The Wandering Inn_Volume 1, page 137
“Thanks, Toren. I guess you’re pretty useful after all, huh?”
She slapped him on the back as Toren contemplated his next move in the odd game of chess.
“Don’t think. Just go for it! I mean, think, and go for it. You can do it, okay?”
He rushed to Erin’s side, sword drawn as she screamed and cried out. She shouted a name in the night.
“Mom! Dad—!”
She wept and he stood guard over her until she stopped crying.
“Thank you, Toren.”
“Thanks, Toren.”
“Good job, Tor.”
Toren stood up. He shook. The voice still called to him from the south, full of power, echoing in the very fabric of his being. But it was a weak thing. Quiet. It couldn’t control him. Only Toren could control himself.
And right now he had his orders.
Go away. Just go away. But Toren remembered orders before that.
“I’m going to visit some friends. Don’t follow me into the city. Wait around the inn until I’m gone. Do something useful. I’ll be back before nightfall.”
He remembered every order Erin had ever given him. And she said that to him. Once. Long ago. But it still counted.
Do something productive. Do something useful. Toren remembered grabbing a fish out of the water and hacking it apart. Erin hadn’t been happy—but she’d said he did a good job in the end.
He wasn’t useful. He was worthless. He made the inn explode and that was bad. He couldn’t fight the adventurer with one eye and he couldn’t kill many things.
He needed to be more useful. He needed to be…stronger.
Yes, strong. Harder. Better. Faster. He wasn’t sure how he could make his bones stronger, but perhaps he could wear armor? That would make him slower, not faster, but better was more important.
He had to be better. Level up. But how? Fight things? He wasn’t allowed to kill Humans or Drakes or Gnolls or Goblins or Antinium or…a lot of things. What about Shield Spiders? What about Frost Faeries? What about the shadowy human that kept following Ryoka around?
Toren didn’t know. He had no idea. And that made Toren frustrated. For the first time in his life he felt genuinely irritated. He couldn’t think, and it made him angry.
Erin was the one with ideas. She had good orders. He had to go back, even if she would be angry.
She told him to go. But he should go back. He would go back. He would go back and Erin would give him orders. If she didn’t want him—well, then he’d think of something else. But he would go back.
Toren nodded. The blue flames in his eyes burned hotter, whiter. The dark sapphire color flared bright white-blue, and he turned with determination. He would be better.
The skeleton took two steps in the snow, walked right to avoid a tripping over a stone twice, and fell into the gaping hole as the snow collapsed around him.
Toren fell down, down, down! He bounced off of a rock, crashed into something hard, and then smashed into the ground so hard his bones scattered in every direction.
For a few minutes all was confusion. Toren reassembled himself as quickly as possible, trying to figure out what had happened. He’d—fallen? How? Why?
A hole. A break in the ceiling. Toren looked up. Yes, he could see something overhead. He’d fallen through a hole, some kind of chasm. Harsh stone crags shone in the faint light all the way down.
He was nearly four hundred feet underground, perhaps. But that wasn’t the interesting bit. The interesting bit came when Toren noticed the stone changed roughtly fifteen feet overhead. From broken, normal bedrock and stone, the walls became smooth and refined. He was in some kind of…ruins?
Yes, ruins. Toren recognized it as being the same sort of corridor as the ruins where he’d went with Erin to find Ceria and Olesm. But these were different corridors, a different place. Where was he?
A vast stone corridor stretched out in front of him. Dark stone under his feet—a long corridor with two exits at the end. Toren stared, and saw bright yellow light coming from the right side and darkness from the other. He turned around and saw only darkness behind him. Some kind of passageway? Leading where?
The corridor wasn’t dark. Something was lighting it up. Toren looked around and saw glowing…runes on the walls. Strange shapes and symbols that glowed in different colors. And that was only what his eyes told him. He could feel this place, feel the nature of it.
Magic, pure and unrefined, hummed through the air. Toren could sense movement around him. Magical hotspots of power burning his otherworldly senses, more undead like him, and movement, struggling figures, shapes slithering, running around him. This place, this underground structure was full of life.
The magical runes around him lit up as something moved down the corridor. Toren saw something humanoid walking towards him.
A giant armored warrior appeared in the corridor, a figure clad in massive plate mail that would be too large for even Relc. Toren saw the strange warrior was holding a greatsword in one hand.
As the armored figure drew closer, Toren suddenly realized something was wrong. The armor was pristine, oddly so for a place this far down, but that wasn’t what was strange. What was strange was that the armored warrior had no head.
Tucked beneath the suit of armor’s other hand was a helmet. It was glowing—something was casting light between the slits in the visor. And the armored head was looking straight at him.
Toren looked around for a sword, a weapon, anything, but there was nothing in the corridor. And the armor was locked onto his position.
The skeleton could run, but he didn’t know where he was. And he wasn’t sure what was happening. So he waited. The magical creation walked towards him, footsteps echoing hollowly down the corridor.
It stopped about ten feet away from Toren. The enchanted suit of armor raised its sword and orange-red light like the lights of hell spilled out from the open cavity at its neck. Toren heard a horrible roar of sound, the screeching of metal on metal, so loud and furious that it sounded like something living.
It advanced, placing the helmet on its head and holding the sword in a two-handed grip. Toren stared at the armor.
It would kill him. Grind his bones. Destroy him. He would die if he didn’t fight or run. He knew.
There was no Erin to tell him what to do. Toren was alone. Alone and without a weapon. But that was okay. He had orders. He had a purpose.
Slowly, Toren opened his jaws impossibly wide, stretching them so wide his skull tilted backwards. He reached up, and with one skeletal hand, reached up into the cavity where his brain would have been.
The suit of armor stopped as Toren pulled something crimson out of his skull. The skeleton pushed and pulled it in the inside of his skull, wedging a…gem into the inside of his skull, anchoring it behind his eye sockets.
Toren looked up. The enchanted gem he’d taken from Skinner glowed in his head. He couldn’t know it, but the blue flames in his eyes were mixing with the crimson light from the gem, turning the flames in his eyes a deep purple.
The enchanted armor hesitated as Toren began strolling down the corridor towards him. The skeleton had no weapons, no armor of any kind. It was just a skeleton, but there was something about it that made the magic automating the armor and sword readjust its stance.
Toren didn’t care. He looked back above, where faint light was shining down from on high. Too far to climb even if he could find a way to reach the ceiling. But this place had been built. By something, for some reason. Toren understood buildings. They usually had an entrance and an exit that didn’t involve a hole in the ground.
There was a way out. All he had to do was find it. And if there were things that wanted to kill him, that was fine. Toren clenched his fist as the armored warrior began to thunder down the hall towards him. He ran forwards, mouth open wide in a wordless shout.
He was going back.
2.11
It was all gone. All over.
The Wandering Inn was finished.
Erin stared at what had been inn and saw the writing on the wall. Actually, she didn’t.
Because there was no wall.
Nearly half of her inn had been blown outwards by the explosion. Walls, floorboards—even parts of the roof had been shredded by the explosive tree bark as it heated up from the fire.
For an added bonus, the bark had been flaming as it shot out of the fireplace. So the parts of the inn not hit by the shrapnel also caught on fire.
It was only because it was such a cold and windy day that the fire hadn’t eaten away the entire inn. As it was, Erin could see straight into the common room and parts of the upstairs from her position outside.
There was no repairing that. Erin wouldn’t even know where to start. [Basic Crafting] did not teach her how to repair the foundations. The spot where the fireplace had been—the center of the blast—was a crater, and Erin could see churned dirt where floorboards and the stone base should be.
The inn was gone. And Erin was homeless.
The feeling that hit Erin wasn’t exactly like despair. It was closer to numbness; a vague hurt feeling in her chest. Why? Why did it always have to be her?
She told Toren to go away, and for a while, she just sat in the snow trying to imagine what came next. What did come next? She had a little money, but not enough. She was an [Innkeeper] without an inn and no other useful skills besides chess.
She was lost.
Again.
That was the word that popped into Erin’s mind. Again. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. That thought created a spark, but Erin was so tired. She didn’t want to think of doing anything like picking up the broken timbers or finding actual firewood to replace the damaged wood.
She just wanted to sit here and stare at the remains of what had been her home.
“Wow. It’s totally gone, isn’t it?”
Erin heard Relc remark cheerfully as the Drake crested the hill. She’d beaten even him and Klbkch in her mad dash towards her inn. The Drake whistled as he looked around.
“What did this? I only saw the smoke and Tkrn said he could see the inn was broken from his spot on the walls. [Eagle Eyes]. Nice skill, right?”
“It blew up.”
“Yeah, I got that p—ow!”
Erin heard a thump and the sounds of a Drake hopping around on one foot in the snow. Then Klbkch was squatting next to her. The Antinium regarded Erin gravely.
“I am sorry this happened, Erin. Was this an attack or some kind of magic?”
“No. No. It was trees.”
“Trees?”
Relc stopped hopping and cursing and looked mildly alarmed. He grabbed his spear and turned.
“Aw, no. Don’t tell me it was one of those cursed trees. Or a Dryad? I hate Dryads.”
Erin almost smiled, but she couldn’t.
“No. It was an exploding tree. Toren must have cut it down and brought it here.”
“An exploding tree? What?”
Klbkch nodded slowly.
“Erin must be referring to the reports of the deadly forest southeast of here. You will recall it’s one of the areas we avoid on our patrols.”
“Oh yeah. The place where that scouting party disappeared? Yeah. Wow. So the trees explode?”
“The bark does.”
Erin could see it now. She remembered how those trees had reacted when she’d hit one with a rock. They’d nearly taken her eye out with an acorn fifty feet away. If that explosive power were compressed into a nice little room…
“Well, there goes dinner. I’m hungry. You want to go to the Tailless Thief instead? I’ll buy the first round.”
Klbkch turned and looked around at Relc. Erin didn’t see his face, but the Drake raised his hands defensively.
“Hey, I was joking! Sort of. I mean…”
He waved at Erin’s inn and lowered his voice, although both Erin and Klbkch could clearly hear him.
“What’s she going to do? I don’t think a hammer and a few nails are going to fix that, do you?”
Silently, Erin agreed with Relc. Her inn was busted. What could she do? It was exactly like before. She couldn’t do anything.
It was so unfair. Why did this happen to her? Why—
“Oh no! Erin!”
Erin heard the voice a second before Selys nearly tackled her to the ground. The female Drake threw her arms around Erin as Ceria and Olesm appeared on the hilltop as well, looking winded. Selys stared at Erin’s inn and then at Erin.
“Are you hurt? Oh no, your inn! What happened?”
Ceria and Olesm stared at the destruction in shock as Erin muttered a few words and Relc loudly related the events.
“And then that stupid skeleton she has—Tors or something—must have put it on the fire. The tree explodes, and there goes her inn. Boom!”
“I don’t believe it.”
Selys kept saying that as she hugged Erin. Ceria looked gaunt and tired as she shook her head. Only Olesm seemed determined to remain optimistic. The Drake peered at a splintered board and stared around.
“Can this be fixed?”
“What? Are you crazy?”
Relc laughed at him. He gestured to the wrecked face of the inn.
“There’s no way she’s going to get that patched up by herself. You’d need a team of carpenters and a small forest, and neither of those is cheap, even if it weren’t winter! It’s over. The inn’s toast. History. Total dest—”
Ceria turned and kicked Relc hard in the stomach. He didn’t budge, but he narrowed his eyes at her.
“That hurt.”
With her good hand, Ceria flicked a sliver of ice towards Relc’s nose. The Drake leaned back inhumanly fast, but the shard missed anyways.
“Shut up.”
“Hey, I’m just—”
Relc dodged another shard of ice, this one larger and aimed closer to his head. He retreated, muttering insults.
Erin didn’t listen or see Olesm and Klbkch talking, or hear Selys assuring her that she could stay at Selys’ apartment or with Krshia. She just thought.
It was always the same. Always. Not in the same way, but the feeling was the same. And it was a sad thing, but Erin was used to the sensation. She was used to things like this.
“I’ve done this before.”
Relc stared at Erin.
“You’ve blown up your inn before?”
“No. But this—”
Erin couldn’t describe it. It was so familiar. Why? It was a pattern in her life.
Something bad happens. Get sad. Nearly die. That’s how it went.
But there was another level to that. Why did it always have to be bad? It was unfair? So why did it have to happen that way?
Erin was an expert at having bad things happen to her. So why couldn’t she turn a bad thing into a good thing? Or at least a not-so-bad thing?
She stared at her inn. Okay, now how did the script go? She’d stare at her broken inn, cry a bit, maybe freeze to death as she nearly fixed it, and then—probably the Frost Fairies would decide to bury the entire thing with her inside.
That was how the story went. But could Erin change the story?
“Can it be fixed?”
“No! It’s hopeless! Let’s go back to the city! I’m freezing!”
Erin ignored Relc as Klbkch looked over at her. He walked over with Olesm and Erin stood up. Ceria and Selys joined the circle while Relc edged closer and received cold stares from almost everyone else.
Klbkch nodded at Erin’s inn.
“I have already contacted my Hive. Some Workers will be here shortly to assess the damage. It may be that this can be repaired.”
“And I’m sure the damage isn’t that bad. It’s only the…side of the inn. I know a few [Carpenters] in the city. They might be able to help!”
Olesm smiled unconvincingly at Erin. Selys nodded and adopted the same too-optimistic tone.
“Yeah! And you could probably get enough wood to rebuild the inn. From Krshia. She might uh, know someone with a lot of spare building wood. They’re rebuilding a lot of the damaged buildings so…it might be cheaper?”
Erin nearly smiled, and then she actually did. It was ridiculous and hopeless. But she was used to that, wasn’t she? Keep smiling, keep trying. She shivered, and suddenly realized it was freezing.
Ceria snapped her fingers and muttered a few words. Erin blinked as the air around her suddenly seemed to lose most of its bite. Selys blinked and stopped crossing her arms together.
“What was that?”
“[Lesser Resistance to Ice]. It’s a basic mage spell in my school. It won’t stop much of the chill, but it helps.”
It did. Erin smiled gratefully at Ceria and the half-Elf smiled crookedly back.
“What a fun surprise, huh? I’m really sorry about your inn, Erin. Let me know if I can help. I’m no good with movement and telekinetic spells, but even I can cast [Repair]. I can fix a few floorboards, at least.”
Olesm nodded.
“And I’ve got a hammer in my home!”
Erin smiled. Suddenly she was warmer, and not just on the outside. She had friends. Even in this cold winter, she had people who’d move mountains for her.
What else could she ask for?
“How about a well?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Klbkch had been silent as he stared at her inn. He looked up and turned to face Erin.
“I have contacted one of the Workers most skilled in constructions within my Hive. He will be on site shortly, but he informs me the inn can be rebuilt.”
“Really?”
Erin stared incredulously at Klbkch. He nodded calmly.
“Yes. But there are a few caveats. Firstly, the damage to the foundations is not inconsiderable. Although much of the building is still intact, the rest will need to be reconstructed and cannot be built from the fragments that remain. With a supply of wood however, another inn may be built, although it would be just as easy to build a new inn elsewhere.”
Everyone stared at him. Olesm opened his mouth.
“That’s not easy.”
