(TLO) Chapter 172: Drognile (Patreon)

The air was heavier than usual this far away from the mountain. It wasn’t necessarily unusual, though, seeing as they’d told her it happened every once in a while. But it was worrying. Just last month they’d been forced to move their hideout farther back than usual when the phantasms increased in numbers and they’d lost one of their golds.

Ayla stepped away from a concentrated beam of black reia, dodging the attack and separating the head of the beast from its body with a length of concentrated reia she held like a sword.

She’d been stuck in this dead world for over a year now, fighting these phantasms that had no defined shape. All she recognized of them was that they walked on four limbs, had a tail, and were reptilian. Some of them had the added perk of shooting blasts of black reia from the top of their heads. The luck those who’d lived here before her arrival had was that the skill was only available to phantasms of Baron rank and higher.

“Any luck?” a voice rang out from her hip. It was scratchy and coarse and it took effort to listen and hear the words precisely.

Ayla shook her head as she cleaved another beast in two.

“None,” she answered. “No sign of Darvon and his team.”

“Shit,” the person on the other end cussed. “Pack up then. Can’t afford to lose you, too.”

Ayla nodded in confirmation, her wild hair of fiery red bouncing at the impact. For the umpteenth she wished she had a band to hold it together. Sadly, this world had no such thing. She didn’t hold it against them since there were a lot of things they didn’t have.

She turned casually and kicked a phantasm that scurried at her, hoping to go unseen within the mist. The force of her kick shattered the thing in one strike. At their gold rank there was very little they could do to her.

“Ayla,” the voice came again and she looked down at the rectangular stone placard with a brown gem embedded at its centre. The color of the gem was darkening, implying it was running out of uses.

“Yes, Sarfin,” she answered meekly, her chosen tone of childish innocence a wild contrast to her bulking seven feet and more.

“Don’t be sassy with me,” Sarfin shot back, having none of it. “I know you’re still out there fighting. Return now. I have no idea what we would do if we lost you too.”

At Sarfin’s words, Ayla took a hesitant step back in retreat, frowning. She hadn’t even gotten into the thick of the mist yet. Darvon and his team had gone in search of a way into the corrupted mountain against, Lunifer’s orders and had lost contact. There was no one that didn’t know they were dead already, but she’d volunteered to go looking for them ‘in case’ they were alive. Not to seem like a leader that gave up on her people so easily, Lunifer had allowed her.

So here she was, not necessarily looking for Darvon’s team but testing how far she could go into the mist before its effect began weighing heavily on her mind. As an oathbound, she could last longer than most people. But the deeper she went in, the stronger the mist weighed on her till she started suffering.

She sighed and took another step back, this one less hesitant. This was another day she would not be finding her way back home.

A few more steps in retreat and she was completely clear of the mist. She would go back to Lunifer and continue the task of scouring this world in search of more survivors. She continued to convince herself it wasn’t just a good cause but a worthy one as well.

She was about to leave the mist entirely when something grazed against the fabric of this world’s reality. It was so close to her that, as an oath, she felt it graze against her mind like the disturbance in reia. But it wasn’t a disturbance in reia. There was a reason this world was called a dead world. The reia here was dead. Affecting it was a waste of time and it left soul artists almost useless. It was in her struggle to be useful in this land that she had bound herself as an oath or, to be more precise, an oath had bound itself to her.

Even now, Lunifer continued to wonder what oath had chosen her, what concept of reality she had embodied. Each time the old Herald asked, she gave the same answer. “None of your business.”

They weren’t enemies, but an oath was a secret in these lands. Especially hers.

Ignoring the attack on her sense of reality she dismissed the white reia in her hand and moved on from the mist. If it had been back home, she would’ve given the sensation more attention since it felt like the early signs of a rift in the world.

But there were no rifts in a dead world, and the phantasms she fought—the phantasms that were scattered all across this world—came from the mountain she continued to try to enter.

She only took two steps when the strangest thing happened.

Two rifts opened in front of her. They stood next to each other, massive tears in a world where it should be impossible, glowing a soft red and something flew out of one and got sucked into the other so fast that she didn’t see it.

Then they disappeared.

She was still contemplating the phenomenon when the placard dangling from her waist made a sound like something scratching and she hurried on back to their hideout.

As she moved, she returned a shroud over her core and her size dimished. In no more than four steps she went from a hulking seven plus feet of brute force to a girl of six feet.

She made a contemplative stroll of the rest of the journey back, wondering what exactly she’d just witnessed.

………………………………………………………

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I joined the team, my lady,” Tatake whispered as they snuck through the dungeon, careful not to make too much sound.

Alfina listened to his opinion—for that was all it was—and discarded it just as easily. She’d recruited him to join her team at her father’s behest a few months agon, and while he’d proven a good choice, his constant bickering left much to be questioned.

“You always make the same complaints. You know that?” Crorn said. He was a lithe boy with a set of yellow hair and an old time childhood friend she was always grateful for, and his constant desire to fight her battles was a definite plus. But sometimes he involved himself in her life a bit too much.

Crorn and Tatake walked ahead of the team, leaving her, Nessica, their healer, and Palpvi, their second damage dealer to follow behind.

Crorn being the scout and Tatake being a tank with his hulking frame, it was only right that they be positioned so.

Till this day, they remained a team she was proud of. Best of all, each one of them had their special perks. Even now, walking within the labyrinth of a structural beast glade, she felt nothing of the fear most people would.

On a simple day, they were soul artists who went in search of beast glades and cleared labyrinths. It was the life she’d always dreamed of; the life her father had eventually allowed her. But today her father had called a favor of her. The patriarch had instructed he send her east where there were complaints of a group of brigands who’d kidnapped a number of women and children, all without reia, and held them hostage in the labrynth they now walked.

Seeing as her team was not designed for such request, she had tried to argue her case. She had begged her father to send her brother instead. But he had refused. The patriarch had asked that she do it, and no one said no to the patriarch.

So here she was, taken from the comfort she was accustomed to and sent in search of brgands.

Crorn held up a hand, and they all came to a halt, silence descending on them in sudden beauty. The hand he’d placed on the matte black wall never left it, and a conjured reia in his hand, activating a tracking skill she knew all too well with quiet words.

When he placed the hand on the floor she knew his eyes glowed a soft beige, though she couldn’t see it from where she was. Beside her, Nessica, a young lady of over twenty with an affinity for life reia, and hair as blue as the waters of David’s tears, prepared herself to play her role in case anything happened, wielding her crosier like some priestess of a god.

Palpvi, however, didn’t look the slightest bit bothered. If anything, he looked bored and Alfina tried not to take it as a personal affront to her. Going on interesting missions was one of the things she’d promised him when she’d gotten him to join her team, so it worried her that he would display his boredom so blatantly.

When Crorn’s skill had run its course, he hurried forward with a touch of panic, leading them faster and less cautiously than a scout was supposed to.

He led them around a corner, then down a bending corrider. They followed with equal speed, abandoning stealth as he had. It had been a while since she’d seen this level of recklessness from her friend and she worried for what he led them into.

When they arrived at their destination, it was in front of a door covered in moss and algae. It looked as if it had been fashioned from wood, a material they hadn’t seen anywhere in this labyrinth. Its blatant desire to stand out tickled Alfina the wrong way.

“Are you sure this—”

Crorn silenced her with another raised her, completely ignoring her worry in a way most uncharacteristic of him.

He turned to their tank, clad in a bulking armor with noise cancelling runes designed to reduce but not eliminate the sound of his movements, and gave him strategic signals.

Whatever expression Tatake had beneath his helmet at being ordered by the scout didn’t show in his actions. He nodded in affirmation once, then barreled into the door.

It broke and shattered under the weight of him and Crorn followed immediately after.

The sight they came to was one Alfina found displeasing. She’d been going on missions since the day she’d been blessed by reia and seen a lot of things. In fact, the sight before her wasn’t that horrible on the scale of it, but there was an undersigned chaos here. And that it had been done to both the bad and the innocent gave a psychological heft to it.

Bodies lay half strewn across the room floors. There were dismembered body parts of both humans and soul beasts all over the place. A decapitated head hung embedded to the wall, impaled by a metal spear. Its eyes were still open and she saw the horror he’d experienced in the last moments of his life in them.

She picked out the brigands easily and was sorting through the bodies of the innocent hostages she had been sent to negotiate for or simply rescue, now dead and dessicated, when Crorn pulled the team’s attention to her.

“Someone’s still alive over here,” he called out.

His possession of a powerful observational skill was the thing that made him a scout, and a good one. So if he deemed it alright to talk casually now, it meant they were free of enemies.

The team gathered to him where he was squatted in front of a man with his back rested against the wall.

“Is he alright?” Nessica asked, always the healer looking for who to save.

“No,” Tatake answered, voice hollow from withing his helmet.

“Can you tell his status?” Alfina asked, still walking up to them, her speed sluggish as she found difficulty taking her attention away from the bodies around her. Her eyes connected with those of a dead boy barely over thirteen years and she had to fight herself from gagging.

Palpvi answered her where she had been asking Crorn. “No, princess,” he said. “We can’t pull it up.”

That was enough to draw her from the dead. “What do you mean you can’t pull it up?”

“It’s hidden,” Crorn answered. “All I can get out of him is his authority and his—”

Her team gasped collectively and Tatake’s hand moved in time to grab Palpvi’s spear before it pierced the man the surrounded.

His helmet turned to look at the damage dealer and Alfina was certain there was scorn in the eyes behind it.

Slowly, the man that held their attention began making sounds.

“Hurry over, princess,” Tatake said. “If I’m not mistaken, you possess the language skill.”

Alfina frowned at being ordered but hurried over, regardless. As part of a ruling family, her knowledge of language and requirement to understand as many of it as possible had been bolstered with a language skill that allowed her understand and communicate with all sentient beings closely related to humans.

She got to them in three long strides and saw the man they were watching over.

He bled from an injury in his side, and the clothe he wore was torn and tattered, caked in drying blood. He had shoulder length hair as dark as night and eyes the color of liquid silver watched her and her team through half-closed lids.

His face was nothing spectacular. He was well enough to be considered handsome, but not enough to be swoonworthy, and lying down it was easy to tell he was on short side for a soul artist. He continued to move his lips in barely audible words and she was forced to squat like the rest of her teammates just to hear him. The language she spoke was nothing like the countless ones she’d heard and she was forced to activate her skill for it, feeling reia fill her from her core as she brought it to bear.

[World Tongue].

Now that it was active, the man found silence.

“Are you alright?” she asked, knowing he would understand her words, even as Nessica fidgeted beside her in the way she did when she was worried about something she was afraid to point out. “Do you need help? Can you stand?”

At her words, the man’s eyes sharpened a bit but not enough. It was the only sign he’d understood her.

“He has a head injury,” Crorn pointed out. “And there’s a dagger sticking out of his gut.”

Alfina nodded once, then turned to Nessica momentarily. “Can you take care of his injuries?”

Nessica nodded with enough trepidation to drown all of them. “I can,” she answered. “But I don’t know if I should.”

Alfina frowned at that. “And why the hell not?!”

“Language,” Crorn said, quietly, admonishing her as he’d done all her life.

Rather than snap at him too, she took a deep, calming breath and asked again. “Why not?”

“Because,” Nessica began, “no matter how tattered his clothes are, I’d recognize its kind anywhere. And I’m not so sure we should be intervening in the duties of a man of the frock…”

That froze all of their actions and decisions.

“… especially,” Nessica continued, looking at the carnage around them, “one most likely belonging to war.”

“So you’re saying he’s a priest of war?” Alfina asked.

“I’m saying he’s a priest, and we found him surrounded by such violent death.”

“And you assume he’s a priest of war not death because of the violence?”

“How many gods do you know that allow their priests this level of carnage?”

Alfina put a thoughtful finger to her chin as her team awaited her next move. She was still contemplating what to do when the man mumbled something she didn’t catch.

She turned to him almost immediately, cautious now that they knew he was at least a priest, and asked, “What was that, Father?”

The priest parted dry lips and croaked out. “Not… a… priest… yet.”

Then his eyes frowned in confusion after his words.

Nessica frowned at his words but said nothing. Alfina knew why. It was rare to see priests in training move alone.

“Where am I?” the priest asked.

“The easter borders of the territory of House Kilvic,” she answered.

The priest’s expression continued to worsen and he groaned in pain.

“House Kilvic,” he groaned, eyes focused on her yet seeming to take up the entire room. Whatever had happened to him, he didn’t seem to recognize anything.

Remembering Crorn had pointed out a head injury, she asked. “Do you know where you are?”

The man shook his head.

“What of where you’re from?”

He shook his head again.

Worry colored Alfina’s mind. “Do you remember anything, at all?”

The man’s gaze grew unfocused, and it was a moment before he spoke again. “What’s Drognile?” he asked, and Tatake swore under his breath.

Rising to his feet, the tank turned and walked away. He might not have understood the exact words, but he knew the second word. It was safe to assume he’d deduced what the priest had said.

The priest’s question was all she needed to know the state of him.

“Drognile,” she began gently. “Is the name of this world.”

She watched the blank expression cover the priest’s face and knew this mission her father had sent her on was worse than she’d been told.

“Do you remember your name?” she asked softly, moving the conversation along.

The priest frowned like a man rummaging through his thoughts. It took a moment of waiting before he found whatever it was he was looking for, so that when he gave his answer, he didn’t sound so certain.

“Oden,” he said. “Oden Al Jabari.”

To Be Continued....

Announcement: This is the end of what can be considered book one. Seth's story will be going on Hiatus until Book 2 is completed, sadly, I cannot give a timeline for that. Ergo, there will be no more chapters for a considerable while.