Corvis Eralith
The desert did not surrender gracefully.
Over two long days, it fought a rearguard action, its sands slowly yielding to grit, then to scattered, sun-bleached stones that clattered under the Darvish Highcolts' hooves.
Then, the stones gathered themselves into hills—barren, rocky sentinels that rose like the bones of the world pushing through a thinning skin of dust.
And then, the hills swelled, multiplied, and erupted into the vast, silent sovereignty of the Grand Mountains.
The transition felt monumental, like crossing into a different age of the earth. The oppressive, flat heat of the desert was broken by sharp, clean winds that swept down from snow-dusted peaks so high they seemed to scrape the bellies of the slow-moving clouds.
The air itself changed—thinner, colder, carrying the scent of pine from distant, hidden valleys and the ancient, flinty smell of abandoned mines. It was exhilarating and intimidating in equal measure. This was a land that had never bowed to plow or city wall.
"We are going to pass through a frontier, let's call it," Olfred's voice, roughened by the dry journey, pulled me from my awe. He gestured ahead to a narrow pass between two colossal slopes. "It is where Darv officially ends and the untamed wilderness of the Beast Glades starts."
He glanced at me, his expression unreadable beneath his travel-stained hood. "And remem—"
"I am Finn Warend, son of a lost member of Elder Rahdeas's family," I recited, the words now a worn mantra that had accompanied every step from Zestier.
I had to admit, the physical transformation was a work of art. The makeup Olfred had applied was more than a disguise; it was a second skin, a miracle of dwarven craft (or perhaps Lance-level precision).
It didn't itch or crack, even after days of sweat and grit and restless sleep. It felt as fresh as when he'd first layered it on, a cool, constant mask.
Looking at my reflection in our water-skins, I saw a stranger: a slightly too-thin dwarf boy with dusky, earth-toned skin and hair the color of shale, my pointed ears carefully rounded, the distinctive teal Eralith eyes muted to thanks to the contact lenses.
All my inheritance, all my royal markers, were gone. It was a profound and unsettling liberation. The prince was erased. Only the desperate purpose remained, cloaked in this new, anonymous flesh.
And something else had shifted, something deeper than the makeup. My perception of the man beside me had undergone a quiet quake. I was no longer just seeing Olfred Warend, the Lance of Darv, a figure of daunting power and potential betrayal from the pages of a tragic future.
Nor was I merely respecting him as a guardian or a guide.
Over the two nights in the desert's heart, something softer had emerged from his granite exterior, and I had begun, tentatively, to think of him as… a friend.
I didn't know why. Perhaps it was because I was a child in his care, a fundamental trigger for a protective instinct.
Or perhaps it was strict obedience to Rahdeas's orders. But the kindness felt too nuanced for mere duty.
The first night, with a gesture so casual it took my breath away, he had placed a palm on the desert floor. Earth mana, vast and serene, had flowed from him. The sand coalesced, solidified, and rose into a small, perfect domed shelter, complete with a wind-break entrance.
To him, a white-core mage, it was less than nothing—a flick of metaphysical will. To me, shivering as the desert cold replaced the day's furnace, it was a palace.
But the shelter was just competence. The kindness was in the fire he built next, and the clumsy, focused way he attempted to cook our rations.
Olfred was a terrible cook. He burned the hardtack, over-salted the dried venison until it was inedible, and muttered curses at the spitting flames. He wasted precious food in the attempt.
Yet, he didn't just hand me a strip of jerky. He tried. He tried to make something hot, something that wasn't just fuel, but a meal. In his concentrated frown, in the way he glanced at me to see if I was eating, I saw a dwarf who, in a life stripped of his immense responsibility, might have enjoyed the simple alchemy of a hearth.
And he saw me. Not Corvis Eralith, the prince he has been tasked to accompany by his father, but the boy plagued by silent terrors. My insomnia, the nightmares that were less dreams and more visceral rehearsals of a future cataclysm, hadn't magically vanished outside Zestier.
I would lie awake in the earth-shelter, listening to the wind, my mind a prison of looming shadows. Olfred never asked. He never offered false comfort or pat platitudes. He simply acknowledged it with a quiet, granting space.
In a life suffocated by the smothering, concerned love of my family—a love I cherished and felt eternally unworthy of—Olfred's respectful distance was a profound relief.
It was an acknowledgment that some wounds are private, and that silence can be a greater kindness than any word. It made me feel… seen.
This made the guilt twist deeper. I liked being Finn Warend. I liked the simplicity of this journey, the clear goal, the lack of courtly pretense, the gruff, undemanding companionship. I liked it too much.
It felt like a betrayal of Tessia's laughter, of Mom's lyre songs, of Grandpa's proud, worried eyes and Dad's love covered in stoicism. I was an ungrateful bastard, finding solace in a borrowed identity while my real one waited, draped in Fate and dread, for my return.
Eventually, the winding path brought us to a high valley, a suture between two mighty shoulders of the range. I gazed up at the peaks, wondering if they bore names.
Probably not, I reasoned. These were not the dwelling places of civilizations, but the timeless abodes of storms and mana beasts.
Built squarely in the pass was a structure that spoke of bureaucracy's cold reach even here: a customs post. It was a sturdy, fortified blockhouse of mortared stone, dwarf-made and enduring. Olfred slid off the steed, gesturing for me to stay mounted.
His posture shifted, becoming more rigid, more 'Damien Malaisson.'
"Damien Malaisson," he announced to the two dwarves who emerged, their faces etched with the deep lines of wind and watchfulness. "I am to enter the Beast Glades."
One guard spat to the side, his eyes appraising me with a mix of curiosity and pity. "Are ya bringin' the kid for an excursion?" His voice was like grinding stones. "I'd turn back where ya came from. The Adventurer's Guild is greedier than a rockworm these days. Taxes the very air ya breathe in their 'controlled zones.'"
"Those Sapin bastards with all their fancy mages, thinkin' they own the dirt 'cause they can toss a fireball!" the second dwarf bellowed, his disgust a tangible force. "It's a disgrace. Our mountains, their rules."
"I will be careful," Olfred said, his tone a flat wall that ended the discussion. He paid a small fee from a clinking purse, and with grudging nods, the dwarves waved us through.
We passed the blockhouse, and just like that, we were no longer in the Kingdom of Darv. The line was invisible, but the shift in atmosphere was immediate. We had stepped off the map of nations and into the raw, beating heart of Dicathen—the Beast Glades.
As we remounted and moved on, the path beginning a gradual descent eastward, I finally voiced the question. "Damien, what did they mean by the Adventurer's Guild?"
He glanced at me, a flicker of something like surprise in his eyes. "You don't know?" he asked, and for the first time, I heard a hint of what might have been grim amusement. "For all the stuff you are premature, politics isn't one of them, it seems."
He was right. My knowledge was a ghost of a future that might never be. The politics I understood were from nine years hence, of a Tri-Union forged in the white-hot furnace of invasion. I had no idea what petty, venal struggles defined this prelude era.
"I don't," I admitted.
"The Adventurer's Guild," Olfred said, the words leaving a bitter taste in his mouth, "is the most corrupt organization in Dicathen. They have a monopoly on the Beast Glades, sanctioned by Sapin's crown. They sell licenses, levy taxes on loot, and decide who lives or dies by who can pay their exorbitant fees. They make the Greysunders," he added with a venom that shocked me, "almost sufferable. Almost."
The corruption made a dark sense. In the novel's timeline, true multi-racial cooperation only came under the apocalyptic threat of Alacrya and that of its dictator-god.
Now, in this simmering peace, human greed could flourish unchecked, dressing its exploitation in the language of order and management.
"You dislike the Greysunders?" I asked, feigning the ignorance of a child who only knew of the dwarven royal house as a distant name.
"I hate the Greysunders," Olfred corrected, his voice dropping to a low, tectonic rumble. He offered no explanation, but the finality of it hung in the cold air like a vow. The personal history there was a locked chest, and I knew better than to pry.
"What should we expect?" I asked, shifting the subject away from his obvious turmoil.
"Elder Rahdeas has obtained a permit for the Red Gorge from House Wykes," Olfred stated, as if announcing we'd secured a ticket to a festival.
The statement sent a jolt through me. House Wykes. The name was a slug of cold lead in my stomach. Rahdeas had done the impossible, or perhaps the inevitable, dealing with the most notoriously avaricious and morally bankrupt house in Sapin and maybe even Dicathen.
In the other timeline, they were traitors, yes, but their evil was banal long before Agrona's whispers—greed, cruelty, a monstrous sense of entitlement.
Lucas Wykes was a brat, but without Arthur as his focal point of envy, he might remain just that. His father, Otis, and his brother, Bairon—the Lance of Sapin—were different.
Otis was a spider of corrupt politics. And Bairon… proud, rigid, arrogant and unforgiving Bairon Wykes. They were a nexus of power and a potential wall of absolute opposition. That Rahdeas had their permit meant he had paid a price, either in gold or in something more ambiguous.
"In a couple of hours, we will reach an outpost nearby the Red Gorge and other dungeons," Olfred continued, his eyes scanning the trail ahead. "There will only be humans inside. So, prepare yourself."
Humans. The word settled on me. Other than Magnus Redson—a man I'd "bullied" and blackmailed—I had never truly interacted with them.
They were the enemy in my Dad's stories, the grasping outsiders in elven lore, the complicated allies and tragic betrayers in my novel-born knowledge, at least from the elven perspective.
Soon, I would walk among them as Finn Warend, a dwarf boy.
"Understood," I repeated, the word a small, steady anchor. I looked east, toward the rising sun and the descending path, where the wilderness deepened and the outpost awaited.
—
The outpost Olfred spoke about was not a fortress or a grand lodge, but something profoundly familiar from the echoes of my old world: a rugged, timber-built mountain cabin, all heavy beams and thick-paned windows, stubbornly clinging to the rocky slope.
It looked like it had grown there, a fungus of civilization on the wild stone. Above the stout oak door, a worn sign creaked in the mountain wind, bearing an insignia I knew must belong to the Adventurer's Guild.
My eyes traced it—a slightly tilted cross, and in the four spaces between its arms, four small, carved symbols. One, positioned at the top, I recognized with a jolt: the crest of the Glayder Royal House of Sapin. Its presence here was a stark declaration of power, of ownership.
But the other three symbols were enigmas. The sight was frustrating, a tangible reminder of how much of this world's present reality was still a closed book to me, my knowledge a spotlight that only illuminated fragments of a future that might never be.
"Damien, do you know what those symbols represent?" I asked quietly, hoping his years of movement in these shadowed spaces had granted him this mundane intelligence.
"No," Olfred stated, his voice devoid of any curiosity as he dismounted the Darvish Highcolt with a solid thud. He turned and lifted me down with the same effortless, impersonal care one might show a piece of delicate baggage. "And honestly, I don't care."
My hunger to understand, to map the unseen forces, would have to gnaw at me in silence for another day. Olfred's world was one of actionable intelligence, of permits and power levels, not heraldic subtleties. He retrieved a heavy pouch that chimed with the cold music of silver coins and strode toward the cabin door.
I followed, a small shadow in his wake, feeling the immense, unfamiliar weight of the dwarvish disguise with every step.
Inside, the space conformed almost archetypally to the fantasy taverns of my old world's stories, transplanted to this high, wild place. A great stone fireplace dominated one wall, though only a low, sullen fire burned within, fighting the pervasive mountain chill.
Rough-hewn tables and benches were occupied by men and women whose faces were etched by weather and wary experience. The air was thick with the smells of woodsmoke, stale ale, cured leather, and the faint, metallic tang of recently-oiled weaponry.
And every single patron was human.
As we entered, the low murmur of conversation didn't die so much as it congealed into a thick, watchful silence. All eyes turned toward us. I felt the weight of those collective stares like a physical pressure.
Here, we were the outsiders, the 'other.' Olfred, in his natural dwarven stature, and I, in my carefully crafted false skin, were interlopers in a human domain.
My mana senses, sharpened by constant anxiety, prickled. I could feel the latent energy in the room—a low thrum of mana cores ranging from solid reds to the lower, simmering tiers of the yellow stage.
To Olfred, a white-core Lance, they were insects. To me, with my own red core feeling pitifully small and bright in my chest, each one was a potential giant, a Forest Giant of hostile intent. The familiar, protective majesty of the Elshire was replaced here by the closed, judging faces of strangers.
Don't let prejudice cloud your mind, Corvis! I screamed internally, a mantra against the rising tide of instinctual fear. You were human once. You are, in your soul, one of them. But the logic felt frail. That past life was ash and echo.
Here and now, my blood was elven, my heart beat with the rhythms of the Elshire, and my face was a dwarven mask. I was a triple stranger, even to myself.
Olfred moved through the silence as if it were empty air, his bearing one of utter, unshakeable indifference. He was a mountain passing through a field of reeds.
I, however, felt every glance like a pinprick. A reckless, terrified thought burst in my mind:
What madness possessed you? A four-year-old in the Beast Glades? Not even Arthur did this! Who do you think you are? The answer came immediately, cold and hard, dousing the panic: I am no Arthur. That is precisely why I cannot afford to wait.
Then I heard it—a low chuckle from a table to our left, followed by a muttered phrase laced with the word "stone-grubber." Another joined in, a joke about dwarves and the dark.
The racism was casual, unguarded, meant to be heard. My eyes flicked to Olfred, my mind instantly conjuring the novel's memory of another arrogant mage, Sebastian, and his horrific, petrified Fate.
But Olfred showed no reaction. Not a clenched fist, not a twitch in his jaw. His calm was more terrifying than any outburst; it was the absolute certainty of a man who knew he could erase every soul in the room without breathing hard, and thus saw no need to acknowledge the buzzing.
He led us to a secluded table in the far corner, nestled in shadow. And there, my breath hitched. Seated around it, deep in discussion over a spread map was a group I knew instantly.
The Twin Horns. Arthur Leywin's parents' party. A wave of profound, disorienting vertigo washed over me. Their existence was a comfort and a curse—proof that some threads of the tapestry remained, but their presence here, now, was a deviation.
What were they doing at this remote outpost? The question echoed in my mind, a new mystery layered upon all the others, as I took my seat, feeling more like a ghost watching the living than ever before.