There are those in life who will, by their very nature, be suspicious of anybody and everybody they meet, especially if they seem too friendly. Poor relations in upbringing, parents who are unreliable, or a string of just plain old bad luck early in life can result in this paranoid attitude. Another source, one less commonly admitted to, of course, can sometimes be the untrustworthiness of the individual themselves. After all, if they’re used to thinking in terms of how to screw over the other guy, then they’re going to be naturally aware of how others will try to screw them.
Thus it was that the stranger named Jago recognized, almost immediately, the sound of the tavern’s door bolt being slid softly into place, securing, ostensibly, his primary means of ingress or egress to the building. Even as the mayor led him, one burly arm draped over his shoulders, toward a great oak table set in honour of this greatest of guests, the stranger found himself discretely peeking out of the windows they passed by on their way.
What he spotted confused him, however. Over the course of three windows, he saw what appeared to be a modest-sized procession of people outside of the tavern loading bags and trunks of various sizes into broad wagons, hurriedly moving hither and thither. They were of various races, ages and sexes, and none appeared to be wearing the kind of garb or gear that one would associate with a particular trade or profession. But the glances had been brief; looking for such details was little more than a fool’s errand if he were to play along with whatever little charade was being strung out with him at the center.
Mayor Torm Knock-Skull signaled for the stranger to take a seat in the lavish, polished ironwood chair that stood at one end of the long table, pulling out the seat standing on the opposite end and standing beside it patiently as the rest of their retinue stood back a few feet, observing this ritual playing out. The stranger sat down, scotching forward with a ‘prrrrr-ap prrrr-ap’ of the chair’s legs on the hard plank flooring until he was seated a proper dining distance from the table. Torm followed suit with a smile, following up with a wave to the rest of his fellows to join them round the table for the forthcoming meal.
Before the stranger named Jago could pose any questions, a trio of svelt serving girls in plain, pale yellow tunic shirts and billowy black trousers came from what he assumed was the kitchen area of the tavern with plates and bowls on wide, flat black trays, setting them down along the table. A broad-shouldered storm tribe werewolf woman came out then, clapping her hands together with a noise like thunder. The stranger tensed up for a moment, but all along the table length, tiny pops of light and a smaller, similar sound revealed the abrupt, magical appearance of bowls, plates and cutlery for all at table, followed by applause and snickering from his dinnermates.
“That was, intriguing,” said the stranger politely. “Is this cantrip standard fare?”
“Only for special occasions, I assure you,” replied the werewolf woman, herself wearing a grubby black apron over cook’s whites. “My lord mayor, the churm will be finished in a few minutes,” she added with an incline of her head to the sizable jaft seated opposite the stranger.
“Excellent. Please, help yourself, guest Jago,” said the mayor. The stranger took his plate and a long fork, spearing a chunk of what looked like roasted duck in some kind of orange sauce, and the moment he transferred the meat to his own plate, everybody round the table began serving themselves with gusto. Not wanting to offend for some reason, Jago filled his plate, then brought to hand an earthenware bowl, into which he spooned a portion of the dish the cook had called ‘churm’. This is just goulash, the stranger thought to himself as he eased back into his seat and began to tuck in.
He was halfway through his food when the stranger realized that he had forgotten himself almost entirely. He had engaged in no conversation with these folks, who all seemed content to chatter among themselves while they supped, paying attention only to his own meal. Recognizing this loss of focus, he lifted his eyes toward Thorm, who sat sipping ale from a thick stein, his own plate already cleared, though traces of some kind of gravy were still in evidence.
He hasn’t paused to talk to anybody either, the stranger thought. Whatever sort of glam is being used here, I can’t even detect it. He leaned back a little in his seat, looking to his right out of a nearby window. The street beyond appeared to be completely emptied of townsfolk, and there were no signs, even, of local animals to be seen.
“What has happened here,” he asked the mayor, whipping his eyes around to stare directly into those of the jaft. The conversations around the table abruptly halted, and all of the smiles and cheerful looks transformed in the blink of an eye into emotionless stares, all directed at the stranger named Jago. Standing over by the kitchen doorway, even the storm tribe werewolf woman just glowered at him, emanating a kind of queer silence.
“Some time ago,” the mayor began evenly, picking up his stein and taking a long pull off of it. He set it down and pushed it with the back of his hand a few inches away, clasping his knobly fingers together in front of himself. “A man came to our village. He was peculiar, this traveler; he wore a golden mask shaped like a screaming skull, with the eyes and mouth all of darkness between its opened jaws. We did not know what to make of him, but we none of us sensed malice from him. As he drew between the first of our outermost homes, he threw wide his gloved hands, and called out, ‘Come, my friends, and hear mine words! For I am The Journeyman, Walker of Worlds!’”
The stranger named Jago felt a touch of that earlier emotion once more, the too-close cousin of fear, at these words. The mayor continued.
“He told us of some of the journeys he had been on, the things he had seen and heard, and done, while traveling from one world to another. And we, the followers of Great Hevka T’Chall, who are supposed to be immune to any sort of glam or illusion or charm, found ourselves spellbound, ringing this masked man and listening to him in awe. For all of the moon’s time in the sky, until the coming of the next dawn, he spoke to us, telling tales beyond imagining or belief. But believe him we did, stranger named Jago, aye, believe him we did.
“Before he departed from us, though, he gave us a warning,” said the mayor softly, eyes narrowing. From the corner of his eye, the stranger could see that several of the men and women ringed about the table were reaching slowly toward weapons strapped or sheathed at hip or shoulder, and the cook’s swelling of magical power could almost be tasted on the tip of his tongue. “The Journeyman said that other Walkers Between Worlds might well come to us in the days after his own arrival, and that each should be welcome among us, until such time as a question could be posed. If the question were answered one way, he warned, we would be in great peril, and should do all we could to destroy that Walker. If the question were answered any other way, then we should make apologies to that Walker, give them peace, and ask them to be on their way.”
“I see,” said the stranger named Jago, silently calling forth his own power, nostrils flaring as his own scalp began to smoulder from the heat within his being. “Pose your question, then, mayor.”
“Very well,” said the massive jaft, as one of the serving girls from the kitchen brought an enormous, stone-headed warhammer over to his outstretched right hand. “Where, Walker of Worlds, are you from?” The stranger named Jago quirked an eyebrow at him, intrigued and, he had to admit, slightly amused.
“Amelia City,” he replied, and the mayor rose steadily to his feet with a nod, gripping the shaft of his weapon fiercely.
“Kill him,” ordered mayor Thorm.
**
Dren came awake the following morning with a dull hum in the space between his ears, and a pleasant ache between his legs. His eyes cracked open slowly, but snapped wide as he saw that Holly was not in the bed beside him. Sitting up, he whipped his head around, trying to spot her. The door to the bathroom stood shut, and he could hear the running water of the dwarf-engineered shower beyond it, putting him once more at ease.
He’d been hopeful about the development of his and Holly’s relationship, though he couldn’t have dreamed that they would engage in physical intimacy of this sort at this juncture. Despite his tendency to keep one eye pegged always toward progress and ingenuity, Dren was, at heart, a conservative young man in personal matters. He had intended to court her properly, once they returned to Desanadron.
Holly had been rather insistent, however, and who was he to deny her? Who he was, it turned out, was the average young human male with even an average sex drive being presented a consentual opportunity- which is to say, little more than a snarling, drooling animal when all sense of romance or civility is stripped away.
So for the moment, he merely laid back in the bedclothes and stared up at the ceiling, a dopey smile on his face, his own worries seeming miles away. This didn’t last long, however; Dren was nothing if not mindful most of the time. He had only a few days in the city to spend with her before Holly would be departing with Andrei up north, into the mountains. Andrei had outlined all too clearly the kinds of dangers they might well come across, in addition to the unthinkable task of procuring a fang from a white dragon.
“How the hell is he going to manage that,” Dren asked himself aloud, sitting up in bed. Moving half-panicked, he began pulling on his clothes, thrusting his arms through the sleeves of one of his more comfortable pullover sweaters as Holly came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a thick, fluffy purple bathrobe, a towel wrapped up atop her head.
“What’s going on, Dren,” she asked him with a coy smile. “I would think you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get dressed again, sauntering over to him. She reached her hands up under his armpits, giving him a light squeeze.
“I thought I should ask Andrei something,” he said without thinking. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, it’s just, how does he intend to get a dragon fang?”
“Hmm,” Holly replied, letting go of him and taking a step back, one hand up under her jaw, finger scratching at the fur on her throat. “I suppose I didn’t really think about that much either. Let me get dressed, I’ll come with you,” she said, quickly tossing off the towel from her head and pulling the robe open. Dren had to shake himself physically to finish getting clothed, a point she didn’t miss, shaking her head at him.
As they exited the inn, Dren took her abruptly by the elbow. “Holly?”
“Hmm?”
“Should we, maybe, not, you know,” he stammered.
“Tell him we had sex last night? Yeah, probably a good idea if we want to actually have any kind of serious discussion with him,” she finished for him.
**
The soft wind blew down the main street of the village, a skirl of dried leaves crackling along in what otherwise would have appeared to be a ghost town. For several minutes, all stood deathly still. But nothing remains still forever in Tamalaria; with a clatter of shattering wood and the rush of expanding flame, a massive jaft came hurtling through the tavern’s bolted front door, wreathed in smoke, blood and sweat. He hit the ground and tumbled away in a loose heap, a warhammer falling from his grasp midway through his rolling out into the emptied street. He finally fetched up on his right side, partly turned toward the tavern from which he’d been blasted, the roof of which had begun to catch fire.
Head encased in wickering flames, hands likewise ablaze, a figure in a bespoke suit strode from the structure casually, several tears in his garb, a handful of wounds weeping smoking blood like lava. The stranger named Jago rolled his head around to crack his neck, flexing his fingers at his sides as he began to approach the mayor.
“I have to commend you and your people, Torm. It has been rather a long time since anyone of flesh and blood was able to wound me more than once.” He turned his head this way and that, casting about the village. He halted a few yards away from the groaning jaft, who was getting up onto his knees, trying to stand. “Though I must point out, you seem to be on your own, now.”
“We, had everyone else, evacuate,” grunted the blue-fleshed humanoid, rising wobblingly to his feet. “Only those of us, willing, to fight to the death, remained,” he said, bringing his hands up into a loose fighter’s stance. “Hmm,” said the stranger, folding his arms over his chest, using one flaming hand to stroke his chin thoughtfully. “Admirable, if ultimately pointless. Stand down, mayor Torm, and I will be on my way,” said the stranger politely. “I will let you live.” The jaft clenched his jaw and lunged toward him then, and the stranger dropped into an evasion-ready stance.
Jago, He of the Flames, thought he saw the uppercut coming, but the jaft proved more cunning a fighter than he had assumed. As he shifted to his right, the mayor pivoted hard and quick, launching a fierce left cross punch that crashed into the stranger’s burning face with the force of a derailed freight train. The otherworldly menace knew, even as he flailed away from his opponent in agony, that his nose was broken, and something felt off in the left half of his face. Most of the strength went out in his legs, and he stumbled over his own feet, falling down in a tangle near the blazing tavern’s outer wall.
Fabulous, the stranger named Jago snarled to himself. I likely have a concussion here. As he got back up, another potent blow landed to his gut, doubling him over as a rib announced its newly discovered ‘broken’ status. Yet as the jaft grasped his shoulder and straightened him against the superheated wall at his back, the stranger felt the healing power of his own flames pouring into him from his back, and his hands flung out, grasping the bald mayor’s head tightly.
The stranger opened his mouth, and a pulsing lance of pure white flame streamed from his throat into the jaft’s eyes, nostrils and ear canals, blasting through the man’s teeth as part of that stream of force pushed unstoppably down his throat. The blue flesh quickly began melting away, and something in the mayor’s chest exploded in a spray of blood, bone and lungs, coating the stranger named Jago in the sickly sweet wetness of death.
The mayor of Osak dropped in a spreading, melting puddle then, and the stranger leaned back, letting the flames of the tavern stretch out to him, sealing his wounds and somehow fixing his torn clothes. “That,” he grumbled to himself, feeling his faceplate line back up and snap into its proper place, “could have gone better.”
The creature brought the flames on his head back under control, pulling on his leather gloves to douse those on his hands as he pushed away from the crumbling tavern and the corpses he had left within. He didn’t have to think long about whether or not the jaft mayor had been lying to him; none of this had been the dragon’s work. If the wyrm had wanted him dead, it would have engaged him in battle out in the plains and had done with it, come what may.
No, this had been the work of the one known as The Journeyman. The stranger had heard of the masked wanderer in passing a handful of times, almost every mention coming from Lord Quoth’s beak. “An interloper in events beyond his ken,” Lord Quoth had remarked once. “But the man is surely no true threat to us.”
“And that is where you are wrong,” the stranger said to the memory, looking around as he strode away from the building, making his way toward the north and slightly west. He had no steed for the time being, but that didn’t trouble him much. After all, it wasn’t like he was on a time table.
That he knew of, anyhow.
**
Dren had never smoked a cigarette in his life, but just at the moment, he could easily have seen himself pounding one down like a life-long lunger if he had one in hand. He stared, dumbfounded, as the minotaur freelancer turned his eyes from the smithy to the cuyotai mage. “Am I not speaking the right language,” Andrei asked after a long moment.
“No, no, you’re speaking the common tongue,” said Holly, rubbing the pinch point between her eyes. “I think we’re just trying to grapple with the absurdity of your statement.”
“It isn’t absurd at all,” Andrei replied with a chuckle. “As a matter of fact, I think it’s possibly the wisest course of action we have available to us.” Dren finally shook his head, arms folded over his chest but one finger pointed between the bars at the freelancer.
“You’re mad,” the young smithy said softly. “I have met some peculiar people in my life, growing up in Desanadron. There’s even a group of folks who walk around town doing all sorts of queer things that make no sense, call themselves the Blessed Children of Maragshet, the Mad God, and I don’t think I’d ever hear out of one of their mouths the sort of thing you’ve just suggested. And these people sometimes try to walk whole blocks on just their big toes.”
“Say what you will about those people, they rarely ever do anybody any lasting or meaningful harm,” Andrei offered.
“The point is,” Dren replied, still maintaining a measured tone, “none of them ever said, ‘Hey, you know what’d be a fun thing to do? Why not we just go waltzing into a dragon’s den, plain as you please, and ask the great big fire-breathing wyrm inside if it would be ever so kind as to yank a fang out of its own face and fork it over to us? Sound like a lark, lads?’ It’s never happened, and you’ll be lucky to not get both yourself and Holly killed if you try that,” Dren said.
Andrei just blinked at him for a moment, then replied, “White dragons breath frost.” Dren’s jaw clenched tightly, and he snorted, throwing his hands up in the air in defeat.
“Holly, do you want to,” Dren said.
“Calm down, sweetie, I’ve got this,” she said, patting his back before stepping up to the bars and grasping them. “I think what Dren’s trying to get at is that we should at least come up with an alternative strategy, one that incorporates for the possibility of hostilities with the dragon. Have you ever fought one before?”
“A couple of times,” the freelancer answered. He came up off of his bunk, pacing contemplatively in his cell. “The first one was a green wyrm, an older serpent that had been rampaging in the Elven Kingdom. I was working with a small merc outfit at the time, and the city of Korrin hired us out to track it down and kill it.”
“And how did that work out for your people,” asked Holly.
“We lost a couple of the older veterans and a newbie, real go-getter type,” Andrei replied. “Can’t remember the kid’s name, but he was a half-elf, nice shiny new titanite armor and a big ol’ enchanted sword, went charging right at the lizard when we came to the clearing it had claimed as its territory. You ever cook a roast in one of those floating pots? That’s kind of what happened to him, just, you know,” Andrei said with a shrug. “A lot faster.”
“By the gods,” Dren muttered with a shake of his head.
“We didn’t have much of a game plan for going after that dragon,” said the freelancer. “I think on this point, I actually agree with the two of you. We need a backup plan, in the event Hevka isn’t willing to part with a fang of his own accord.”
“But you still want to use that as an opening approach,” said Holly.
“I do. But we have a few days to consider everything,” said Andrei, moving back over to his bunk and plucking a book out from under the pillow, laying back and opening it to the page he’d left off on. “Holly, you can swing by again tomorrow, about this time, and we’ll go over a few options. We can do that for the next few days until they let me out of here.”
“Sounds good,” said Holly, backing away from his cell and putting her arm around Dren’s back companionably.
“Oh, and guys?” Dren and Holly both raised eyebrows at the minotaur freelancer, who had his eyes on his book. “Try not to catch pregnant before we get you back to Desanadron.”