by Dante King
He drew from his pocket a round, polished ball of crystal. I recognized it at once. It was a scrying crystal. The old man placed the crystal on the ground and, with a practiced motion, he waved his hand over it. Instantly, a bright space appeared above the crystal. It was as tall as a doorway, and as broad, though it was oval shaped rather than rectangular. I heard Cara gasp next to me.
“A portal!” she cried. “I never thought I’d see one of those. Only the most powerful of magic users can control portals!”
“The most powerful magic users, and the Keepers. Although some might say we are one and the same,” said the old man, sounding pleased with himself. He gestured at the portal. Through it, we could see a view of a very different place. There was no dark sky there, no deserted boggy marshland. Instead, a bright and sunny scene was revealed to us. Snow-capped mountains glowed in the sun against blue skies. At the feet of the mountains, perched on the top of rugged cliffs above an azure sea, there was a little town. The houses were single-storied and were made of light timber frames and grass roofs. In the center of the town, a larger building of stone rose up, like a castle. This central building had many layers and a stout outer wall of stone. Red roof tiles gleamed in the sun. The gable ends of the building’s roof were turned curiously upward, in a way I had never seen in Saxe.
Stepping closer, I saw a strange sight. The view changed, rising and flying smoothly closer to the town. Looking down upon the strange civilization, I saw that the castle and the market square were patrolled by soldiers in strange armor. They had shoulder-plates of glinting black enamelled metal, and stout helmets which protected their faces and necks, adorned with decorative metal plumage attached to the front of the helmet. They moved in groups of twos and threes, and they were each armed with a pair of long curved swords.
“These soldiers you see are the Samurai of Yamato, and this town is called Otara in their language. Yamato is very different from the land of Saxe, with many customs, traditions, and magics which will be strange to you. Go carefully. There are new enemies near the town. There are four, but I know only of one; Yukana, a brave Samurai from the town who ventured out alone to investigate the mysterious threats. He was caught and enslaved by the Festering, and now he stalks the outside of the town he used to protect, and the folk fear to leave their town at night. You must defeat Yukana and cleanse him of the Festering. In doing so you will bind his Persona to yourself. Once you have succeeded in that, you must find the other threats for yourself.”
“And what about me?” Cara asked, stepping boldly forward.
“Ah!” exclaimed the old man with a mischievous glint in his eye. “I had not forgotten about you. Cara Ironside, you must choose. Will you stay in Saxe? Or will you go with Leofwine? His quest will be a long one, and indeed he may never return! Who can say where that choice would lead you...?”
She turned to look at me, naked lust in her eyes. “You know what this means, don't you, Leo?”
From the way her gaze roamed over my body, I had an idea, but I preferred to play it coy.
“An adventure beyond anything we’ve ever known?”
“You could say that.” Her tongue flashed across her teeth. “And the oaths we swore on our world won’t apply. We won’t be leaders of our respective armies. . .” She let her words linger, and I smiled at her.
“Perhaps we will finally have our chance, eh, Cara?”
The Keeper coughed loudly. “So, you will be going with Leo then?” he asked Cara.
“I will go with Leo,” she said decisively. “There is no greater threat that I know of than the Festering. What more could I ask of my life’s work than to join in this noble quest to cleanse the taint from all lands and worlds? There are, of course, other benefits to being away from Saxe.” Again, her ice-blue eyes set to scouring my body.
The old Keeper nodded and wagged his beard at her, well pleased with this. “Good, good,” he said. “You pass the test. I could not choose for you, but it is essential that Leo have strong and brave companions with him. Without your choice, the prospects would not be so good.”
“Keeper,” she asked, “I, too, have felt the gathering of Renown in my heart as I’ve dispatched my enemies. But if I do not have the ability to bind Personas, then how can I use my Renown to gain upgrades?”
“Ah, you may not be able to bind the Personas, but who’s to say you cannot use them? I am limited in what I may tell you, but I will risk telling you this: there is a way for Leo to share his Personas with you. You cannot do it just now, but you may be able to in future. In fact, it’s essential that you learn to eventually.”
“But how? Can’t you tell us?”
The old man threw back his head and cackled, seeming in high good humour.
“No, no, my friends, I cannot tell you. You and Leo must work out that particular aspect of the magic for yourselves.” He glanced from Cara to me and back again and smiled secretively. “I have no doubt that you will work it out, sooner or later.” He chuckled, shaking his head, and would say no more on the subject.
“There is another matter,” he said. “Of language.” He raised his hand, and a coolness washed over me. I glanced at Cara and saw that she had experienced the same sensation.
“With this enchantment of mine,” he said after the feeling had vanished from me, “you will be able to speak and understand the languages of all peoples you come across. A rather powerful spell, I must admit, but what else do you expect of a Keeper of Cultures?”
“Thank you,” I said. “It would have been rather difficult had we not been able to speak with the natives.”
“Say no more,” he said. “Now, you should be off. Tarrying will only provide the Festering with more time to work its taint on the land of Yamato.”
“You’re sure you want to come with me, Cara?” I asked, laying a hand on her arm.
Her eyes shone as she looked up into my face. “More than anything,” she breathed.
“Very well, then.”
I took her arm. The portal had shifted its view again, and we were now looking at the top of a soft, grassy hilltop some way away from the town. I could just see the red roof of the foreign castle poking out over the treetops a little way away.
I took a last glance around the devastation of the ratmen’s camp. The flames were dying away now, and the fog had lifted. Many cold stars sparkled high in the velvet sky.
The light from the new world shone on our faces through the portal. I caught a smell of the sea carried on the new and humid air of the new world.
Cara looked up into my face and smiled. She squeezed my arm, and together we stepped through the portal, out of Saxe, and onto the thick, warm grass of the new world.
Chapter Three
“That smell!” exclaimed Cara, breathing deeply.
The change of air was the first thing that struck me, too. The air of the Westmarch had been thick with the smell of smoke and battle, the deep damp of the marshes, and the repulsive undercurrent of the festering. As we stepped through the portal into the land of Yamato, I breathed deep, smelling a crisp sea breeze that cut through a humid, richly-perfumed air.
The grass was deep and thick, rising up to our knees. We stood for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the bright sun.
“It feels like early summer here,” Cara said in a wondering tone. She was gazing around with an air of professional interest. “It’s much warmer than Saxe! I wonder what plants there may be here for me to use in my potion-crafting?”
We were standing in a woodland clearing on the top of a small hill. The clearing was surrounded by small, low-growing trees with dark, reddish bark that gleamed in the sun. Their leaves were gracefully pointed, and from every branch, big bunches of blossom flowers frothed like sea foam. The flowers ranged from bright white, through soft pinks, to a dark, blood-red. The sweet scent that permeated the air was coming from these blossoms. In the spaces between these trees nestled an abundance of flowering plants.
As I gazed around at the new
land, Cara took a few steps away and knelt with a cry of delight to examine a dark-leaved bush. As she moved, a flight of creamy yellow butterflies fluttered up from the thick grass and darted here and there in the glade. I laughed aloud, gazing around at the beauty of the place.
I reached up to wipe a bead of sweat from my brow. It was warm here, and the armor of Ironside seemed unnecessary just at present.
I reached toward the Helm, intending to remove it, and a sudden strange feeling washed over me. It was like stepping through a curtain of warm water. I felt lighter, and looking down I found that the armor was gone.
Instead of the heavy white-enamelled steel plating, I was wearing a very well-made tunic of fine blue wool. Dark trousers of good black linen and high leather boots clad my legs and feet, and a belt of sturdy leather cinched my waist to finish the outfit. Fixed to the belt on the left were three big pouches containing my food supplies. On the right, there was a steel belt knife in a sheath. The belt, the knife, and the pouches all bore the wolf’s head motif of Ironside.
Clearly, this ensemble was another aspect of the Ironside Persona, one which I could switch into at will when I needed a lighter and more comfortable gear set.
Cara turned with a handful of dark leaves in her hand and looked me up and down appreciatively.
“My ancestor’s Persona has good taste in clothing as well as skill in battle,” she commented. Her eyes lingered on my waist and chest. “Can you switch between them at will?”
“I think so; the Persona seems to respond to my intentions.”
I took a breath before I brought my focus to the battle armor. Immediately, that same warm feeling bathed me for a moment, and I was rewarded by the satisfying clicking into place of the enormous suit of armor. The huge two handed axe leapt into my hand in response to my thought.
Cara laughed out loud as I made a fierce face and struck a battle-ready pose.
“It’s brilliant,” she said.
With a thought, I switched smoothly back into the humbler tunic and trousers.
“I wish I could do that.”
“Well, the Keeper did say that there was a way for you and I to share the Personas.”
“That’s true. I wonder what he meant?”
“He seemed sure we’d work it out for ourselves in time.”
She nodded, looking at me thoughtfully. In one hand, she held a bunch of dark leaves.
I walked over to her. “What’s that you’ve got?” I asked.
“This? Oh, it’s a plant we call Greenroot. It’s a binder that I use as a basis for a lot of my potions. In Saxe, it’s mainly grown in sheltered spots away from the wind, sometimes even in artificially heated glasshouses. Here in Yamato, it seems to grow wild. I wonder what else there is growing wild in this land? I’d bet there’s all kinds of useful stuff I can gather.”
I smiled at her enthusiasm as she gazed around the clearing with the bunch of leaves clutched in her hand.
“Let’s take a walk,” I suggested. “Maybe you’ll find more ingredients as we go.”
“What direction shall we head in?” she asked, looking around.
I pointed to the red roofs of the town, barely visible over the trees. “That way. I’d like to reach the town, but not too directly. We should get an idea of what the surrounding land is like first.”
It was about mid-morning by the sun. The town was to the north-east. In the north, the wooded hills climbed steadily away to the distant mountains. From our view of the land through the portal, I figured that the sea lay to the east and the south. To the west, I could see nothing over the trees. I had no idea what lay in that direction.
Questions filled my mind as we headed off in the general direction of the town.
What new threats would the Festering present in this land? The Keeper had mentioned magic; what form would they take? What were the people’s traditions that the Keeper had mentioned? And what would the people of this land make of Cara and I? From the brief glimpse I’d had of the people, they were smaller than Cara and I, with darker hair and skin than either of us had. I suspected we might look rather strange to them.
Under the warm shade of the blossom trees, the grass was shorter, and the woodland bustled with life. Tiny brightly colored birds darted about in the branches above our heads, and a multitude of small creatures flittered busily in the grass. Dragonflies feasted on the clouds of smaller flies that hung in the shade below the blossom-rich branches.
“This is as different from Saxe as I could imagine,” I said to Cara as we moved slowly through the woods.
“It is, in many ways,” she replied, her eyes on the ground. “But for all that, a lot of the plants here are familiar. Some are almost exactly the same, and some are like bigger versions of familiar plants.”
She stopped and crouched, taking a few leaves from a low creeping plant with bright yellow flowers and adding them to the already generous bundle under her arm.
“I want to stop and craft a potion or two,” she said.
“Fine by me. I want a rest and a bite to eat anyway.”
I glanced around for a likely spot and saw a shaft of bright sunlight cutting through the trees away in the direction we were headed. It looked as if there might be another clearing in that direction.
“Let’s go that way and see if we can find a good spot to stop for a while.”
We walked for half an hour through the woods, Cara stopping every now and again to gather some new herb for her potions. I didn’t know much about potion plants, but I knew about gathering food in the wild.
I was pleased to see a flash of bright, sulfur-yellow peeping out from a fallen tree stump. It was a Yellow Treefall mushroom, which could be very good to eat when fresh.
I took my belt knife and cut a generous portion of the mushroom, gathering some wild onion tops from the ground around the fallen tree and adding them all to my supply pouches. Cara looked on in approval.
The brightly sunlit spot we had been heading for turned out to be more than a clearing. It was the edge of a fern-clad cliff which dropped away steeply down to a flat, grassy tableland stretching away toward the town. We were higher up than I had realized; the grassy flats were forty feet below us.
Looking in the direction of the town, I could see that it still lay some way off. The land below us was dotted with copses of trees and bushes, but these seemed tended. Paths ran through the land, and here and there smoke rose from the chimneys of little homesteads, the outlying farms surrounding the town of Otara.
Cara smiled down at the land. “This world is beautiful, peaceful, and well-cared for. That says a lot about the people.”
“Whereas Saxe is grim, austere, and cold; does that describe the people, too?” I asked with a wry smile.
She looked at me with a smile and touched my arm lightly. “Some of them, Leo. Not all.”
Directly below us, hard by the cliff, the roofs of a few simple buildings gleamed red in the sun. One looked like a simple home, with a kitchen garden out back and a little bench at the front. It was very humble, roofed with grass and made from what looked like bricks of clay or mud. Nearby, a larger building looked more formal; a tiered, red-tiled roof lay over an entranceway framed by two green-painted columns. Lamps hung from hooks on each column, and three broad stone steps led to the entrance, but there was no door.
“What could that be?” asked Cara.
“It looks like a shrine or temple of some sort,” I hazarded.
In Saxe, we had places where a fighter could give an offering to the God of War, and places where a farmer could pray to the spirits of the land for a plentiful harvest. The building we were looking at followed a similar pattern; an open entrance, which I figured symbolized the ever-present nature of the spirit or deity, and three steps up to the entrance, symbolizing the three levels of superiority of the spirit world over the earth.
As we watched, a man approached from the direction of the road. His brightly colored yellow robes fluttered in the wind as he carried
a bowl of some white grain. He laid the bowl on the bottom step before bowing low to the entrance, raising his offering to the second step, and bowing again.
“Definitely a temple of some kind,” Cara said. “I wonder what deities they worship in this land?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. I was about to turn away when something caught my eye. I grabbed Cara’s arm. “Look down there! Look at the worshipper!”
The man had finished genuflecting to the temple and now raised his bowl from the final step, but a change had come over him. Instead of walking into the temple, he stood still as stone, as if frozen in place by some spell.
The sky darkened for a moment. From the open entrance of the shrine, a sudden mass of ethereal black tendrils reached out and wrapped around the frozen figure of the man. With a jerk, they drew him quickly through the door.
As he disappeared from view, a sudden wave of dark energy pulsed from the temple. It expanded swiftly in every direction, then vanished, leaving the scene as empty and peaceful as it had been before.
Chapter Four
I heard Cara gasping as she crumpled to her knees beside me.
“It’s the Festering!” I hissed through clenched teeth. “But somehow it’s concealed from my senses. I didn’t know that was even possible. There was a wave of it when that poor worshipper was dragged in, but now it’s hidden again.”
“My potion has worn off,” Cara said.
I looked at her to find her looking pale, but determined.
“Give me a minute,” she managed to say. “I’m going to craft something more potent, and something for you as well.”
I had been looking forward to a satisfying meal, but I contented myself with chewing on a dried apple and drinking some water while Cara worked.