Sro 04 greenfire, p.5
SRO-04. Greenfire, page 5
part #4 of Sky Realms Online Series
Bealee put the object in Leigh’s hand. Gripping it tight, Leigh placed it in the hole. Using both hands, she covered it in dirt, patting the mound. Satisfied, Leigh stood up in one smooth motion, not having to use her hands. She wiped those on her robe.
Grayleaf rumbled something.
Leigh turned to see Hall. He held up a hand, waving. She smiled. Not taking her eyes off him, she said something to the others. Seo and Bealee nodded. The Wood Elf turned and made her way past Grayleaf, heading toward the forest of trees behind them. Seo stepped across the stones to the small island containing the Branch. Leigh started walking to Hall, Grayleaf following.
The Craobh’s footsteps echoed, each one heavy as they stepped on the grass with the hard rock of the mountain beneath. Surprisingly, they left no trail. Not a single blade of grass was damaged by his passing. His gait was awkward as he adjusted his steps to compensate for the much smaller Leigh. He kept behind her as well.
As Leigh got closer, Hall could see her smiling in the depths of the hood, which she pulled back to reveal thick and curly red hair with light green streaks. The antlers grew out of her forehead. White bone about six inches long, two points spreading off. They had grown some in the month or so since Hall had returned from Huntley. Since the first time he had seen them.
She had been nervous, concerned about what he would think. Hall had surprised himself. The antlers weren’t a concern or problem at all. They were nothing at all. He had spent the entire time in Huntley missing Leigh and had been so happy to see her; he hadn’t given the antlers a thought.
As time went on, he still felt the same.
They were there, and some adjustments had to be made. But that was it.
He made one of those adjustments as he bent down to hug her. Hall tilted his head to the side, avoiding the sharp points of bone.
“Morning,” she said, stepping back. “Sorry I didn’t come home last night.”
“It’s all good,” he said, meaning it. “You missed the Trow though.”
She chuckled, taking his hand and leading him back to the shore of the pond.
“I hit Level Six finally,” he said.
“Congrats.”
Leigh had hit Level Six while he had been gone. She had already gained Level Seven. Hall thought about what Brandiff had said about leveling. Leigh hadn’t seen combat in months, but she kept gaining experience. The only way she was getting experience was by doing “Druid things,” as Garick would have said. Seo had said he got some experience each time he cleansed part of the Meadow Grove; Leigh probably got more.
He wondered if she also acted as a quest giver. When she assigned Seo or Bealee a task, did it count as a quest and grant experience?
They stopped in front of the small mound of dirt. Freshly dug and replaced, the grass around it had been carefully kept upright. Only an inch or so of loose dirt, the mound was perfectly formed. Hall saw that a rune had been cut into the dirt.
He glanced down at Leigh to see her beaming with excitement. Her blue eyes were bright as she looked down at the mound.
“It’s a Greater Shambler seed,” she said, not able to contain herself.
Hall remembered the Shamblers from the first time they were at the Grove. Large creatures made of moss and vines. Strong. Defenders of the Grove. The ones they had encountered had been corrupted. It had been a corrupted Shambler heart that had saved their lives. Vertoyi had proven too strong for them. The corrupted Druid would have killed them all, but Leigh showed him the corrupted heart they had recovered. It was proof to the delusional Druid that the Grove was not the beautiful place he envisioned but a place of death and corruption.
“The same one we showed Vertoyi,” Leigh continued. “In about a month it should grow into an Immature Shambler.”
“Wow,” Hall said, sharing her excitement. “That’s great.”
“I can only grow one a month,” she continued. “And it’ll take a while for them to grow to adulthood.”
Leigh had managed to create a half dozen Lesser Shamblers. Only three to four feet in height. They were strong but would not make good guardians for the Grove. The ability to have Greater Shamblers would increase the overall defense of the Grove. Hall wondered what the range of the Shamblers was. Could they be used to patrol Breakridge Meadow as well as the Grove ? Maybe all the way into Greenheight Vale?
Leigh looked up at him, poking him lightly in the ribs to draw him from his thoughts. “So why did you come all the way out here?”
“I missed you,” Hall answered, smiling. He bent down and kissed the top of her head.
“Of course you did,” she answered. There was a silent “but” in her reply.
Hall sighed.
“Had a council meeting,” he said and proceeded to tell her what had happened. He mentioned the quest about the postmaster as well as being eligible for the quest from Dyson.
She nodded her head when he mentioned the quest. Leigh had been with him when he had met Dyson.
“So you’re going to Auld?” she asked.
Hall nodded. He hadn’t even thought about it, but she was right. He was going to Auld.
“No rest for the wicked.” She laughed, but there was a note of sadness to it.
They barely got to spend any time together. She was essentially stuck at the Grove for now, maybe for a very long time, and all that he needed to do kept drawing him away from the village.
And Leigh.
But it was important. What each was doing was important.
Is it? Hall thought, putting his arm around the shorter Leigh and pulling her in tight. She leaned her head into him, and they just enjoyed each other’s company. How important was Skara Brae? How important was adventuring?
Leigh was the Custodian of the Grove. She couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give that up, and he would never ask her to. But could he give up adventuring? Stay in town all the time? Or most of the time, just leaving on town business?
He could. Take up a craft. Run the village. Be more involved as the lord of Skara Brae. There would be enough to keep him occupied with growing the village.
But how long would that last? He was living his new life in Sky Realms Online. Living as an Adventurer. He knew that urge would be there. The urge to explore and see what the world had to offer. He wasn’t ready to fully settle down.
He knew he had to at some point. Skara Brae was his responsibility. That would always limit his choices. He had chosen to become lord, and he would honor that commitment.
There has to be a way to do it all, he thought.
“When do you think you’ll leave?” Leigh asked.
“No rush,” Hall replied. “But the sooner I leave, the sooner I’m back.”
She smiled, stepping away and taking his hand.
“I have a couple of things I need to finish up back in the forest, and then we can find a place to hide from the world for a time,” Leigh said, pulling him along behind her.
They headed for the forest a short distance behind the pond. Hall could see a shadowed shape moving among the trees. As they got closer, he heard the mooing of Angus. The small highland cow, covered in shaggy brown fur with horns, came bounding out of the trees. He circled around them, mooing.
Hall reached out to pet the cow, but Angus jumped out of the way, glaring at Hall. All this time and Angus still wasn’t a big fan of his. The cow looked to the sky and Hall chuckled. He turned and looked over his shoulder, eyes searching the blue sky. He saw two specks out over the edge of the island. Using his connection to Pike, Hall mentally called to the dragonhawk.
Both specks grew bigger, Angus seeing them. The cow ran through the low grass of the grove as the two dragonhawks came closer. They circled around him, just out of reach, as Angus happily tossed his head, chasing after them.
Leigh laughed.
Hall woke up to see a stone ceiling above him. Not the normal wooden floorboards on thick beams that he was used to. The bed was different. Softer than the one in his room on the second floor of the so far unnamed inn. Furs piled on a feather mattress, another fur pulled up to cover his naked body. He could hear light breathing next to him. Turning, he saw Leigh on her side, the fur covering her moving up and down with her breathing.
Looking around, he saw rough stone walls, a vaguely circular space. A tunnel was off to the side, a line of light just visible from around a corner. Against one wall was a wooden dresser, a bowl and mirror on top. Furs covered the floor, a couple of chairs scattered around.
Leigh’s cave was at the far end of the Grove. Past the forest was a small clearing surrounded by the mountains with the small cave at its base. It was there that they had fought Vertoyi. Leigh had cleaned it and turned it into a room to use on the days, which were most of them, that she didn’t make it back to their room in the inn.
This was the first time that Hall had spent the night in the cave.
Lifting the furs off, he slowly slipped out of bed, trying not to disturb Leigh. His clothes lay scattered around the cave, as were Leigh’s. Quietly he picked them up, glad he hadn’t worn his leather armor. The wool pants and shirt were easier to slip on.
“Going somewhere?” Leigh asked sleepily.
Hall turned around and smiled. She was still lying down, eyes open, smiling at him. Hall walked back and kissed her on the forehead, managing to avoid the antlers.
“I’ll come say bye before I leave,” he said.
Leigh smiled.
“Are you sure the Trow won’t be back?” Hall asked.
He, Brandiff and Brient stood on top of Breakridge, just ahead of the stone arch, looking out over the seemingly endless plains of Edin. Hall could see a dark green smudge against the horizon, standing out against the lighter green of the grassy plains. Is that Fallen Green? he wondered. The forest where the Brownpaw tribe of Firbolgs lived.
“As sure as I can be,” the other Skirmisher replied. “We killed a lot of ’em. The tribe couldn’t have been that big to begin with. Losing that many warriors will hurt them. They’ll keep close to their village for a while. They have other enemies out there besides us.”
“Are you sure we don’t want to attack them?” Brient asked, repeating the suggestion he had made during yesterday’s council meeting.
Hall shook his head. He didn’t like the idea of becoming the raiders. After some thought, he ended up agreeing with Timmin. If Brient started handing out quests, they would involve thinning out the Trow numbers. Brient was the village sheriff, charged with protecting the village and its people. Any potential quests would revolve around that goal.
But that was a concern for another time.
Right now he was worried about the Trow returning to Skara Brae.
“I agree with Brandiff. They won’t be back,” Brient said.
It would have to be good enough.
He made a mental note to check with Timmin about where increasing the village guards came in on the upgrade list. Hall had yet to see what the Administrator had come up with. He turned to head back down to the meadow and the hard-packed road to the village when he suddenly remembered something he had gotten while down in Silverpeak Keep.
He glanced at Brient. It had been a reward from the former Peakguard sergeant.
“Change in plans,” Hall told the older two men. “We’re going to Silverpeak Keep instead.”
Chapter 5
Hall stood at the railing of the Ridgerunner, his small airship. Behind him, all across the ship, he could hear the Dwarf crew. Yelling, cursing, laughing. As chaotically as they ran the ship, somehow it flew smoothly. That was because of Gerdi Battleforge, the youngest of the Dwarf siblings. Gorid Stoneglare was the official captain of the ship, but it was really Gerdi who kept everything running.
When she wasn’t busy flirting with Roxhard.
The Thunder Growl Mountains sailed by as the ship headed south. Below them was nothing but the open blue sky of Hankarth, dark shadows below that were other islands floating at different elevations. The planet’s core was somewhere far down, so far down that no one had ever been there. If Hall fell, he’d just keep falling.
He had never done it, but he had known plenty of Players who had leapt off an island’s edge to see if they could make it to the core. They never did. Dying somewhere along the way and respawning. That had been pre-Glitch. Now they’d probably just keep falling. They’d die, but their bodies would keep going.
Now that death was permanent.
From day one he had always suspected that was the case. Seeing it firsthand, when Roxhard had killed the Bodin Player named Davit, had not been as shocking as he would have thought. Iron, the Storvgarde Player who was slowly taking over the island of Huntley, had said it best.
“Now we know.”
Calm. Simple. A statement of fact.
Hall had just accepted it as a fact of his new life.
“Makes some sense,” Seo had said one night back in Skara Brae.
The subject had only come up a couple of times. No one seemed to want to talk about it. The NPCs all had one life to live. When they died, that was it. They accepted it. Back in the real world, the old life, the Players had only one life. So why not here? They all just accepted it. They had to. There was no choice.
“Electronic Storm’s message said that our bodies were dead and our consciousnesses had been uploaded to the game. If the NPCs are just stored bits of data, then we would be too.”
He had left it at that, sensing the mood from the other Players. All four of them.
Hall, Roxhard, Caryn and Seo.
Iron had surrounded himself with Players and NPCs who were little more than cannon fodder or servants. Beings to use as he saw fit. Hall thought and felt differently. The NPCs were as real as the Players. Especially now.
Part of him thought his choices made no sense now that he knew death was real. Why adventure, explore and fight monsters that could easily and quickly kill him? There was no respawn, no do-over. But he didn’t want to just cower in the corner. He was Hall, the Skirmisher, and that was what he would be for however long his life lasted.
In the real world, there were dangers and the threat of death hung over them. Not as great as in Hankarth, but it had been there. He hadn’t locked himself away to try to protect himself. Not there and he wouldn’t do it here.
Hall pushed thoughts of death away, watching the mountains. They got their name, the Thunder Growl, from the sound of the wind pushed through the peaks and valleys. It sounded like a large animal growling. He couldn’t hear it now, just the wind and passage of the ship, the whine and thudding of the engines and the cursing of Dwarves.
The mountains were beautiful. Exposed rock cliffs, trees up part of the side. Even the mountains on the edge were sloped. Some steep, others not that bad. They would have been walkable. Trees and grass covered the lower slopes. Cliff Shrikes flew around the higher peaks, not venturing out to harass the airship. Luckily rocs and dragons did not inhabit this part of the mountains. The voyage from Skara Brae to Silverpeak Keep tended to be uneventful.
Hankarth was composed of floating islands. It had been all one large continent centuries ago, but had fractured due to a battle between titanic elementals. Through the Branches of the World Tree, the islands had somehow been able to float in what used to be the sky, at different elevations. The people survived, all living on the islands in the sky. Because of the fracture, the islands had been ripped apart. Lakes torn in half, mountains sheared, the land pulled apart. Hall had seen ruins start on one island and finish on another hundreds of feet down or further away. He thought of the waterfall to the west of Auld that fell through the sky to crash into a pond on the island of Cumberland.
The Hardedge Mountains, on Huntley, where the Dwarf stronghold of Axestorm Hall was found, had been sheared in half. The side facing the sky of Hankarth was smooth, straight, chambers open to the nothing below.
Not the Thunder Growls. On this side of the mountains, the sky side, the fracture looked to have started only a couple dozen feet or so from the lower edge of the peaks. Hall could see space to land the ship, flat strips of land running from the edge to the start of the slope up the mountains.
Were those buildings he saw on the slopes of a mountain? Nestled among the trees, there appeared to be small homes. Built of wood and stone with low sloping roofs. He counted a half dozen of them. There were no people, not that he could see.
Why hadn’t he seen them before? He had made this trip a couple of times. They were built close into the trees, barely visible. Maybe it was just the angle? The perfect location to see them. The camouflage had to be part of their defense. No wall, exposed on the side of the mountain. The village or whatever it was would be easy pickings for Duntin raiders. The Redcaps would make short work of the place.
Maybe that was why it was empty?
Mentally pulling up his map, Hall saw the dot that was the Ridgerunner as it moved past the mountains. This part of the range had been uncovered, and he set a marker on the mountain with the buildings, intending to return later.
Skill Gain!
Cartography Rank Two +.1
Like Skara Brae, those buildings had never been there before. They were new, added post-Glitch. Why, he had no idea, but he would find out.
Some other time.
There was still too much to do.
To the south he could see a shiny beacon, the sun catching on the stones of a mountain. Silverpeak itself.
The ship settled into the berth it had been assigned, with a minimum of bumping. The long wooden docks, wide and built of thick planks, jutted out from the edge of the island. Thick supports ran from the underside to the rocky cliff face below. A sprawling mess of buildings spread out from the docks, leaving a wide space filled with people, animals and supplies. All moving around each other in some kind of chaotic organization.
