Chương 148: Blessings on the road

Three weeks went by without much complaint. The road rolled almost directly east through the Virethane in long stretches, broken by the occasional run-in with hostile fauna. Cal trained Corinne every time they stopped for the night, the two of them carving out a small space near Mahina's wagon after dinner. By the end of the first week after the ambush she had managed to cast the [Light Orb] Spell, thanks in no small part to Cal's considerable patience and [Teaching]. She'd cried the first time it succeeded.

Then she'd laughed. Then she'd run the whole length of the camp with the orb bobbing along overhead, showing it to anyone who would look. Cal had watched her go, proud of her achievement and wishing he could someday have a similar experience with his own children. Christoph, in the meantime, had become an unexpected fixture at the evening fire. The Mycari seemed to enjoy Cal's company, or at least to find him useful as a conversational instrument.

The two of them fell into a habit of long, sprawling discussions about Dominion commerce and legal intricacies. Christoph spoke of supply chains, of rune gate logistics and the careful art of moving perishable goods through provincial customs. Of the unspoken understandings between Gilded merchants and Illuminet houses. Cal listened, asked careful questions, and quietly built a working map of the messy economic structure that lay beneath the empire's polished surface. Corinne sat in on most of these conversations.

Some nights she contributed. Other nights she simply leaned against the wagon wheel with her [Light Orb] floating beside her, listening to her great-uncle talk as if hearing his voice was a treasured novelty. A different merchant found him on the fifth morning after the ambush. Cal was taking a whetstone to some of the arrows he'd recovered when a thin, well-dressed man approached him hesitantly.

The fellow rode in the seventh wagon, a textiles merchant out of some small Deadfall shop, and Cal had killed the bandits that were chasing him when he'd hopped down from his firing position during the fight.

"Master Valorn." The broker waved his hand tentatively for Cal's attention.

"Please f-forgive the intrusion... I've wanted to speak with you for some days now you see, but I, well, I lacked the courage."

"Nothing to be afraid of here," Cal said.

"I'm just a guy with a spear." The merchant produced a small leather purse from inside his coat and offered it with both palms.

"Ahh, to most of us you are much more than that, I'm afraid. This is a small token of my gratitude. It's nothing like what being alive means to me, of course, but I wouldn't be able to look my wife in the eye if I didn't at least do this much." Cal looked at the purse. Crumb.

"I appreciate the thought, mister, I really do. But I can't take that."

"Master Valorn—""Seriously, it's no big deal. I was just doing what anyone would do and besides, Eris already paid me for my efforts." The merchant shifted through three flavors of polite distress before landing on something close to wounded dignity. He pressed the purse forward another inch.

"Then please. Accept it as a gift between travelers. A blessing on your road east." Heat crept up the back of Cal's neck. He took the purse because refusing it another time would have insulted the man. Thanking him with what felt like the wrong words in the wrong order, Cal watched the merchant bow himself back toward his wagon, visibly relieved. Corinne, who had been pretending to inspect a wagon strap two yards away, gave up the pretense entirely.

"Master Valorn, Master Valorn. Oh, Master Valorn. May I touch the hem of your cloak, Master Valorn?"

"Shush, you."

"Should I bow? I feel like I should bow." Grinning, she executed an exaggerated curtsy with an imaginary dress in her light leather armor.

"Did he call you a blessing on the road? Cal, that's beautiful. Mom really needs to hear about this. I'm so writing her a letter tonight."

"You're enjoying this far too much, you know that?"

"Oh, I disagree. I'm not yet enjoying it nearly enough, thank you very much. It will take days before I've properly enjoyed this." Cal grimaced at the thought of hearing about this for the next week, which got another smile out of Corinne before she continued.

"What are you going to do with the coin, anyway? You hardly looked like you wanted to keep it."

"I don't know, give it to Mahina for the garrons' feed, maybe? Or to Eris for the fallens' families? Maybe I'll just throw it in a creek for good luck."

"Why would throwing coin into a creek grant you luck? That's like the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You're impossible." She bumped her shoulder against his arm.

"He wanted to thank you, Cal. You saved his whole life, you know? That's allowed to feel like something." He walked on, holding the purse in his fist. That's the problem, he thought. It does. It feels super embarrassing. Sure, he'd saved that man and many others, and he would do it again in a heartbeat. The gratitude, however, felt like an obligation he didn't want, and a small, traitorous part of him wished people would stop noticing his actions altogether.

Christoph told me I gotta get used to it, he reminded himself. And that if I keep walking this road more people are going to live because of me. They're going to want to thank me for it too. He shivered at the thought. Ev always did say I needed to figure out how to take gratitude more gracefully… He glanced over at Corinne.

She was watching him with the slightly too-knowing expression she tended to wear more often lately, the one that suggested she could hear at least half of what he wasn't thinking and really made her look like her mother.

"What?"

"Nothing, Master Valorn."

"I will trip you."

"You wouldn't dare. Blessings on the road don't trip people. You'd have to be a curse, and the only one who tends to curse around here is Steinar."

"Shite, I can't argue with that logic," he laughed, finally pocketing the purse. For twenty-three days the caravan moved unimpeded from the moment they set off in the mornings until Steinar called for a halt in the evening. Up until the morning the lead wagon stopped. A heartbeat later, the second wagon stopped. Then the third. The deceleration dominoed down the long line in a chain reaction of garrons slowing and drivers easing back. Within thirty seconds every wagon in the caravan stood still.

Cal frowned, coming to a rest alongside the eleventh wagon with Corinne. He glanced up at Christoph on the bench above them next to Mahina.

"This is not a scheduled break," the green elf said. A hushed murmur had begun to travel down the line, growing as it came. Drivers swung down from their benches and walked forward up the road. Guards followed. Then Corinne pointed.

"Cal, look." Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. And so he did. A driver three wagons ahead had walked further down the road and stopped dead, poleaxed. He was standing with his head tilted back, one hand half-raised toward the sky, and even from that distance, the man had clearly forgotten what he had been about to do. Christoph hopped down from the wagon and Mahina shortly followed.

"Well," the businessman started.

"Let us see what's going on, shall we?" They walked forward together until the road bent slightly to the southeast as it crested a low rise, and as Cal cleared the curve, he saw what had stopped the caravan. The air ahead was full of light. A slow river of soft green motes drifted through the air above the road, moving on unseen currents. Each mote was perhaps the size of a thumbnail, faceted like a tiny living gem that caught the light and spun.

They floated, suspended, in a great unbroken procession that stretched as far as the eye could follow in either direction between the trees. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A celestial migration passing through. Beside him, Corinne made a small breathless noise.

"The Green Drift," Christoph said softly. The old half-elf's urbane composure had slipped entirely, and child-like fascination covered his features.

"I… I have not seen one in over forty years."

"They're so pretty. What are they, Uncle?"

"Ah, right you are, Rinny. They're called the Seeds of the Forest, my dear. Released from a Greatwood; trees that are the hallmark of any healthy forest. Instead of producing their own seeds they soak up the seeds of other trees from miles and miles around, storing them into those small shells you see floating. They're impossible to grow domestically, though many have tried, and can appear anywhere.

Every few years they send the seeds they've collected on a pilgrimage throughout the land that can span up to hundreds of miles. They say it renews the whole wilderness." Cal could only stare up at the floating green river. He'd read about this in Selara's texts and it had said something about— Without continuing the thought, he reached for [Mana Sense] and [Spiritual Perception], opening them wide. Each seed was a gemlike sphere of vibrant green nature Mana.

He could taste them as much as see them, green and keen, with an earthen brightness that felt full of energy and life. But it was what lay beneath the seeds that stopped his breath. They were riding the Mana currents. Little gems floating through magical streams in shades of blue and gold and red and yellow, dancing through the air without concern for the wind blowing through the trees. Each tiny vessel possessed an innate affinity for the ambient flows.

They bobbed through the invisible tides with purpose, responding to the currents the way a leaf on a stream answers the water, letting the flow guide them to wherever they were meant to land. [Your proficiency with Mana Sense (E) has increased to Practiced] It was… mesmerizing. Beautiful. The kind of thing you wanted to share with the ones you loved. Beside him, Corinne had begun to laugh softly, one hand pointing out.

"Cal, they're so pretty, aren't they? Look at how they—oh, look, that one's spinning." He looked. Despite the bittersweet twinge, he was glad he wasn't here alone. That he had someone to share it with. And then, because he could, he simply stood in awe and watched the river of light pass by overhead with his friend. The Green Drift lasted nearly two hours. When the last of the seeds had floated past, the caravan resumed its progress in a kind of reverent hush that continued the rest of the day.

As afternoon came, the road emerged from the last of the Virethane proper into a broad, gently rolling band of cleared land that Christoph had identified as the outer agricultural belt of Mirathra's provincial holdings. That's when the malfunction had happened. Cal had been walking near Mahina's wagon as usual when a cracking sound split the air nearby.

The front-right corner of the wagon dropped over a foot in a lurch, and the whole rig listed hard to the right as the broken wheel tore free and the corner ground down into the road and peeled hard into the shoulder. One of the garrons cried out in shock and pain, the one whose harness ran directly back to the collapsed corner.

The wagon's weight had shifted onto its back through the rigging, and Cal heard a sound he had never heard from a draft animal, as it was simultaneously pulled to the ground and dragged forward. Mahina vaulted from the driver's bench before the wagon fully stopped. Hitting the ground at a run, she scrambled to the sinking corner and set her shoulder against the wood, heaving up, putting her entire stocky frame into the impossible lift.

A grunt tore from her throat as her boots slid in the loose earth, but the heavy frame barely budged.

"Off him," she gasped.

"Get it off him." Corinne grabbed the wagon next to the dwarf as Cal quickly dropped to one knee beside them, pulling Mana through his spirit and drawing the runes to cast [Earth Sense], followed immediately by [Earth Manipulation]. The shoulder was wet and soft, but he found better material under the road, as well as further down, and started to pull. His attempts at grabbing anything from beneath the road were immediately, and rather violently, rebuffed, so he turned his attention deeper.

Mana poured down his arms into the ground, finding the resonant frequency of the soil and small stones, convincing them all at once that they were no longer separate things. The earth beneath his hand unified, then began to rise. A column of compacted dirt and stone eight inches across grew upward in a gradual push against the underside of the wagon's frame. He felt the moment it took the burden, as the wagon shuddered.

The harness lines on the trapped garron began to loosen and Cal poured it on, lifting the wagon further and further.

"That's it," he said, holding the column in place with half of his attention.

"I've got them, Mahina." With the wagon's weight lifted, Mahina darted to her garron without a word and helped it back up off the ground. She ran her hands down its spine, then its ribs, then its hindquarters, her fierce expression fading into concern and then relief as she comforted and checked over the animal. The garron leaned into her touch and made a small rumbling sound. She made a similar sound back, then turned her attention to the next animal, her examination just as thorough.

Steinar arrived at a fast jog with two of his men shortly after. He took in the scene at a glance, raised an eyebrow at the column of earth holding the wagon's corner aloft, and gave Cal an evaluating look.

"Alright then. Guess I'll fetch ya Tom." The caravan's carpenter arrived within minutes, a broad-shouldered man with sawdust ground permanently into the creases of his knuckles. He took one look at Cal's earthen jack, grunted in what sounded like approval, and got to work. He had a spare wheel off the back of the supply wagon and a replacement axle pinned within a quarter of an hour.

Cal held the wagon steady the entire time, the drain on his Mana pool manageable, his attention split between the Spell and watching Tom work. When the new wheel was seated Tom stepped back and slapped the wagon's side.

"Should be fine and dandy now, Master Valorn." Cal released the Spell carefully, the column of earth lowering down a hair to test the wheel. Finding no issues, he pulled it back into the shoulder of the road and released the Spell. Then he stood, rolled his shoulders, and found Mahina watching him. She had finished her examination of the team. Crossing the distance between them, she stopped a yard short of him and looked up.

"You are… khen'gorn," she stated.

"I… don't really know what that means. I was just trying to help." She ignored the question in his words and continued to stare at him.

"Thank you."

"It was nothing, Mahina. No worries."

"It was not, nothing." She locked eyes for another second, suddenly looking fierce again, then turned and walked back to her garrons without another word, the tips of her ears flushed around her double braided hair. Corinne, who had appeared at Cal's side at some point during the repair, nudged him with her elbow.

"Cal."

"Stop."

"But that was the most words I've ever heard her say to a person! Are you some kind of dwarf-whisperer—"" Stoooop." Three more days carried them through the steadily widening agricultural belt. The forest fell behind them in stages, replaced first by managed woodlots, then by orchards, then by neat fields striped with the dark furrows of plow-turned earth. Stone farmhouses dotted the landscape, each one square and tidy, their yellow-tiled roofs identical from one homestead to the next.

On the morning of the third day, the road climbed a long and gentle rise. The lead wagon crested ahead of them, and one by one the drivers further forward began to call out to each other the way men did when they came home from a long journey. Cal climbed the last twenty yards and the land opened.

Below them, the eastern road descended in a gentle grade through the final miles of cultivated fields and walled estates, and at its end, sprawling across a broad valley and climbing partway up the surrounding hills, lay a city. White stone with grey accents caught the light of both suns and threw it back, and the city gleamed against the surrounding countryside. Elegant spires rose from district centers, each one a bright vertical line against the sky.

The roofs of the city were uniformly tiled yellow in a sea of terracotta that ran from one ridgeline of the valley to the other. Every line of it stood worlds apart from Deadfall: grand and beautiful. It was a vast sprawl of white stone and yellow tile, spiraling around a central point in ever-widening rings. The entire metropolis seemed to orbit a specific point, drawn toward it like dust looping around a star.

And in the middle of it all, dominating the city the way a mountain dominates a foothill, stood the rune gate. Cal very suddenly forgot how to breathe. The gate was huge. Even at this distance, with miles of road and city between him and it, the structure dwarfed every spire, every other piece of architecture in the entire valley. It made the surrounding hills feel small. Rising in a single colossal arch from a broad rectangular plaza at the city's heart, Cal couldn't grasp its height against the sky. And it was…

black. Kind of. Not the black of stone, or the black of iron, or the black of any material he had ever seen, really. No, it was more like an absence. A light-eating absence that drank the morning suns and gave nothing back, so that the arch appeared more like a hole in the sky than a material object. Standing patient and immense at the center of the city. Waiting. Beside him, Corinne simply breathed, " Oh. Oh my." Christoph spread his arms grandly from atop the wagon.

"Welcome... to Mirathra."