The Wandering Inn_Volume 1, page 197
I am in a magic world, but I still can’t do anything. I can’t learn any new spells, I reject the system of classes, I can’t kill or help my friends…
All these thoughts are because I’m tired right now. Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll feel better but right now I’m depressed and I know it. It makes nothing better. Because I can feel the same bad cycle in my head.
It’s the same as my childhood. It’s the rhythm I run to; the beat of my life.
Stay lonely. Fight with friends. Ignore my parents. Rebel. Cause trouble. Stay alone. Live in my head. Wish other people were dead.
Something like that.
And now, as I sit here next to a warm fire in a place of sanctuary with a hot belly full of food, I still despair. Because I can look up two inches and see the limit of my abilities floating next to my head.
One of the frost faeries waves at me and flicks a bit of snow at my face. It melts on my skin. I glance over at that shimmering creature of crystal and ice and magic and see wonder. And despair.
Here sits an unsurpassable wall. It’s ridiculous, but as I look at the faerie, I can’t imagine myself ever defeating one of these things. I punched one, once, and I nearly lost my hand to frostbite. Their bodies are ice, but their nature is magic. How could you even begin to destroy one? Maybe Teriarch could do it, but I am no Dragon.
They can freeze a Wyvern in seconds, conjure snow and ice, and they’re practically invisible and untouchable. That’s right. One of these little overgrown ice wasps is far, far stronger than Ryoka Griffin can ever be.
And now it speaks to me, in a voice that makes my earwax want to vibrate out of my ears.
“You should be grateful, oaf. Were it not for your Human friend we would have chased you out of this place and hounded you to the ends of this world.”
Funny thing about faeries; they never say hello or goodbye, or any of the pleasantries Humans use. They’re direct and to the point, another thing I admire about the bastards.
And they’re speaking to me, which is rare but not unusual. Sometimes they do that. When they’re bored of making my life a living nightmare. They float alongside my head and chatter to me, although when I say anything to them they refuse to answer.
But today’s different. My pride is exhausted, so I look over at the faeries.
“What did she do? Erin, I mean.”
The faerie narrows her eyes at me, as if she’s wondering if she should deign to respond. But then she raises her small chin, like a queen.
“She did what few mortals remember to do in any day and age. She honored us. She followed the traditions. But most wondrous of all: she made food fit for the fey.”
I stare at the faerie. Part of me, a large part, wants to ask how hard it is to slap together a bowl of milk and sugar. Another part wants to ask the faerie how many dead snails Erin had to gather to feed all of them. A third part just wants to slap the damn thing.
But all of those parts would just land me in trouble, or at least get me a face full of ice. So I look at the faerie and ask.
“How? A Skill?”
The faerie looks offended. It’s practically their default expression around me.
“A Skill? Pshaw! As if you could bottle knowledge and true magic so easily! Nay, what she did, she did herself and for that she is special.”
Special. Yes. I close my eyes briefly. Erin is special. Stupid and weird as well, but unique in her own way.
I look over. Mrsha is sitting next to me, staring up at the faeries. I wonder what she sees. The other Gnolls are twitching their ears every time I speak, but I don’t think they can hear the faeries speaking.
Part of me wants nothing to do with these faeries still, but they’re different from people like Persua. She’s a coward and a hateful fool, but the faeries at least are honest about their action and they’ve never tried to cripple me for life.
Plus, they’re magical. And I have to know as much as I can about magic. So I open my mouth, however reluctantly.
“I’ve heard of idio—people from my world going out to leave food and gifts for faeries. Do you visit them as well?”
The faerie looks insulted. She raises two fingers in my direction* and sniffs.
*Ah, the lovely V sign. Definitely means she’s from the U.K. or some country colonized by them. All bets are on U.K. though, given their accents.
“Us? Visit your pathetic kind and take your small gifts? We left your crumbling, dying world centuries ago. The earth dies, and death fills the air. We want nothing of it.”
And just like that she drops a bombshell in my lap. I’d suspected the faeries journey across worlds, but ours? We once had…?
And we lost them because of pollution. Holy fuck.
“You mean there were actually faeries on our world once?”
The faerie looks disappointed, and only now do I notice others are floating around nearby. Are they interested in this topic?
“Once. Do ye have no stories left that tell of us?”
They look almost…crestfallen. And I stare at them and remember.
“Excalibur. King Arthur. That story is the backbone of modern culture.”
But the faeries don’t look happy. One of them shakes their head.
“Is that all ye know? Naught of any other stories?”
Cautionary fables, stories about faeries spiriting away children…I don’t think that’s what they’re looking for. I hesitate and rack my brains. Think. Old myths…
“Are you…the Tuatha Dé Danann?”
“Tuatha! ‘Twould be as like to call us Fomoire, you fool, you!”
Great. Now they’re insulted. But again, the implications are staggering.
“So the Tuatha are real?”
Now it’s their turn to hesitate.
“Maybe not in your world, bratling. But each tale has a grain of truth. In another world, perhaps. But ye shall never live long enough to know the truth of it.”
“I remember the old stories. Did heroes like Cú Chulainn once walk our earth?”
The faeries pause, and then a look of infinite regret passes across their gaze. Just for a second.
“Not yours, mortal. Not yours. There is magic in the worlds, but yours has no heroes or legends that ever walked your earth. Nothing true or worthy. All ye have now is dust and old dreams.”
It shouldn’t hurt. It really shouldn’t. But I’d hoped—no. I should have known better. I lower my head, bitterly. It was just a dream of a kid after all.
“No gods, and no heroes. I guess superheroes were only a wish.”
A petty wish from a world too weak to save itself. I close my eyes and turn away. Is that our world? A place without magic or legends?
I stand. I’m done with faeries. I’m going to my tent to lie down. To think. Maybe—
“Wait, wait. What did she say?”
“Superhero? What’s that?”
I pause with my back to the faeries. But I can’t help it. I turn.
“You’ve never heard of superheroes? Superman? Batman?”
I feel silly speaking those names out loud in front of actual beings of myth and legend. But the faeries exchange glances and shake their heads.
“No.”
“Nay.”
“We have not heard of them. But if they are heroes, surely you know their story?”
I hesitate. But not Mrsha looks up me. And slowly, a thought passes into my head, so slowly I can’t believe it.
Of course. If the faeries left right after the dawn of pollution—the Industrial Revolution perhaps—they would never have heard of superheroes or—or anything since.
Well, what does it matter? It doesn’t. It’s just a story, and a stupid one at that. Modern-day legends meant to make money by selling comic books. But I still hesitate.
Once.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who jumped around with a red cape made from curtains she tore down. If I didn’t have the pictures I wouldn’t believe it. But it’s true. And if I have to admit it, I still went to see the movies.
Maybe it’s that which makes me turn and sit back down. And maybe it’s because they’re alike a bit, the faeries and I. We might be different in size, temperament…well, not temperament, but in our natures, mortal and fey, but we are alike in once sense.
We can’t let some stories die. We hope. And that’s what makes me speak.
“I do know a few stories. About heroes you’ve never heard of.”
“Hah! They’re probably not good stories anyways.”
But is it just me, or are all the faeries now floating around my head? They’re clustering so tightly that even the Gnolls can see something. And Mrsha is sitting, staring up at me, and I look over and see some other Gnoll children staring at me from a distance.
Well then. Maybe, just maybe…? But what story should I tell? They’re all silly, and culturally they make no sense. How would you even begin to explain half of the things they do?
But another part of me says that it doesn’t matter. They’re timeless stories. The details may change, but the heroes remain. And so I hesitate, and then look at the fire. Which one? Well, I could be feminist, but I never really liked her as much as the other two.
One dark, and one light. A duality. If there were only two heroes in the world I’d talk about to someone who’d never heard of them, it would be those two*.
*And maybe Spiderman. But honestly, I was never into Marvel as much.
And if I’m honest, I always did like him a bit more than Batman. So I look up, to the sky. The dark storm clouds are still there, but they’re clearing up a bit. And is that a bit of blue sky I see overhead?
Maybe not. But that’s the thing. It might be. So I take a deep breath and look at the faeries, Mrsha, and the sky.
And begin.
“Do you believe…a man can fly?”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Fools! Any mortal can fly with magic!”
“Anyone can fly for a few seconds if we push them off a cliff!”
“Shut up.”
They quiet down. And now I have an audience. I take a deep breath. My heart is beating fast for some reason. Why? It’s just a story.
But it’s a good one. It’s one I have to tell. It’s something I cling to, a legend I want to be true. And maybe, just maybe, there’s magic there.
“Once upon a time—no, a long way away, so far you’d never dream of it, there was a boy. And his world was dying. But his parents wanted him to live, so they sent him far, far away. Not by spell or any kind of magic you know. But by a ship. A wondrous ship, made of metal and glass. It carried the boy through the air, higher than mountains and further than the furthest sea, across worlds, through space. His parents sent him away that he might live, while their world died. And their world was called Krypton. But the boy would not know that for a long time. He travelled far, and came to our world—my world, where a young couple lived. They were two Humans, named Martha and Jonathan Kent, and they found the boy in his ship as he landed on their world. And they named him Clark …”
—-
Stories. They don’t mean much to people who don’t listen. But to some, they mean everything.
Perhaps if you live forever you wouldn’t care about the passing of mortal lives, the concerns of those who flicker in and out of existence like mayflies. But I think you’d still care about stories. You’d still care about fables even as history passed you by. Because unlike the fragile conceit of mortal empires, some tales are immortal.
And sometimes, people write new stories which become legend. Perhaps the tale of Superman, Batman and all the other heroes I grew up aren’t such stories. Perhaps.
But they’re damn close.
I’m no storyteller, and neither do I have a gift for words. Hell, my throat was hurting after the first five minutes. But I had an audience who hung on my every word, tiny mouths agape, and Mrsha and the Gnolls as well. They might not have gotten every nuance, but they understood heroes, and I think they were just as blown away by the idea of a superhero. Not someone with a [Class], but a truly supernatural person, someone who could lift a mountain over his head and had skin stronger than dragon scales and could outrun even the fastest arrow*.
*Look, I had to improvise a bit to explain. And Batman—well, it’s hard to explain a guy who hangs around in shadows and leaps from building to building to a non-brachiating species. I did my best.
Perhaps it was all meaningless, but that day I sat in front of a fire and told stories from my world. Not just for an hour, or even five, but the entire day. The fire in front of me waned, and then grew brighter as Gnolls threw wood on it. The camp bustled, but slowly, quietly, as Gnolls worked and listened.
First superheroes, but not just them. I realized something as I told the first story, and then Batman’s. These people, this world…they’ve never heard these tales. Never. And that’s a realization worth more money than—
I’ll dwell on it later. Some things are worth more than gold, and that’s the look on the Frost Faerie’s faces when I told them what they’d missed.
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
Blake, William, Auguries of Innocence. Print. Not sure about the date or anything – the 1800’s? But the faeries had never heard those words. They had actual tears in their eyes, and some of the Gnolls looked just as moved.
How many years? Two hundred? Three hundred? Something like that. To the fey, I suppose it seems like not any time at all since they left. But how much have Humans made since then? Maybe not much in terms of moral gains or evolution of our bodies, but vast strides in areas like literature.
They’d never heard Lord of the Rings either. Hah. The entire time they swooped around my head, shouting.
“They live, they live!”
“Rings! Forged in darkness to bind souls! Yes! How did the Human know?”
“The small folk! They remember them!”
“To Mordor! To Isengard! To the ends of the earth!”
“Ye shall not pass!”
“Shut up!”
It was the best of times and the worst of times. Actually, it was just the best of times. I told that story too, and you’d be surprised how emotional Gnolls get. They get pretty physically demonstrative too.
I could close my eyes and remember a thousand times where my audience gasped or cheered or reacted with wonder and awe to stories that I’d nearly forgotten. But one moment stood out to me, as I sat beneath a dark sky full of stars and retold a moment from the Lord of the Rings.
Trick memory. It was just one conversation in a three-hour long film in a quartet of movies, but I’ve always remembered it.
“And Gandalf paused, and spoke. He looked at Pippin with a smile, and said ‘End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.’ And Pippin said, ‘What? Gandalf? See what?’”
I look around. My audience is spellbound. I take a breath.
“‘White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.’”
As I finish speaking, I look up, about to finish the scene and describe the Rohirrim coming to Gondor’s aid. But I pause, and hesitate. I see a speck of something bright and pure and eternal fall to the ground and melt in the snow.
A tear.
The faerie floating in the air above me slowly drifts downwards, until she’s right in front of me. Eye-to-eye. She stares at me, and her voice is quiet.
“I was wrong, mortal. There are still things in your world worth seeing and hearing.”
Just that. I cleared my throat and kept speaking afterwards. But I sensed the change in the air after that, a lightening. A difference in the way their small eyes looked at me.
Maybe, just maybe, not all stories are just that. I kept telling stories into the night, until the fire was low and everyone was dozing. But I went to sleep smiling.
Some weeks, some months, some years are bad ones. But it can take just one day to turn it around.
One day, or a story. A bit of magic.
It may be all that we brought from our world, but—
It’s enough.
—-
It was a bright and clear day when Ryoka shook hands with the Chieftain of the Stone Spears tribe and bade farewell to the Gnolls gathered to see her. She looked nothing like the Human who had first limped into the camp site, injured and weary. She stood straight and tall, and her flesh was healed. And she had something in her, a spark in her eyes.
She smiled at Urksh and bowed her head slightly.
“I owe you a debt, Urksh of the Stone Spears Tribe. I will repay it someday.”
Urksh shook his head slightly as he offered Ryoka a refilled back full of provisions.
“There is no debt for the joy you have given us. If you wish to stay, you would be more than welcome, Ryoka Griffin.”
“Three days is more than enough. They’ll get bored and start causing trouble to you if I don’t go soon. I need to keep moving.”
Overhead, the Frost Faeries flew high in the sky, telling jokes, laughing, but for once, not bothering her. Urksh glanced up and shook his head.
“You do not know where you are going?”
“Sort of.”
Ryoka hesitated, and then showed him the stone with the arrow.
“I think it’s taking me to a [Necromancer] of some kind.”
He looked troubled.
“We know of one Necromancer, but he is dead. And even a lesser one would be terrible indeed. Going by only a stone is dangerous, yes?”
