This detestable chunk of rock. Such a condescending look on its face—well, on its lack of a face.
Sorry, not sorry nameless statue. You're the closest thing I have to a memorial stone for father.
My hands quivered, still locking the ebony circlet firmly in my grasp. My knuckles were fading whiter than the snow banks built up around us.
Why couldn't you have survived? How come Rias and I are the only ones here? What's my purpose in all this…
"Why didn't you tell us anything!?"
My emotions erupted, spilling out of the tiny bottle I had tried to trap them in.
Rias didn't even flinch to my outburst, as if she had been expecting it since the start.
I glared angrily at the faceless surrogate for our father. My right hand finally came free from its clenched position around the metal band.
"If you knew, then why in the Aether didn't you tell either of us? Destined for some great purpose… I never asked for this!"
I turned my head back to my sister.
Her head was tilted down, eyes closed. Listening and waiting.
I whispered through trembling lips.
"We didn't ask for this…"
To endure all this stress. All this pain.
Another violent explosion clawed its way out of my throat. A slew of curses assaulted the skies above Tolin.
My sister's arms wrapped tightly around me as the first swell of tears streaked down my cheeks.
A numbing chill blew through the graveyard. I braced myself for the frigid air to bite at my grief stricken face. Instead, my face was flush with an unknown warmth as the breeze whipped a frenzy of leaves around us in a vortex.
A moment later the air was still again.
-✵-
When we got back to our room the only thing I wanted to do was flop into bed.
Getting out of the new gear was more than a little troublesome, but I had my sister to thank for being so studious when I showed it off earlier.
She was able to unfasten the new plate in no time.
I was out before my head even hit the pillow.
The herby aroma of freshly brewed coffee drew me from my slumber.
My eyelids raised to reveal a cascade of ruby hair hiding behind a steamy cup. Hailey grinned at me as my hands slowly crept out of cover to grasp the cup.
"Mmmm, it's so warm."
I sat up carefully and sipped at my morning kick-starter.
"Is it that time already?"
"Yeah, sorry. No sleeping in for us today."
I let my head fall back against the headboard.
"Rias is coming with us, by the way."
Hailey swung from her position sitting on the floor to face Rias' bed.
My sister was already sitting up.
She covered her mouth to hide a yawn.
"Well, that will make seven of us then. A proper party, I suppose."
"I'm still not thrilled about my lil' sis risking the perils of this trip to who knows where. But this does make it easier than trying to convince Alistaire to leave Soren here alone."
Rias perked her head up.
"You were going to try to do what? There's no way either of them would've gone along with that."
"Even Julius was hesitant to try asking. He was just going to find the first lone soldier and conscript them."
Hailey shook her head.
"What a dummy. We could've pulled someone from Hanna's party. Aeko would have jumped at the chance to accompany us."
"Any other time I would have asked her, or even Abigail or Murphy—but they're helping the Consulates and Ministers reform a new court and government. Hanna has her hands full. I couldn't steal her people for an indeterminate amount of time because our team's got two oddball ambassadors in it. With Luke standing in for Julius, the whole chain of command is a little off center, last thing we need is to start pulling people out of their own units to fill for us."
A knock at the door followed by a gruff, "Get your asses out here so we can leave already." indicated that Julius had rousted the rest of our party and was ready to go.
Everyone was already in the common room by the time us three geared up. I swiped through the interface and formed our party.
As usual, Julius was assigned the Initiator role.
Mei took over Luke's assignment as the Field Monitor. She may not have the same skill-set to watch for traps and the like, but with Valiance performing overwatch and her experience in heavily forested areas, she'd be just as valuable.
Lady Aisling was a sort of guardian specialty, so she would be at the front with Julius. Lady Viane was a hybrid spec, but favored a bow and would stay at range with Mei, Hailey, and Rias.
- - - - - - - - - - - - {PARTY MEMBERS} - - - - - - - - - - - -
[AIRIS] {OPERATOR}
HEALTH: (320 / 320) | STAMINA: (410 / 410) | MAGICKA: (600 / 600)
- - -
[HAILEY]
HEALTH: (90 / 90) | STAMINA: (190 / 190) | MAGICKA: (600 / 600)
- - -
[RIAS]
HEALTH: (70 / 70) | STAMINA: (120 / 120) | MAGICKA: (720 / 720)
- - -
[JULIUS] {INITIATOR}
HEALTH: (630 / 630) | STAMINA: (400 / 400) | MAGICKA: (70 / 70)
- - -
[MEI] {FIELD MONITOR}
HEALTH: (250 / 250) | STAMINA: (450 / 450) | MAGICKA: (170 / 170)
- - -
[VIANE]
HEALTH: (240 / 240) | STAMINA: (510 / 510) | MAGICKA: (220 / 220)
- - -
[AISLING]
HEALTH: (750 / 750) | STAMINA: (650 / 650) | MAGICKA: (650 / 650]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In terms of group balance we would probably have a pretty high stability index, a rating given to adventurer parties to provide a rough estimate if the member's specializations were in correct proportions.
A proper party should have two heavy armor classes, commonly referred to as tanks; two support or healer specialized classes, which Hailey and I fulfilled; with the remaining members filling offensive roles.
I had to admit, I wasn't expecting Rias' statistic numbers to be as high as they were. She must have been training hard in the few weeks since the ordeal at the basilica. Even against most of the better trained divisional soldiers she would hold her own.
More surprising was the incredible numbers boasted by Lady Aisling. I now had a heavy suspicion that she was either much older than I had initially suspected, or much more than a simple envoy from the elves.
The higher your attributes got, the harder they became to increase. Some people's growth stopped altogether at a certain level. Like Julius. After as many difficult battles as we've gone through, his STAMINA has remained at four-hundred.
So to see Lady Aisling show those high values, across multiple statistics, was a little awe-striking.
After a quick stop at the stables we departed Tolin. According to Mei, we could make it in five days: a two-day ride to the forest border, then another three days once we crossed over.
The forest was dense but not so much so that we'd have to dismount and go on foot.
We pushed close to fifty miles, an extra ten over what we had expected to make in the first leg. With a mix of anticipation and anxiety, we rode with few breaks and even less banter—until the first of the mounts started to show signs of nearing exhaustion.
Aside from a ten mile stretch along the roadway, the rest of our travel took us along the border of the Nariyn River, which flowed through the northern groves of the forest. This close to Tolin though, it was sparsely populated with foliage.
After riding for half a day we made camp at the crest of a rocky hill overlooking the river.
From the minor altitude vantage, Mei pointed out the overgrowth that marked the start of the forest's border. A fork in the river defined a natural border. Anything west of the fork belonged to the Ixian Elves.
Knowing another faction had a border within a two day's journey sparked a new kind of anxiety for me to deal with, and after eating a quick dinner I retired to my tent.
Our second day was more eventful than the first. But not in a good way. In a sense, it defined a clear factional divide within our party.
Throughout the day we were assailed by monsters that looked like rats, but were worse in almost every characteristic imaginable. They had horns, sharper fangs, bigger bodies, poisonous claws, thicker hides…
The list could continue until I ran out of breath.
And because of the constant attack by the rat beasts, we broke into two distinct groups within the party.
Team Anti-Rat: Hailey, Rias, and I; we hated them. The three of us found these things to just be disgusting. And they would show up outta nowhere! A muffled scratching would itch at your ears—then, POP! Dirt would fly up in the air and a dozen of the nasty things would crawl out of a burrow.
Team Pro-Rat: Idiots, AKA the rest of the party.
Julius and Mei were having a field day with the beasts. He would stun a pack as they breached the surface with a new shield ability he'd learned, and then she would nail them with a quick volley.
Lady Aisling and Lady Viane were both so enthralled with their antics that there was no convincing them. No matter how hard I tried to bring them to Team Anti-Rat, they sided with the other two.
Granted, it wasn't all terrible if you considered that Mei had been packing the remains on her mount. As we rode towards the next inevitable pack of the damned things, she would whittle away at their corpses with a knife. She was able to carve them up into all sorts of usable materials.
When we finally reached our camping destination for the day she had amassed an impressive amount of fair quality hides.
Today's camp was a spot along the border where the forests continued east into the plains, but the river made a wide bend north, into the heart of the forest. Tomorrow we would follow the river, marking our first crossing into Ixian territory.
Lady Aisling assured me that even if we were to be spotted by any of the shadow elves, they would ignore us because of our Aestori escorts.
I want to trust her, but after my run in with the would-be assassin, Hikita, I wasn't so sure that the Ixians weren't a threat.
Day three. We crossed into the vermilion veiled forest of the Ixians.
Massive oak trees rose up as far as the eye could see. We were engulfed by a rich red canopy which filtered out a vast majority of the sunlight. The ridged bark of the trees were a subdued reddish gray brown
Built up snow paired with wild overgrowth reduced our speed to a fraction of the previous two days. Nevertheless, we ventured deeper.
Not long after passing into the forest, Lady Aisling and Mei both noticed something off.
We were being followed.
Though, neither of them could tell what exactly was trailing us. Paranoia threatened to break my already strained will.
Hailey and Rias shared a tent with me that night.
Our fourth and, Celestials willing, our second-to-last day. I was still exhausted, missing about two hours of sleep keeping night watch for a shift with Julius.
Both Lady Aisling and Mei were now feeling the strains of trying to ascertain the nature of our stalker.
By the time we had traveled our allotted mileage for the day, they still couldn't agree on a possible culprit, though they both rejected any notion it was another elf.
"No Aestori worth a damn would have trouble identifying an Ixian."
Mei seemed upset I even made the suggestion.
"Listen, I don't know enough to make an educated guess. But couldn't it be possible that a scout with a high level stealth or evasion skill could be the one following us?"
"There's just no way some two-bit stealth skill would fool me. I can sense something is there, but not what that something is! Even Valiance can't get a target on it."
"Screee!"
Aside from her aerial companion's response, an unsettling silence followed.
I had a suspicion that the elves knew more than they were letting on, but didn't want to make a bad call.
In an effort to learn anything about a potential foe, I had been reading everything I could find relating to the Ixians. Primarch Karina's collection of questionably forbidden tomes had one book that was ripe with stories.
Tales of forest spirits, paganistic rituals, and terrifying encounters with the denizens of realms beyond the veil.
Such stories that I was certain the probably centuries old elven envoys would have also known.
Lady Viane was the most suspicious of them all. She'd been casting spells in the elvish runic language since we'd starting setting camp.
Strange glyphs floated around the campsite. They pulsated with a soft golden light. When I asked her about them, she'd simply said they were for our protection.
Anyone who sets warding glyphs around a camp has to know something. Why set up defenses if you have no idea what you're defending against?
My question was answered not too long after, as Lady Viane completed another glyph that started resonating immediately.
"Well, that's not good."
"What isn't good, Viane?"
"I can guarantee that it isn't an elf following us."
"Do you know what it is now then?"
"A goblinoid. One of the more malevolent creatures of the forests."
"Is it something we need to retreat from, or can we fight it off if it decides to attack?"
"Um, well that's part of the, not good, thing I was gonna bring up. Since I put up a warding spell against it… There isn't really an if anymore. It's a when."
"Great. A goblin can't be worse than those rat things, can it?"
All three of the elves turned to me with uneasy grimaces on their face.
Mei shook her head and whispered in my ear.
"All races of goblins are known for… forcing themselves onto anyone they capture."
"They what!?"
"They're vile things and should be destroyed as soon as possible."
"Agreed."
Both Lady Aisling and Lady Viane nodded their head in agreement with Mei.