Chương 8

On the Road from Hoofcross to Erem Rayne the Bastard"So, why'd you end up leaving anyways? Feel the call for adventure?" Rayne asked with an amused look on his face, knife rapidly whittling away the skin from wild turnips to add to the stewpot. The evening had come, tinting Sotha's light reddish-purple and bringing the world to cool. Soon the dark would be in full, and Aluna's eyes would be upon them, and things in the dark would dance to her madness. There was nothing in that darkness for him to fear.

The elf's ears twitched over to him, as did the ears of the dark elf from Madam's tavern. The dwarf, busying herself with the stoking and kindling of their campfire, likewise heard him but was polite enough to not interject yet. The elf, knife running through the carcass of a wild boar and rapidly parting its components from the whole for tonight's dinner, gave a somewhat frustrated huff at the question.

The slaughtering process was supposedly rather vile to smell, but Rayne didn't know anything about it, as his sense of smell had long left him. Rayne understood why the elf was frustrated, he had been badgered all day by the dark elf and her persistent worries over his health. The elf, after all, was merely twenty.

As it was explained to him, about this age they were normally just very big children not expected to do anything but frolic and learn from their elders, and most did not develop maturity until many decades later. How curious was it that 'Mallorn' seemed to hold himself to a higher degree of maturity than even most men of his age.

"Hm," Mallorn hummed, splitting open the belly of the beast, already removed of hide and hanging from a nearsome pine. Organs spilled from the thing, barely nicked by the sharpened blade, and then dropped onto a prepared bed of wide and platelike bark used as an improvised table. Particular organs, the liver and kidneys and other edibles, were quickly seized, cut away from the whole, then set aside on another tray of bark.

The inner section of the wild boar was splashed down with handfuls of water, then rubbed away, and cleaned in less than half a minute of practiced labor.

"I have no good reason, being blunt," the elf declared as he picked up the tray of organs, grabbed the severed head with another hand, then marched out towards the treeline to set both down upon the ground.

"Here now, little beast, I can hear you rummaging out there. These are for you," he called out, before walking away in an unhurried manner. It was hard to hear that far, with his left ear being deaf. Previously unseen, a wild dog crept forwards from the darkness of the treeline, rapidly reaching and chomping down upon a particular hunk of flesh before retreating, prize in maw, back to the darkness. It was easy to lose track, being that only one of his eyes worked.

"No good reason?" Rayne asked to clarify, throwing his amusement at the statement into the air as he rapidly chopped through another wild vegetable and added it to the pot.

"Not driven by a sense of righteous justice against the risen Demon Queen, or to make a great name for yourself, or even to join the party of the Chosen Heroine?" The elf considered that for a moment, rapidly removing the front legs of the hanging boar and setting them aside as he did.

"... There's an active Demon Queen?" he asked with a curious tilt of his head and twitching in his ears. He let out a long, barking laughter as the dark elf groaned and the dwarf gave him an aggrieved reply.

"How do you not know that?! She managed to defeat the previous Chosen Heroine! She's a threat to every good thing in the world!"

"Of course he doesn't know about it! He's twenty!" Lucia fell back and groaned loudly to the sky about. That was something she continued to harp on about, hovering about and looking worried over every step he took.

"I'm only twenty-four and I know about it!" Dura countered with a wave of her fire-poker, a hardened wood stick now charred at the end.

"I learned about it when I was ten!"

"Do you know what Elven education is like?" Mallorn cut off an argument with a shake of his head, rapidly cutting the boar into manageable chunks and setting them aside as he spoke.

"It does not begin with useful information. It begins at the beginning, the very beginning, and goes forwards in time from there." Rayne elected to stay quiet, and let the information come to him without effort.

"... Yes?" Dura replied with furrowed brows.

"That's how it usually goes, I think."

"No, you don't understand," Mallorn sighed.

"You know what this country is named? The country that we are currently in, that is."

"Aye, we're in Empire lands right now."

"That's more than I knew before," he declared with a nod. The dwarf pulled back at that, with a confused expression.

"By the time I left, my general tutor had covered the history of the world as elves knew it up to the year two-thousand. These lands are still known as Amaranth, the Land of Many Small Rivers, by that time. They are ruled by a dozen-dozen warring tribes of beastmen, and the strongest among them are the Grimahn, who wield fearsome blades of star-iron."

"... What?" the dark elf asked with her own furrowed brows.

"Aren't you an elf, shouldn't you know this too?" Mallorn asked with a dry tone, cutting away the final hunk of meat from the hanging skeletal remains. He untied the remaining carcass from the ropes, then hurled it out into the forest. A few moments of disturbed movements in the underbrush occurred, before the sound of jaws chewing and crunching bone began to softly carry towards them.

"I- Why would I need to know any of-" Lucia began, before cutting herself off with a look of realization, then a scowl.

"No. Mother taught me much more practical things for my education. The locals and the present, to be specific."

"I'm glad for you," Mallorn replied without a hint of sarcasm, carrying the tray of meat over to the fire and setting up the little cast iron pan on one of the rocks, next to the fire. The stewpot was hanging over the actual fire itself, but the dwarf had arranged piles of rocks into three improvised stoves around it with nothing but time and a keen eye. A dense bit of animal-fat was laid on the pan first, to grease it as it melted.

"I was not so lucky." Rayne almost wished he could smell it, carrying the pot of vegetables over to add to the boiling water above the fire. The hardest stuff first, which took the longest to cook, and then the other ingredients over time. Stew and a side of boar was something of a luxury, especially on the road, benefits of having an elf travel with you.

"Then it's even more dangerous for you to be traveling about as you are, with how unfamiliar you are with the world," the dark elf scolded, reaching into her own bag and bringing out little clay jars of something. The elf took them from her hands, sniffed them once, before smiling and waggling his ears in thanks. The dark elf huffed, looking away at the expression.

"I could spend another few decades sitting around and learning," Mallorn stated simply, rolling the pan and spreading the fat about before wetting his knife and slicing some of the pork into thin strips, laying them about the pan to gently sizzle in the early-night.

"Another- fifty, hundred years learning histories, mythologies, magics, refining my skills in archery, swordship, woodcraft, and so on. I could then leave my home just the same, set off into the world, and be far more secure as a result."

"I decided to leave now, and that's all there is to it." Mallorn nodded firmly.

"If a man is grown at twenty years, and can set out into the world with a sword in hand and a desire to see it all, then an elf most certainly can do the same."

"That's hardly the point!" Lucia waved her hands about.

"They're men! They live and die in the tens of thousands! They barely reach a century if they're lucky! You're an elf, you can't waste your life risking it needlessly!" Mallorn pushed a bit of the pork aside and laid another juicy slice upon the hot pan.

"It's my life, dark elf." He let out a stern glare that was utterly ignored by the groaning Lucia.

"Mine. I am free to spend it as I wish. I will spend it in the world, sword in hand, and regrets left at home." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"You're a child! Your family is probably beside themselves with worry!" Lucia waved her hands at him, nose scrunching as he added a light sprinkling of what Rayne could now see was pepper to the sizzling pork.

"I doubt it," Mallorn huffed.

"The only one who might care is my war-teacher, and even that's just…" He raised a hand and began to snap his fingers, clearly trying to think of a word.

"Not close, mannish word for… merchant relationship?"

"Professional?" Rayne asked with raised brows.

"Professional, then." Mallorn nodded.

"My education was a job to her. She's good enough to find a better job."

"And your parents?" Lucia growled with flat ears.

"Mother has three heirs already," Mallorn grunted, ears equally flat.

"I speak to her maybe once a year, and our conversations are cold. She'll fund a tiny search for me, then go back to management. I'll probably see her again in a few hundred years, and we'll have nothing to say to each other." There were a few moments without conversation.

"Bacon's ready. Hold out plates." Mallorn bounced back into a cheerful sort of countenance, using his knife to hoist up and display bits of sizzled pork. Dura was the first to have her tray extended. —"So what are you going to do, now that you're out in the world?" Rayne asked, holding his good ear towards the elf. The hour was far later, the women had gone to bed, and they were taking the first watch. More like he was supposed to take the first watch, but the elf slept little and ate much.

Nearly half of the boar had been cooked up and devoured by him alone, and there was still meat left over from where the other three had not been able to finish it and the stew.

"I have no idea!" Mallorn replied happily, quietly enough to not disturb the ladies but clearly in the night.

"There's a whole world I know very little about, and there's nothing to stop me from exploring it all!"

"Nothing but the monsters and road-tolls, I suppose." Rayne chuckled, leaning back and looking up at the twin moons. Silver wickedness reflected back at him.

"The monsters are but part of the journey!" Mallorn declared, munching on a slice of pork as he spoke.

"... And the taxes?" Rayne leaned up and asked.

"I am good at navigating the wilds," the elf huffed in reply. Rayne leaned back and chuckled. It was easy to get along with this elf, an unusual occurrence but not an unwelcome one, he supposed.

"Well, if you're aiming for anything of note, I suppose you can't go wrong with seeking out the Chosen Heroine and her little band. They're supposedly in the region at the moment."

"Ho-hum." The elf considered.

"She's chosen by Earth Mom to defeat the Demon Queen, correct?"

"Earth Mom?" He furrowed his brows. The elf waved the question off.

"Amarami, Mother of the World."

"... You mean the Chief Goddess?" Rayne asked with an inquisitive brow.

"I've heard that elves are blasphemous and speak her name casual-like, but I didn't know she had two names."

"Well, Amarami is what elves call her, but she's clearly an Earth Mom." The elf rolled his wrist.

"It's easier to remember."

"And you're not worried about being smote? If not by her or her servants, then by any of the men who worship her?" Rayne pointed out, before briefly tensing as he realized what he had implied.

"Hm. I suppose that's true enough. Even if she doesn't care about me, her worshippers almost certainly do. What did you call her again, The Chief Goddess?" The elf let his ears wiggle inquisitively.

"That's right. You'd have to ask a priest for her many other titles though. I'm just a Bastard." Rayne calmed himself with a grin and a joke. The elf laughed along, before Rayne spoke again.

"And I believe it's heresy to say that she doesn't care about anyone." He advised.

"I'm sure she cares for me in some distant manner. I'm one elf, ultimately, she has many other, more important things to worry about than I." Mallorn waved a hand about with a sigh.

"Great evils and villains and demons."

"I suppose that's probably true," Rayne muttered a reply, reaching up to scratch at his thin beard.

"I might ask to join the Heroine's party, it would be polite to offer aid against the Demon Queen," the elf mused in a very amusing manner.

"Casting myself against tides of darkness until they or I break sounds quite exciting."

"I'm sure the sex has nothing to do with it." Rayne chuckled.

"... The sex?" he asked with a tilt of his head. Rayne looked over and raised a brow, before letting out another rolling bark of laughter.

"Heh. Do you honestly not know?"

"Do people have sex with demons to defeat them?" the elf asked in a flat and disappointed manner. Rayne considered that for a moment, before letting out another humored string of huffs and puffs.

"N-no, heh-heh, no… No see, the Chosen Heroine's party are also her carnal lovers. Always are. Something about 'spreading the power of love around' in church doctrine. The real reason is that it lets her share the magic of the Chief Goddess with them. Makes them all stronger." The look on the elf's face, utterly blank and stonelike, was too hilarious to look at directly.

"... The Chosen Heroine fights the Demon Queen with her band of lovers?" Mallorn asked blankly. It was the sound of a man who had learned of a less-than-satisfactory answer to a long-held question. Rayne was unable to answer, on account of laughing too hard to get any words out.

"I don't know what I expected," Mallorn muttered in Elvish, taking a slow bite of his pork strip and staring at nothing in particular. He was exceptionally funny, for an elf. His eye, ear, and nose burned as the conversation went on. Mistress was quite interested in this one. Rayne almost felt bad for him. The Bastard could only chuckle.

— The Wilderwood Titania of Whitewood, Dame-Captain of the Golden Oak The scents of wild animals muddled the trail here, scavengers and carrion-eaters picking at the corpses of five goblins, their bones and much of their equipment strewn about the clearing. Behind the scent of death and rot and sulfur, however, was the smell of smoke and honey, and a new scent of root and mushroom. The most clear evidence of his passing, however, was the lance of ironwood impaling a goblin from above.

His lance, staking the greenskin to the earth and leaving it there as an example, flesh gnawed at by wild dogs and picked at by birds. A glance above revealed little, for the branches had already grown back into place if he had disturbed them. He had approached by treeline, shot down four arrows, then dropped to impale the last. He then… She sniffed again. The faint scent of urine indicated a fearful response, and the particulars of the scent indicated a female. A captive of the goblins, perhaps.

She smiled in a proud and rueful manner. Grim but good-hearted Rasil, leaping at once to protect a woman from her antagonizers. Another example of his charming side. Leaving the lance behind… She couldn't see a reason for it other than sloth, or perhaps to deliberately leave a trail. Knowing him, he just didn't want to deal with a goblin corpse and didn't care to take the lance with him after being so thoroughly greased with greenskin.

She reached up to grasp it by the upper section, before ripping it from the earth and flipping it over. The goblin, long drained of fluids by the puncture, was nearly dry. A strong flick shook the branches of the clearing, provoked a tiny gasp from the monster behind her, and sent the goblin's corpse flying off to splatter against a heavy oak. The meat will fertilize those roots. Another, more powerful flick send much of the fluid staining the wood off to splatter in an arc before her.

She brought up the lance to inspect once more. The scent would never leave it now, so thoroughly soaked into the wood. An effective weapon against goblin-kind, they would smell the death of their own on its length.

"Carry this, spider," she commanded, tossing the lance off towards the monster at the edge of the clearing. It bounced off her unprepared head with a 'thonk' noise, sending the monster reeling and stumbling back, clutching at her head while still gasping to return air to her lungs. She was not used to exercise, from how weary she got from moving even basic distances. Slovenly and sedate, that spider was.

"... oww…" she whimpered, rubbing her head at the spot where shaft had met flesh.

"... You weren't prepared," Titania muttered bluntly, lowering her hand and maintaining a judgemental stare at the downed monster. An ambush predator with many limbs and a trap-based hunting strategy, it was obvious in retrospect that her reflexes would be lacking. The spider flinched, covering her head with uncalloused palms.

"I- I'm sorry!" Her chest was still heaving and her skin coated in sweat from walking through the foliage after the elf for half the day so far. Titania made a mental note, setting her expectations for the monster one notch lower than before. It would take a great deal of education to whip her into good shape. She looked over the corpses littering the clearing once more. Four arrows, one lance from above, no evidence of injury on himself or the captive.

She would have to tell him how proud she was of him, when she found him again.

"Catch your breath, we leave again in five minutes." The spider made a whimpering noise.