Chapter 39
Luna watched Alsen fly out the window.
He banked left, rising above the rooftops, heading northeast. Toward the spiral temple dungeon, probably. She hadn’t the faintest idea why he would fly there, but hey, it worked for her.
She gave him enough time to fly out of sight.
Once she couldn’t see him, she dropped from the roof, landing in the alley below. The cobblestones made for an unpleasantly tough landing.
Without much rushing, she passed through the city, heading north. She made a promise to Savnoj, which she intended to deliver upon. His directions would hopefully suffice, though, as she couldn’t ask for details anymore.
The northern mill sat at the edge of the city, where Vellhorn’s cramped streets gave way to fields and the occasional farmstead.
The mill itself hadn’t operated in years, by the look of it.
The water wheel hung lopsided over a stream that had thinned to barely a trickle, half the paddles missing, the rest covered in moss.
The building’s stone walls still stood, but the wooden roof had partially caved in, leaving the upper floor exposed to the sky.
A nice place to hide things. Remote enough that nobody wandered by, decrepit enough that nobody cared, but structurally sound enough that the cellars underneath would still be intact.
Luna walked straight to its entrance. She crouched by the main door, running her fingers along the frame.
A wire, thin and taut, stretched across the threshold at shin height. She followed it with her fingertips to where it connected to a mechanism in the wall. A crossbow bolt, cocked and aimed at whoever tripped it. The bolt was oiled, the mechanism clean. Someone had maintained this recently.
Savnoj’s work. Or one of his boys’.
With her dagger, she unhooked the mechanism. The wire fell, and she walked in.
The mill’s insides smelled of old grain and damp stone. Moonlight filtered through the holes in the roof, casting pale patches on the floor. The millstone sat in the center, cracked down the middle, useless. Old sacks leaned against the walls, their contents long since rotted or eaten by rats.
The cellar entrance sat behind the millstone, a wooden hatch set into the floor.
She found the second trap on the hatch itself, a pressure plate underneath that would release something, probably a blade, when the hatch was lifted without disabling it first. The mechanism sat in the floor’s underside, accessible only if one knew to check.
Luna checked. She found the latch, disengaged the spring, and lifted the hatch.
She continued down into the cellars, no light coming along.
She used to be used to operating in complete darkness. But now that she had her personal mage that cast light at every opportunity, she lost the habit a bit.
The cellar was smaller than expected. Roughly ten by ten feet, low ceiling, dry stone walls. One shelf held a few bottles of something, probably wine or spirits. A rolled-up blanket sat in the corner. And against the far wall, underneath a canvas tarp, sat a chest.
She liked the chest. Iron-banded, double-locked, made of heavy wood. It looked heavy, though.
Luna crouched in front of it. Two locks. She returned up, and took the wire from the trap at the entrance. With it, she returned to the chest, and slipped the wire into the first lock.
Admittedly, she hadn’t done this in a while, so it took her a bit. It was so much easier to just break things, but she needed to carry the chest, so shattering its closing mechanism wouldn’t help.
After half an hour of effort, the second lock also clicked open.
She lifted the lid, feeling the insides.
Gold coins filled most of the chest, packed tight, with a leather pouch on top that probably held gems or something else small and valuable. A folded piece of parchment sat in one corner, sealed with wax.
She closed the chest, without engaging the locks.
Luna grabbed the chest’s handles and lifted.
Oh, fuck, this thing was heavy. Her back screamed at the effort, filing an urgent complaint to the brain.
Denied.
Her knees also didn’t like it as she carried it up the stone steps.
She should unpack the chest and carry it in parts. But that would be so humiliating she couldn’t stomach the idea.
After adjusting the grip four times, she made it up and dragged the chest outside the mill. The farm was east, she remembered, and hopefully, it was the one she saw.
If not, this would be really unpleasant.
Luna hoisted the chest again, bracing the bottom against her stomach, the weight pulling her forward. She left through the mill’s door.
She headed east.
The walk took longer than it should have. The chest dug into her arms and her hip bones, the handles biting into her palms. She shifted grip every few dozen steps, alternating between carrying it against her stomach and hefting it onto her shoulder, which hurt worse but freed one hand to balance.
The road was empty. No one loitered between the mill and the farms at this hour. Just Luna and a dead man’s gold, trudging through the night.
She found the farm by the low stone wall that marked its boundary. A modest homestead, nothing fancy. A house, a barn, a small field that looked like it grew root vegetables. A couple of chickens slept in a coop by the side. The house was dark.
Luna carried the chest to the front door. She set it down as gently as she could, which wasn’t very gently at all, and the chest landed on the doorstep with a thud that probably woke every chicken in the coop.
She straightened, rubbing the raw marks the handles had left on her palms.
Luna looked at the chest. She looked at the door.
Nah, couldn’t leave it outside. She opened the door, and looked inside.
The inside was simple. Clean. A table, chairs, a kitchen area. A hallway led deeper, toward what were probably bedrooms.
She grabbed the chest, dragged it over the threshold, and let it rest on the floor. The scraping sound of iron and wood on stone was louder than she would have liked.
As she turned toward the door, the hallway creaked.
A boy stood there. About twelve, thin, dark-haired, holding a sword in both hands. The sword was too big for him, and he held it wrong, but his knuckles were white, and his eyes were wide and furious.
Savnoj’s spare sword, most likely.
Behind him, further down the hallway, she caught the shapes of smaller children, two of them, peeking around a doorframe.
The boy’s voice cracked when he spoke. “Get out.”
Luna stopped. She looked at the boy, and lightly kicked the chest. “Your father left you this, so that you don’t become an adventurer like he did.”
The boy’s eyes watered up, the tip of the sword wavering. “What happened to my dad?”
“His journey ended the same way the journey of every adventurer does. He died, torn apart by a monster. If you try to avenge him and seek that monster yourself, then one day, you will end up like that too.”
“How… how’d you know that?”
Luna smirked, flashing some teeth. As the boy’s sword tip dropped to the floor, she slipped out through the door.
She instantly ducked beside the door, and rushed along the house’s wall, under the windows to not be seen through them.
The boy rushed outside, but got through the door only after she had made it behind the corner.
All the animals around them woke at once. The sheep rose, the horses yanked at their ropes, and the chickens flew from their roosts.
Covered by the chaos, she slipped away.
Luna headed back toward Vellhorn. She had one more errand before she could sleep.
The night air thinned as Alsen flew.
To avoid obstacles, he flew at an altitude safe from trees and lower hills. The wind pulled at his clothes and dried his eyes, and the ground below was a patchwork of black shapes he could barely distinguish. Fields, forests, the occasional flicker of a farmstead’s dying hearth.
His left arm throbbed with each gust. Arleria’s healing matrix still held, the pink light pulsing faintly under his skin, doing its work without her. The last thing of hers that still functioned in this world.
He pushed the thought aside. He had a job to do.
One thought bothered him, though, aside from him needing goggles for flying.
The levelscanner assigned a surname to Luna, Laen’Ash.
He knew that surname, spelled exactly like that.
But it wasn’t from this world. He knew it from Earth.
From old stories, more like legends.
Those had one highly repeating tale.
In the early 21st century, a witch had gone rogue. About the entire magical world of back then hunted her, culminating in them finding her in what was then Rio de Janeiro.
Thanks to the technology of the time, the satellites captured most of what happened.
First came the EMP, which knocked out the phones of everyone in the city.
Then came a battle of about fifteen mages, at the end of which, the rogue witch alone remained standing, the city was completely destroyed, together with its metropolitan area, becoming a grave for the roughly fourteen million people who lived there.
The witch’s name was Cassandra Laen’Ash.
No image of her existed, only the worst act of mass manslaughter in the history of mankind.
It was at that point that the world turned against the magic users, starting the long political conflict between mages and everyone else.
In his age, the 23rd century, in which he was born, this legend served as a warning of how dangerous magic was, and why it was good that it died in the world.
No picture of Cassandra was ever found, but he did see a painting of her. He had no idea how idealized it was, but she looked nothing like Luna.
So, how did Luna have the same surname?
That didn’t fit, unless it was a coincidence, or a bloodline that spanned across different worlds.
If the name meant something, sure, it would be a coincidence. Most languages had surnames like Smith or Black. But Laen’Ash meant nothing, especially the spelling with an apostrophe in the middle being unusual, at best.