As the dead man slumped on his saddle, Hawke ran to another one, who was staring blankly at the blinding darkness surrounding him. He didn’t see the sword thrust that ended his life. The remaining two began to ride out of the cloud of darkness, but he skewered one of them before he could get far. The last one fled, driving his horse as fast as the poor beast could go. Hawke nailed him with his flying hammer spell. Done.
All he felt about what he had done was a sense of cold satisfaction.
For Slaying Your Foes, you have earned 4 XP. Current XP/Next Level: 7,853/10,000
He didn’t know how to ride or take care of horses, so he let them go. Hopefully, someone would find and take care of them. His loot reward consisted of one silver and eight coppers.
Life was cheap in the Realms.
Fifty-Two
Hawke dropped his magical disguise and put on his armor as the approached the lone tavern tending to visitors in Eagle’s Watch. He didn’t need to hide anymore. His friends were there.
The ten people he was there to see had taken over the outdoor dining area outside the tavern. Kinto’s family and Nadia were sharing a table. Nadia looked happy and relaxed, laughing at something Gosto was saying while Tava grinned at them. On the next table over, Desmond was hanging out with five Dwarves; he and the biggest one in the bunch were engaged in an arm-wrestling contest.
“Is there room for one more?” he asked the gathering.
“Hawke!” Tava shouted as she all but somersaulted over the table and jumped into his arms. “You didn’t warn me you were near,” she whispered in his ear before giving him a playful nibble.
“Didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
Kinto greeted him with slightly less enthusiasm, but Hawke couldn’t picture the grizzled Hunter hugging it out with anybody, including his closest relatives.
“It is good to see you,” the old Hunter told Hawke.
“Kill any monsters without us?” Gosto asked him.
Just four bandits. All the Nerf Herders I killed are back among the living.
“No monsters,” Hawke said out loud. “Maybe on the way back.”
Nadia stepped forward and gave him a hug as well. “I’m glad you made it,” she said in English.
“Everything okay?”
She glanced over at Desmond, who was sitting up as he laughed and slapped the shoulder of the Dwarf he’d been arm-wrestling with. “Yes,” she told him. “Things got a little awkward at first, but Tava and Kinto dealt with it. Tava’s great!”
“She is,” he said, a big grin on his face. He had missed the Ranger. Seeing her again felt like coming home.
Desmond came over and shook Hawke’s hand. He looked a little more relaxed, but didn’t seem to be comfortable around Kinto’s family.
Kinto introduced Hawke to the Dwarves of Clan Stern. Hawke examined them with his True Sight.
“This is Korgam Stern, Sixth Level Shield-Bearer and leader of his company,” Kinto said. Korgam had fiery red hair and a long beard; his stats were very impressive, with just over two hundred Health. He was wearing simple traveling clothes, but Hawke figured an impressive suit of armor was stored in a pouch or backpack of holding, ready to materialize at a moment’s notice.
The other four Sterns – Daggon, Crommen, Taggan, and a bald guy that went simply by the nickname Egg – were at level five in their classes: Warrior, Battle Bard, Stone Mystic and Priest of the Earth god Gaon, respectively. If they had been by his side, Hawke felt he could have taken down all the Nerf Herders in the compound.
You’re probably right, although it would have been fun to try, Hawke told Saturnyx as he clasped forearms with Korgam.
“Tis a blessed day, for we have finally met, Paladin!” the Dwarf said. “Great-uncle Dorrham speaks highly of ye, so much so that the gathered families of Clan Stern agreed to send some of their most promising sons on this quest. All trained Miners Arcane, with proper surveying and extraction tools. And all bloodied in combat against both folk and beast. Neither Arachnoid nor Undead will keep us from doing our duty.”
“Thank you,” Hawke replied. “Dorrham is a good man, and I am proud to call him a friend. I carried his shield into battle, and it saved my life many times.”
“That is a shield’s purpose, and I know Dorrham was glad it served you well. But you must be tired and hungry. I will leave you to your friends.”
The Dwarves went back to their seats. Desmond glanced back and forth between the two groups before following the Sterns. They seemed to have taken to him, especially Crommen the Battle-Bard.
“Desmond was a Ren Faire regular,” Nadia explained. “He was a Bard, and the Dwarves love his singing.”
“Is that what it was?” Gosto said with a scowl. “Every time he let out those sounds, I kept looking for the poor cat he was torturing.”
“Kindness to strangers is repaid tenfold. So is rudeness,” Tava scolded her brother, but the look she sent towards the Warrior was not friendly.
“He should be kinder to our ears, then,” Gosto replied.
“Enough. Come and sit down, Hawke, and tell us what happened.”
“Yes, we all want to know,” Kinto said. “Although my daughter already knows more than she is telling, thanks to whatever magic lets her speak with you at a distance.”
“It’s one of the powers of my sword,” Hawke told Kinto as he sat down and Gosto was sent off to bring him food and beer. He had been living off trail rations the last couple of days and was looking forward to a cooked meal.
“Well, as I told Tava, my meeting with the Nerf Herders didn’t go too well.” While he ate, Hawke recounted Kaiser Wrecker’s plans and the fight at the compound. “The guy is looking to build an army of Eternals, kill or enslave the rest of us, and take over Akila and eventually the Ruby Empire. He doesn’t think small.”
“We have to do something!” Gosto said. “Send word to the Empire, at least!”
Kinto’s chuckle had little humor in it. “What makes you think the District Governor is going to read a letter from a nobody from the sticks, fool child of mine? Even if such message reached him, he would laugh for a bit and forget about it a moment later.”
“What will happen then, Father?”
“If this Kaiser thinks he can conquer an Imperial city, let him try. His name may sound a bit like ‘Emperor,’ but he is not going to become one, not even with a hundred Eternals at his back.”
Hawke realized that the Vulgate imperial title was ‘Kasar,’ and must come from the Latin ‘Caesar,’ which the Germans had turned into Kaiser. Languages were funny.
“Akila is a pit of vipers,” Kinto went on. “Dozens of competing factions, all willing to slit their own mother’s throat to improve their position. Let that fool join the game of castles and towers, and enjoy its prizes: poison in his cup and daggers in his back.”
The Hunter had a point. Even non-Eternals could live a long time if they had the money or magical skills available, so many of them had decades or even centuries of experience in court intrigue. Kaiser might have a lot of twenty-first-century knowledge to draw on, but the locals weren’t helpless country bumpkins, either. He might prevail, but it wouldn’t be easy or happen overnight.
You said it, you sexy-ass slice-and-dicer.
After finishing the early supper, the Dwarves, with Desmond in tow, went into the inn’s common room to drink and sing. Kinto and Gosto went inside as well, leaving Hawke, Tava and Nadia at the outdoor table as the first songs began.
“That’s Desmond,” Nadia said when an incomprehensible Dwarven ballad was followed by something in English, accompanied by a string instrument. “He even added a guitar to his starting equipment.”
“It’s not bad,” Hawke admitted. “Not my sort of music, but I’ve heard worse.”
“Pity the singer is a
pig in human clothing,” Tava all but hissed.
“What happened?”
Nadia answered first. “He didn’t want us to go meet your friends until I told him I would leave him behind. Then he tried be a tough guy and boss Tava’s father around.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Hawke was shocked. Was the guy really that dumb, or that desperate for female attention?
“Father was not amused,” Tava said. “Gosto healed the black eye and broken teeth; after that, your Warrior friend learned to stay out of the way.”
“I thought the old guy was going to kill him,” Nadia whispered in English.
“Stick to Vulgate, please,” Hawke told her, and she repeated her words in the common language.
“He would have been within his rights,” Tava said. “A man who offers insult to another man should expect blows or worse in return. Only a nobleman would think otherwise, and even so, one who casually abuses his peasants had best look to his safety, for even a peasant can drop a rock upon a passing horseman, or loose an arrow from behind a bush.”
“Desmond isn’t a nobleman,” Hawke explained. “But he comes from a place where manners aren’t enforced with violence.”
“Violence doesn’t solve anything,” Nadia said, and looked startled and angry when both Tava and Hawke burst out laughing.
“Do you jest, Sorceress?” Tava told her. “Every graveyard in the Common Realm is filled to bursting with solved problems.”
“That’s… that’s horrible!”
“On my way here, four bandits saw me, a man traveling alone, and they tried to murder me for whatever I was carrying,” Hawke said. “They won’t be doing that anymore.”
Nadia looked like she was about to burst into tears. Hawke brushed aside a surge of irritation with her, reminding himself that until a few days ago, she had lived in one of the most prosperous places on Earth. He couldn’t expect her to accept the new realities immediately.
“Hey,” he told her in a soft voice. “It’s going to be okay.”
He looked at Tava, who shrugged and got up. “I will see about getting us more drinks,” she said, and left.
You are the best, he told her through Saturnyx. I just want to make sure she is all right.
She is very soft, softer than the most coddled merchant’s brat, Tava sent back. But if she learns better, she may be all right. I do not think she would make a good third wife, however.
Ladies, I haven’t married once, let alone two or three times. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
All he got back from Tava was a chuckle.
“I’m sorry, Nadia,” he told his fellow Earthling. “We are in a different world, though, and the sooner you understand that, the better off you will be.”
“Okay, I get it,” she said, now sounding angry rather than upset.
“The Realms are dangerous. Any place that is called a ‘land of adventure’ would be.”
“I liked having adventures in games. I liked pretending to be somewhere else, doing all kinds of amazing stuff. Adventuring was great. I also loved gathering herbs, and crafting. Fishing. I thought this place would be a little more like that.” She shrugged. “I was wrong. But I would do it again.”
“I think it’s time for that long story. Why you were willing to risk your life for a chance to come here?”
She hesitated for a second, and then it all came out: “I was a diabetic, morbidly obese, forty-three-year old woman on Earth, living alone,” she said. “Last year, one of my feet got a cut that became infected, but it had so much diabetic nerve damage that I didn’t notice it until it was too late. They had to chop off my foot and half my lower leg.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I guess it wasn’t that long a story.”
“I’m really sorry, Nadia.”
She shrugged and went on. “It took a while for things to get bad, maybe that’s why I thought it was a longer story. I got diagnosed at thirty-six. I weighed over two hundred pounds then, and didn’t listen to what my doctor was saying. Whenever I got depressed, I ate. Being fat made me depressed, so I ate more. Vicious circle, and I never figured out how to break it. And when I lost my leg… It was bad.”
She had never mentioned any of it, but he felt vaguely sick when he remembered that she had ‘taken a break’ for two weeks.
“That break you took from the Guild.”
She nodded. “I was too ashamed to tell anybody what happened. I came back to the game as soon as I could. It was my escape from everything. Without the game… I don’t know if I could have gone on.”
They had exchanged a bunch of emails during those days. She always seemed cheerful, like she didn’t have a problem in the world. He wondered how many people hid their pain behind smiles and small talk, until it was too late.
“I had a shitty work-from-home job, my parents and most of my extended family were dead, and my cat passed away a week before Eternal Journey Online went live. That’s why kept playing even after the disappearances. I had nothing left to lose.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, unsure of what else to say.
“Yeah, I got that a lot, too. The couple of people I told didn’t know how to handle it. They started treating me differently. So I stopped telling people anything. I didn’t want pity. I wanted friends, but all I had were online acquaintances.”
“I’m beginning to understand,” he told her. “I wish I’d been a better friend.”
“You were as good as I allowed you to be, I guess. But now I’m here. The violence bothers me, yes, but do you know how amazing it is to be an Elf? It’s not just that they cannot get fat no matter how much they eat, or the 20/5 vision, or the magic. I feel young, except I never felt this good when I was younger, either.”
“Even being a Half-Elf is pretty damn good,” he admitted.
“I’m not worried about my insulin anymore, or about my vision getting blurrier every year. That was all I had to look forward to, back on Earth: going blind, losing my other foot, and waiting for a stroke or heart attack to finish me off. Even when that swamp monster was killing me, my last thought was, at least I’m not me anymore.”
“I’m…”
“Sorry. Yes. You said that already.”
“Okay. I wasn’t a good friend then, but I’m here now. You’re not alone anymore.”
She started tearing up. “Okay. That is good, Ben. Hawke. That is really good. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
He let her sob on his shoulder for a bit. And caught the glare Desmond was giving them from one of the inn’s windows.
Fifty-Three
“I’m going to scout the side of the road for a few minutes,” Hawke told Kinto as the eleven people in the group made their way down the Legion’s Highway. “Desmond, you’re with me.”
“Why? Ranger types should be doing the scouting, and we’ve got two of those.”
“Why, you ask? Because I’m the Party Leader, that’s why.”
Desmond looked at his newfound Dwarven buddies, but even Crommen shrugged and stayed quiet. They all knew better than getting in the middle of someone else’s dispute. With a betrayed look on his face, the Warrior followed Hawke off the road and into a young-growth section of woods. They kept walking in silence until a rise on the ground separated them from the road. Hawke turned around and faced him.
“This B.S. stops now,” he told him. The sullen looks and complaints had everyone on edge, and it had only been two days.
“Are you going to kill me?” Desmond asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“No. Are you going to kick my ass like that old hired thug did?”
“I probably should. Kick your ass and then kill you. And that’s just for calling Kinto a hired thug. He’s a better person than you’ll ever be.”
“He’s a…”
“If you say NPC, I’ll skin you alive. Starting from the feet and going up.”
“What do you want from me, Hawke?”
“I want you to stop being a problem. We are about to go to war, bro. You and I can die and come back, at least a few times, but the rest of the people following me can’t. You need to stop being a dick to Nadia and everyone else. We can’t trust you right now. If you turn heel at the wrong time, it can get us all killed.”
“So kill me, then.”
“I’d rather not,” Hawke told him. And not just because I don’t kill people without a good reason.
Nadia and Desmond had moved their respawning site to Eagle’s Watch, which had a small all-pantheon chapel. As soon as they reached Orom, they would change it to the temple of Shining Father. Until then, however, if his fellow Eternals died, they would come back miles from where the group was, with the distance increasing with every passing day. Killing Desmond would bring about more problems than it solved. Even restrained by his oath, the Warrior might figure out a way to let the Nerf Herders know where Hawke was.
“This is all about Nadia,” Desmond said bitterly. “I’ve seen you two together. I thought you were with the Ranger chick. Or do you want both of them?”
“I kinda do, actually, but that’s not the issue here,” Hawke admitted, startling a choked laugh out of Desmond.
“The hell, dude? You think you’re some kind of rock star or something? Gonna bang every chick you run into?”
“Nah. Just those two, and another one you haven’t met yet. If they all agree and we can work things out.”
Later.
Hawke went on. “But like I said, that’s not the problem. You being a dick is.”
“I saved her life,” Desmond said.
“True. And you risked your life playing the game because she asked you to. Also true.”
Twilight Templar (The Eternal Journey Book 1) Page 31