Chapter 1: Puzzle (Patreon)

Riloth 19th, 720 AF is a day all know by name if not by date. The Day of Heroes. While for most, it was a day like any other, others were not so lucky. Many like to mark the Day of Heroes as the beginning of the Last Dragon War, but that is not correct. It is more accurate to say that Illunia 15th, 720 AF was the real start of the war, as it was the day the Fel dragons coordinated an attack on the Hardune that nearly wiped them out. This is due to the surface-centric nature of most Waatin[1] scholars.

[1] Waatin: Torcish for surface people.

-Day the Heroes by Erol Vondermin

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"No! That doesn't make any sense!" Amara yelled, snatching the piece of paper out of Doug's hands.

While everyone else in the Academy was celebrating Landing and the festivities leading up to it, Kole and his friends had spent the time cooped up in Zale's home trying to piece together the marred fragments of the letter Zale's mother had sent via the strange icy Kobold creature Rakin had melted.

They'd all banded together, putting their minds to the task, but some had gotten way more into it than others.

"Amara," Zale said in a disapproving tone for not the first time.

"Sorry," Amara said, shamefaced.

"And?" Zale asked expectantly.

With the air of a child being forced to repeat something for the hundredth time--even though it hadn't been more than twelve--Amara said, "'I appreciate your efforts, but I don't think that's correct.'"

"What did he write?" Kole asked.

"I don't want to taint your minds by reading it out loud," Amara said, words that from anyone else might have been meant as an insult, but were from her simply a scathing assessment of the quality of work.

Instead of coping in a healthy fashion with the revelation her sister was an evil spider-loving primal kidnapper, Amara had instead decided to become obsessive. And, she wasn’t being too picking in the topics she’d chosen to obsess over. Strategy games, mysteries about other realmly invaders, it didn’t matter. If she could delve into a task with her mind to forget her worries, she would. She’d even become fixated on finding a better method to gather crumbs.

After Kole’s room had been magically moved to adjoin Zale’s, it had been suggested by Zale that everyone else move in as well. Amara had resisted, but when it had been made clear the suggestion hadn’t in fact been a suggestion at all, she relented. And they’d all quickly discovered she was a terrible roommate. Despite the seemingly chaotic layout of her workshop, she was very concerned with the cleanliness of the shared spaces.

Apparently, it was very difficult to properly focus a colony of ants to get any work done when they found crumbs, and it took her weeks to get them to stop trying to forage.

"Maybe we take a break?" Rakin suggested from the couch, where he was 'meditating' on the idea.

Personally, Kole thought the dwarf's meditations looked a lot like a nap, but he wasn't going to say anything if Zale wasn't willing to. While the dwarf's adopted mother Dagmar had been mentioned in the letter, his excitement over the mystery had only lasted a few days.

"Let's read the note again and see what comes to mind," Zale suggested instead, earning a groan from Rakin.

"'Azalea, I’m okay do not worry. Blank, an enemy your uncle warned of, blank, travel is dumb.' That first blank has to be something along the lines of her having found an enemy, right?"

Everyone nodded.

"Something is dumb, but she calls things dumb all the time, so that's not really going to narrow it down," she continued with more nods.

"'I'm working to subvert their efforts, but you, blank."

"We still think this is related to the 'prophecy,' right?" Kole asked, receiving his own nods. "Then I think this is probably related to the imminent attack. She probably told us a day or something to prepare for."

Kole sighed and then added, "If only it hadn't been burned."

Without opening his eyes, Rakin said from the couch, in his own tired and repeated tone, "I already said I was sorry. Next time I'll let the ice monster kill ye all before I try to melt it."

"'Blank, kobold is Flake, the least stupid of blank. He has details on the attack to come," Zale said. "so, she introduced her... minion."

"If a kobold is the smartest she could find, I'd hate to see what else she has working for her," Rakin joked from the couch.

"Maybe he was a genius kobold, and we'll never know, because he melted," Kole said, and when Rakin didn't react he added, "When you murdered him."

"Bah," Rakin said, "I'm done talking about that."

"'Paper is hard to, blank'" Zale continued. "So, she probably explained why the note was s short, and why she had to use a kobold to begin with. Any disagreement?"

Shakes now, instead of nods.

"'Dagmar found me, she is here with me--'" Zale continued, only to be interrupted by a half-hearted cheer and a lazy fist pump from Rakin.

"'The Midlian empire--'" Zale read on, ignoring him.

"Are a bunch of evil jerks?" Kole suggested, interrupting with a smile.

"Yes, but probably not what she was saying," Zale replied.

"It wouldn't be out of character," Rakin observed.

"It would be if paper was scarce and she was writing a message. Look at how cramped the writing is," Zale explained, holding the note up, showing the small cramped letting squeezed into the small piece of paper. "Mom would never waste space on a joke when she wasn't even flourishing her letters."

"'The Midlian empire--'" Zale read again, loudly continuing, "super long blank, coming back with an elemental army.

"Oh, yeah. That's probably connected despite the long blank," Rakin admitted.

"Stop joking around!" Amara shouted, she'd been shouting a lot lately. "We already talked about this. The ice people mentioned an emperor. They are related to the empire."

"Didn't someone say something about the Midlian empire recently?" Kole said, trying to remember some mention at the edge of his brain. "Aside from the ice people."

When no one could recall, Doug asked, "Why can't we use magic to repair the note again?"

"Identity Font based repair spells won't repair text," Kole said, absent-mindedly as he tried to remember who had mentioned the Midlian Empire. "We'd need time-based repair spells and I don't think anyone in the Academy knows any."

Kole pulled out his spellbook, which was in reality an ensouled artifact, and starting thinking as he starting writing. The book had helped him recall class lectures with perfect memory, maybe he could get it to help him here.

*The last time I heard about the Midlian Empire from my friends--prior to this week was

Kole's nib hovered over the page in anxious anticipation for only a moment, when the words came flooding into his mind.

when Zale spoke about the legion structure of the soldier ants.

"The soldier ants!" Kole shouted triumphantly.

"Oh yeah," Zale said, rubbing her face. It was getting late, and they were all a little ragged. "I forgot. I know we are assuming this was all connected, but they aren't elemental—they didn't smell like elementals."

"Actually," Rakin said from the couch, sitting up.

Zale glared at him challengingly, but he raised his hands in surrender.

"I'm being serious this time," he said and waited for Zale's look to fade. "There was all the Earth magic around the ants. The weapons and the road were definitely made by using the Font of Earth."

How could this be related? Kole wondered, trying to fit the pieces together. They’d fought elemental people and strange hybrid creatures, but what did they have to do with one another?

He thought through all the interactions, and an Idea began to form.

“Those ice people had a...” Kole began, but then paused to think of a charitable word, “Low opinion on dwarves.”

“Not anymore they don’t,” Rakin said, grinning at his past killing.

“I mean to say, the Midlian Empire was very structured, basically a caste system,” Kole said.

They’d researched the lost empire in the past week as part of trying to parse the letter. While the Midlian Empire had been known widely for its cruelty in the pursuit of knowledge, they were also awful in their treatment of non-humans, and anyone else they conquered They had conscript armies, but the human ones were at least trained and equipped. The non-human conscript armies were simply a means for the empire to dispose of their less desirables. The system was set up to breed amity between the humans and non-humans of the conquered nations, eventually granting citizenship to some of the humans after enough service. Citizenship, though, had tiers to it as well, and the longer one’s family had been a citizen, or the rank of the official that granted it played parts in their complicated caste system that pit the masses against each other.

“If those Ice elemental people were the elite of this empire remnant force, then maybe there are Earth elemental elites as well, and these soldier ants were their army.”

“That makes sense to me!” Amara said excitedly. “Doug, you should have ideas more like—”

Zale gave her a look, and Amara put her hand over her mouth, realizing that maybe she wasn’t being helpful.

“Moving on then,” Zale said. “‘Long blank, between realms. I cannot leave, I’ve embe, blank, the same Rakin battled) here while Dagmar is blank, bellion amongst the dwarven slave.”

“Well, we think ‘embe’ is supposed to be ‘embedded,’” Zale said, repeating what they’d settled before. “So, that, and the mention of the people Rakin battled, AND the ice kobold minion, suggests strongly that my mother, the ‘queen of ice’ is trying to subvert the empire’s goals in this other place.”

“Aye,” Rakin agreed with a mischievous smile. ”And me ma is a freedom fighter. That’s so undwarfly of her.”

Kole thought that phrasing was a bit odd, but didn’t know enough about dwarven culture to be sure, so he kept his mouth shut.

“I think that’s probably the gist of it,” Kole said, getting sounds of agreement. “Should we, I don’t know, tell an adult?”

“Probably,” Rakin said at the same moment Zale said, “Definitely."

As they walked towards the door that led back to the new headquarters of the Academy’s defenses set up in the foyer of the Dahn, Kole turned to Amara.

“What did Doug say that was so bad?” he asked.

“He said, ‘living in cities is dumb,” Amara said

“It is!” Doug shouted as he ducked his antlers under the door frame.