Chapter 12
Vellhorn sprawled before them in an absolute mess. No one ever even tried to make it appear organized.
No walls. No gates. No checkpoints or guards or watchmen or anything that could be called security. The road simply widened, buildings multiplied, and suddenly they were walking through streets crowded with merchants, laborers, and the occasional adventurer.
An utter disappointment, as far as Alsen was concerned.
He imagined many things, but not… this. It was all so mundane and uninteresting that he wanted to scream.
All that traveling to reach an oversized village, just with some more complex houses.
After days of marching through forests and farmland, he expected the city at their center to be a proper city, with a wall, a castle, towering spires, and some architecture.
Something, anything, worthy of being called a major city.
“Yep,” Luna remarked, voice slightly desperate. “There really has never been a war here. Like, ever. This can’t even be sieged because there’s nothing to siege.”
“Oh, no,” Alsen said with every bit of sarcasm he could muster. “You won’t be able to join a mercenary band. How terrible.”
“I know, right?” She chuckled. “My new life is ruined already.”
He chuckled.
They walked deeper into the city. The streets finally turned into ones made of cobblestone, somewhat maintained, with drainage channels running along the sides.
People went about their business with the tired efficiency of those who had long since stopped expecting anything to change.
Merchants hawked their wares. Children ran between adults’ legs.
A woman argued with a butcher over the price of pork.
Normal. Mundane. As if the world hadn’t been conquered by dragons thirty years ago.
Then Alsen saw the dragon.
Absurdly large, the crimson beast lay curled among what looked like hills made of gold coins.
Red scales gleamed like fresh blood in the sunlight.
Its body stretched longer than several city blocks, tail wrapped around a gold hill, wings folded against flanks that rose and fell with slow, rumbling breaths.
The pile of gold beneath it defied comprehension. How many golden coins did it take to make a hill out of them? How about four hills?
The coins weren’t particularly thick, so he figured he stared at easily a billion golden coins. That had to take years to even bring and pile up.
Luna wheezed. “Well, that’s a lot of gold.”
“That’s a gross understatement.”
“We paid a hundred gold for a map. Jobs on notice boards offer single-digit rewards. That farmer nearly had a stroke over five coins.” Alsen pointed at the dragon’s hoard. “That’s easily a billion coins. What the fuck is gold even worth?”
Luna squinted at the distant pile. “Depends on how much of it you have.”
They stood there, watching the dragon sleep on more wealth than entire kingdoms had possessed.
A merchant pushed a cart past them, barely sparing the scene a glance.
Two children played some sort of ball game in the street, their shouts echoing off buildings while a creature that could incinerate them all lounged a quarter mile away.
The dragon shifted. Its massive head rose, jaws parting in a yawn that revealed teeth longer than many houses were tall. A pigeon that had been perched on a golden goblet took flight.
The dragon’s eye tracked the bird with lazy disinterest. He huffed, releasing a short burst of flame. It turned the pigeon into a puff of ash and charred feathers.
The dragon settled back down, seemingly satisfied with this minor entertainment.
Verathras. That was its name, Alsen remembered.
Nobody in the street reacted. The merchant kept pushing his cart. The children kept playing. The woman finished her argument with the butcher and walked away with her pork chop.
“And everyone sees it as normal,” Alsen said, more to himself than Luna.
“You’ll be used to it next week.”
He grunted. Well, yes, but she didn’t have to call it out like that. He thought about the ritual by the river. The mother’s screams. The grandma floating toward the waterfall. “I don’t want to get used to things like this.”
“Then you’re shit out of luck.” Luna started walking again. “Come on. The dragon hoard won’t steal itself.”
Right. That. Of course. He followed her deeper into the city, though his eyes kept drifting back to that impossible mountain of gold and the monster sleeping atop it.
A thought occurred to him. “Luna.”
“Hmm?”
“If gold is so worthless that a dragon can sleep on literal mountains of it, why do people still use gold as currency? Why does anything cost gold at all?”
She snorted. “Because you can offer it to the dragon to not burn you alive.”
Yeah, well, fuck. In a twisted sense, he perfectly understood the logic of it. The dragon had more gold than it could ever need for anything. But that was true at about one hundredth of the gold he had now. Just because he had a lot, it didn’t mean he didn’t want more.
And for as long as the dragon wanted the gold, then it had value.
“What if it’s the other way around? Gold is used for trade because it’s the one thing dragons don’t want more of.” The theory formed as he spoke. “They have all the gold. More gold is meaningless to them. So humans can trade in gold freely because the dragons will never confiscate it.”
Luna’s eyes widened slightly. “That would explain why everything’s so cheap. Everyone wants gold, because anything else might be taken by the dragon in the future.”
“A billion coins on that pile, and the farmer acted like five gold coins were highway robbery.”
“Because to him, it is. To that dragon?” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Five gold wouldn’t buy a sneeze.”
Alsen filed the thought away for later consideration. Right now, they had more immediate concerns than why gold has so much value here.
“We need to find the adventurers’ guild,” he said. “And get registered properly so we can take actual jobs.”
“Agreed. I’m tired of counting chickens.”
They asked for directions twice before finding the guild.
It occupied what had clearly once been a temple, the religious iconography stripped away, but the bones of the architecture unmistakable.
High vaulted ceilings. Stained glass windows with the images scratched out.
An altar at the far end that now served as a reception desk.
The irony wasn’t lost on Alsen. The dragons destroyed all temples, so the survivors turned them into something useful.
The interior was nearly empty. Dust gathered in corners. Of the dozen tables scattered around the main hall, only three were occupied. The job board on the side wall held perhaps a dozen notices, several of them yellowed with age.
A far cry from the bustling hub of adventure he’d imagined.
They approached the reception desk. A woman sat behind it, middle-aged, with the dead-eyed stare of someone who had stopped caring about her job years ago. She didn’t look up as they approached.
“Registration or job inquiry?” she asked, already reaching for forms.
“Registration,” Alsen said.
She slid two sheets of paper across the altar-turned-desk, along with a quill and inkwell. “Fill these out. Processing fee is posted.”
Alsen looked at the sign she’d indicated.
It was a wooden board with numbers carved into it, each one crossed out and replaced with a lower figure. The original price, barely visible beneath layers of amendments, had been 100 gold. Then 50. Then 20. Then 10. Then 5.
The current price, scratched into the wood with what looked like desperate finality, was 1 gold.
They could afford that. The dragon had so much gold that there wasn’t enough to go around.
“Business is booming, I see,” Luna remarked.
The receptionist didn’t respond.
They took the forms and started filling them out.
Alsen struggled with the quill for a bit, but it wasn’t all that different from a pen, just needed a slightly different angle.
He wrote down his name, the estimated age of his new body, and stopped at the class designation.
Archmage would look strange, so he wrote down Mage.
For the current level, he wrote down five, and he crossed out the rest of the fields. He stopped at the last one.
Nickname or alias.
Nah, his name sufficed. He got curious about what Luna wrote.
He glanced over. She wrote in a slow, focused fashion. Name: Luna. Class: Fighter. Age: 21. Rest of the fields crossed out, her quill soon hovering above the nickname.
After a heavy sigh, she wrote down Nurnfell Reaper.
He leaned closer to her. “What does that mean?”
“That’s a story for a more private setting.” She pushed the files to the receptionist, together with a coin.
Alsen handed over his own papers. Luna had all three remaining coins though. He smiled. “I need a coin.”
She conjured a bright smile. “Convince me you deserve it.”
“I did the job with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You are impossible.” She pulled a coin out of seemingly nowhere and added it to his papers.
The receptionist picked up their forms, scanning them with the same bored disinterest she’d shown everything else.
Then her eyes reached the bottom of the pages.
“So, Alsen and Nurnfell… aww, honey, nobody calls you that.” She stroked Luna’s shoulder a bit.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure someone will, eventually.
Anyway, Alsen and Luna. All right, your papers are in, so we’ll do a basic competency test to finish your registrations.
” The receptionist filed the forms away.
“It’s the standard procedure. Mages light a candle, fighters hit a target, and so on. ”
She gestured toward a side room.
They walked there. The room had a couple of wooden dummies at the far end, and a shelf with old weapons around the door they entered through. The receptionist motioned toward the weapons. “Hit a dummy with something that looks like an attack an adventurer would use.”
Luna picked up a dagger and tossed it in her hand.