🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
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Cavya and Heather peered at a magigraphic representation of the lay of land, their faces telling me it's not anywhere good. I sat beside Ahrian and Yaora—two people who initially wanted nothing to do with me—and did my best to keep my foot from tapping against the room's marble tiles. We've been here for quite some time and nothing of significance has happened yet.
After the brief meeting inside Raventhone, Cavya instructed everyone to move-out, to come to one of the outposts on the edge of the Northern Tower. "Best be near the place for the briefing," Cavya reasoned when he caught me giving him an incredulous look for his decision to not stay in Suprana for the night.
That way, we've spent the night on air, flying from the east back to the north. If we could have, from the start, traveled from the Central Empire towards the Northern territory to meet the scouting party there, we could have saved so much time.
But no. Heather, the over-eager dragonkin leader of the scouting party, seemed too keen to hold out on the details of the mission until she's sure the adventurers taking it were able to deal with it and score them some points.
It took me a few weeks to grasp the guild system in Solarlume. Adventurers and scouts were considered part of the joint army initiative of all territories to deal with the threat of the netherside. From what Valren told me, it's an unknown realm filled with thick shadows which could birth strange and deadly creatures. These creatures, ranging from miniature to gigantic to leviathan classes, would infest the towns. When the local soldiers and mages couldn't handle it anymore, they called the adventurers.
Sometimes, these creatures proliferate and take over a certain place entirely, usually cave systems, old ruins, or spots of untouched forests, and that's where the concept of dungeons came from. When a place was overrun by nether beasts—as Nazran insisted on calling them—it's the adventurers' job to cleanse the place and perform purification rituals to prevent future infestations.
"If you say they're starting from this point up to this point, then we're talking about at least twenty prinks," Cavya nodded to whatever Heather said. "That's a bit of a stretch."
Heather tapped a curved claw against her chin. A frown pulled down the corners of her lips. She could be serious about something, it seemed. "When we scouted it one and a half months ago, they were just up to this point," she circled her shorted finger over the magigraph. The spot she pointed at was at least a handbreadth from the point she initially marked. "The twenty prinks was just my prediction. I could be wrong, though."
Cavya rested his gloved paws on the table. "Thank you, Heather," he said. The dragonkin's uneven locks bobbed with the motion of acknowledgement on her way to take her seat. "Everybody, listen up."
All chatter around me ceased. Even the dog-headed langkoor, who I could vaguely remember as Trink, snapped to attention, a grim expression on his face. What was he discussing with the blue-haired spiria?
