old philosopher in my home world whose most famous quote was that we mirror the world, and also the world mirrors us. That if we change ourselves, we change the world with it. Or, as we like to shorten it, be the change you want to see in the world.
“I’ve thought about that ever since I got here. I am not who I was in my previous life. All my grudges, anger, frustrations, depression, and history have no meaning here. I get to choose who I am in this life, so I choose to be the man who is trying to help the world.”
Luna nodded. “I have a similar story from my own life. My… something like a father, James, was once pursued by this group of hunters. There were about thirty, twenty-five mercenaries among them. They had no hope of ever finding us. But James decided to teach me a lesson and went out of his way to intercept them and to wipe them out. As he stood among the thirty corpses, he told me to remember that moment. If he chose to ignore them, they would have lived, returned to their families, and lived on. Since he chose to kill them, he not only made it impossible, but also set their children to become the next generation of hunters. One day, he was going to kill them too.”
Alsen’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a rather strange lesson.”
“I think his point was that even small actions we take towards the world and others have a far-reaching impact.”
“Killing thirty people isn’t a small action.”
“It is for James.” Luna stretched her neck, joints popping.
“Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I get where you’re coming from.
I mean, it’s na?ve, childish, a bit stupid, but James would respect it, so I’ll respect it.
My goal is to return to my home world, obviously, as I’ve got a few too many people I care about in there.
But I’m sure I wouldn’t survive the journey unless I find a way to completely heal my soul first. So, that’s my intermediate goal…
” her eyes watered up. “Which might well be impossible, so I’ll be happy to travel with you, provided you promise to help me heal my soul when the opportunity presents itself. ”
Alsen nodded. “We have an arrangement then. It would be the pinnacle of hypocrisy from me to set out to help the world and start by ditching the person straight next to me. Let’s go have breakfast.”
They left the room.
The common room of the inn buzzed with nervous conversation.
Every table hosted a different theory about what the stars meant.
Divine punishment. A blessing from forgotten gods.
An omen of war. The return of some ancient evil.
The symbol of the harbinger of the thousand-faced God.
Too many theories, one worse than another.
Alsen and Luna took a lone table near the wall. The serving girl brought them bread and boiled eggs. Dark circles hung under her eyes, but she still found the energy to brush against Luna.
Luna pushed the eggs around the table. “There’s no meat inside the eggs, is there?”
Alsen chuckled. “Most likely not.” He started peeling his eggs.
Luna drew her dagger and cut an egg in half. She scooped the insides with her finger straight into her mouth.
They ate in silence, displeasure radiating from Luna. From what Alsen heard at the other tables, nobody mentioned the spiral or any related religion.
Breakfast was prepaid as part of the room’s cost. When the barmaid came, Alsen asked, “Sorry, but can we find the town’s archivist somewhere?”
“Sure, it’s old Corwin, I think… He lives on the same street as Merrick’s. You know Merrick’s, right? Of course you do. It’s farther down that street, the house with the uneven roof. You’ll recognize it when you see it.”
“Thanks.” He put a gold coin on the table, which she promptly swiped. They left, heading for the archivist.
Once they left the inn, Luna started humming again. In the city, that didn’t matter at all to Alsen, plus he had started getting used to it.
Luna spotted the house first.
It had a weirdly uneven roof. The front garden had gone wild, weeds climbing over a fence that was more suggestion than barrier.
They invited themselves to the garden and knocked on the main door.
A woman answered their knock. She was perhaps fifty, with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a practical bun and tired eyes, a result of too many sleepless nights. Her hands were stained with ink. “Morning, travelers, what brings you to us?”
Alsen smiled. “We are here about the stars. From what I understand, Corwin, the archivist, lives here, and there is something we need to discuss with him.”
The woman’s expression flickered. Something between hope and worry. “My husband’s not here. He went to the Oak Library a few days ago and hasn’t returned yet. You should be able to find him there, or on the way.”
Luna stepped forward slightly. “We aren’t local, so how do we get there?”
“You start by heading to Vellhorn, then turn right by the lake. Into the forest, turn north at the Lass, and the path will take you to the library.”
“What’s the Lass?” Alsen asked.
“You really aren’t local.” The woman chuckled, but it was without mirth. “It’s a tree that looks a bit like a young woman.”
“Thank you,” Alsen said.
The woman nodded. “Look along the road, please. My husband usually takes three days before he returns. It has been five, and he isn’t back yet. I’m worried about him.”
And so, a couple of adventurers looking for him were exactly what she needed. That made Alsen smile once more. “We will.”
They headed out. But immediately on the street, they stopped, because they hadn’t asked which way led to Vellhorn.
“Let’s look for a cartographer,” Alsen said. “We need a map.”
“Yep.”
That turned out not to be a difficult find.
Though on the way, Alsen realized this town entirely revolved around adventurers.
All the shops he saw were adventurer-focused.
The blacksmith advertised new magical weapons.
A tailor’s sign promised enhanced gambesons.
Aside from Merrick’s Oddities and the general adventuring store, they also had a cartographer, a shoemaker specializing in long-distance travel boots, a high-end traveling clothes tailor, the inn they slept in, and an alchemist.
What he didn’t see were any normal shops.
Like a bakery, or a butcher’s, or a furniture carver.
Those must have been away from the center, where adventurers didn’t go.
The town also looked much smaller than he had thought originally.
The center looked like that of a town, but the rows of houses only stretched about ten houses deep in each direction, with generous space around each house.
No more than a few hundred people lived here, if even that many.
They entered the cartographer’s shop, which Alsen quickly reclassified in his mind as the map-seller. The maps had nothing in common with what he would expect of a cartographer, and everything to do with selling pretty maps to dumb adventurers.
The maps had a painfully selective level of detail, where entire swaths of land were ignored as the author apparently deemed them unimportant for adventurers.
He got into the queue with Luna. As they waited, Luna leaned toward him. “Is it just me, or is all of this garbage?” She said it a little too loudly, so she earned a few angry looks, especially from the salesman behind the counter.
“Not just you,” Alsen whispered.