Chương 20: Chapter 19

Four weeks passed in a blur, and even with the additional foot traffic from traders and adventurers, my days had fallen into a routine once more. Every day, without fail, I practised the Path of Aethersensing with my grandpa. I could reliably detect two to three uses of aether around me in the couple of hours we spent together and it had shown dividends. You have advanced the Tier of your Path! Path of Aethersensing I (53/10) … You have advanced the Tier of your Path!

Path of Aethersensing III (53/50) Reward: 3 Aether None of my other Paths had progressed up a Tier in the same period, though I had gained at least a few steps in all of them. I had also improved Muffled Steps by a single point. I was happy with how everything was going and brought up the details of the two Paths I was most interested in at the moment.

Path of Stealth IV (854/1000) Path of Climbing IX (8388/10000) Stealth was closing in on the finish line, and at the rate it was going I thought I would probably manage to finish it shortly after the trading season ended and the winds turned icy rather than merely cold. As for Climbing, I had been spending extra time on it, my arms growing sore every day from pulling myself up and over anything I could get my hands on.

It had grown to the point where the old man was paying Griselda to build what was effectively a training course made of wood in the backyard for me. It wouldn't be done for weeks yet, but I was excited at the new opportunities. We were just finishing up lunch when I heard the outpost doors swing open. I doubted it was traders at this time of day and spun around in my chair to see who it was.

The three individuals who marched in wore steel armour over leather with their breastplates and greaves polished till I could see my reflection in them. Two were men, one older and one younger, while the third was a woman who was taller than both. Following the three warriors were two more individuals, a woman and a man, wearing cream white robes and breastplates over the top.

"Halkur," Cornelius said in greeting.

"It's been what? Three years? Your letters said nothing of you coming through the pass." I wondered for a moment why the name sounded familiar. The older warrior smiled and opened his arms, stomping forward to wrap the old man up in a friendly hug.

"Even if I had written you, we would've arrived long before the letter. A Warden found signs of a Demonic Cult on the lower slopes of the Horndale. South of here and almost halfway to Ajinport. We dealt with the Cultists, but there were signs that they had been making forays higher into the Horndale. We've been dispatched to investigate." Cornelius nodded seriously while my mother moved to stand behind me, wrapping her arms around me while I stood on my chair goggling at the warriors before me.

Mentions of a Demonic Cult had jogged my memory, and I could recognise my saviors now. How different would my life have been were I raised in the cult instead of by my wonderful mother and my crotchety grandpa? I shivered at the thought.

"How long will you be staying?" Cornelius asked.

"We'll do a search of the area, and the denizens of the community. We'll start immediately, but we'd appreciate a place to stay for the night when we're done," Halkur answered in a gruff voice.

"You'll have it, of course. I'll make a note in the book of your use of the outpost. I assume the Shining Light Guild will foot the cost?" Halkur nodded and frowned slightly, unwilling to meet Cornelius's eyes as he spoke his next words.

"We need to check all of you as well. Is there anyone else in the outpost?"

"Just the three of us," Cornelius replied.

"Go ahead." Halkur stepped forward, and I sensed a fuzziness around me. I would've recognised the feeling as aether passing over me even without the notification of progressing my Path. I could tell my mother felt the same as her arms twitched while still wrapped around me.

"Clean," stated Halkur clearly, and the other two warriors relaxed slightly. I hadn't realised till that moment how tense they were.

"How many others live nearby?" Halkur asked.

"Fourteen," Cornelius answered after a moment before he detailed who he was aware of and roughly where each of them lived. I caught a sneer from the female warrior and the male priest, mage, whatever the less armoured ones were, when grandpa mentioned Griselda's heritage.

"A Hedge Witch?" Halkur looked to Cornelius for confirmation when the old man got to Magatha. Cornelius nodded with resignation, but when I glanced up at my mothers face I could see the look of worry she wore clear as day. A few more words were shared with the female priestess or mage making notes on a piece of brown paper the entire time. Then the five-man crew was gone and this time I caught the clatter of metal on stone as the horses they had rode in on took off down the road.

I realised why I hadn't heard them arrive as we watched them leave. They'd gone to Kellin's trading post first, the married couple standing outside their store and home, watching the five members of the Shining Light Guild gallop down the road. Stolen story; please report. My mother put me down on my feet next to grandpa.

"I'll just go reassure them," she said quietly.

"Good idea," Cornelius agreed, watching his daughter hold her skirts up as she walked across the road with the dust still settling.

"What's Domonik Cult?" I asked. Cornelius pursed his lips, and I could tell he was at war with himself. I didn't blame him. The question was as loaded as they came, and while I might appear smart for my age, I was still a three year old.

"A Demonic Cult," he stressed after an interminable wait while we both watched my mother charm our neighbours and settle their fears.

"Is a group of people who have made a…deal…with a type of monster."

"Why make deal with monster?" I asked.

"Because, Bastian, the monster gives them something in return. Usually, it's a Path. A very powerful one." I nodded with all the seriousness a three-year-old that didn't come up to his grandpa's hip could muster.

"Why bad then?"

"Because the only way to progress the Path is to do very bad things. Bad things that help the monster."

"Like eating last piece of candied honey?" I knew what he meant, and my Path of Deception ticked up at my playing dumb. This was one of those times that I hated lying to my grandpa, but what was the alternative? Telling him that I understood the concepts of murder, torture, or maybe even human sacrifice? Not a chance.

"Worse things," Cornelius muttered darkly.

"Much worse." If he was going to say any more, we were interrupted by my mother's return.

"They're scared," admitted my mother immediately.

"I invited them to eat with us tonight, but they declined when I told them the Shining Light Guild will be staying as well."

"Can't say I blame them," Cornelius replied.

"While Halkur is a moral man, not all of the members of the Shining Light Guild are. Well, nothing to be done about it." Cornelius turned and started walking back towards his office while I followed my mother towards the common room for my afternoon lesson.

"Do you think they'll find anything?" called my mother right before her father had vanished behind the walls of his office.

"In our community? No. If there were cultists passing through our woods, Hurin would know. If they were in fact climbing the Horndale, they were probably doing so further south. The question is, why?" Cornelius left that question hanging before closing the door to his office. I performed terribly at my afternoon lessons, half because I was distracted and the other half because my mum was distracted. I could see it in the worry lines on her beautiful face and how she glanced at me when she thought I wasn't looking.

Don't worry, Mum! I thought reassuringly, I'm a demonslayer! Not a demon worshipper! Of course, that had been when I was sharing my body with a discombobulated demon's soul. I had more than a few doubts about whether I could manage the same against an actual demon. Or demon-possessed I guess, since that was what this body had almost been. The warriors of the Shining Light Guild returned for dinner, their armour slightly less shiny after all the dust from the road and tromping through the underbrush.

I even noticed a few leaves stuck in places they were less likely to notice. I slipped away as soon as I had finished eating, uncomfortable beneath some of their hard gazes. Before I vanished I did learn that true to the old man's prediction, they found nothing. They even managed to track down Hurin who had told them he'd seen no sign of crossings within two days' walk of us both north and south.

Perhaps it was their failure that had the warriors of the Shining Light staring around them like there were demons hiding in the shadows. Whatever the reason, I wanted none of it and escaped up to my room without even considering attempting one of my pranks or stealth operations on the hardened warriors. My mother ducked in to check on me but I decided on an early night rather than my usual workout.

As far as these shining assholes should be concerned, I was just a normal little boy, and normal little boys didn't do full exercise routines before bed to eke out a few extra steps on their Paths. Sleep, for once, was freedom, rather than wasted time. I woke with the sun, its pale light barely shining through my curtains. Getting out of bed quietly I dressed myself and crept downstairs only to find that my mother was already up and cleaning empty wooden plates from the common room tables.

She noticed me as I reached the bottom of the stairs and smiled over at me before following my gaze and glancing at the table.

"They've already left, dearest. Did you like them?" Her question had a tremor to it, as though she wasn't sure which answer she wanted to hear. Did her baby boy aspire to be the kind of person who scared the common folk? Not really. I shook my head like I was worried and she knelt down and opened her arms wide. I crashed into them a second later and felt the warm comfort of a mother's hug wash away all my worries.

I hated that feeling, you know the one, where you're completely innocent but something about the situation makes you feel like you're guilty somehow. My mother's presence and the fact that they were gone finally let the stress and anxiety I had built up inside of me fade away. Cornelius found us there, a few minutes later, still hugging. It seemed that today was an early day for everyone. Usually the old man was up after me as my mother and I vied for the position of earliest riser.

He took one look at us and gave a nod.

"Let's have an early breakfast, shall we? Maybe break out some bacon for me, Penny, and some of your red-stripe honey for Bastian?" Thankfully, my mother didn't need much of an excuse to spoil me or her dad so we ate a tasty breakfast as a family with cooked tomatoes, warm bread from the Kellins drizzled in red-stripe honey, a couple of eggs, and I even managed to sneak a few small pieces of bacon off the old codger's plate when he wasn't looking.

Though it didn't increase my Path at all so maybe he let me have them. I was expecting the day would follow its normal routine from there as we settled back into my lessons. Instead, my mother threw a wrench into the works.

"I'm going to go check on Magatha this morning, dad. I was going to take Bastian with me."