Then I got the following message. Due to your growth in power, a challenge has been spawned.
I didn't think much of it at the time.
A week later, I found myself facing that situation from a different angle.
"Daughter, did you hear?" Mother asked me. Mother had long since accustomed herself to her daughter being more astute than she looked, though she didn't speak of this to anyone else, nor did anyone else know
"No, Mama. What news do you have for me this day?" It was just her and I at the eating room. We didn't exactly eat at a table in our customs—we ate on cushions, laying around in a room within the house with several rooms between us and the kitchen, where the slaves ate their meals standing.
"I spoke to the merchants today. They were selling the prettiest necklaces and torcs of electrum." She spoke as we partook in our bread dipped in oil and aged fruits.
"Which merchants are these?" I inquired. "Those from the south? They were due to return, yes?"
Mother shook her head sadly. "Yes, those poor Ionians. They have been punished worst of all by the King of Kings. Even their works are less, and their people less. They would take a pittance for their wares where a season ago, they had not stopped bargaining until the sun had come down from the skies."
"What did they say?" I asked.
"They spoke of a giant spider, a horrible monster, in the countryside, with the size of a lion and eating whole caravans like normal spiders eating flies." Mother peered at me, gauging my reaction. Then she kept talking, as a mother would to her daughter in this warlike era. "It has teeth sharper than knives and limbs armored in chitin stronger than bronze. Many have died, dragged back into its webbed lair."
I paused and frowned. That sounded like a job for someone else. I went back to my meal. "Sounds like a job for a prospective Hercules. A Nemean Lion for a brave warrior."
"Perhaps so," she sighed and turned away.
What did she expect? For me to display magic and go hunt it down? Fuck that! I was just a five year old child, anyway. It wasn't even in my town anyway. I ate my bread, drank my milk and learned to sow. I wasn't going to go hunt giant horse-eating spiders.
This was totally not my problem, yep.
Rebirth 1.2
*
Alright, I fucked up.
It wasn't that I fucked up my ability scores such that my god-awful wisdom, strength, and dexterity were going to cause the death of me some day. That was already evident to me after some introspection.
No, it was that damned tunnel vision. When I got the idea to make my spells, I didn't think about any other goals. I didn't even have a bad feeling about it. I would have failed if I was in Star Wars. Feats didn't help me in learning available spells or making new spells off of the spell models available, so I just ignored them.
I never noticed how bad I had fucked this up until I was already on the cusp of level two. The Bastard had chosen for me. He did it. He did it. He did it. Such a lack of efficiency that I threw the first tantrum of my life and scared everyone in the house.
He chose my level one feats for me. Level one classes started with one feat, and as a human variant, I gained another feat. I had wanted something specialized—something for the goal of removing versatility so that I could better preserve my life. That wasn't wrong, was it?
Instead, the first feat chosen for me was Fast Learner (Human). A racial feat. Instead of having to choose between one of three choices whenever I leveled up, I chose between gaining +1 hit point and +1 skill point or the class reward. The silver lining was that this wasn't exactly terrible—one skill point into linguistics meant spoken and written proficiency in a language, even if I didn't get all the cultural connotations. This meant, from a certain point of view, that a single skill point could be worth a potential two to four years of study.
But the first feat was nice to me. It wasn't so terribly redundant, nor was it very much a mockery of who I was. The second feat was less so. It was the Additional Traits feat, which yielded two extra traits… which were, of course, already chosen for me.
One was Reincarnated. The trait itself gave a minor bonus to saving throws against fear and death effects. Wow. I could hear the Bastard laughing at me in my ears right now, even if I knew it would never let me hear it.
You lived a life as someone—or something—else. For you, life and death are a cycle, and you have no fear of death.
What a load of shit this flavor text was.
Of course, then it got worse.
Disillusioned. Your childhood was ended by a great disaster or atrocity that you witnessed. To cope with the horror, you have learned to reflexively suppress all emotion. It came with a slight bonus to saves against emotion and fear effects.
Oh, how lovely. I knew what it was saying about me. Bastard.
If that was it, fine.
But it wasn't.
It had also chosen my arcane school for me; rather than picking something useful that I was already considering like, I didn't know, conjuration or divination to solve some of my middle to long term problems of living in this era, I got something else instead. It wasn't even one of the class arcane schools!
It picked the elemental arcane school of Ice for me. I felt as if it had just taken a dice and rolled off to give me a random school rather than just remind me I hadn't assed to bother with this shit. Now, I was reminded that I suddenly had an affinity with water and air—the associated schools of ice—and I couldn't touch fire and earth with a ten-foot dick. Not that I could; I was still years off away from actually making use of any of this…
… however, with my elemental arcane school chosen, instead of gaining something useful, I just gained the ability to toss little shards of glass-like ice at people's eyes. Sure there were other things later on… but that was later on. Years and years later on.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It wasn't all bad, I told myself.
I had found that by aiding mother in cooking in these last two years, I had gained a single skill point in cooking, a wisdom-based profession skill. Similarly, having already spent some time sowing coarse threads together into cloth and weaving dried grass into wicker goods. That was a point in the tailor profession skill. I could gain skills by learning them manually, rather than be forced to use my precious skill points.
It was a comforting thought. But at the same time, I wondered if it just left me room to breath because it was more fun torturing someone who had something to lose. Certainly, with something to lose, I couldn't cross as many lines and I couldn't just forsake and abandon all of this.
After all, despite my complaints, I was just being a spoiled five year old princess of the house. I wouldn't want to go back to death, nor did I think going back to mundane life could fulfill me after all of this.
… a raven landed on the wooden, woven window. This was an era were glass was more expensive than gold.
Ah, I knew who that was.
My familiar.
Picked for me.
Caw. She answered sarcastically.
Yes, I could see this becoming a wonderful relationship, I thought too.
The raven, whom I should named Nevermore, turned her little feathered butt and hopped into the room and perched herself atop the only table within, which held a bronze mirror and most of my tools. Caw.
I eyed it. It was so smug.
Caw.
As I was leveling from level one to two, I was gaining new spells and new skills. I wasn't about to dump every point in spellcraft and knowledge (arcana) like I had; that was awful.
Instead, I first slapped a point into the language I was thinking in, yet never got to even know the name of. And certainly, I didn't know how to write in whatever I was thinking and speaking in.
Linguistics was helpful. With a single skill point, I learned the utterly useless and dead language of Phrygian, which would have been an utter waste if I had been alive in the twenty-first century. With it, however, also came with a basic understanding of Ancient Greek—they were cousins in terms of language, and close enough yet.
This cemented my thoughts on diversifying my skills. In truth, even if I sought to learn everything myself and save up my skill points, there was just too much I needed to know now.
A point in local knowledge and geographical knowledge, boasted by my greater mind, told me I was living in a village on a hill by the Hellespont. This was the site of the mythological city of Troy… yet I had missed the myth by a thousand year or more.
Points in appraise and the knowledge of nature told me what I needed to more than survive, if I wished to actually leave the town and hunt down the giant spider. Let me think… nope, let the Persians take care of it. They want to rule this place, it's their problem now.
I put another point into spellcraft and another into arcana knowledge, but I dumped the rest into engineering knowledge. All that taught me was how to build walls and bridges, but I reasoned with myself that if my engineering skill was high enough, then maybe I could become Iron Man or something. I was about uncomfortably close to his starting situation; it was no cave in Syria, but I was without a box of scraps.
And that was around the point where I lost any idea of what to do. Even with all of the information arrayed before me in my head, I had zero experience with this, and with my abysmal wisdom score what it was, I couldn't even bring myself to figure out what to do.
I picked Obscuring Mist, Shield, and Mage Armor for my spells of this level.
Obscuring Mist was just one of the spells in the list of spells that came with the elemental arcane school of ice, so I thought I might as well use it. If nothing else, a giant spider's cave wouldn't have anything that could blow away a mist.
Shield was rather self explanatory—it was an invisible shield the size of a targe shield, round and large enough to cover basically all of me. Well, you could still see a vague out line of it, but it was almost completely unseen. One of the first things I wanted to do was modify it so that the shield was a hexagon so I could call it my Absolute Terror Field. That was the silly anime degenerate in me speaking, of course.
Mage Armor was a great spell, all things considered. I already had Jolt and Freezing Shards for offensive capabilities. It was an invisible but tangible force field around my body that moved unhindered with similar defensive capabilities as chain mail, if it weighed nothing and covered my whole body.
Really, my options were limited because I only enough slots to cast one of each of these spells one time. It wasn't like a crafting spell or my hypnosis spell were going to kill a hive of giant spiders.
Den? Swarm? I wasn't even sure what to call them.
I just didn't want to be near them.
The strategy, as it were, was simple. If I met a foe, I'd conjure up a mist, where in I'd throw shards of ice at them like it was fistfuls of shattered glass. Well, the spell itself was more like a nova in that it expanded out in a radius of a few feet from me, but that just meant I was attacking in every direction.
Running out of my most devastating magic, I would be left with just Jolt. It wasn't that awful—an average of two damage in a world were having 10 or 15 hit points already made people the top five percentile. Without the mist, I could still throw around magic for a minute more under the protection of Mage Armor, but after that, I was going to just throw on a Shield spell and run away. That was the plan… if I was being attacked at home.
But going out and killing giant spiders? I wasn't that stupid. I planned to let other people—adventurers of Phrygia or soldiers of Achaemenid Persia—do that heavy lifting. They weren't going to clear it out the first time. I could just jump in after the spider den was pinpointed and we knew how many there were exactly.
Yes, I sighed and rested back. Life was good.
*
Life was shit.
Apparently becoming level two meant I couldn't gain experience from minor mischief anymore. Furthermore, due to my minor mischief for the last few years, someone started a rumor that I was bad luck!
Who was it? I'll get back at them eventually!
As if that wasn't enough, Uncle Leomedon had started his power play. It was small, really, and he seemed innocent enough… if father was still home. Instead, every day Uncle Leomedon visited our house, barging in knowing that no one could stop him.
"Penelope, I know you are trying to play the part of a loyal wife. This is loyalty, to find her a good husband!" He roared so loudly that everyone thought it was his house. He certainly treated our slaves as if they were already his.
"Leo, you should know this is too early." Mother spoke gently, because she knew she had not the strength to struggle against him, nor did she have the political might. "Aisa is only six years of age. Even in the decrepit land of Athens that you wish to send her, the girls do not seek marriage until they are at least twelve years old."
"Only so they can better look like prepubescent boys. Penelope, you know how the Athenians are. They like their new wives young, so that they cannot attempt to protest when the men take concubines." Uncle huffed and started pacing around the room. "I am not saying that the fate is perfect, but you could find your son with local help. It has been, what, eight years since he had left?"
And with that, my uncle knew he had touched on a nerve that my mother could never let go. One of my older brothers served as a "noble slave" within the Persian empire—a hostage. Another had died in the Ionian Revolt years ago. The last was across the sea and fighting for money. Mother turned to face away from him, knowing her face showed weakness. "She is still too young, Leo."
"Argh!" My uncle threw his hands up into the air and screamed in frustration. "How much must you coddle the girl? It isn't like she can help our family! All she is good for is to sell for an alliance, paid for with a heavy dowry. You know this to be true. It was how you entered this house after all, Penelope."
"You make awful conversation." Mother leaped from her seat, and immediately regretted it.
For all that he was scrawny, my uncle was taller than mother by more than a head. "So?"
"I ask you," she answered with a hiss. "Leave this house."
"I will return tomorrow," Uncle smiled, knowing he had touched that weakness in mother's heart. He had her, and he would enjoy watching mother suffer… to have to choose between two of her own children. To have to sacrifice one for the life of the other.
As my uncle left and silence returned to the house, mother slumped back into her seat and rested her elbows on the table. This was highly unusual as we didn't have body-sized desks, we just had tables that acted as stands for jars and they usually sat between two seats. Mother had nearly sank into the cushions when she noticed I had been watching this whole time in utter silence from a different doorway. "Oh. Aisa. Did you…?"
"I heard everything." I answered the question she couldn't finish.
"Oh." Mother's weary eyes closed. "I'm so exhausted."
"Where is father?" I asked.
Mother didn't even bother looking at me. She just leaned back and readjusted herself so that she was comfortable enough to just fall asleep right there. "Your father… to protect us and the village… has gone to become a minor official in the Persia court. He cannot rise far, as he is no Persia, but the trickle of Persian bribes have dried up in our Troad."
"How is that good?" I wondered. "If there are no new wealth, then they who received it before will become most upset. They might even blame father for saving us from Persian meddling, as it came with Persian coin."
"Another reason your dearest uncle Leomedon holds over me." Mother grumbled so uncharacteristically. "I… I shall go cast a prayer and entertain the mysteries of the mountain. Will you join me, Aisa."
Mysteries were what the people of Greece called magical rituals. Except they weren't arcane in any way, and mostly were there as hidden traditions.
And prayers were little different from… magic rituals. Everything was too similar.
Alas, I was bored out of my mind.
"I do not have anything else to do." I jumped off my little wooden stool and walked up to mother. "How long will this service take, Mama? I hope it'll be over before I fall asleep."
Mother chortled and reached over to pat my head. Her strokes were long and soft, but soon she stopped and laid her much larger hands upon mine. "I do think it will take the whole day. We must give the Mountain Mother her due."
The worship of the Cybele, a goddess of fertility, rested there. With that single point of knowledge, many words spoken to me in this entire life gained more perspective. From Cybele came the Sibyl of our lands—a priestess who gave prophecy. It was said that she held the bloodline of Cassandra, but that much was doubtful. What was true was that many in Ionia made pilgrimage to her in worship of Apollo, while we saw her as oracle of all our gods.
I didn't have any opinion on that—I didn't care for religion one way or the other, other than knowing that the divinity they espoused only existed in dreams and stories.
Instead, there were other things to talk of. "So, my uncle, Mama…"
"… yes, I suppose I should explain it to you." She held my hand so tightly it began to hurt. Then she let go and sagged further. "There is no simplicity. Your uncle just wants what's best for all of us…"
"That's a load of donkey poop, Mama." I shook my head.
"It's true." She smiled sadly. "Though, he places more weight on his son. Agelaus is already fourteen, and needs to be sent to schooling. If not to learn from Persians and become a hostage in his own right, then he must go to Athens or Thebes. Your uncle wishes that you go with his son, so that you could protect each other… well, perhaps more that your husband, whoever he may be, protects Agelaus, and Agelaus protects you."
"But then who will protect you, Mama, from uncle?" I asked.
She nodded. "That is… a question, yes."
It didn't take me long to figure it out. The way she rubbed herself, the way she looked… Mother had laid with father in this month a few times, though as their child, I tried to block that out as much as possible. "You are hoping for a son, Mama? Well, I wouldn't mind a little brother."
"I can hide nothing from you, can I?" She smiled again, but the wrinkles on her face—from the sun, from the toiling… people aged faster in this era than in modernity—they, those wrinkles, creased. "I can only hope and pray to the Mountain Mother."
Ah, so that was why she started paying greater respect to the goddess of fertility. "I suppose I shall go to the mysteries too then, Mama. For your sake, not anything else. Certainly not for uncle's!"
Mother rolled her eyes. Despite disliking when I did it, she had picked that motion up from me. "I am almost too old to bear child, Aisa… so, I worry. If nothing else, your uncle is a man of stature, and as long as our house has a man of stature, the other houses will not plunder us."
"There is a give and take in every relationship," I agreed. "But I don't want to marry an old man! They're gross and they smell bad, and if they're in Athens, they probably lay with little boys!"
Again, Mother sighed. "You are still young. I hope you meet a good man… if not, then a strong one."
*
I decided to show Mother my familiar, if nothing else than to have a reason to craft a harness for Nevermore to land on my forearm or on my shoulder. I didn't expect the first thing she do was ask, "Well, that's a rather strange name, isn't it? Nevermore. I have never heard it before, what does it mean?"
"It comes from a…" Huh. Phrygian poems, much like Homeric Greek, didn't exist in the form of American literature. Poems just weren't the same now as in my relative past; and I couldn't exactly claim The Raven to be a poem. "An aria of a mystery. Shall I tell it to you?"
Mother leaned back; we were outside on the roof of our stone house, where we watched the sunset and ate our supper in light—having torches and eating inside was too expensive, and less said about having candles the better. Her wicker woven chair creaked as she moved, the slight bump on her tummy unnoticed to most of our slaves, but not to me. "You have learned this? I would be delighted to hear it, my dear daughter."
"As it goes,
'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more."
And so it goes," I paused in recitation to take a breath. It was the strangest thing that rebirth gave me; I remembered some of my earlier experiences, such as reading this poem in school, but not many later memories with clarity. It was as if it came back to me slowly, and I needed time to decipher it all. "The entirety is rather long, but the point is rather simple."
"Oh?" She raised an eyebrow at this. "Explain?"
There were themes and items that were rooted even in eras older than ours. The raven sat atop the bust of Pallas Athena, it mentioned the memory losing drug from the Odyssey, and much of the poem couldn't be explained without background in the occult and the Bible. "Perhaps a mystery of love and loss… the name, in essence, is the absence of Nepenthe, yet desiring it beyond all else. A sort of desperate depression, Mama."
"Depression." She repeated the word, tasting it, for we had not this saying in our language as it was in English. "Sometimes I wonder which god had taught you these things, daughter, but these are trying times. Many of the ways of the past have changed so greatly, and perhaps it is better I don't question it. There is power in knowledge, and you should not share it with your old mother." She sighed and drank deeply her soup.
"Nevermore," my raven crowed above me, perched over the woven seat that was just two sizes too big for me. I could feel her satisfaction, preening in the attention given to her.
I eyed her carefully. Nevermore had better attribute than me in some fields; 2 STR, 15 DEX, 8 CON, 2 (6) INT, 15 WIS, 7 CHA. She flew in combat at an average of 40 feet per round (or per six seconds), or 4 miles per hour—which was quite stupid on paper, until we note that this is in combat and with a high degree of maneuvering. Her true traveling flight speed, as with all birds, was at around 20-50 miles per hour, and she had a diving speed of about three times that. So, with these things in mind and with the fact that she was soul bound to me as a magical wizard's familiar, it wasn't so shocking that she was physically more impressive than I could be at this age. "Yes, yes, you're a beauty."
"Nevermore," she lifted her beak, as if even more smugly than before.
"That is impressive, but what is the purpose?" Mother asked. Seeing my confused look, she sighed in the manner that I associated with her bemoaning that her intelligent daughter was lacking in common sense. "You are already known for bringing bad luck with your presence. It is also why your uncle wishes for you to leave the Troad, you know? Taming a black bird of death who lingers in battlefields does not help you."
"Hear that, Nevermore? You're a black bird of death," I snickered.
She cawed back at me in return, almost like mocking laughter.
"I am quite serious," Mother crossed her arms under her full breasts and frowned down at me with the sort of body language that all mommies had, one that was filled with the promise of punishment and discipline.
I was immediately cowed, the coward that I was. "Sorry, Mama."
She cupped her head in her palms. "What do I do with you? Is there no other means to show that you have the blessing of the gods? If we do not deny the rumors… soon they shall say that you are cursed, and that you must be abandoned to wolves, or worse, sacrificed to the gods."
"Ah. An act of supernatural power?" I frowned. I couldn't exactly conjure anything permanent, nor could I create massive acts—I was not even level three yet. If I had another level, I could do so much more. I could cast Invisibility, I could attempt to craft Pearls of Power, I could… no, wait. I was thinking too much like I was in a setting or world of fantasy. I wasn't. There were street magicians who used optical illusions to look like they could levitate an inch off the ground and got millions to love them for it. "I… I think I can do something. When was the Mystery of Cybele taking place again, Mama?"
She eyed me, and her expression told me she could see through my thoughts as if they were glass. "In three days, daughter. What exactly do you wish to do? I hope it will not… cause too much trouble."
"Just party tricks, Mama," I leaned back, but I knew I wouldn't be sleeping tonight. So much preparation needed to be done. "Just party tricks."
Rebirth 1.3
*
The City of the Troad was ruled by three powerful houses, with nine lesser noble warrior houses beneath them, five houses of artisans, twenty-seven houses of master farmers and herders, and then three roaming merchant families.
Breaking that down further, each of the three powerful houses were split between different lines.
The House of Troidae held its main line in my father, a second line in my uncle, and then two more lines in distant cousins who pursued their own lesser interests. We held most of our power in having the biggest herd of sheep, the most prized armors and weapons, and owning much of the land near the River of Skamandros, which was some of the best farmland in the region. One of those cousins, or my distant great uncle, owned the local smithy, and another taught philosophy, both respectable professions to be passed down to their family lines.
The House of Arradaes had two lines that split several generations ago, where the head of house was a powerful warrior and kept much of the law in the Troad. His line had been the great warrior of the city for three generations now, and that seemed to keep for the foreseeable future. His distant cousin had taken to tanning and cutting leather, and the two lines of the House of Arradaes held much of what could have been called the 'military industrial complex' of our city.
The House of Danne was a more recent addition, comparatively, to our city. They came to us, according to our oral traditions, about two or three hundred years ago, and were, at the time, bread bakers and farmhands. At the time, the Troad was even poorer than now, and we had not slaves to work the fields. In this, the Danne found a niche owning much of the small grove of olives and grapes in the city—such that olive oil and wine came mainly from their house. They were split into three smaller family lines, where the main family kept much of their works while the others enjoyed a moderate income and wealth while doing the majority of the labor. They kept to themselves, but they looked like they migrated north from the Levant.
Troad did not have the richest farmland, nor was it best positioned to take advantage of trade routes. In this way, we never developed like the Ionians to the south, with their many cities and great wealth that tempted even the Achaemenid Persians. We were wealthy enough to sustain a population of about seven or eight hundred citizens, another two or so hundred surrounding but distant farming families, and some four hundred or so slaves.
It was hardly right to call this place a city when it didn't even have a population over two thousand, I had thought to myself. They called it polis, but I felt it little better than a small town. I had lived in cities with twenty or thirty million residents. There wasn't much to compare.
Perhaps a generation ago things were better. Mother said we had perhaps triple our numbers before the Persian King of Kings Cyrus the Great crushed the Ionians. That was back in 547 BC.
It was around 491 BC now.
If I had to guess, the reasons for our decline were manifold.
First, there was the decline in trade. Perhaps we saw it less now, but we had a connection to both the mainland Greeks by the passage of the Hellespont—the closest sea route between Greece and Anatolia—just on our doorstep. We also traded with the more barbaric peoples of the north, and we traded with the many cities of Ionia. Without that, our economy suffered. With the suffering economy came less food for everyone around. This could cause a slow trickle of people leaving for better lands.
Second, there were the wars. Many conflicts fought over the decades might not have seemed like much, but if we lost ten people to violence every year, then in that half-century we would have lost five hundred people in terms of population. With the slowdown of economy and lessening of food in an already not-so-prosperous region, famine would have seen to another large chunk in times of war, when armies took what they wanted.
Thirdly, there was the voluntary migration—seen in the most recent time by my own older brother. According to Mother, more than thirty boys left with my brother to fight in Thebes against the Persians. They claimed they would return laden with gold and silver, but most of them died. If every ten years half of the young men left to war and to never return, then how could we see any growth?
In truth, the only true export that the Troad produced were wool from sheep, grains that we could spare, and the occasional hides. The smithy did little more than maintain what we had, perhaps making one new necklace every month. That was not an export, that was just… well, barely anything.
What wealth our city held was the accumulation of tens of generations. When I walked into our storage and armories, and saw the bronze helmets and pots and pans, I felt a sense of exasperation. This was all we had?
*
The microcosm representing the politics of our city came in the form of our youth. I could even call it 'it's like high school all over again', except worse and not at all.
Other than me, these were the list of characters known, who got together because our families wanted us to meet on occasion, such as the days before the Feast of Cybele. We would gather in one of the few rooms in the local temple to the gods—there were a few—and, staring up at the colored marble statues, mostly of green and red colors as they represented our city, we would just stand or sit around waiting until we could leave.
Unlike modern interpretations of this era, we didn't actually have perfectly cut stone walls. Most of these walls were made from spherical boulders, as we didn't actually have the tools necessary to cut them into bricks. That meant those castle walls of the medieval era were, compared to now, a luxury we couldn't afford even if we wanted them. Instead, we took large boulders, lined them up, tilled the empty pockets between them with a mixture of mud, gravel, sand, hay, wood, and other things local that we could find.
Basically, I was saying that everything looked different from what I expected the past to look. It was my relative present now, but perhaps because it didn't look like how I expected Ancient Greece to look, I was having a better time dealing with it than if it looked like something out of a Hollywood movie.
Within this particular shaded room of the temple, we had several people. Of course there was me and my cousin, Agelaus. He had lost some of the fat in his cheeks and the peach fuzz that looked like a caterpillar resting under his nose now grew sideburns too, so it looked like three, dark, fuzzy caterpillars sat on his face.
From the House of Arradaes, there was a young girl named Eleni. Well, she was older than me by six years, being a twelve year old. Their family was a house of fair-haired, lightly tanned people, and having some Scythian blood too, perhaps. She was the only person who talked to me and treated me as a person, despite being so much younger than her and also being a girl. We sat together in a shaded corner of the temple room, enjoying the cool shade away from the sun and talked about nothing important, like what meals we like or what the clouds above us looked like.
Eleni also had a brother two years her senior named Alexander. Apparently it was a rather common name. Even Paris of Troy had a second named being Alexander, or some variation of it, apparently. Not that it all sounded the same, of course, but with enough retellings, it did. He was a muscled boy who liked to ride the horse, and boasted that he was going to go off to Greece one day and fight against the Persians too. Bless his heart.
The main family of the House of Danne had enjoyed a pair of twin boys, who were named Caleb and Sethur. Something about their names tickled me funny in the head, but they didn't look much different from other Greeks and lived in our lands for hundreds of years, so I was probably just grasping. They were smart too—they had brought a pair of dice that they hid in their belt to pass the time. Pretty smart for a pair of thirteen year old boys. Apparently they also had a sister, but she wasn't joining us this year since she had grown too old to sit with the children.
Three other boys and one other girl joined us in our little get together, but they were just followers, and it showed in their demeanor. They didn't speak much, and mostly followed another like Crabbe and Goyle followed Malfoy. This didn't mean they weren't competent or they weren't smart, it just meant they didn't do much.
"Two more days of this, huh?" Eleni murmured.
"It's not… so bad." I tried to comfort her.
She looked over at me. "It's your first time, isn't it? They kept you at home before this, right? The first time is always nice. But it's the same thing every year."
I shrugged. She was probably right. "Why are you talking to me, anyway? Why not, uh, what's her name?"
"Soph?" She raised a blonde eyebrow at me. "You're awful at remembering people's names, aren't you? I pity whoever will have to marry you and have a wife who can't remember the names of her slaves."
"Oh, the horror." I choked out, hoping this wasn't going to turn out like high school all over again.
"You're funny, you know that?" Eleni giggled. She waved over at the girl she called Soph. "Hey, Soph! Come here, join us."
Soph, unlike me who was a tiny thing and unlike Eleni who seemed perfectly proportioned like a swan, was one of those long-necked girls with a very thin body, bones too long that it made her feel awkward. "Nothing else to do anyway. Did you talk witty, Eleni?"
"Yeah, and the little princess here can keep up, you know?" Eleni chirped.
"Oh." Soph sat down beside us, but not close enough that her knees could touch ours. "Good for you, I guess."
"Wait, what do you mean by that?" I asked.
"She talks fast," Soph said.
"Ah." I nodded.
"Oh come on, don't be so boring! Now that there's the three of us, we can do fun things together! Gossip about pretty boys and cute girls! Talk about our newest dyed clothes and that new Persian jewelry that all the Ionians are talking about! Rule the city from the shadows through making the men into our puppets!" She nudged my shoulder.
I paused and looked over at her. "What was that last one again?"
"Talk about cute boys?" She asked. "Or the pretty girls?"
She talked fast enough that I didn't catch all of that, but I was pretty sure that wasn't what she said. Did a lower DEX also affect reaction time to conversation? I hoped not. "Why the pretty girls?" I asked despite wishing I didn't.
"Well, look, everyone talks about how the men in the rich cities like Thebes and Athens always go around sleeping with little boys, no?" She spoke as if trying to lead me down her path of twisted logic. "Well, if the men can make sweet eros with other men, why can't girls love other girls?"
"… is this a Sappho thing?" I eyed her carefully. She couldn't actually be coming onto me, but the way she talked was like if anyone could love anyone else. It was awfully strange in this era.
"You know Sappho!" She clapped her hands and turned to Soph. "She knows Sappho!"
Oh my god, it's like high school all over again. "Please let me breathe."
Eleni let go of me. "Sorry, I got a little carried away."
Nothing better to go, I pulled out the wooden scrolls made out of strung together pieces of wood I had spent time to craft. I scribbled on them with a small knife, which I used to carve the arcane symbols into the bark pieces.
Having a craft scroll feat helped, but sometimes I wished I didn't have to actually spend hours to make scrolls. Gold pieces, or whatever equivalent, didn't really seem to work in costs. Not that they could, considering there was no flat cost; whoever created that system didn't know shit about economics. Still, I was limited to five first level spells a day (two from the class, one from my arcane school, and two from intellect bonus), so I had to make some scrolls, or be left with nothing when I needed them.
Honestly, when talking about roleplaying games, we never mention the time skips. In games like Skyrim and Fallout, you could automatically skip time. Making a single scroll took me hours. It was god awful, but it was a good way to train myself to have better handwriting… I guess.
"What's that?" Eleni asked, being the only person in the room willing to violate my personal space and peek over my shoulder.
"It's a scroll. I'm, uh, inscribing a mystery into it." I answered honestly.
"… So rich," Soph remarked.
I felt my cheeks heat up. I wasn't trying to show off my wealth, or what little I had. I had made this myself, after all… but having the time to do it was a luxury in and of itself. "Er…"
"No one would believe that," Eleni scoffed while giving Soph a look that silenced her. "You have to say something like 'Oh the Mighty Athena has taken my body to gift this upon you' or something like that."
"Who's voice were you imitating when you said it like that?" I blinked up at her. "I didn't know your voice went so deep."
Eleni giggled. "The head priestess. She always stays up the mountain and it's always full of smoke where she is, it's no wonder her throat has become so worn out. Ah, I shouldn't have said it like that. Oh, goddesses please forgive my disrespect."
I watched her clasp her hands and do pray. At first, I thought she was being sarcastic again, but she kept repeating herself, and I realized that it wasn't. She actually believed some invisible whatever divinity was watching over her, or us all. "Huh. I'll keep that in mind next time I want to tell other people I can invoke mysteries, I guess."
"You… you do that. Though, be sure, don't play with dark mysteries! It's against the law to curse near the farmlands, you know? I should know, my father has cut off more than one tongue for such a deed!" She warned very seriously.
What a reminder that no matter how similar to high school this could get, it was never going to be modernity. I could only nod at how sincere she wished to help me. That sort of feeling never appeared back when I was in high school. I wonder why? "… Thanks, Eleni."
She wasn't paying attention when I gave my heartfelt thanks however. Instead, her eyes were on her brother, or more specifically, her brother and his friends staring off with the Danne twins and their friends. "Oh no, not again."
"Hm?"
"Boys are so," Eleni groaned. "Ugh!"
Soph looked up from whatever she had been doing and gave the most nonchalant sort of glare a teenage girl could give. "Again?" Seeing my glance, she answered, "they like to fight. It usually ends up in bruises, but it's getting worse of late."
Two boys stood behind Alexander of the Arradaes and one other boy stood behind the Danne twins. My cousin Agelaus—or Aggie to everyone here—looked on with a faint look of amusement.
Alexander pounded his chest with open palms. "You wanna go? I'll go!"
One of the Danne twins, probably Caleb, grinned and turned to the other boys. "You lads spread out, yeah? I wanna settle this with the big boy here. We'll do this honorable, one-on-one."
"Yeah, that sounds just fine to me," Alex nodded to his two friends and motioned for them to back up… and they did, clumsily, right into me and my stuff.
"Hey!" I yelped as one of them interrupted my scroll carving and made me miss a sign.
"Oops, sorry, princess," the boy shrugged sarcastically.
I wanted to lash out, but I was better than that. I was a reincarnated person for fuck's sake, and they were just kids doing a jumped up ancient version of a rich kids' schoolyard brawl. I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. It wasn't like I couldn't fix this with a Mend spell anyway. "It's fine, I'll just mend it."
"What are you doing anyway?" The other Danne twin, Sethur, walked over and pulled the wooden scroll out of my hands. My little wood carving knife clattered onto the stone tiled floor. "Oh, she's learning her letters, but what letters are these? Lads, I think whoever her teacher is needs to go back to school."
"Ha! Yeah, this is why girls shouldn't learn to write. They'll just mess it up." His friend added with a laugh at the totally not funny joke.
I had moved passed the moral dilemma of intellectually bullying these kids.
I was already cycling between the spells I had on hand.
In the zeroth level spells, I had Aisa's Greater Mage Fingers, Improved Prestidigitation, Jolt, and Dancing Lights prepared. Since they were cantrips, I could use them however many times I wanted… but I didn't want to kill these kids. On paper, Jolt dealt about 2 hit points of damage, but I was in a setting where basically no one, outside of a few mythical warriors, had more than three hit dice. Jolt would reduce any one of them down to half health or worse.
I wasn't about to kill a kid just because they messed with my homework! Anyway, in the first level, I had Obscuring Mist, Shield, Mage Armor, Crafter's Fortune, and Color Spray prepared. I had one used of each spell per day. In addition to this, I had one scroll of Hypnotism and one scroll of Mage Armor. I was… a bit paranoid about my own safety, but that was only because I had thought the giant spiders might Kool-Aid Man their way into my life at any time.
Instead of dealing with giant spiders, I had these brats messing up my shit. Now, I could have gone Carrie or something on them, sure. I even wanted to. Except, I didn't really have anything to use on them that wouldn't have a worse and lasting effect on my own standard of living.
I wasn't about to hurt someone over my homework, just to get banished from the community. I had a Mama here, a pillow and a bed, I even had slaves catering to my needs, and, while I wasn't respected about the town, I was of good standing.
But I wasn't about to let this go unpunished.
"Nevermore," I stood and brushed the dust from my knees, speaking without looking up. "Get my scroll back, will you? And peck Sethur's hand for me, will you?"
"Caw," my familiar acknowledged and swooped from her perch atop a tree outside in the courtyard of the temple. She, with her 15 DEX and 120 miles per hour diving speed, dove into the hand that held my unfinished scroll in the blink of the eye.
I caught the scroll that dropped from Sethur's now bloody hand before it could clatter on the ground like my little carving knife. I tilted my head and allowed Nevermore to land on my shoulder. Ugh, her talons were too sharp for my thin clothing. Nevertheless, I nodded. "Thanks."
"Nice bird. Bad decision." Cousin Aggie shook his head and walked out, but not without leaving me with some parting words. "I thought you were staying out of it. I guess you were just too young."
"Ow!" Sethur whined, completely unlike the tough man act he had put up earlier. Right, he was still a child, and a scion of a rich and powerful house at that. Even a scratch would cause him to cry.
"Come on, let's get someone to wrap it up," Caleb took one look at me and ushered his twin out.
"Never mind. This is just like high school." I muttered to myself.
"What was that?" Eleni leaned closer—her nape smelled of roses and honey—and blinked her puppy eyes down at me so filled with gossipy curiosity. "Did you just say something strange again? What did you say? Was it the mystery that allows you to talk with your bird?"
The way she spoke was as if we all treated mysteries as if they were spells. Well, that wasn't too far off. I shook my head. "I was just lamenting that I had accidentally fallen into the trap known as 'local politics'."
"Well, it was bound to happen. You are a Troidae, after all." She smirked. "You can't stay out of trouble."
"Please don't tell me that's going to define the rest of my life," I groaned.
I should have just let the brat take the scroll.
Damn it.
*
The mystery of invocation was a tradition, a law, and a magic as old as humanity itself. In modernity, people called it praying directly to their deity. When people spoke the name of Jesus Christ in surprise, that was the shorthand of a shorthand of a shorthand for the invoking of the mentioned deity.
Taking that ability away from people was perhaps one of the most subtle power moves that the Catholic Church had ever done—before then, in the time of the Late Republican and Early Imperial Roman eras, people could invoke their gods by themselves. They could call upon their deities to bargain with them, to beg them, to gift to them, and more, almost as if they were a constant companion of not just themselves but their family, friends, and fellow citizens.
The slow return of this ability to worship your god, and to have a personal relationship with your god, was something that took centuries. The entire intricacy of how it went down shaped the very soul of human history—without such religious conflicts, Earth wouldn't have been the same. It would have been unrecognizable, and a foreign world entirely.
But there was still five hundred years before the Anointed One would be born. It was seven hundred years before the fall of the Han Empire, and nine hundred or more years before the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The conflicts in religion had yet to even start, and we walked as if the gods walked among us, and that every time their name was called could beckon even the mightiest of the gods to give their attention to us.
For Athenians, they could walk upon the Acropolis at the center of their city, and see an olive tree and a shallow pool. The olive tree was said to be a descendant of the first olive tree offered to the city by the goddess Athena, and the pool was the remains of the salt bath given to the city by Poseidon. For Troias, we could walk to the Skamandros and climb Mount Ida. So on, and so forth, people could go to these places and see proof of the existence of their gods.
Thus, the mystery of invocation, or the spell of calling a god's attention, wasn't treated as if it were just a joke or some idiom. It was treated like the most delicate glass with which the life of the invoker was filled. Shattering it, dropping it, throwing it, being clumsy with it… could end not just one's life, but those around them.
Or so I thought people believed. I thought people believed a lot of things; that was how knowledge of locals, as a skill, acted, but it was one thing to know it and another to experience it.
On the second to last day before the ritual feast to the Great Mother, the Seated Woman, the Matron of the Oracle of Mount Ida, the Mother Goddess, and so many other titles, we were gathered again, in that room in the temple as the adults did their own worship on their own. Even the twin Dannes were there; Sethur had a bandaged hand and flinched whenever I looked his way.
Alexander, being the idiot, mimicked a crow's cawing sound whenever he thought he was being funny. He enjoyed watching Sethur of the Danne being uncomfortable, and it had slowly edged onto the consciousness of the group to either enjoy it with him or be uncomfortable with Sethur.
And, of course, pitted together, they sought something to argue about so that a fight could commence. This topic, on this day, happened to be the mysteries of invocation.
It was no surprise, if Mama taught me of it yesternight, then my fellow aristocratic children would have been similarly reminded of it around this time too. It was fresh on all our minds… but we all worshiped differently. This was how those troubles began, and I saw no end to it. Religious conflict wouldn't end in my life time, even if I was immortal.
"The mystery of invocation is just a myth," Agelaus, my cousin, scoffed, having joined the conversation for once. "The old people treat it as if it's something special, but it's just tradition."
"One of the oldest traditions," Caleb remarked. "You should not be so quick to dismiss such things. There is a reason some things are tradition."
Agelaus shook his head, his pudgy cheeks jiggling ever so slightly. "Do spare me of that, won't you, Caleb? You know as well as I that the old men say things like how the youth do not respect them anymore or that our preferences for melodies are atrocious."
On that, Caleb agreed, as did all the others. He spat, "They do that the way of dressing have deteriorated. What a bunch of dullards."
"I believe in the mysteries of invocation, and I have proof of it too." Alexander interrupted, steering the conversation back.
"Explain?" Agelaus requested.
"Oh, I'll do it," Eleni interrupted and walked between the boys. "He tells the tale wrong with every retelling, the smug brother of mine."
"It is my story to tell, not yours," Alexander practically pouted. He didn't argue that compared to his sister, he was the inferior storyteller, however.
"You'll tell it like some sailor saying he begged Poseidon to return home and then he came home the next day. It's so… bland, brother. So be a dear and keep quiet," she patted his cheek and turned her nose up well aware of her own superiority to him in this aspect. In her house, all children were educated, and so while her brother mastered the blade, armor, shield, and horse, she learned instruments and diplomacy, as well as poems and song.
"It's not magic," Agelaus argued still. "It is just… what we believe in. There's nothing wrong with tradition, and you've not heard me argue otherwise. I am just saying… if the gods are real, they bloody wouldn't spend their time listening to every idiot who calls their name. It is a custom, and customs come with respect as they age. There's nothing wrong with that."
"And, what? You're comparing the mystery of invoking a god's name to… to… to the act of giving sheep to a man when your daughter is being married off? Those things are not the same, Aggie." Caleb disagreed. "A bride price can be a custom, but this is something binding. The almighty will smite you if you don't do this, whereas no one cares if you're just showing you're too poor to afford some sheep."
"Here we are, back to talking about bloody fucking sheep," Eleni bemoaned. She turned to me, "What of you, Aisa. What do you believe? Do the gods care if we say their names? Surely, you must have an opinion."
"Huh?" I blinked and thought back to Mister Bastard. I never did ask for its name, did I? Another mistake on my part, that was. "Did you tell your story already?"
Eleni paused and then her eyes widened. "Oh, no! I forgot! Yes, it was a tale alright. I suppose I should preface first that I think if someone saves your life and you promise a reward, then you can't just… back out of it. Similarly, if a god had watched over you all your life and shielded you from death and disaster for many years, you can't just act as if they didn't exist."
"That's… awfully specific," I frowned.
"That's because the mystery of invocation never acts on its own." Eleni lectured. "When you call upon a god, you aren't just checking on their day, and they don't have time for platitudes anyway."
"On that, we'll have to disagree," Caleb jabbed in despite both of us rather tuning him out. "Our gods are powerful and have time for all their followers, else how can they even call themselves gods?"
"… anyway," Eleni continued, "A mother might ask the god of healing to save her child. See that? The mother is the invoker, and the god of healing is invoked, but there is a third party in her child. And as we all know, the father of the family controls the child's life, even if he became a king. That is the bond of blood, after all."
"Sometimes I forget that our newest member knows so little," Agelaus remarked as he watched me for reactions. "Do hurry up, we have other things to attend to, like watching the clouds or sitting in the shade and dreaming of nothing."
"I asked Apollo to save Eleni from sickness, and she became well." Alexander bit out at Agelaus.
"Ugh, thanks for ruining my story," my blonde friend grumbled at her brother. "I was building up to that, you know? You can't even keep your mouth shut, why do I even bother?" She added to her audience, "There were a lot of details he skimmed over! And those matter, a lot!"
He held his hands up in defeat. "I don't claim to be favored by a god, but it is clear to me that none of the remedies our priests and the others prescribed worked."
"Saved by a god, huh?" I blinked. Was this willful ignorance, or just plain ignorance growing into a whole culture? Then again, the rest of the world was no better in this era, so what did I even have to complain about?
"Technically true. Nevertheless, be it magic, religion, or tradition, the invocation mystery is a powerful one as old as the world, probably," Eleni shrugged.
"We could sit here bickering all day," Soph added.
"… or we could do something else?" I asked.
Soph huffed humorlessly. "No."
Eleni placed herself between us and wrapped an arm around each of us like an extrovert adopting two introverts. "Let's not bicker. Let the boys do it if you have to. It's not like you can just call a god up just by saying their name. My mother told me that anyway, about the proper titles of gods. You have to flatter them, no different than flattering the Persian King of Kings."
"And you have to offer them things. Most of the time, it's your own blood, if you can't just slaughter a cow for some festivities." Soph added in the mostly dead monotone. "Alexander cut his palm and bled until his prayer was done before he sought to bandage it. Then, a month later, Eleni recovered from her sickness. There's your magical miracle."
I almost questioned what kind of setting I was in. Certainly, Bastard could pull some dick moves. Thankfully, all knowledge checks told me this was still a mundane earth… except if some of that arcane power seeps and someone around me became born with sorcerous powers.
Still, I couldn't believe how such a simple thing was such a big part of our lives. I had really taken the modern world for granted, hadn't I? I thought I was passed culture shocks by now, but I was so wrong.
But what could I say? I couldn't just tell them all their beliefs, all their gods, and all their tradition were built on something that didn't even exist.
Well, I could, but that was a shit move, wasn't it?
"I guess I'll have something to look forward to in two days then, don't I?" I smiled at everyone else in the room cheekily. "It's my first time. Hopefully nothing, ah, interesting happens. Right?"