by Andrew Rowe
“Help?”
“To defeat Vaelien, once and for all.”
“A worthy goal.” She frowned. “But trying to do that is how the heroes in most of my books die.”
I handed the Blackstone book back to her. “Right, but there’s a key difference here.”
“Oh?”
“Those heroes weren’t me.”
Reika laughed. “You really mean to challenge the tyrant?”
“Not personally, mind you. I’m just bringing the gods back at home some help.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?”
“I was wrong about you.” Reika nodded. “I think maybe you’ll be worthy to be Dawnbringer’s partner after all.”
“Thanks. I guess we’ll find out. You want to walk me to the edge of the cave?”
“I...guess so.”
Reika walked me toward the end of the cavern, and I turned back as we approached the exit. “You could come with me, you know.”
It was an empty offer, the kind that people make in stories, knowing the tragic outcome. They’d always refuse.
“Okay! Let me get my things!”
...Huh.
Sometimes, I’m the one who forgets things don’t always go the way they do in stories.
Chapter IV – Shining in the Darkness
Reika walked with me to the exit of the cave. “I can’t go with you for the rest of the challenges,” she explained. “And I need to take some time to pack everything. But I’ll see you when you’ve finished earning Dawnbringer.”
“How many more challenges are there, and what should I expect?”
“I can’t give you any hints. That’s against the spirit of the whole ordeal. I’m sure you’ll be fine. I was the toughest challenge, obviously.”
“I can’t imagine how they could be any tougher than you,” I replied.
Reika beamed brightly at me, apparently appreciating the compliment.
Right.
Nothing worse than Reika.
Unless there’s a bigger dragon.
Or if the mist in the forest ahead is poisonous.
Or if it starts raining acid.
Or it starts raining bigger dragons. Possibly ones that are also poisonous.
It was actually pretty easy to come up with challenges that would be more dangerous than Reika. But I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any of those.
Probably.
“Hey,” Reika said, interrupting my musing about horrifying potential threats.
“Hm?” I glanced back at her.
“If you do actually get to Dawnbringer...be nice to her, okay? She’s important to me.”
Reika looked sincerely worried, so I gave her a solemn nod. “Of course. I have a feeling Dawnbringer and I are going to get along very well.”
“...I really hope so.” Reika shook her head, clearing away her dour expression, and added, “I wouldn’t want to have to beat you up again.”
I grinned, understanding Reika’s sentiment. I was very protective of my friends, too.
I did, however, have a habit of failing to protect my equipment.
Since I’d ruined my dagger earlier on in the cave, I didn’t have any weapons aside from the sword at my hip, which I wasn’t willing to use outside of emergencies.
Reika did have a few other assorted swords in her cave, mostly decorative in nature. I wasn’t sure if she’d plundered them from people who had failed to retrieve Dawnbringer, inherited them from a previous cave owner, or simply been left them as offerings by the nearby townsfolk (who apparently liked to leave stuff for her at some sort of altar near the entrance of the forest).
I’d carried multiple swords before, but I was already planning to pick up Dawnbringer, and wearing three swords at one time sounded excessive even by my standards.
Instead, I found a modest sized kitchen knife in good condition, and with Reika’s blessing, reshaped the metal into something closer to a fighting dagger.
Feeling a little bit better now that I had a weapon I could safely use, I said goodbye to Reika for the moment and headed out of the cave.
I took a breath of the misty air outside — which didn’t seem poisonous — and walked forward toward the trail that led deeper into the forest.
A bit later, I came upon a simple wooden sign in the middle of the road. The writing on it was in two languages. Thankfully, one of them was Velthryn.
The path of dawn shines brightest in the dark.
I re-read it a couple times, honestly trying to figure out if that was just some sort of really terrible clue for an upcoming challenge or if the writer just had a keen sense for the dramatic like Reika did.
Does that mean I’m supposed to wait until night time to travel on the road? Or that some alternate path is only visible when it’s dark out?
If I hadn’t already been waiting around for days, I might have considered trying that, but I was getting impatient. If I ended up wasting the day by walking around on the wrong path, I figured I could still backtrack and try to find a hidden path later if I needed to.
I walked beyond the sign, the mist growing thicker as I followed the trail. I could feel the moisture in the air, meaning this was probably actual mist, rather than whatever weird mist-like spirit stuff Reika was emitting when she turned into her dragon form.
There was a single cobblestone path that led into the woods. It seemed perfectly ordinary and easy to follow. That meant that even as my visibility shrank to the point where I could only see a few feet ahead of me, staying on the road wasn’t hard.
The area on the sides of the road was mostly grass and weeds, giving way to bushes and trees only a few feet out. The foliage wasn’t quite thick enough to form a boundary, but traipsing off the road would be decidedly more difficult.
It was a pleasant enough walk until I reached the crevasse.
The path terminated abruptly at a wide crack in the ground. With the thickness of the mist, I couldn’t see the other side of it.
Nor could I see the bottom. When I crept carefully toward the edge and knelt by the side, it looked like a sheer cliff that plunged into nothing but darkness below.
I paused and did a classic rock dropping test, listening and counting to see how long it took to fall.
A minute later, I hadn’t heard it hit the ground.
I tested with a few more rocks, finding the same results. It probably wasn’t just that I’d missed the sound, then.
That didn’t necessarily mean the gap was actually impossibly deep. I’d seen teleportation magic in the earlier parts of the forest, and it was plausible that some sort of ritual boundary just teleported whatever fell into the pit to some other location. Alternatively, maybe there was some sort of magical effect that diminished sounds or senses beyond a certain point. The mist was a way of limiting my sight, and it was likely that was a deliberate part of this test.
I definitely didn’t want to take the risk of falling down and finding out that the pit was real.
I walked alongside the pit for about a minute in each direction, careful not to lose my footing and fall inside. I was hoping for a bridge or some other easy route to cross, but I had no such luck.
I went back to the place where the path had terminated, thinking.
Was this the point where darkness would illuminate a path?
Maybe if I wait until nightfall here...
Or maybe the darkness of the pit itself is what they’re talking about?
I looked down again, searching for anything that could constitute a path within the pit itself. The darkness of the pit definitely would have been easy to contrast against if there was something, but I couldn’t find anything.
I lifted a hand.
Burn.
An aura of flame collected around my hand, dispersing a bit of mist. I pushed outward on the fire, trying to clear a bit of the mist ahead of me to see how far across the pit reached. I thought I could make out solid ground about twenty feet away, but I couldn’t be sure I was seeing it correctl
y.
I also couldn’t be sure it was actually safe over there. Given the style of tests this place had, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the “solid” ground was actually an illusion, and the darkness was actually solid ground with an illusion over it.
...And that thought process gave me an idea.
I let my flames disperse, shivering for a moment at the spell’s cost, and then closed my eyes tight.
It was dark, of course. I felt a little silly.
I wasn’t quite ready to abandon my hunch yet, though, so I kept my eyes shut and scanned from right to left.
Just at the edge of my vision, I thought I could see a glow.
I opened my eyes and headed in that direction for about a minute. Then I looked in the direction I’d seen the glow and closed my eyes.
And there it was. A glowing path, visible only with my eyes shut.
I didn’t know how they’d pulled that kind of magic off. Maybe the glow itself was indistinguishable in the daylight, but bright enough to shine with my eyes closed? Or some sort of mental effect that prevented me from discerning it while my eyes were open?
Either way, I didn’t trust it in the slightest.
I walked along the edge of the crevasse, all the way to the edge of where I’d seen the glow, then closed my eyes again.
Up close, it was much clearer what I was looking at — a bridge just a couple feet down into the pit which seemed to stretch a good way into the distance.
When I opened my eyes, the bridge was invisible again.
Once again, I debated waiting until nightfall to see if that helped, but it really didn’t resolve my overall problem.
When I’d grown up, people had often told me to take things on faith. That I could trust that our king would make the right decisions for our people, or that the Thornguard would protect us from any outside threat. That people were born with the magic that the gods felt was best suited for them. Or, perhaps most of all, that the gods were just and merciful.
All I had to do was put my faith into the words that someone else had written or spoken.
As a kid, I’d bought into it, just like most people do. I’ve never been a natural skeptic like Corin. My first instinct was generally to trust people, even strangers.
But over the years, I’d been manipulated, betrayed, and tricked enough times to develop a healthy degree of caution.
This was especially true in cases where a simple “faith” test could easily result in my untimely demise.
I’d seen a dozen challenges like this before. Most of them involved some kind of additional trap.
Even if the see-in-the-dark bridge was real, maybe it wouldn’t hold my weight. Or maybe it had traps on it that were invisible, even with my eyes closed. Or that some flying monster wouldn’t assault me on the bridge while I had my eyes shut.
I had no evidence to indicate that whoever had written the sign was benevolent. I also didn’t even know for certain they were associated with the test.
Some other random test-taker could have written the sign to eliminate their competition. Or just because they thought it’d be funny to send someone else off a cliff. Yeah, I’d run into things like that before, too.
And that’s why, when presented with the simple option of hopping down onto the bridge, I chose to test a few things.
First, I tossed a rock onto the bridge. It stayed, appearing to float in mid-air. That was a good sign.
Next, I tried something heavier. A fallen log. When I shoved that off the edge, it hit the bridge, bounced, and rolled off. That confirmed the presence of the bridge at that spot, but not its load bearing capacity.
I tossed several more rocks across the surface, trying to test boundaries and create something that would be a visible guide that I could potentially use to walk across with my eyes open.
I reached down, touching the surface of the bridge, and felt it with my hand. It was cool to the touch, and it didn’t register to my senses as being stone or metal.
Ultimately, that was what made my decision.
I was not taking the invisible bridge.
Instead, I bent down and touched the side of the rock face and concentrated.
Reshape.
The stone shifted at my command, liquefying and moving as I concentrated, spreading over the first foot or so of the bridge. Then it solidified, leaving a visible stone layer over the surface of that section of the bridge.
Stone shaping wasn’t my area of expertise, but I’d gotten better at it over the last year or so by practicing with an enchanted knife named Sculptor. The knife was designed for exactly what it sounded like — sculpting stone. I’d gotten much better at rapidly moving stone by sensing how the knife worked while I used it. I didn’t have the knife anymore, but the lessons remained.
It was still much harder for me than working with metal, but I could move ordinary dirt or stone from place to place easily enough. Changing the density and composition of stone were much harder for me, but I didn’t need to do that for this task.
I spent the next hour or two using stone shaping to gradually move rock from the mountainside to cover the remainder of the bridge. I had to take breaks frequently to avoid overusing my stone essence, and even then, I still was gradually tiring myself out through the process. It was a lot of work, but I found it worthwhile to have something I could see and feel, and that I knew I had made — or at least moved — myself.
I gradually made my way across, finding that the gap had spanned further at this point than the previous spot I’d checked. The total length of the bridge was about thirty-five feet, maybe forty.
Velas might have been able to jump that, but I certainly couldn’t have.
I was about halfway across when a gust of wind slammed into me.
I knew it.
I dropped into a lower stance, bracing myself against the force of the gale.
With an instant of concentration, I reshaped some of the stone at the edge of the bridge to curve upward, preventing my feet from slipping off the edge.
The wind shifted, pushing upward, and threatening to lift me off my feet entirely.
Body of Stone.
I flooded my body with stone mana. This increased not only my strength, but my mass. The wind continued to batter at me, but I’d made myself too heavy to lift. Fortunately, I’d made the bridge sturdy enough to hold my increased weight.
It might have been wiser to retreat and find the source of the wind, but that wasn’t my style.
I gritted my teeth and pushed forward.
Something brushed across my body, tearing my shirt. It felt sharp but failed to penetrate my stone-reinforced skin.
A moment later, I felt a dozen similar cuts. One of them was across my face.
Whatever was causing the cuts wasn’t metal. I couldn’t sense any projectiles or deflect them.
I stepped forward again. A dozen cuts became a hundred. My clothes were being shredded, and I realized it was only a matter of time before whatever was cutting my body tore across my eyes.
As with before, closing my eyes was the easy answer. Perhaps that was the point of the wind. Another way of trying to force me to follow the design of the test and blindly trust the makers.
Instead, I raised one arm for a moment to shield my face, then reached down with my other arm and pulled the dagger off my belt. Then I concentrated on the dagger.
Flatten.
I reshaped the dagger’s blade into a large, flat metal plate, then held it up in front of my eyes. I had to angle it carefully to block the wind while retaining my ability to see, but it was better than complete blindness.
I stubbornly walked forward, feeling more cuts from the wind. A few of them managed to break my skin, leaving painful gashes.
And then, finally, I was at the end of the bridge.
The wind died down as I took my final step to the bridge’s edge. Perhaps the test-giver was satisfied, or maybe they’d just given up. Or maybe there was no test-giver at all, and I’d just
stepped on a magical trap somewhere along the bridge.
Either way, I hoped to eventually find out who had designed this challenge and punch them in the face. Possibly more than once.
I tested the seemingly solid ground on the other side before I actually stepped onto it. Fortunately, it at least seemed safe. After a few more moments of hesitation, I stepped off my own makeshift bridge.
I briefly considered whether or not I should destroy my visible bridge, since I was probably defeating the point of one of the tests for future people who might come through.
After a moment, I decided the test was terrible, and that it deserved to be wrecked. I always preferred tests that were more straightforward, like the ones that involved hitting things.
I prodded the ground with a branch for the next few steps, making sure they were safe, and then found myself back on a cobblestone road like the one I’d left on the other side of the bridge.
My shirt was in tatters. My pants were torn, too, but not quite as badly. My bag was, fortunately, almost completely intact. It seemed like whatever was directing the cutting winds had been hitting certain areas of my body more than others, whether by deliberate design or simply due to how the trap was placed.
I’d successfully shielded my eyes from the wind using the dagger. I gave it an affectionate pat on the blade, concentrated to reshape it, and then tucked it away in my old dagger’s sheath.
My body ached from the effort of all of that stone shaping. Using stone sorcery drew strength from my muscles and bones. When used in moderation, like when I practiced with my Body of Stone spell, it would gradually build muscle mass and density, making me stronger over time. If I overdid it, though, I could hurt myself for a long period of time or permanently, much like if I’d torn something during exercise.
It was a comfort to finally have solid ground all around me again, so I sat down to take a break.