A Soldier's Life - 408 -

Chapter 408:

I had our group push a little harder, even though Evie was having some trouble with interval gallops. We reached Donianos well before midday. The high stone walls looked welcoming, and the numerous soldiers walked the battlements. There was a small tent city outside the wall, but it was for the people and not the soldiers. I guessed this larger city was already overcrowded.

“We are going to push to the next town and maybe beyond,” I informed my party. The road to Cydonti was almost directly west, away from the dungeons and fissures to the Endless Dark. Lesna groaned but didn’t voice an objection. As we circled the road around the city, we drew closer to the camp, and the people there looked pitiful. They were not farmers, and I guessed they were the poor or homeless from the city and the surrounding small towns.

It might have been cruel, but I could understand that they were prioritizing protecting their productive citizens. Most of the people we passed looked old or crippled, which made me feel guilty. At first glance, there were over three hundred people in the camp, and I had no chance of helping them all. Evie was too naïve to understand the implications as she spoke to Lesna while we passed the camp.

As we turned onto the road west, Blaze came alongside and asked, “What is wrong?” I looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Eryk, you are easier to read than a children’s picture book.”

“You can read,” I retorted.

“Children’s books only have pictures,” Blaze said snarkily.

I shook my head, gathering my thoughts. “The creature. It was not a dire boar but something else. It yielded an abyssal essence,” I explained.

Blaze was not schooled in magic, but had some understanding. “What was it then?”

“I don’t know,” I said weightily.

“Well, if Eryk doesn’t know, it cannot be good,” Blaze said with a mix of good-natured mocking and seriousness.

“I do not know everything,” I joked. “But I will check the dreamscape when we rest to try and figure it out. Everything since we crossed the Shadow Belt everything has felt—off.”

We rode in silence for a time, before Blaze talked again. “You know, I remember when you joined us. During the griffin hunt, you looked both afraid and captivated. I think you pissed yourself too. You are a different man today. Someone worth following and trusting. Just trust us in return,” he said before turning to ride with Benito. Blaze was asking me not to hold anything back from him, and it wasn’t the first time. I typically didn’t, but I sometimes tended to delay informing my companions.

“I did not piss myself during the griffin hunt. That was after, when I was forced to go into the dungeon with Castile,” and we both laughed. That never happened, but I had certainly been scared enough that it might have.

“Just remember, you don’t have to do everything yourself,” Blaze noted before rotating his position.

Evie rode with me for most of the day, and she felt the need to talk about everything. We started discussing her magic first. She had a strong protection affinity and wanted to learn a spell form for it. “You need to wait. The Death Hunters might have a more useful spell form to teach you after you join them,” I told her.

Evie froze and was silent for a time. “I thought they were just going to train me to control my necromancy, and then you were going to bring me to Lexi,” she said with a tremble in her voice.

“That is the plan,” I confirmed, kicking myself for voicing what I anticipated happening. The Death Hunters wouldn’t let the girl out of their supervision for a very long time. Evie nodded contentedly, trusting my words, and the conversation turned to her asking me questions about essences.

How many essences have you consumed? Did they all taste the same? What did they all look like? Could they make her magic stronger? What creature gave which essence? Can I try to use the collector? Can I get my own collector?

From there, she implored me to continue training with her daggers, and I promised that once things settled down, we would resume her martial training. The girl’s enthusiasm and inquisitive nature made the journey pass quickly. We encountered only a few people on the road, with none heading toward the chaos.

I allowed us only one modest break to water the horses and stretch our legs. So many hours in the saddle were hurting everyone except me, who could heal. We were not going to reach Cydonti before nightfall, so we stopped at an open-walled town as dusk closed in. There were still people here, but many had left. Rooms were available at the tiny inn, and after stabling the horses, we all retired. I planned to get a few hours of rest in the dreamscape before spending the remainder of the night in the stables to watch over the horses.

As our meal of stew was delivered to our table, I asked the gray-haired woman serving us about the state of affairs. Her Elvish was passable when she took my coin for the rooms. “Any trouble this far west?”

She rubbed her hands on her greasy apron and pursed her lips. “Some. Mostly looting at some farms, boys making good on old grudges. A large goblin migration was rolled over north of here by the mounted soldiers a few days ago. Other than that, just a lot of worrying rumors passing through.”

I tipped her a large silver, and that got us a yellowed-tooth smile, a second helping, and our pitchers topped off. The conversation at the table was dominated by Evie and Blaze going back and forth about what monsters he had seen in time with Castile’s company. She was most excited for the one time they caught a chestnut Pegasus foal for an annoying Duke. “Pegasi may look all majestic, but I will tell you they can really bite.” Blaze finished his story, while Benito nodded emphatically.

I let them continue, telling Blaze my plans for the night, and headed to my room to explore the dreamscape library. The room was tiny, so I tossed some alchemical powder on the stained mattress, as it was probably infested with bedbugs. The powder was a skin irritant, so I laid out a horse blanket from my dimensional space and then secured my room.

The dreamscape people were a welcome sight, and I realized I missed many of my companions—even Konstantin. I wondered what the old man was up to these days. I somehow doubted he was still peacefully running Adrian’s Rest. I spent a short time playing with Oscar and sparring with Konstantin, Adrian, and Maveith before heading to the library.

It took some time to mentally sort out references to red eyes, with most passages referencing dire creatures. Dire creatures, as I already knew, were saturated with aether, and their red eyes had a glow to them. This only happened because they were close to an aether source, and their aether core was too small to handle the saturation of aether; as a result, their bodies mutated.

I found an entire passage on a race of elves that lived near the ley lines and intentionally exposed themselves. This race, called the drow, had pure white eyes with a soft glow and wielded potent magic. Fortunately, they rarely traveled to the surface and had difficulty in sunlight.

Other references to red eyes were from diseases, which didn’t help me much because the boar appeared healthy. I finally started to find some success in old dungeon tomes, many of them describing dungeons that had been destroyed. I read the passage:

The blood-eyed cyclops is not to be underestimated. It is smarter, stronger, and heals faster than its brethren. That is only the beginning of the difficulty in fighting this abyssal creature. You will find yourself getting weaker and weaker the longer the fight is prolonged. Every encounter is different with this abomination, so never underestimate it.

The dungeon where the cyclops was once found was destroyed in Esenhem long ago. The only other variant of crimson-eyed creatures was the blood squirrels in the Wintershire Forest in the Telhian Empire. The Wintershire Forest teemedwith other fey creatures, but these squirrels possessed a terrifying ability to confuse people, often leading to severe cases of insanity. They would relentlessly track their prey from the branches until the prey perished, and then they feasted on the organs. Fortunately, this entry was from one of the books from Caelora, and I think the blood squirrels were extinct.

Did this mean there was a subset of creatures with blood orbs for eyes? I needed a more extensive library and an older one to delve deeper into the mystery, and it finally gave me something to do while I chaperoned Evie through her training with the Death Hunters.

I had spent about four hours in the dreamscape and woke to a mostly silent room. There was a couple below my room who were not done for the night. I retreated to the stables, checked on the horses, and then settled in till morning.

At breakfast, I shared with Blaze what I discovered in the dreamscape, even though I didn’t really get any answers. Blaze was primarily concerned that the people of the past had sought to eradicate all the crimson-eyed creatures.

I gave Evie an essence and took two more myself in the early morning. We reached Cydonti before midday and rode around the stone-walled city and the sprawling area outside it. In nearby fields, dozens of units of young men were being drilled with pikes and spears. It evoked a sense of déjà vu, recalling the Telhian Empire as it was being squeezed on all sides during the war, when they conscripted every able-bodied male. To me, this was a sign the conflict was not going well here against the monsters.

With the well-fortified city Cydonti behind us, we now had a buffer between us and the dungeons and no longer needed to push our horses. It was the last day of hard riding and we ended our day in a modest town that looked almost normal.

Before we entered, I addressed my companions, “We can slow down a bit. It is about 100 miles to the border of Nausis and I will give us four days to reach it. From there it should only be five days to the capital.” They all nodded in understanding, as the Death Hunters training citadel was not far from the capital.

“Can I continue learning to use these?” Evie asked hopefully, her hands on the sheathed daggers.

I nodded, “We should all begin training again. Thanks for reminding me.” Benito and Blaze sighed in disappointment. “Actually, Benito is much closer to you in size, so he can…”

“I want you to teach me!” Evie exclaimed, complainingly. Blaze snickered, and Benito looked offended. I was struck by the oddity of this world where an eleven-year-old girl was eager to learn how to stab people.

“We will all teach you,” I compromised, earning a satisfied grin from Evie. I looked to the others. “Now that we are closer, we should also start asking about the Death Hunters and see if we can learn more before we approach them.” Nods of understanding circulated through the group, but Evie probably didn’t fully grasp that we were uncertain whether she would even be accepted. Yes, we knew necromancers were part of their organization, but Evie’s power was different, and she had imprinted one of the forbidden spells.

After a large dinner, we moved to a small yard adjacent to the inn. The horses had a good view of the show as the tiny Evie gripped both her daggers and came at me with aggressive determination…

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