Chapter 41: Chapter Twenty Four – The Journey North

“There’s a change on the breeze,” Sayuri called above the howling of the wind outside the cave where we’d taken shelter, sniffing the air around her, ears twitching cautiously. “A storm is coming.” I glanced at the snow falling heavily outside the cave entrance and sighed, shaking my head. She’d been saying weird things like that for nearly a week now and I’d grown accustomed to it. Carrisyn, however, had not and possibly never would.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Carrisyn demanded with a scowl. Sayuri grinned broadly and shrugged. “Shut the hell up.”

“Oki!” Sayuri replied brightly and went back to humming to herself.

We’d separated from the Elves nearly three weeks earlier and made our way on horses provided by Carrisyn to the small port town of Karenda where we’d secured passage up the river to Faywater. Using crude maps provided by some of the trappers in town we currently found ourselves several thousand meters up a mountain path traveling through the Thunder Peaks.

I huddled deeper into the smelly furs we’d purchased from the trappers and shivered, hunching back further against the cave wall. Before seeking harbor from the storm, the harsh winds had roared down from the mountain peaks high above us, threatening to dislodge us at any moment from what I had been told was some sort of mountain pass but looked more like a goat trail.

While my armor was uniquely suited to the fighting style my body was geared toward, it was also wholly useless against any sort of inclement weather. It reminded me, quite honestly, of some of the bikini armors females were forced to wear in many of the MMOs I’d played.

I’d once listened to several female members of my guild complain for nearly two hours one night about why they should be forced to wear slut armor whereas the men got real armor. I stared down at my exposed belly and thighs and shrugged. Sachi hadn’t been wrong, I supposed. Personally speaking, I hadn’t minded the slut armor, but I seemed to have few of the hang-ups some other people struggled with online.

But honestly, who had time to worry about inclement weather when there was advanced breast and butt physics? I shivered again and silently apologized to my poor, under-dressed character battling dragons on top of a snowy mountain in what amounted to nipple pasties and a piece of butt floss with a band aid covering her vagina. I had been wrong, I thought apologetically. I should have at least put a cloak on her.

I glanced around me at the rest of our party and marveled for the hundredth time how truly out of place we were. Sayuri sat naked on a smooth rock, still not showing the least bit of effects from the cold, humming while she licked her leg. I had no idea if there was some sort of magic at work keeping her warm or if it was biology or whether she simply kept forgetting she was actually naked and simply didn’t notice the cold, but I knew if I could lick myself the way she was, I certainly wouldn’t be focusing on my leg.

Sascha had finally convinced Lysabel to share a fur with her and the two sat huddled together, talking in low voices while Alarice sharpened her sword a short distance away casting venomous glances their way. The tall blue demon, Zelaeryn, still naked as well with her immense sword strapped to her back stood at the entrance of the cave, staring into the snow as if willing it to stop, muscled arms folded across her ample chest. I glanced over at Carrisyn who was alternating between reading silently from a dark leather notebook and poring over maps spread on the ground around her.

I stared at the damp, cold pile of twigs in the center of the cave floor, a symbol of my failure as a human and elf to learn how to start a fire from twigs and rocks and sighed again. My parents had tried to teach me but I’d not possessed either the interest or intelligence level necessary to learn so the only illumination in the cave came from the pale storm outside and several hovering globes of light Sascha had conjured from nothing.

Thinking back on my run-in with the half-naked Jaxxin as well as my recent marriage to Lyrei, almost romantic encounters with Carrisyn and occasional sexual harassment from Sascha I began to wonder whether I was the clueless main protagonist in a harem anime. Honestly, I had always hated that trope. How could the person be brain dead enough to not notice that every woman in the show, especially the rather stupid busty elf, kept throwing themselves at them? Was the concept so outrageous as to be below notice? I’d have thought I’d notice that sort of thing, but did I?

Was everyone near me throwing themselves at me? I vacillated wildly between thinking it had be the case and deciding it couldn’t be true. The fact I was still a virgin played some sort of role in deciding it couldn’t be true. Wouldn’t I have already had sex at least once by now if I was the focus of so many people’s affections? Wasn’t that part of the deal? If I was the protagonist in a harem anime, shouldn’t I be with a different girl every night rather than suffering through being endlessly clam jammed by, literally, everything around me?

Back in my own body in my own world I’d had a girlfriend once. We were perfectly compatible. She was attractive, intelligent, funny, and engaging and even though I wasn’t really any of those things to any real extent, she had chosen me. I was madly in love with her. At least for the week we were together. We had begun dating on a Thursday and by Wednesday of the following week she’d decided she was straight after all and had started dating some guy on the Kendo team. It was at that moment I found love could be a fickle thing, indeed.

My guildmates online had told me I was the antithesis of the rule that every girl was straight until they got wet and began to call me Sahara. They had joked that every girl was bi-sexual at least until they met me, and I dried them all up, so they became straight. I’d laughed at the joke because, well, it was funny, but it also made me think. What if I was? What if all these people in this world who seemed to throw themselves at me realized shortly after that they were probably straight, leaving both of us unsatisfied and me as the only one wet?

Speaking of wet, my level of sexual frustration at this point was becoming unbearable. I had plenty of material both on hand and in my mind to drain the lake which seemed to be building inside me and threatened to overflow at any given point in time but had no alone time with which to do tear apart the dam. I needed twenty minutes to myself. Badly. I glanced out the cave entrance at the driving snow and sighed, then shifted my gaze to Zelaeryn’s sculpted back, legs, and butt and sighed even deeper. The view was not helping my frustration.

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“We need to head out,” Carrisyn stated abruptly, climbing to her feet.

“But!” I protested staring at the driving snow then at her. “The weather sucks ass! It’s a blizzard! We’re going to fall into a ravine or get crushed in an avalanche or eaten by yeti or something!”

“You fought the empire’s premier assassin to a stand off and you’re worried about any of that?” Carrisyn shook her head in disappointment. “Besides, we need to be at the Temple of the Moon by tomorrow night or we’ll have to wait another month.”

“Well, what’s a Yeti or two?” I shrugged, climbing to my feet. While I enjoyed some of the people I’d met thus far, this world pretty much sucked as a whole and I had no intention of staying in this hellscape another month if I could help it. If given enough time I’m sure I’d come to despise it slightly less, but I really had no interest in finding out whether I would or not.

“How long will it take to get to this alleged tower?” I asked, the others reluctantly climbing to their feet. I’d heard about this stupid thing for what seemed like forever and wanted to get this whole thing over and done with.

“If we travel without stopping, about 14 hours or so,” Carrisyn bent down to collect her backpack.

“No time like the present!” I grabbed Carrisyn’s backpack and swung it over my shoulder. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Daylight’s wasting!” I insisted, fixing the rest of the party with a steely gaze. “Damn slackers.” I muttered, pushing a befuddled Sayuri out of the cave and onto the snow-swept pass outside.

The beauty of a party composition such as ours, I soon found out, was that with only two actual humans present, it was not a problem to travel without rest. Zelaeryn easily hefted Lysabel into her powerful arms when she needed to sleep while Carrisyn used some of her slowly recovering magics to keep herself going. Once we’d dipped below the tree line the storm subsided and we found ourselves on the rugged plains of the Eastern Frontier Wastes north of the Thunder Peaks by the time dawn broke on the land. By midday the dark stain of the wild forests the Elves had once called home had resolved into individual trees clearly visible. By late afternoon we found ourselves climbing a steep, winding and mostly destroyed road leading up a cliff face. We reached the top of the road and found ourselves standing before a ruined city wall, the steel and stone gate which had once breached the shattered walls lay twisted and broken on the stony.

“Here we are!” Carrisyn proclaimed, pointing at a looming, ruined spire stabbing out of the twisted stone wreckage of the city below like a broken, skeletal finger into the late afternoon sky.

“Here?” I stared at the tower, then at Carrisyn, then back to the tower incredulously. “This is the Tower of the Moon?”

“Majestic, isn’t it?” Carrisyn breathed in awe. I stared around at the tumbled walls which had once outlined homes and shops and citadels in the city with no small amount of distaste. Wind blew among the silent ruins, crying and howling as it blew through holes and cracks in the stone remains. Above it all, most of its roof in ruins, loomed the shattered but still standing remains of what had once been a mighty tower.

“If by majestic you mean ‘hunk of crap and threat to fall over at any time’ I wholeheartedly agree,” I nodded. There was no reason I could easily discern why the thing was even still standing at this point. Though the structure seemed mostly intact, it was plain it was shifting as the rock base it sat on slowly turned to dust. Holes had been blown in the sides of the tower and signs of flames licking from the gaping wounds stained the stones. It was, in short, a hazard in every sense of the word.

“You have to look at it as it had been before the end of the Elven Kingdom,” Carrisyn scowled at me, clearly displeased by my lack of reverence. “The magical gates were never breached. The Elven Sorceresses and Wizards sealed the Tower from Rhade’s invading army and chose instead to fight to the last in the courtyard against overwhelming odds, all of them dying in the process. This is at least half of your heritage!” Seemingly satisfied she’d suitably cowed me with tales of the towers’ defenders she strode forward, winter robes flowing in the wind behind her.

“Well,” I muttered, picking my way carefully after her through the ruined streets of the city, “it’s still a piece of shit in my book.”

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