Chapter 42: Chapter 42: Brand New Day

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Brand New Day

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“Freaking Hel,” I cursed.

The pain in my head, like a hot poker lancing my brain, vanished in the seconds it took for me to breathe the fresh air again.

I was standing just outside the tower’s front steps and staring up at a now familiar early morning sky with clouds the color of molten gold. The lone sun rotating around Yggdrasil was just beginning to climb up from the south horizon too.

Yep, unlike with Earth, this solar system’s heavenly bodies were wheeling around the great tree, because the Realm Ethereal was the actual center of the realmsverse, the nexus from which all life is born.

“It feels like I just died,” I grunted.

“That’s what we all say after a celebration like last night’s revelry,” answered a gruff voice.

A tall, gray-furred, bear-like creature dressed in blue mage robes lumbered over to stand next to me. His mane of braided pale gray hair framed a savage-looking countenance that had two sharp fangs jutting out of his lower lip. He was much bigger than me too, with a frame like a bodybuilder’s but not as big as our Master of P.E.

“And you were particularly insistent on drowning your…” His furry face turned contemplative for a moment. “…sorrows—yes that’s the right word—with more chili mead than a human’s stomach was made for.”

“I have no sorrows,” I grumbled. “Zen, you’re squinting again.”

I’d gotten used to it by now, but the unintended narrowing of the yeti’s crimson eyes always made Zen look more menacing than the genial bibliophile that I now knew him to be.

“Oh, yes. Hold on.” Zen reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the round-rimmed spectacles he kept there. “There, much better… By the hoary hosts of Shambala, I must say, that is one gorgeous sunrise.”

“Yes, it is.” I glanced up at the sky with a face that was slowly filling with excitement. “It’s a brand-new day.”

Zen glanced sideways at me.

“That’s the right mindset, Will,” he nodded encouragingly. “No need to think about last night’s row with Liara this fine morning.”

“Zen.” I frowned. “You talking about it doesn’t help.”

“Ah, yes, apologies,” he said sheepishly.

What was Zen talking about? Well, that would be the heated argument I’d had with Liara Lockwood last night which some of my busybody tower mates bore witness to, including how we parted on a super awkward note.

See, the pretty she-elf with long chestnut hair and almond-shaped amber eyes who’d been my guide and partner on my first week of adventures here in the Academy had asked me to do something impossible; set my vengeance aside to help her find her missing father, a bright elf who’d been part of that ljósálfar death cult that had sacrificed me to the gods of death back when I was an eleven-year-old kid. That death didn’t stick as I’d inadvertently stolen the cult’s very wish of immortality, which, honestly, wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Imagine having to experience painful death only to come back and relieve the day of one’s death all over again. It was freaking Groundhog Day with swords and sorcery and lots of painful memories my teenage brain didn’t know how to deal with.

Moreover, I suspected that Liara’s father and his guild, Golden Bow, had been responsible for the ‘Dungeon Break’ incident that nearly killed me, Liara, Zen, and a bunch of other novices two nights ago.

Of course, Liara didn’t know any of that. To her, Lorias ‘freaking’ Löwenthal was an elf who’d cared about his half-breed daughter in a way most of his kind probably wouldn’t have. And, since he’d disappeared in the aforementioned dungeon break, Liara only saw him as a victim.

The thing is, I told the she-elf I couldn’t help her only a day after Liara had helped me save nearly a hundred lives. Not to mention the fact that she’d been at my side while I plundered the Academy’s secrets—which she benefited from too, by the way—and helped me navigate the intricacies of campus life and teenage cliques without asking too many questions about my shady past.

I saw the disbelief and misunderstanding grow on her face just before she stormed off on me last night. However, me being me—which is to say I was a noob at social interactions—I chased after Liara without even an inkling of what to say to her. And, just like a dog who’d caught up to the car it had been chasing, I didn’t know what to do next, and that made Liara even angrier than if I’d made up excuses for my caginess.

She’d accused me of being disingenuous and racist—which I wasn’t really—and I said all the wrong things in response because I couldn’t exactly tell her the truth as that required admitting certain things about my past that I wasn’t ready to share with her or anyone else. Just like that, our budding friendship seemed to be at an end, and I’d smashed it into scattered Lego parts myself because I’d answered her sincerity with cowardice.

“Are you alright?” Zen asked, drawing me out of my reminiscence.

I wiped the frown from my expression and slapped a grin on my face. “I’m fine.”

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and made sure my instrument bag was clipped properly to it too. I made sure that everything clipped to my belt was secured as well before finally pressing my fingers to the trinket underneath my shirt which hung from the silver chain around my neck.

Good morning, Flameheart, I whispered to my uber-special grimoire that I inherited from the Elemental King of Fire. Let’s work hard today.

“You’re carrying an awful lot for a trip to the aerie,” Zen commented.

“I’m planning to train straight away afterward,” I reasoned. “All right, I’m heading out.”

“Have a productive day, Will,” Zen said genially.

I took the steps down two at a time and raced across the Raven Bridge that separated the Mage’s Tower from the rest of campus to keep my spirits up as I was still feeling that annoying ache in the pit of my stomach.

Moments after I’d crossed the length of that precarious bridge, Zen called out to me. “Didn’t you say you were going to the aerie?”

I glanced over my shoulder. “Yeah?”

“You’re going the wrong way then!” He raised a finger in the opposite direction of where I was going. “The aerie’s north of campus. Not south.”

“Oh, yeah. I knew that.” I lied. “See you!”

I began feeling the effects of losing Liara’s trust mere minutes after leaving the tower as she’d been the perfect guide to help navigate the Academy’s massive campus that sat on one of Yggdrasil’s lowest hanging branches. Actually, I was pretty sure I’d seen the same unused drengr pit twice now.

“How in the Hel did I get turned around?” I wondered aloud.

I couldn’t ask the novices I passed for directions either as many of them wore the red and green cloaks of the Warrior’s Lodge and Rogue’s Gallery, which were the two other famous schools of the Academy. These novices eyed me warily as they passed me by, with some even blatantly glaring daggers at me, not just because I wore the blue cloak of the Mages Tower, but because I wasn’t much liked in the Academy. They didn’t like that I showed them up during my first week in school.

Anyway, I, the genius apprentice of the dragoness, wasn’t about to be defeated by something as measly as directions. So, I trudged on—on and on and on until I found myself staring at the edge of a cliff by the far south end of the campus.

“Why?!” I screamed at the sky. “Why is this stupid school so freaking big?!”

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I didn’t expect a response, but, strangely enough, I think I did get one. It wasn’t like any response I’d ever heard of either. Just the low howl of a beast from somewhere down below me.

On closer inspection of the cliff’s edge, I found two-meter-high stone markers that marked the beginning of a series of steps hewn from the rough rock that led down the cliffside. Far below, where the morning mist grew thickest, came the softly glowing light of torches.

“What’s down there?” I wondered curiously.

The thing about new adventures is that they always seemed to come calling when one least expected it, and I wasn’t one to ignore that call when it arrived for me just as Divah taught me.

“It’s a strange business, kiddo, going out into the wild. You step onto grass thinking you’re traveling one way, but if you pay attention to the world around you, listen and watch for signs, then there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to—and that’s the fun part of adventuring,” she’d often say to young, impressionable me.

While smiling at the memory of Divah, I pulled out the hearthstone that hung from the silver chain around my neck and activated its flashlight feature with the rune, “Kenaz.” Light blazed to life from within the small crystal to spread around me, giving me around twenty feet of visibility, which was all I needed to traverse those precarious-looking steps down the cliffside.

“This school has never heard of hand railings, huh?” I asked no one in particular.

A pang struck my chest as I remembered I’d said this very same observation to Liara the first time I’d crossed the tower’s bridge.

“Get a grip, Will,” I chided myself. “You didn’t come to the Academy to make friends…”

On that rather lonely note, I began my trek down the cliffside.

It took about half an hour to reach the bottom of those steps which opened up into a craggy platform that skirted the cliffside. The orange lights I’d seen from above had come from the two stone braziers placed between the entrance of a large cave. Around this cave were raised Banners sporting the colors and symbols of the Academy’s three schools—the blue raven, green wolf, and red bear—with chipped swords and broken spears planted on the ground around them. Finally, carved above the cave entrance was a single familiar phrase; ADVENTURER BEWARE, FOR HERE BE DRAGONS.

“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” I whispered.

In the really old days, back when Realms-Googly Maps wasn’t a thing yet and cartography was an actual job people worked hard on, that quote about dragons on uncharted corners of a map was the old-school way of warning someone about danger. And, as symbolisms go, dragons, which were perhaps at the very top of the realmsverse food chain right alongside gods and greater demons, were the perfect imagery to warn people off entering this place.

However, such warnings were meant for lesser folk because I laughed in the face of danger.

Still, I wasn’t one to dive into the unknown unprepared, which is why I unclipped the journal that was both my greatest treasure and my lifeline from my belt and opened it to the very first page. Then I reread the words written there for the thousandth-and-one time.

In pursuit of a grand adventure, I challenged myself to be better. I learned a great deal and decided to share this knowledge with you. Not to make your journey easier, but to increase your chances of survival. So, don’t let pre-established logic and practices limit you, Will. Dare to see things not as they are, but what they can be.

Sure enough, goosebumps once again appeared on the back of my arms as I remembered how thankful I was that my master Divah had found me after I was resurrected that first time.

A warm, wistful smile flashed on my face. “Who needs Liara Lockwood when I’ve got the dragoness watching my back?”

I moved on to another page, one that gave a specific accounting of Divah’s experience with this particular dungeon—for what else could it be—that she’d labeled Grendel’s Grotto.

From what I’d learned from my tower mates, Grendel’s Grotto was the Academy’s exclusive dungeon which the masters maintained for both research purposes and to teach novices all about dungeons. This included training for dungeon expeditions too, which was happening right now according to the signboard hanging on the post next to the dungeon entrance.

“Warrior-One field training,” I read out loud. “Hey, isn’t that Dess’s group?”

Warrior-One, the designation for the warrior apprentices who were part of my Apprentice-One class, was instrumental in keeping us alive back during the other night’s dungeon break. These future tanks also included some of my Team Six mates who’d helped me defeat the blue-eyed emissary that led the monster horde against our base camp.

“I guess I can’t just interrupt their training without permission, can I…”

Steal killing and raid interference was a big no-no in adventurer etiquette after all.

“Well, it’s not like I need to go where Dess and Morph are.” I gave Divah’s guide a warm pat. “Every known dungeon has a secret entrance, and I love a good cheat when it benefits me.”

Per Divah’s instructions, I pulled out my climbing rope and tied it around the stone brazier that was to the left of the cave’s entrance. Then, after clipping the rope to the cables I attached to my belt, I moved over to the edge of the cliff directly opposite the stone brazier I’d lashed my rope to.

“Truthfully, I’m not very fond of heights,” I glanced warily down that cliff. “But I go where the adventure takes me…”

I spent another second calming my mind—reminding myself how fun it would be to go on a solo adventure for a change—before I finally jumped off the cliff.

Nope, I didn’t take that slow climb down the cliff like a proper climber would have done. I simply leaped into the void while trusting Divah’s written word to get me through this next challenge.

According to Divah’s guide, using just the right amount of rope attached to that specific brazier while jumping off the cliff would swing me over like a pendulum onto an outcropping of rock hidden from view by the persistent fog that hovered over the cliffside. Sure enough, my feet slid across a stony surface just a few seconds after I’d pulled off that crazy stunt which any sane person might not have done regardless of how much they trusted their intel.

Quick as a snake, my hands reached out for the stone wall, with my fingers latching onto its craggy surface to help anchor me to this extremely narrow ledge I’d fallen into.

“Whoop…” I let out a breath. “That was fun.”

After securing my rope to a climbing nail I stuck into the rock, I began moving west along the narrow ledge while hugging the wall as much as I could. It took another minute, but my fingers eventually found the crack in the cliffside that Divah had written about, and it was just enough space for me to squeeze through it too.

Once inside the crack, the light from my hearthstone shone across the floor of a cave that was no bigger than my bedroom in the tower. Stalactites hung from the high ceiling, with stalagmites rising from the ground, giving one the ocular impression of climbing into a monster’s maw.

Like the journal promised, however, the cave's far end was a smooth stone surface whose secret door would have been unnoticeable to someone without a guide like mine. Luckily, I’d already activated the ‘Torch Rune’ that allowed the light from my hearthstone to outline the lines of a magic door on that wall. It was round with a depression at its center.

“Grendel’s backdoor,” I chuckled. “What an apt name.”

The next thing I did was unsling my instrument bag so I could finally get this adventure started.

As a safety measure against accidents, it was a LEPRCON rule that weapons were stowed until the moment before entering a dungeon. So only now was I able to unzip my bag and pull out my glaive, the Blue Wing Redeemer, from out of it.

It was a single-edged blade with a slight curve that was two-and-a-half feet in length. Its ash wood hilt was also two-and-a-half feet long, was roughly the same width as the blade, and ended in a softly glowing blue stone pommel.

“It would be so much easier if I stole the Skeleton Key from the Rogue’s Gallery first.” I pressed my palm against my glaive’s blade and drew blood. “Then I wouldn’t have to shed my blood to open this thing… Secret doors and their demand for sacrifice. What a cliché.”

I pressed my palm to the depression at the center of the wall, and sure enough, the whole wall slid back, revealing dark space beyond that was lit only by the softly glowing blue gems embedded in the rock.

“Freaking Hel… this adventure’s just begun”—my eyes zoned in on those blue stones that I’d only read about in Divah’s journal—“but I’ve already hit jackpot!”