Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Eight — Successful Insertion
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Eight — Successful Insertion Flying wyvernback was awesome!It was also, I realised after a few minutes, a bit of a literal pain in the behind. The saddles we had were designed more to prevent chafing against the tough scales on the wyvern’s neck than to provide a soft cushion.The wyverns, or at least Greencrest, shifted their neck up and down slightly with every big, sweeping wingbeat, which meant that we were constantly moving in our saddles. The multitude of straps made a lot more sense; they kept us in place even as we were forced to shift with the wyvern’s movements.Bastion leaned down ahead of me, head lower so that he was almost hugging Greencrest’s neck, with a rein in each hand. I saw him glance back quickly, as if to make sure I was still here. “Are you well?” he asked.“Yuppers!” I called back against the blowing wind.“If you need to warm yourself, use fire mana. Though be careful with it, you could burn yourself internally or externally with it.”“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m from Canada.”I think Bastion didn’t quite understand what that meant, but he just shrugged and refocused on flying.We were in the middle of the formation of three. Ahead of us, Winnow and Amaryllis were pushing ahead with Bloodfang, and Little Doug took up the rear with Melos and Awen. if I understood things correctly, at some point we’d switch around, a new wyvern acting as windbreak for the others.“Are we faster than if we were on an airship?” I asked.Bastion shook his head. “Not really. A fast airship is faster than the fastest wyvern. The advantage with wyverns tends to be their mobility and size, as well as their acceleration. The average wyvern can fly circles around even the most manoeuvrable airship, and they’re much smaller targets. They’re discreet too.”“Discreet?”Bastion gestured to his ear. “Not nearly as loud as an airship. The wyvern knights are excellent at hunting down air and sea pirates, especially at night. A wyvern with a handler and a mage riding it can deliver a pretty heavy blow to a ship from angles where an airship might not be able to defend itself.”That made sense, I supposed. “Hey, can wyverns fly on airships?”Bastion shrugged. “It’s happened before. The wyvern knights have a ship or two in their employ that are built to house and launch wyverns, though they take up a lot of space and tend to dislike roosting onboard a ship, at least that’s what I understood from the experiments.”“That’s still kind of neat,” I said. I shifted my bum again to try and find a comfortable position. “How long will it take to reach our destination?” I asked.“We’ll be arriving by late afternoon or early evening,” Bastion said. “It’ll depend on the winds and weather. Though, the skies are predicted to be calm-we have stations all around the nation that report back to the capital, and some talented individuals have skills that let them predict the weather.”That sounded very useful. “I guess we’re using wyverns because they’re sneakier, otherwise it would be better to use an airship, right?” I asked.“This mission is supposed to be quiet, yes,” he replied. “Having a whole crew in on it would spread the news around a lot more. And airships are noticeable. The Trenten Flats aren’t the most observant, but they’ll see a ship landing on their territory.”We continued to fly, and after a while I tucked my hands into the big fur coat I’d been given to keep my fingers warm. I was regretting not wearing thicker shoes, or maybe just some boots, too. My toes were freezing. My ear-tips weren’t any better, especially as they flapped in the passing wind.It wasn’t all that bad though, and the slow trip gave me some time and plenty of reasons to practice circulating mana. I turned some of my raw mana into fire mana, then with a bit of help from Way of the Mystic Bun, I pushed it towards my feet, then my hands and back again, as if I was going to launch an attack then pulled back.The warmth was nice, thawing out my toes and warming my shoes.At the same time, I took in the passing scenery. The mountains of Sylphfree were quite beautiful. Dozens of peaks, all jammed in together with deep valleys between them. There were plenty of plateaus where little fields were growing, and I noticed a few villages next to rivers near the lowlands. Just little spots with maybe a couple of dozen homes, some fields, and maybe a mill by the river.They weren’t on any of the maps of Sylphfree I’d seen, but maybe they were too small to be noteworthy.I let my imagination run wild for a bit, putting myself in the shoes of some normal farmer living in a peaceful little town like that, barely more than a hamlet where you’d grow up knowing everyone, and where you’d dream of maybe visiting the city one day.Then I shook my head and recalled that I was currently riding what was basically a small dragon. Anything my imagination could come up with was objectively less cool then what I was currently doing.The flight continued on through the afternoon. My tummy protested a bit after so long without a snack, but I didn’t complain. I was glad I didn’t drink much before leaving either, we couldn’t exactly make a pitstop along the way.The sun was right overhead as we finally escaped the grasp of the mountainous terrain around Sylphfree. The land below dipped down into rocky crags, then levelled off, with only the occasional bumpy hill below. The world of ice and grey rock was replaced by verdant fields and open plains with a few clumps of trees growing where they could find respite from the wind.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.“See that little mountain to the north?” Bastion asked. He pointed to our right.“I see it,” I said. It would have been an impressive little mountain anywhere else, but with the Sylphfree mountains as a backdrop it was kind of underwhelming.“That’s Mount Goldshire. Once we’re past that to the west we’ll be looking for a place to drop you off.”I nodded. “Okay!” I said, since he couldn’t see me. “Any tips for when we’re in the Trenten Flats?”Bastion didn’t reply for a bit, thinking. “I know you like trusting people, but be careful with the locals. They’re superstitious, and they don’t trust strangers easily.”I’d have to win them over the hard way, then. I could work with a bit of a challenge, I was sure. “And what about our mission?”“Get to the fort, ask around,” Bastion said. “Then leave before you wear out your welcome. If it comes to it, you can likely divulge that you’ve come from Goldenalden. We don’t have excellent political or diplomatic ties with the Trenten Flats, but at worst, you will only be temporarily imprisoned.”“That makes it sound a lot more dangerous than I expected,” I admit. I was hoping for a fun time, not something overly dangerous. I knew there were risks, of course, but still.“You’ll be in a foreign land. Keep your guard up. And while you’re there, you might want to consider practising your magic and combat where you can. It’s a little late to hone those kinds of skills, but some added proficiency is better than none.”“Is the wildlife around here dangerous?” I asked.“Somewhat. Lots of large, predatory cats. Some very territorial land beasts, and a few nasty local creatures. There’s a kind of snake common to the region, and slimes are abundant during the right time of the year too. Stick to the roads if you want to avoid them, though that will mean that you’ll encounter more guard patrols than otherwise.”“Okay. We’ll do our best to stay safe. Or at least safe-ish.”Bastion glanced back. “You’re an honest girl, so I’ll take your word for it.”Our flight continued, though only for another half hour or so. Eventually, we started to circle over a particularly hilly bit of terrain. The wyverns shifted, then on Winnow’s command, we stooped downwards.I heard Amaryllis and Awen screaming, so I joined in too, arms loose above me as if I was on a big rollercoaster. The dive levelled off soon enough, then we skimmed over the top of a hill and the wyverns flared out their wings to arrest our momentum.With big meaty thumps, our rides landed at a run with their taloned feet racing below. Finally, we came to a full stop near the bottom of a valley nestled between a few hills.“Alright, let’s unbuckle you,” Bastion said.I helped him undo the clasps holding me in place, then once I was free, I leapt off of Greencrest’s back and landed with bent knees next to the wyvern. “Thanks for the ride,” I told her as I gave the underside of her chin a proper scritching.The wyvern huffed contentedly at my face and I had to wipe off some drool with a bit of cleaning magic.My friends were dropped off too, and we started to collect our equipment. Mostly those were backpacks with plenty of survival stuff and of course our various weapons and other things. I slipped out of my harness, then handed that back to Bastion who stuffed it into one of Greencrest’s saddlebags.“This is the last we’ll see of each other for a couple of days, I think,” Bastion said. “If I don’t hear back from you for more than that, then I’ll start looking for any major signs of trouble. Burnt down villages, destroyed dungeons, that sort of thing.”“I’ll be sure to leave a super-obvious trail if we’re in trouble,” I said.“That is less reassuring than you probably thought it was,” Bastion said.I grinned up at him. “I’m kidding,” I said. With a little hop to reach him up in the saddle, I gave my sylph friend a quick good-bye hug. “Stay safe too, okay Bastion?”“Always,” he said.“And watch over Caprica while we’re off. I bet she gets lonely.”“I’ll see what I can do,” he replied.And with that, I rejoined my friends. Amaryllis was fixing her feathers back into place-the long flight had mussed them up-and Awen was swapping out her loaner fur coat for her regular blue trenchcoat.“Are the both of you ready?” Amaryllis asked.“I think so. Where are we heading to?”Awen pulled out a small compass, then tugged a folded up map from her pack. “Awa, I think we’re about... here. Which means that if we’re going to Fort Middlesfaire, we need to go west and a little bit south.”Amaryllis glanced at the map, then the compass, then she stood taller and looked westward. “I noticed a river that way while we were in the air. It’s quite a ways off. We’ll need to find a way to cross it, fortunately, it should thin out to the north.”“Then we go around?” I asked.“That would be a start,” she replied.The three of us paused as our friends took off without much said other than a few heavy wingbeats from the wyverns.“Okay,” I said as they became distant specks above. “Let’s get started?”“Yes. The sooner we move away from here, the better,” Amaryllis said. “Someone might try to investigate the area if they saw the wyverns coming down.”“And we need to find a place for a camp, soon,” I pointed out.“So soon?”“Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m real hungry, and we flew right past lunch time, literally!”
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Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Nine — Campground Ladies
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Nine — Campground Ladies We didn’t end up setting camp so much as we just found a comfy-enough spot to rest and rummage through our packs for food. We had a bunch of Sylph rations that came in enclosed packages made of something like wax-paper with a few simple instructions written on the side.The ready-to-eat meals were... edible.On opening one of them (vegetable lunch, it was called!) I found a couple of little tin boxes and a small pouch with some water in it. The instructions said to pour the water into one of the little boxes, then apply some fire-aspect mana to the circle on the side of the box.After doing what it said, I discovered that the box had little wires in it that conducted the heat through the package and warmed up its contents, producing a sort of stout soup with veggies and pasta.The meal was fun to prepare, and a lot less fun to eat.I think some of the metal might have rubbed up against the veggies because they tasted like tin.“Well, that was an experience,” Amaryllis said as she chucked the meal package aside.I shook my head at the casual littering and picked the tin up. In the end, we dug a little hole and shoved all of our waste into it. Amaryllis claimed that it was a good idea to mask our tracks a bit.With a glance at one of our provided maps, and with another look at Awen’s compass, we aligned ourselves westward and headed off again.We knew we weren’t going to make it too far, it was midafternoon already and Fort Middlesfaire was quite a ways to the west and around a little river, so we wouldn’t make it there today no matter how fast we walked.The hilly landscape levelled off after a while. That really just meant that there were fewer hills, but each hill was much broader, like a huge grassy plateau with drooping sides that were a bit of a pain to climb up.The grass reached up to mid-thigh, whipping against my legs with every step. It was actually kind of nice though. At some point we crossed through a huge patch of wildflowers, all of them white with pretty yellow dots in their centre. The air was filled with their perfume, and happy little bees bumbled past, fat with pollen.My friends and I chitchatted as we walked along; there wasn’t much else to do out in the open fields. All it took was a quick glance around to prove that we were all alone. Amaryllis went over the political implications of what had happened recently and tried to imagine what various factions would do now, Awen, when it was her turn, talked at length about her ideas. She was planning on building a wyvern-inspired flying machine one day, one fitted with a bunch of repeating crossbows and maybe some rocket-propulsion.With all of our talking, the day slipped by. We’d done enough long-range trekking that I think our legs were going to be fine, but to someone unused to it, the long walk might have been exhausting.By the time the sun was starting to set, we’d crossed a good chunk of the distance between our landing spot and Fort Middlesfaire.“That’s the river,” Amaryllis said with a wing over her head to shade her eyes.“Looks like there are some trees around it,” I said. “Should we camp near the bank?”“If we can find a high, flat spot to set up our tents, I don’t see why not. We’ll be able to gather some kindling at least,” Amaryllis said.We climbed up one last hill, then down the other side towards the riverbank. Being tucked between the hillsides provided the river with shelter from the wind, which meant that the trees growing around there had plenty of water and sun and not too much wind pushing against them.My friends and I found a spot where a few big flat stones stuck out of the hillside. Someone had used the place to camp before, because there was a fire pit dug into the rocks and an old lean-to made of branches had been left off to one side. It had fallen apart, and the leaves on the branches had blown away, but it was a clear sign that someone had passed here once.Our packs had little tents, but instead of erecting three of them, we decided to snuggle up into a single one. It would be warmer and the tents were all a mess of poles and ropes and pins that had even Awen confused and frustrated.While she set that up, Amaryllis and I scoured the area for fallen branches and twigs. Soon enough, we had a nice big pile of them. I used some cleaning magic to wash out the fire pit (after removing some charcoaled wood from the bottom) which uncovered a little tunnel dug into the bottom of the fire pit.“That’s to suck in air from below,” Amaryllis said. “Look, the other hole’s right here. I think a firepit like this will create less smoke too.”She might have been right. Once we got a fire started, it didn't create all that much smoke. I had fun plugging up the hole with my palm, then popping my hand off the entrance to see the fire shift.We ate more rations, fished out some blankets from our packs to keep our backs warm, and then stared at the starry sky above through the faint sheen of smoke rising from our fire.We drew straws to decide the watches — Awen was first, then poor Amaryllis in the unenviable middle watch, and myself for the last slot.I guess all that walking had tired me out more than I expected, because almost as soon as I snuggled in next to Amaryllis and closed my eyes, I fell into a deep slumber.I was awoken a few hours before the dawn by a grumpy Amaryllis shaking me awake. Sometime in the night, she had managed to swap places with Awen without disturbing me, and now I did the same, vacating my warm bedding for the cool of the night.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.Nothing much happened. I kept the fire company in the morning and got my tea stuff out as well as some rations that I cooked over the fire. A few curious birds gathered on some of the nearby trees to watch us prepare for our morning trek.“We’re going to have to go north along the river, I think,” Amaryllis said between bites. She had the map on her lap and was occasionally glancing at the river while a talon-tip traced a path.I looked through the sparse trees between us and the river. It was pretty wide, maybe as wide as a hockey rink was long, and the water was moving along at a steady clip. There’d be no jumping across that, and I didn’t trust that I could swim across easily, especially not with all of our gear.“Alright, let’s find a spot where we can cross, then. Maybe there’s some shallower parts downstream.”Amaryllis nodded. “The river will end eventually. But I think we should move upstream, not down, at least if we hope to ford it and not end up at a lake.”“Oh,” I said. That made sense.Once the tent was taken down and we’d packed everything away, we started off along the river’s edge.The morning walk was fun. I got to see a fox who scampered away when we got closer, and there were a bunch of long-legged heron-like birds with bright green plumage standing very still on the river bank, only moving their long necks when they spotted a fish darting below the water.We had to cross a few streams that joined into the river, most of them were small enough that we could just step over, but a few were wide enough that we needed to splash through or carefully walk across some logs that had been put in place by previous travellers.By early afternoon, after stopping for a break in the shade of a big willow-y tree for a snack, we were all quite sweaty and a little tired.I offered to use cleaning magic on my friends, but wiping away sweat was going to make it much harder to deal with the heat.I think that after spending a week or so in the cool weather around Goldenalden, we’d gotten so used to the cold that the moderate warmth of the Trenten Flats was really hard to deal with.“How far do we have to go, still?” I asked as I knelt next to the river and splashed some water against my face.“Not too far, I don’t think,” Amaryllis said. “Here, can you fill this?”She handed me her waterskin, and I dutifully filled it up with river water, then pushed some cleaning magic into it to clean out anything too icky. Fish pooped in that water, after all.Amaryllis’ predictions ended up proving true. An hour or so later, with the river thinning down until I could almost just jump across, we came upon a little village.There was a squat wall around it, only about as tall as I was, with maybe two dozen homes on either side of the river. A bridge crossed the water, and further into the town was a long building with a mill and big stacks of wood cut lengthwise next to it. A sawmill, maybe?The homes looked like pretty cottages, with wooden walls and thatched roofs with chimneys poking out here and there.“Do you think they’ll have an inn?” I asked.“Doubtful,” Amaryllis said. “It doesn’t look like all that many people live there. We’re on the frontier here, far from the centre of the Trenten Flats, this is hardly a metropolis.”“Ah, maybe they’ll have a general store, at least,” Awen said. “We could buy fresher food. Our rations are meant to be kept for a long time, but they’re not very tasty.”I nodded. “And I want to meet the locals too. Maybe they’ll know something about the ships we’re looking for?”Amaryllis shrugged. “If we can’t use their bridge, we’ll have to go all the way around. No harm in stopping by, I suppose.”Grinning, I bounced ahead of my friends, flaring out a bit of Cleaning magic to freshen up. I hardly wanted to meet new friends while stinky and dirty. We reached the edge of the town’s walls and found well-ploughed fields with irrigation ditches running all the way over to the river. There wasn’t much growing except for some tiny hand-high sprouts of... something set a few centimetres apart.Going around the fields, we made it to a big gate that was left wide open. The town’s roads looked like they were shaped like an H. There were two roads with houses on either side, then the bridge in the middle of the town joined the two halves together.When my friends and I walked in, we immediately became the centre of attention.Cervid paused on the street, with some of them, especially the younger ones, running off to hide in their homes. No one called out to us or said a friendly hello, instead they watched us as if we were twenty-foot-tall monsters bent on eating all of them.Undaunted, I pushed on through. It looked like there was a store on the other side of the bridge, one right next to a smithy and what might have been a church of some sort.“Hello!” I called out to one cervid. A well-built man with a hat made of woven grass. He was carrying a stack of baskets which he dropped when I addressed him.“Warm welcome,” Amaryllis muttered.“Maybe they’re shy?” I asked.“You!”I spun around at the voice. It came from an older cervid lady, one carrying a cane which she was using to point right at me. “Hello?” I tried.“You! Strangers!” She barked. “You’re the ones who kidnapped my son!”
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