The Quantum Wanderer

The mob at the foot of the stairs slowly spread out. There are groups forming, people speculating. Among them I can see Griffin, he has his head lowered, listening to someone. He lifts it, and sees us.

“LIONHEART! Come on over.”

I offer my arms to my girls, and we go over to the group. The others look at us. A couple of guys in the group look at my girls, but their friends tell them that my girls are into winterization. It even became a verb, apparently.

We meet the group. Huginn and Muninn take flight and land on a big bean near us. A couple of adventurers that were already used to the two birds look at them with some discomfort. I can see that Muninn is having some fun with the situation.

I mouth the word ‘don’t’ to him. He tilts his head, very bird like. I smile and nod at him. I turn to Griffin, he is listening something from an adventurer by his side. Some people call Griffin from a table, we go with him.

“I am telling you, this totally makes sense! We should have known!”

“You’re full of shit!”

“Ok! Explain the banner, then!”

“Hey guys! What is the theory here?” Griffin asks.

“This moron here is saying that the supposed dragon in Romuela was supposed to be a prophet for Wrax. But he got so disappointed with humans that he just went back to his land.”

This guy is creative.

“I am telling you! The goal was to spread the banner of Wrax. That’s why every escort mission was wearing the banner. Come on! You have to at least agree that that banner is suspiciously close to what a banner for Wrax would be, right?”

Some people nod, but everyone has this face that they are really eating the whole story.

“So, why didn’t he just conquer the whole thing? He could have planted the banner wherever he wanted. Provided the stories are true, of course.”

“The way I see it, it was a test. Gods don’t want to force you; they want to just show up and be given respect.”

“I don’t buy it. Why didn’t he get with the church of Wrax, then? He could just land in the square in dragon form, become human and start preaching.”

“Really? Is your pea sized brain going to try to guess what the prophet should have done? They probably have a reason for that.”

“They?” Someone else asks.

“They… I mean, dragons, crows, Wrax… It is a they, right?”

“Pffftttt… That is a lot of crap.”

A server gets close to the table.

“What will the strong men and ladies want?”

We all order ale. The talks are fun. Cecilia is having fun with me. Ruby also snorts here and there. The faces of the other girls tell me that they are slightly amused, but they are not having as much fun.

At some point, Griffin turns to me.

“What do you think, Lionheart?”

“Humm… I don’t know. You know I am bad at gathering intelligence. Just a question… How big was that guy’s party?”

“They were 4. They took a lot of mounts, enough for all the guards. The mounts were strong enough that the women were brought in a hitchhiker backpack. Time was of essence.”

I don’t know what a hitchhiker backpack, but everyone else seems to know.

“Where are they?”

“They were delivering the people they rescued. Apparently some high placed nobles. People that saw then are saying that they were pretty beaten up. It sounds weird, given that there neither monsters neither bandits.”

“Do you think they managed to survive the judgement?” Another adventurer asks.

He shrugs. They all drink a sip of ale. The silence is dense. I put the cup on the table.

“We can always listen to the others as well. They might have additional information. Or other points of view.”

They shrug. They were just enjoying the silence, apparently. The girls and I drink a little more. I go to the counter, pay our bill. On the way out, I pass by the table. One adventurer, with the double crow pendant, waves his hand.

“My Rebirth guide you.”

I lift my hand. I had not heard that yet. Griffin just does a gesture with two fingers, touching his head and waving at me.

We walk towards the exit, Huginn and Muninn again land on my shoulders. We walk slowly home, the sun is about to set.

Once we get home, Muninn clears his throat.

“So, father, am I Death or Rebirth?”

“Death, probably. You don’t have the finesse to be Rebirth, hubby.” Huginn answers.

They both laugh. Cecilia laughs as well.

“Just kidding, papa. We actually love our names.”

Aquamarine tilts her head.

“Really? Do they have a meaning?”

“Yes! There was this ancient people, made of warriors, in papa’s land. They had their pantheon of gods. Their main god had two crows, and we are named after them.” Huginn answers.

“Huginn is supposed to mean thought, and Muninn is supposed to mean mind or desire.” Muninn answers, proudly.

“That sounds interesting… Would you tell us more about that, my lord?” Asks Aquamarine.

“Sure. Let’s do that after dinner.” I smile at how Huginn made it sound way bigger than it actually is.

We go to our room to wash up, then we come down for dinner. Food gets served. Between one piece and another, I turn to Cecilia.

“Cecs, what is a hitchhiker backpack?”

She looks at me like I asked something strange.

“Didn’t you ever get one? I thought you were  part of a party at least once.”

“Not really. Just for a single quest, here and there.”

She shrugs.

“It is something that looks like a huge backpack. It was designed to put a person in. It has holes for arms and legs, and some belts you can adjust… If not using that, how did you carry injured party members?”

“I… Huh, I never thought about that. And there wasn’t anyone really hurt on the quests I participated. I think I just did one escort mission, though, with the Requiem Warriors.”

Ruby tilts her head, swallows the food in her mouth.

“Why, my lord?”

“Huh? Why what?”

“Why did you join a party? And such weak one…”

I smile.

“First, I wasn’t always strong. When I came to this world, I was about the weakest adult human alive. Second, I had other plans. I intended on traveling the land, meeting new people, joining a party, getting new friends.”

Aquamarine was paying attention.

“What happened?”

“You all happened, basically. I am actually not the kind of person that gets to meet a lot of people. Let’s put it this way, I am the opposite of Griffin. If we both go to an inn with a lot of people, I will be sitting in a corner, watching everything, while by the end of an hour he will have been invited to 3 parties, 2 weddings and a funeral.”

Cecilia, Charles and Lucille giggles.

“Then some stuff happened. I met Cecilia, and my will to travel the land suffered. I preferred doing the quests alone because of my secrets. Then I met you girls, and the idea of traveling the hand by escort quests was just gone.”

“Why were you so fixated on keeping the secrets, my lord?” Shandon asks.

“Because it would spread fear. Let’s get the knight school as an example. If you turned into your dragon shape in the knight school, everyone would run. They would not care that you are the same being you were before, just a different shape.

“In the past, I was afraid people in power would try to use my growth or kill me if I didn’t comply. People are afraid of losing control. As for now, I try to keep some normal relations. The normal relations demand that people don’t think  I am god. Otherwise it happens like around the demons. I can’t just enter an inn there and start conversation, the whole room just kowtows.”

“Shouldn’t everyone kowtow before you, my lord?” Opal asks.

I smile.

“Why would I want that? To show someone I am stronger than they are? What benefit would I get? Nobles and military demand this kind of thing, it is ingrained in their culture because of the effects it creates in the mind of the people. Kowtowing reminds one that one is a serf. The habit gets ingrained.

“The number of people that will resist an order goes way down when everyone has to kowtow. A lot of things that make this world work are based on everyone’s belief. A king or an emperor, at the end of the day, is just a person. If his guards turn against him, he is fucked.

“Just like money. Why can you exchange a piece of metal, completely useless for anything else, for goods? There is a general belief that the metal has that worth. It is a belief, though. I mean, the elven coins, made of rare seeds, is more useful than the coins we see around. If everyone around us stopped believing in the value of money, it would be no different than a lump of metal.”

“But we weren’t raised in that belief, my lord…” Aquamarine says.

“But now you know money is worth goods. But that is not a fact. Not like one plus one is two. It is just a belief. A belief that Cecilia and I exposed you to, and now you believe it too.”

Charles, Lucille and Cecilia are looking at me with very weird faces. At some point, Charles starts pointing at me with the fork, and starts laughing.

“Good one! HAHAHAHA!”

I shrug and smile.

We finish dinner, and retire for the brief interval.

Huginn wakes us up at midnight. We all get up. It is more of the same. Clouds, fires. Huginn proceeds with the crows ghost illusions.

After some time, she is flying around the city. She makes her crow ghosts cry out for a name. The first few times people hear it, they panic. As they hear it a second, a third, a tenth time, they start to calm down.

Some people leave an inn, running. They point to the inn, and look at the sky, screaming that he is there.

The inn’s doors are locked, and it catches fire. The people that left the building and pointed to the inn fall to their knees, their hands together in prayer.

Huginn comes back to us.

“Are we done?”

“Not yet, papa. There is still one more place to visit.”

She opens a portal. We jump through it. We are again high in the sky. Below us is the lake, the place Angelica used to be. In the middle of the lake there are some boats of medium size.

She dives, right in the middle of them. They hear the noise of something like a rock hitting the water, there is not a big splash.

I sense a vacuum in the mana around around the boats. Some mages to got the deck, start looking around. They feel something is wrong. Huginn has cast a sanctuary spell.

A whirlpool starts forming. It is large. A couple of boats in the middle dive into the whirlpool, and disappear. She opened a portal under the water.

I can see that the volume of water in the lake goes down a little bit. Mages try to cast, but their spells have no power. Water mages can’t seem to affect water. Wind mages can not produce enough of to even affect the sails.

Some people jump out of the boats, desperate, but they are dragged just like the boats. The boats crack under maneuvers they were never made to support. I can sense that Huginn goes through that portal.

“Muninn, do you know where she went?”

“Yes, father.”

Muninn opens a portal for us, again high up in the sky. The boats are falling through a cascate of water that starts on the usual spheric distortion. There is a mess of floating wood, sometimes a piece of a boat, a mast, sails. We are over the Big River. Not exactly the middle, though.

People are screaming. Soldiers already sunk in the river, their armors bringing them down. Others are trying to swin for the first time in their lives. Some boats survived the fall, among the couple of dozens. None of them have intact masts and sails, though.

Some people start getting back to the boat. They throw ropes to the some people in the water. Huginn comes from beneath the water, a splash of water. In the middle of the dark, they don’t really know what is going on.

Some sailors in the boat are looking around, trying to understand how they came to be in the middle of the Big river.

Then a person in the water starts screaming. Then another one. The water start to look like it is boiling against them. They pull a person into the boat. Their lower torso is gone, eaten.

One of the mages that managed to stay in the boat tries to cast, but Huginn still has the sanctuary spell active.

At this point, the outside of the boats start catching fire. We see a bishop undressing his regal clothes, throwing them in the fire. He kneels down, hands together in prayer. The people around him start to slowly walk towards him. One sailor hits him with an oar, and all of a sudden the mob acts and beat him to death, throwing him through the fire, to the water.

I look around, and Huginn is with us. I turn to her.

“Were those soldiers?”

“Yes. A couple of bishops, soldiers, priests, paladins. They were trying to escape. They had heard that the places they were in were going up in flames. There are so many cathedrals a girl can burn before people realize there is something going on, right?”

“And they decided to try to escape through the rivers? Actually, given the information they have, it is not a bad idea. But why did you bring them here?”

“I brought them here so I could drop them on the top of the nest of piranhas. They are generally kind of  lazy at this time of night, so you need a little extra to make sure they get wakey wakey.”

Ruby snorts. I look at her, tilting my head. I also snort. Not because of how funny it is, but because how savage she is. The other dragonesses are nodding, approvingly. They didn’t forgive the humans that hurt her precious daughter yet.

I look back down at Huginn’s work of art. The ships, now without people in them, are burning till the waterline. At this point, they start getting dragged down the river. Huginn shifts around, I look at her.

“I am done for the day, papa. Let’s go home?”

“Of course.”

Huginn opens a portal to our room. We washup. The sun is about to rise up. There is not going to be enough time to sleep. We just cuddle a little bit and then dress for the next day. When the sun comes out, we go down the stairs for our breakfast. After we eat, we go back up and have a nap.

We wake up around noon. We all sit on the bed.

“What do you girls want to do?”

“Whatever you want, my lord…” Opal answers.

“Do you want to go to the elves?”

“Sure.” Cecilia answers. “We should check with Roberta if they want to go as well to get supplies.”

“Good catch.”

We go downstairs. The girls stay in the living room, I go into the kitchen. Roberta stops cutting something, she drops the knife and comes over, cleaning her hands on the apron.

“Hi Roberta.”

“Good afternoon, lord. How may I help?”

“The girls and I are going to visit the elves. I am guessing that we might be needing to resupply some condiments?”

“Yes, lord. We didn’t run out of anything yet, but there are a couple of things that we need to re-stack on.”

“Great. How long do you need to prepare?”

“Just half an hour, lord.”

“By the way, I don’t mind bringing in the buyer.”

“The buyer, lord?”

“Yes, the hooded maids’ buyer.”

She opens a smile.

“Did lord know already?”

I laughed.

“If I knew? Edward knows. You know, the duke…?”

“Eeek.”

“Don’t worry. As long as it is a small thing, there is no problem. And it is not like you can move too much merchandise or keep this going for a long time.”

“Huh? Why?”

“The dwarves are stablishing merchant routes already. Currently, you are the only ones with access to it, so the prices you get for the material is really high. In the future, you are going to have to lower the prices a lot. Inns and other places will prefer buying with official sources, like merchants recognized by the empire. You might still make a profit, but not nearly what you are doing now. Or not nearly what I expect you to be doing now…”

I giggle. Roberta tilts her head, and looks kind of up. She is doing some math in her brain. I continue.

“Anyway, let’s get ready!”

“Of course, lord.”

I leave Roberta and sit with my girls in the living room.

“Is she getting ready? How long does she need?” Cecilia asks.

“She told me half an hour.”

Cecilia takes a look through the window, to guess the time. It is just past noon.

“Yes, we are probably going to make it before the rain.” I say.

Cecilia nods.

“My lord, I was thinking…” Ruby turns to me. “You like to go there so much… Could it be because you enjoy looking at female elves?”

I thing a little bit about the way to answer this question. If this were Cecilia, it would be closer to something a girl would expect. But it being Ruby, I think I can be honest.

“Not really. I enjoy our place there. We get to talk to the dryads, to Autumnstart, we listen to music. We are well treated. It is a nice way to pass the time. The elven girls are nice looking, but so are you…”

She has her left arm under her breasts, holding her right arm. She is tapping her mouth with her index finger. She tilts her head to the side.

“Would you prefer this?”

She start morphing. Her ear elongates to the side. Her face features start to get a pull, her brows go up a little, she gets a little leaner. She assumes the shape of an elf. And a very beautiful one. Her dress is a little off, some of her measurements changed.

“Well? My lord?”

I take sometime to answer.

“You are beautiful, but we would have to adjust the dress… You do realize that I love your true shape, right?”

“You never tried to fuck us in that shape, though.”

“Huh?”

She snorts.

“Aaawww… Sisters, I think I broke our lord…” She puts her tongue out. “We are dragons… You never tried to fuck us in that shape.”

I was still wrapping my head about possibilities when Roberta arrived with a helper. Cecilia whispers in Ruby’s ear.

“Please go back to human, sister.”

Ruby shrugs, while getting back to the Ruby I know. It actually helps me to ground myself. I breath a couple of times. I clap my hands.

“Let’s go?”

Everyone nods. I open the portal. We jump to our home in the elven city.

“Big brother! And sisters! How are you?” Ypê, excited as usual, greets us.

“We are doing well. How about you?”

“We are doing great, big brother. The forest has never been greener.”

“I am glad to hear that. What happened?”

“Big brother don’t remember? The food big brother is providing?”

I laugh.

“I can assure you that it is no trouble for us at all…”

I laugh. Ypê is looking at me like she wants to tell me something.

“Yes? Is there something you want to ask?”

“I was just wondering… Big brother has such beautiful females with him… Has big brother taken a look at the female griffons as well? We hear they are very alluring…”

“Huh? A griffon? Why woud…? What? Did you all choose to mess with me today?”

I look at Ypê, she is looking with a very fake innocent look towards me.

“I don’t – fuck. Just let it rest.”

Ypê raises a thumb, we leave the house. While we walk towards the stores, I turn to Cecilia.

“Do you know what is that about?”

“I have no idea.” Cecilia answers.

“Why? Why would they even come up with the idea?”

“I don’t know. But you can probably continue the conversation in the inn later.” Cecilia answers as she shrugs.

“I don’t know if I want to continue this conversation. Right now, I am happily married. To 5 spetacular women, no less.”

“Well…”

“You know what I mean.”

Cecilia giggles, Ruby snorts, the other girls smile. Muninn and Huginn laugh a little. They are having a lot of fun with all this.

We leave Roberta and her helper in the store. Huginn leaves a bird with each of them, for communication. We go to our favorite inn. The clouds are already covering the sky when we get there.