Growth 2.3
*
Just like how oral tradition had transformed a Roman general into King Arthur and the common ideals of medieval 'fuck the police' into a single, central figure in Robin Hood, lack of records and oral traditions had most likely created Heracles and Theseus. There was probably no way of finding out who they were, since they drew historicity from before the Bronze Age Collapse, or in the ensuing centuries afterwards where total world trade and written records mostly disappeared due to an ancient version of everything going to shit.
While finding out the truth behind the myths was nigh-impossible, what was possible in similarity was that anyone could see the results of the historical Heracles and historical Theseus. For anyone could look towards Sparta and see that in their twin lines of duo-kings, there were the two descendant lineages of Heracles. The Houses of the Heracleidae were like Naruto and Sasuke in that they kept returning to struggle for dominance in their village politics, and in a similar format to this, even Athenian politics were dominated by men who were descendants of ancient lineages despite their support of 'democracy'.
There was no aversions to dynasties in Athenian democracy; the greatest and most populist of Athenian leaders, such as the up and coming Pericles, were all descendants of this or that mythological figure. They thrived on it, and derived much of their mystique—their 'why I'm better than you' aura—from this. Pericles himself claimed lineage from the House of the Alcmaeonids, the descendants of the mythological Alcmaeon, great-grandson of Nestor, an Argonaut who joined in the similarly mythological Trojan War. Right now, Pericles was only 7 years old, so who knew what would happen later on in the future.
Of course, the truth of history shrouded such men and events from accuracy, but the clues available to modernity told us that this was probably fan fiction, similar to the creation of Lancelot by a Frenchman, or King Arthur's round table being a rip off of Charlemagne's paladins.
Alcmaeon, by the best estimates, lived only around 900 BC to 700 BC, whereas the supposed historical skirmish in the then-backwater region known as western Anatolia and the even more backwater region known as Greece that was later called the Trojan War happened around 1200 BC. So how the fuck would any Roman historians know shit about this if their time was six times further away from the era compared to modern historians' distance from the American Revolutionary War?
At the time, the events that grow into the poetic traditions passed down of the Trojan War were not even truly a war between great powers. It wasn't a war between the might empires of the Hittites and the Egyptians, or between the Assyrians and the Babylonians. In truth, the Trojan War and much of its mystique were created as fan fiction of truer events. And why wouldn't they be made, when local rulers used their supposed connection to said myth as a form of legitimacy?
In the end, it allowed each Greek region and each major Greek city to claim a sort of self-righteousness and self-proclaimed superiority. So, from those hundreds of years ago, the Greeks hated each other more than any other outsider, including peoples like the Persians and the Egyptians. After all, if your mythological ancestor had a grudge against a nearby neighbor, who gave a shit about some faraway empire?
We were so far apart that the linguistic drift of our dialects made entirely new languages of us. The similarities between our Phrygian language and the Athenians' Attic Greek was like the similarities between Sicilian Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. The Epirots spoke their northwestern Greek, and Phrygian Greek split into Ionic Greek of the Ionians and the Aeolic Greek of Thebes and Lesbos. Spartans and the Cretans started using various forms of a Doric Greek, and of course Arcadians wanted to feel special so they had their own Arcadian Greek with the Cypriots. That wasn't even taking into consideration for the lesser derivatives like Demotic Greek!
Perhaps Attic Greek and Ionic Greek were the only two that were of value if I took the point of history. Attic Greek would grow to dominate Greece much in the way of the spreading influence of Athens. In Anatolia, Ionic Greek would grow in influence. These two languages would then converge into something that people knew as 'Ancient Greek', though even one thousand and five hundred years from now, historians like Anna Komnene, Byzantine Princess, would still use Attic Greek.
In the end, there were many dialects, many cultures, and many myths just within the sphere known as 'Greek'. We were so diverse, having grown so in a thousand years, that sometimes I couldn't see ourselves as one people but many different peoples of many different tribes that only came together due to a mixture of local hegemons and Persian adventurism.
The point?
I took my responsibilities seriously. It wasn't a thing of 'with great power comes great responsibility', I had always felt the comic book writers who wrote that line never wielded 'great power', so how could they know? At best, it was powerless peons begging powerful people to exercise some moral fiber, but morality itself was something constantly in flux with the passage of time and the waxing and waning of cultural beliefs. In the end, it was a matter of personal discipline for me; I couldn't be some kind of ignorant border guard who couldn't even ask incoming traders questions. I was going to know where everyone was from and I was going to understand them all. Mommy didn't raise no quitter.
Therefore, the time I spent in gaining said knowledge was not insignificant. Arcado-Cypriot Greek, Attic Greek, Ionic Greek, Aeolic Greek, Epirot Greek, Doric Greek, all their culture, all their stories, I had to familiarize myself with it all, but how could I? There were no public libraries, no private libraries, and certainly no records. No single wise man could be such a polyglot in an age where information traveled slower than a snail.
The closest available collection of information laid in Smyrna, which had replaced Sardis as the regional capital of the Persian province of Anatolia, or as it was called locally, Asia Minor. Perhaps the Satrap's own archonic collection could prove valuable, but in the end, I decided against it. There wouldn't be any instructors available for a little girl, and maybe, I decided, I could learn on the job.
What's the worst that could happen? I had thought. It was during this time that my next challenge came to me.
*
… As the Babylonians raise their fists in revolt for Xerxes' pillaging of religious sites to fill his empty coffers, the Egyptian Throne raises one of their own against Achaemenes, Brother of Xerxes and Prince of Persia. The Libyan Priest of Set follows the False Pharaoh with Dark Grimoire in hand. Intervene before Egypt becomes Land of the Dead.
"Motherfucker." I muttered. This day just couldn't get any worse, could it?
"What was that?" Eleni asked as she walked into my workshop.
"Uh, nothing, just…" I looked back at my quest log within my mind's eye and wanted to choke on my own invisible vomit. This was what I got for not preparing enough! "I might need to leave the city for a while."
"Oh no, what's wrong?" She asked in concern.
I ran a hand through my hair. "It's… it's nothing. Just… troubles."
"Ah." The smile on her face stopped wavering and disappeared completely. "Like the time with the giant monsters…?"
"… yes." I didn't lie to her. It was going to be known anyway.
"That's not good," Eleni looked down, lost.
"Yes, but I'll get over it. It's nothing that I will have to solve on my own. I'll just need to send a word to Xerxes that I'm going to go to Egypt to see his brother. I will need to make preparations to travel…" I turned back to her, the thoughts already fluttering through my head as my puppets packed things up. "What was it that you were here for anyway?"
"Oh, well it seems like nothing in comparison, but, ah," She shuffled her feet on the ground and seemed almost uneasy at the thought of another quest. Maybe it was best I didn't bring her along for this ride, considering how dangerous it was going to be. "Well, I'm just going to say it. Your mother is giving birth."
"Ah." Months of nothing happening, and then a week where months happen. Next time I saw the Bastard, I was going to talk to it about its awful timing. "I won't need to leave immediately. Maybe I'll make one last gadget before I go, so… I suppose I will see mother first."
*
It felt rushed. One moment, events held so little tension that I was deciding to learn dying languages, and the next moment, I was telling my puppets to prepare to pack up.
Giant spiders could stay in a single spot and multiply all they wanted, but if some unknowing muggle got their hands on a dark grimoire, then shit was going to turn sour sooner rather than later. I could be looking at a zombie apocalypse or an invasion of aliens, or demonic summonings, or whatever the else fuck was going to happen. Monsters were just monsters, but people? People fucked shit up too quickly for me to feel safe.
Mother gave birth to a healthy boy that Father named Polydamas. I had half thought that I was going to get an ugly look at the ancient era's mortality rates, and I thanked even the fucking Bastard that I didn't have to see that after meeting the pudgy little cheeks of my new little brother.
I knew then that I was going to burn all of Egypt to keep him safe, even if I couldn't cast a single fucking fireball.
I bid my farewells to my family and told them I would need to leave the city for a while. I was sure I had also said something about dark gods, the dead escaping the underworld, and the shitfest going down in Egypt, but I had been rambling by that point that I wasn't keeping track of my own words. Thankfully, my father didn't attempt to join me on my adventure this time.
My puppets had readied a wagon cart of my design; a simple thing that was still pre-industrial era, but sturdy enough to travel quickly and with a hood up so I didn't have to endure so much sunlight, being the nocturnal shut-in that I was. I had packed up my half dozen metamagic rods of extend spell, my tomes of spell scrolls, my two amphoras of haste and cure light wounds, and my odd fifty or so wands of lightning bolt.
It wasn't much in way of preparation, but it was all I had. And then Alexander showed up.
"I heard you're leaving," He said.
"Just a short while, probably," I replied.
"I'm coming," the boy, already a man, declared. He was prepared, with his armor, his Doric helmet, his three spears and a long blade and a short blade, and a bag of rations.
I was going to argue with him, but then I saw Eleni's pleading gaze. She was clearly asking me to take her brother with me, poor girl. It was a favor I'd do for her anyway, but it was strange that he cared so much about this sort of thing. Oh well, I could use another hand. "Sure."
"I can do many things, I… oh, oh. Oh. Alright then, good." He nodded and looked over at the cart. "Should I drive the cart? Where are the horses?"
"Oh, right." I didn't want to deprive our city of more. The last time we went to fight the giant spiders, we lost a good heavy horse then, in the final fight there. The horse that Xerxes gave us afterwards was father's only steed. I didn't want to take that from him, so I cast Phantom Steed. "There, magical horses. We're off, then."
"Come back soon!" Eleni called out after us. "Or better yet, take..."
What was that? She faded out before I could hear the rest... whatever it was, it was probably just a last farewell. That was nice of her to care so much.
Of course I was coming back soon. It was just a person with a book. Even if they were casting spells, they weren't going to have the time that those giant spiders had to build up. I was coming down on them hard. How bad was it going to be?Growth 2.4
*
There were basically two ways we could go from Troad to the Egyptian Delta: by land or by sea.
By land, we needed to go east towards the lands of Tarhuntassa, later known as the Taurus Mountains. There was an arid, mountain plateau city there known as Laranda, which would later be called Karaman. From there, we could go southeast towards the lands of Canaan, which would in the distant future be called the holy land by some. From there, we circled around Mount Sinai and then we could enter eastern Egypt.
By sea, our path took us to Smyrna, which was a major port city of our day, and would later be called Izmir. From there we would need to catch a boat ride down through the Aegean Sea but shipping of this era was still too fundamental to have long voyages, which meant most ships hugged the coastline to an extent. We would need to follow the coast to Kition, a cosmopolitan bay-side port city on the island of Cyprus, and then from there, we could catch a ride to the mouth of the Nile Delta.
In hindsight, knowledge (local) and knowledge (geography) combined was an overpowered combination of skills. Compared to how much time was used to ask for directions and to just find locations on a map in a time before the GPS, I had shaved a portion off the time our journey took simply by knowing how to get to our destination without excessive exploration similar to if I had a rough GPS.
I even knew that in the second leg of the journey, it was easier to go from Cyprus to Egypt than to go from the currently rebellion ridden backwater known as Canaan to Egypt. The Cypriots worshiped goddesses for thousands of years. First, they loved Ishtar, then Astarte, and now Aphrodite. We had a connection there, even if it was the sort of connection a Brooklyn rapper might have with Uganda or Wakanda.
The first half of our journey however leaned towards the land route. We left and started traveling south with minimal excessive supplies—I didn't take the wealth of my city with me, especially since I never did anything to earn it. That meant we didn't actually have money to pay for a ship to take us south, which then required some… diplomacy. It was this, or we could try, around Hadad, or modern Aleppo, to catch a ship from there.
Since news moved slowly—such that most people didn't even know they had a new King of Kings until months after the event that caused Xerxes to be crowned—the news that Egypt was currently in revolt probably just started to filter through. It would keep in people's minds for about a year to come, which meant most people would avoid traveling to Egypt, making taking ships to Egypt directly rather difficult.
I explained all of this to Alexander as we traveled the trail south, with my three puppets sitting in the wagon. Our freight wagon was of the heavy covered design with arches holding up a canvas similar to those heavily reinforced ones used in the westward expansion.
Alexander had the decency to become flustered and embarrassed, "I wouldn't know which to take."
"Then I suppose we can take the land route for now," I decided, looked around the interior of the wagon.
There were two replacement wheels, some extra rations, two quivers of arrows, most of my portable artisan tools, and Alexander's stuff. My puppets each had covered themselves in plain, black, masterwork leather armor that were mostly skintight, which was more than comfortable for waxwork creatures that had no sweat or body odor.
With the extra padding, and without any extra frames or wires or other methods of 'lift', they were still too perky to be actually human-like. I could say that they were ethereal, but the truth of the matter laid in how they simply didn't sag and didn't act like they weighed as much as humans did—this returned to at least a portion of how they were animated in the first place was by magic and artificial souls.
Quite frankly, I was worried staying on a boat for too long would reveal their inhuman nature and cause some sort of discomfort for sailors or other passengers. I wasn't about to test their buoyancy just yet! "Yes, it's probably for the best that we go by land for now. The three of you should watch out for hostilities… and unlike in Troad, there is no need to hold back fatal damage."
"Is that why I won?" Alexander muttered to himself only after a moment of uncomfortable silence.
My puppets acknowledged my commands layered into their framework of mind, but did not speak or act out like a person might. He still kept his eyes on the road, being such a professional about it too. I watched his gaze rise and drop with the bounce of the phantom steed, only to shrug. "I don't know. Perhaps Galatea could have beaten you in the wrestling match if she were allowed to kill you, but that isn't the point of a contest of strength, is it?"
"No… but deaths are sometimes something we can't avoid in matches," He said quietly, more morose than before.
"Don't be so down about it," I patted his shoulder. It was hard with muscle, not soft like Eleni. "If she can't beat you without killing you, then it just shows that her strength isn't good enough, Alexander. Cheer up and keep your mind on the mission."
"What you're saying is… to be truly strong, a man must be able to defeat his enemies without killing them? That is very difficult. Almost impossible. How could I show my honor without making the finishing blow?" His brow furrowed in thought.
"Are you still on that?" I grumbled and scrambled up from where I had placed myself—with my head on one of my puppet's laps. The leather padding made it feel almost real and very soft. "Look, why don't I tell you the story of what's happening in Egypt?"
"… alright?" Alexander finally snapped out of his funk and eyed me from the corner of his vision. "What is the enemy we are going to face?"
"I'm not sure!" I shrugged. "I know there's a rebellion against Achaemenes, brother of Xerxes. He is probably the preemptive Satrap of Egypt. The one making war against him is probably someone from further west, in Libya."
"The Archon of Egypt?" He used the Greek term for the Persian governors as he processed this. "We are going to Egypt to fight for the Persians again?"
I shook my head. "No, that's not exactly it. Under this Libyan power, there is a dark cult of Set, the God of Chaos, Trickery, Envy, and Violence. A priest of this cult has gained the power of a dark grimoire… ah, a Book of the Dead, or a Book of Spells. However, it has been cursed to drive its wielder insane."
"Godly power in the hands of an insane mind sounds like a horrible combination," He agreed. "How is… this isn't like your first adventure at all, is it? This is more urgent, more dangerous… what can I even do?"
"I'm not sure, because I don't know the actual situation there." I shrugged again and leaned back to lay myself against my soft puppets. They felt so good to rest my head against, no matter where I put myself! I should have made padded outfits sooner! I closed my eyes and added, "Who knows? Maybe they have a good reason to fight against the Persians… you seem to dislike them enough."
Alexander scoffed. "Any good Greek would dislike the Persians. This is just the fact of life. However, if our opponent has lost their mind and reasoning, then they are one hundred times more insidious than Persians. Any reason they had to fight for will be lost, for all they have in their mind would be violence and evil."
"I didn't know you felt so strongly about it." I remarked with my eyebrows raised.
"I am an honorable man," he replied evenly.
"Then I guess I can only hope you don't get put into a position to make hard choices," I sighed. With the mood as it was, I would never get to take my nap, I might as well start focusing on deriving a spell for commanding the undead or at least doing something against them.
I already had protection from evil/chaos and protection from negative energy spells. I had scrolls of each type enough to make a booklet on their own.
There were several options.
The first was to learn the third level spell lesser animate undead. It would give me an understanding of how they functioned beyond the mechanics given to me by the system. I could also, with materials, control a small, near-instant army of up to twenty skeletons at my current caster level of five. If nothing else, that was more distance between me and anyone wanting to kill me.
The second was to learn the third level spell halt undead. At my level, I could stop three undead for up to thirty seconds. It wasn't much when in place of long-term conflicts or on a field of battle, but in smaller confrontations, thirty seconds of crowd control could be godly.
But the problem with these options and any other that laid in the necromancy arcane school was that they didn't have enough long term benefits. Even if I focused in that school, I would rather focus on spells like enervation or more potent spells. With this in mind, I didn't take my third or fourth option, and took a lesser option that had more long-term benefits, fox's cunning, a second level spell.
I needed all of them, and once I had one, I could have the others. With that spell and bear's endurance, bull's strength, cat's grace, eagle's splendor, and owl's wisdom, I would be able to craft all of the items I needed at a comfortable enough level that I could attempt the higher ranked versions of them.
Of course, I doubted I could finish even studying one spell on the road, where everyone was deadly dangerous and the whole world might be out to get me. I had to split focus on the road, on the things far away, on where we were on the map, and then finally I had some concentration for studying. Considering how long it took me to learn spells, and that rate slowed as I rose in the ranks, going for a level two spell was slightly more manageable than a level three spell. I was still looking at basically not getting anything done considering how all roads in this era were mainly just dirt roads outside of the paved roads in Babylonia.
Still, I had to start somewhere, right?
*
"Halt!" An outrider called out with the city of Smyrna in the backdrop in the distance. He wore an Ionic helmet with bronze shin guards, which displayed his wealth well enough to show that he was probably of the upper crust. Considering he also had a sword strapped to his belt when his main weapon was a spear, it clenched it that he was a rich citizen.
We had traveled at about a little under thirty miles an hour almost directly towards the south, due to how desolate and empty central Anatolia was. This allowed us to reach Smyrna in the early afternoon, but that was only about a third of the distance to Laranda, and getting to Laranda was perhaps a tenth or less of the total distance we needed to travel… the feeling that the land route might take me a whole month to get to Egypt was only starting to sink in.
Alexander looked up. We had parked our wagon outside of the city, seeing as my phantom steed only lasted so long. He had been waiting for me to prepare the spell again, and we had agreed that as the man of the group, he needed to be the one to face these inconveniences. "Yes? What do you need?"
I nearly slapped myself. I shouldn't have designated Alexander as the person to talk to strangers, he didn't have his fathers' or my father's experience in politics, and he was utterly abrasive in tone and confrontational in body language. The rider sneered when he saw us, though he had not noticed my puppets hidden within the wagon. "This is a routine check, I need to look in your luggage. Taxes, you understand?"
"No, I don't understand." Alexander's frown deepened. "What taxes?"
"Normal taxes. Don't you ever travel? You must be from a backwater, if you don't know, so let me spell it out for you. When you travel to a new land, you need to pay taxes in order to pass." He waved at the dirt path beneath us, "The Smyrna owns this earth. Our feet crafted the path you walk. To not pay taxes is to be an affront to the Shahanshah."
"What are you talking about? The last time I went this way, this didn't happen." I grumbled as I peeked out of the front of the wagon at the man. He had a scraggy beard, the look of a man taking some kind of advantage, though I didn't wish to judge him by his looks alone. "Besides, we have nothing, so we have nothing to pay in tax. We're just travelers, not merchants."
The man slid off of his horse slowly and then walked up to the wagon. He slapped his meaty hand on the side so hard that I nearly jumped in my skin. Then his sneer deepened. "This is a well made wagon. It's even got oiled cloth coverings. That's a rich man's wagon, girl, so who do you think you're trying to fool?"
"I know the Shahanshah, he wouldn't collect taxes from me." My eyes narrowed down at the man and my voice lowered to a hiss.
"Uh, Lady Aisa, um, please, it's no big deal, we don't have anything, he can look for himself." Alexander interrupted for some reason. He looked rather unsettled and his gaze darted back towards the puppets who started to creep into the obscuring darkness.
"Yes, let me see for myself." The Smyrna noble tax collector licked his lips and poked his head into the wagon.
He just had to do it, didn't he? I felt a prang of worry shoot through my heart. I saw a flash of imagination before my eyes—the sight of failure. The sight of my family dying, and rising against me in death. The sight of my beloved friend, my gal, being taken from me. I felt my hands twitch towards my wands, but I still felt an inborn hesitation.
I couldn't allow my being slowed down on the first day of the journey. I couldn't allow anything bad to happen. I couldn't, wouldn't allow failure. I just couldn't.
I just… had no alternatives.
I didn't have any cute tricks up my sleeve. I could have used hypnotism, or charm, or something else, but they cost time, effort, energy. I couldn't allow this. I didn't want this. At the same time, an irrational hatred welled up inside me, a frustration I didn't know I had. As he closed in, as I felt his his odorous scent in the air and his desirous gaze upon his visage, something snapped inside me, and I no longer felt the need to grip those wands so tightly.
Then it wasn't my fault that a pair of wicker-covered wax hands grabbed him by the jaw and twisted his neck into an unnatural angle. His body crumpled to the ground. I turned to Galatea. I felt nothing but cold emptiness. "You should look in his pockets, pouches, and that sort of thing to see if he has anything valuable after combat is ended. If there's nothing, he might be hiding it in other places, such as his shoes or a pouch on his mount."
"Of course, Mistress." Galatea nodded and her hips swayed as she leaped off of the wagon and shifted her hands through the offending noble's things. A few pieces of silver, a small bronze knife, two pieces of gold, and thick, heavy electrum bracer were the only loot available.
Alexander sighed and went to catch the man's horse. He looked over at my questioning gaze and shrugged. "We might as well make use of it his horse. It's not a bad horse, it just had a bad rider, is all. Are we going to kill every border guard we meet?"
"No, that's probably a bad idea. I don't know why I had him killed. I guess he just bothered me. That's probably a bad reason… well, with his coin, we'll have something hand off to other border guards we meet." I frowned. "Bribes and taxes seem to be so similar."
"Aren't they the same thing?" Alexander shook his head. "But anyway, I'm sure someone on the city walls must have seen this happen."
"… we still have half a day. Let's just keep going along the road southeast." I suggested.
I tried to rationalize it with myself. I was going to save the world, what right did some undoubtedly corrupt noble have to stop me? Yet that was just an excuse for the dulled lack of disgust from the man's death. Yes, I did feel something, but the turning of the stomach came from how hideous he was in death, not in the act of killing itself.
Was I more stressed and worried about the new challenge than I initially thought? That didn't feel right. Yet I didn't know if I was just trying to find some reaction that wasn't there. Death surrounded the living, it seeped into our culture.
In this era, the morality of murder laid not like how it was perceived in modernity but something more primal. It was either me or him, the reasoning went. Where it might have been honorless to kill a messenger or someone under truce or within the hospitality of home, there wasn't anything wrong with killing outside of it… in this era. That sort of culture had sank into the core of my being, simply for growing up in this atmosphere, and I had not even realized it.
I turned my thoughts to the young man driving the wagon cart, and how he didn't seem phased at all by the sudden violence. And I thought back, to how he seemed to want Galatea to have nearly killed him if it meant he could claim he truly defeated her. He didn't look like he was acting, after he nonchalantly tied and harnessed the horse and we continued on our way.
Why was I even overthinking it? Here we were, a stolen horse, three puppets, a nearly full sack of rations, and it was mid-afternoon. In a sense, we were on a divine mission. Wasn't this so laughable? Or maybe, in the end, I just shouldn't care. Why did I even try to fit in, when the optimal path was to blaze through all obstacles? Why bother pretending to be innocent? Why hold back?
Staring back at the disappearing corpse, now just a black dot in the distance, I couldn't help but laugh and cry.
*
Any word send to Xerxes, now King of Kings, the Shahanshah, wouldn't arrive until after we arrived in Egypt. The dark grimoire allowed casting of spells simply with passage of time and sacrifice of lives. Considering mortals of this world were each worth one hit dice, they were going to require a lot of lives.
But that wasn't going to be a problem. It was a 'revolting' force, which was questionable to begin with since they were from Libya, a region that fell on the rim of Persian influence at best while Persia claimed to be the 'one empire', and its emperor claimed to be 'king of all nations', or 'king of the world'. And as a 'revolting force', they could get plenty of slaves, war prisoners, and refugees to sacrifice.
Every use of the dark grimoire had a chance of causing insanity, and every instance had a chance to draw the attention of more ancient, eldritch beings. Perhaps this insurrection—if it could even be that in truth—started out as the mad creation of a necromantic priest of evil, it would end up something very, very different.
I thought back to my family. I thought of my stern father who acted like he didn't care for me, but still shielded me from horrors and intrigue. I thought of my mother who taught me everything I knew in this life, and cared for me, fed me, treated me, and loved me. I thought of my newly born little brother. I thought of the folk of our city. I thought of my friends and their touch. Wasn't that love?
… Yeah. I would choke and kill random stranger a thousand times if it meant the people I loved were safe. I was staring down what might truly be the end of this Earth. Every enemy, every monster, every speed bump, every nuisance, every gnat, I would squash with impunity.
My hands fell onto my wands and my implements. My tools of creation and violence. Of twisting reality to my whim.
So I hadn't even met the enemy yet and I was a little desperate.
So what?
No more subtlety. The next one to stop me was going to get a face full of lightning. I had agreed to that and even promised it, hadn't I? I nodded to her, and that was enough. I was going to come back home soon. I got this.Growth 2.5
*
We traveled passed Laranda the next day after camping out in the middle of the road. It felt like the antiquity version of sleeping in the car, and it was equally uneventful. Most wild animals already knew not to approach the human flames on instinct, and we didn't meet another corrupt man abusing his power.
Leaving the mountains of Anatolia, we reached the edge where the hills and the deserts met. Hadad laid just in the horizon—yet, the sands obscured the city completely. A swirling wind picked up some days ago, engulfing much of the desert in a storm. While waiting at a clearing where other travelers stopped before entering the desert too, I decided against using magic to change the weather.
I didn't want to waste my efforts to change this land into greenery or even to make a temporary oasis, when the storm would subside in a day or two anyway. We had made good time by taking only over half a week to reach this point of the journey, though I had to get Alexander to practice his bargaining skills and vendor the horse. Living creatures simply couldn't sustain the speeds we needed.
Under the crackling embers surrounded by weary travelers, surrounded by the eerie, exhausted humming of dried throats, we found that evening among others who also traveled the long roads. This clearing had once been an outpost of a might empire lost to the sands of time and the fault lines beneath our feet, but its great pillars still offered refuge for those who sought relief from cutting winds and sinking sands.
There was a small caravan of about a dozen men at the other end of the clearing, they kept from most people due to the wealth they transported. It was a wise precaution, considering my last experience. At this fire, there were only smaller groups.
On my right, there sat the elderly man in his late forties or early fifties with his daughter at his side. He hummed a strange, forgotten tune while plucking at the strings of his setar, a long-necked lute of Iranian origins. Three men, looking and sounding more and more like bandits who survived an imperial raid, sat across from us. And finally, there was also a stranger who kept to himself, wrapped in a heavy cloak and the mannerisms of someone who thought himself superior to others, with a reinforced satchel that perhaps denoted the station of a messenger.
"… hum, hm, hmph," the elderly man sang his throaty tune without words.
"I thought you were supposed to be magus," Alexander asked him without any propriety and manners.
Yet the man did not take offense to this, even as his daughter bristled. He laughed and took a sip from his waterskin and responded with similar earnestness. "Just call me Farhad, young man. I might be a mag, but that is just a title other people foist onto me for being a little better read than most. My true passion, ah, it lies here."
"In music?" Alexander frowned. "I, ah, call me Alex, if I am to call you Farhad. If you keep calling me young man, I will start calling you old man."
"There is no shame in speaking truth, young man." He placed his fingers on the strings, stopping the sounds that vibrated the air. "There is more to this than music, it is the story passed down from long ago. There is power in song! It preserves the knowledge of the world!"
I couldn't take it anymore, so I interrupted before Alexander made further a fool of himself. "So then, Magus Farhad, why don't you tell a story? I would like to hear the song of your people. It must be fascinating."
The old magus' fingers plucked at his aged instrument with dexterity and skill, and a surety and slowness that came with age and experience. He nodded to himself as he gathered momentum in rhythm. "And so I shall oblige, young girl. I tell an ancient tale, the oldest of the old, of a song sung of one thousand years ago, of the ancient times to then. You might enjoy, young man, for it is the tale of a hero, the hero, the first hero."
Alexander turned his furrowed gaze my way, as if I could or would give him the answers he sought. It was almost silly how like a confused dog he looked. I shook my head and nodded to the old man; I had already decided not to act today, so I might as well enjoy the downtime.
"In those ancient days, in those distant nights," He sang with the melody, watching with dark eyes reflecting the cracking embers. "In years long forgotten, as sure as men forget the lessons they learned in each and every age, before the myths flooding and burning that ended the world, before the first bread were tasted and before the first ovens were lit, all things were created, and all things were given their place."
His daughter sang the next verse, whether out of concern for his weakening voice or because that was the way it was. They were an interesting bardic pair in this little desert watering hole, and even though she glared so at my companion, the vigor with which she threw herself into song told she sang this Babylonian song as if it was the first song she had learned. "When the Skies were split from the Earth, when the Earth was torn from the Skies, when Mankind first established itself, when Mankind first stood on its feet, those were times that Man would forget most, with such short memory of the mistakes that caused Man's first fall."
I knew by now that while Alexander closed his eyes to enjoy the tune, the words were lost on him. He didn't understand this twisted dialect of Akkadian that mingled with Avestan and the younger words from the current tongues of the Persians.
For a moment, I wanted to answer the accusations of the song. I wanted to rant about my experiences. I wanted to talk about what happened. I wanted to confide in someone my deepest secrets.
Such a dangerous influx of emotion could only be evoked by music.
But I gained insight in that moment.
I was fucked up.
I didn't know anything about child psychology, nor did I know anything about dealing with traumatic experiences. Anything that happened before literally dying couldn't compare. Yet, I haven't spoken to anyone about those thoughts. I had never truly gained an equal to gush about my dreams and my nightmares, my trials and tribulations.
Every emotion pent up within the heart, so full it filled to burst, and yet I couldn't, wouldn't dare think of speaking of such things. There was no one who could understand, anyway. And here in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, in the middle of the fucking desert, with only a senile, old bard, a teenage girl who couldn't decide to fuck or kill my companion, and with my muscle-headed companion who could only be as close as 'the older brother of my friend' could be, I had no one to confide to.
That… that couldn't be healthy, I realized in that moment. If I kept at it like this, then my emotional outbursts would only become more extreme as time went on, or perhaps I could break. Or something else. I didn't know, and that frightened me. Toss me a game system and I could deal the problems I faced as if they were game mechanics, and that was easy.
Toss me mental issues, then I couldn't make heads from tails. The Bastard must have known all along. It had done this, and I nearly ranted and raved to strangers—I might have even tried to tell this bard of how I missed modernity, of the weapons of the future, of massive cities of tens of millions, and of weapons that each could end the world.
It would have been a sweet release to just… talk about it. To keep talking about it. To ramble on and on about it, as if I were some lonely loser who missed all the problems of modernity simply because that was familiar.
But I wasn't that kind of person. I didn't speak. When the song subsided, my dark familiar perched above, casting a shadow so similar to her namesake in that poem.
"Did you finish singing of Gilgamesh?" I asked.
The old magus' eyes weren't exactly on mine. He met my gaze, but it seemed as if he was looking through me like I was glass, for something that I didn't even know was there. "No, no, young girl. I was just singing of the Goddess Inanna, who threatened to raise the dead to eat the living."
I had only spaced out for a moment, and already, we had descended into awkward silence. I turned to Alexander, who seemed to be rather flush, possibly from his strange flirtations with the magus' daughter. "It just sounded familiar to our situation, Aisa."
"… huh. Yeah, it does, I suppose. Do you know of what is happening in Egypt, old man?" I asked.
"No, no. We are going east to escape the wars, young girl." He shook his head and sighed, "And from the sounds of it, we made the right choice. I had heard strange tales of monsters walking the world, and I thank the Gods I never have to face them. The story of the Sardisian Spider is not for the faint of heart… and now, stories of the dead rising in Egypt? These are troubling times."
"The Sardisian Spider? Ugh, I told Xerxes it sounds better to call it Aragog," I grumbled. I had not liked the name after finding that the connection to other myths and the naming schemes of their monsters was not a coincidence. Xerxes had wanted to make himself into some kind of legendary hero, but all he did was make the fight sound so lame. "It wasn't so bad. I could take, like, ten of those spiders now."
"The young friend did say you had been present for the epic battle. Are you perhaps…" The magus' eyes widened.
"He's just boasting," the man's daughter huffed and drew herself away.
"What exactly did you even say?" I asked him.
Alexander looked away, but even in the dim moonlight, I could see his face had heated up. "I just said what I had heard, since I was not there, but my father was. You were summoned by the King of Kings, when he was just a prince, and together, you fought against a monster that was larger than walls, and could spear men up in a single bound."
"That could easily have been just an elephant. In fact, that was probably just an elephant or some exaggerated story. You Greeks are so ignorant, you probably don't even know what an elephant is, do you?" The girl chattered on to my surprise. She spoke well and loudly, and her father had not stopped her.
I wondered which tribe they were from that a girl had such freedoms. It couldn't have been the more eastern tribes, and the northern and western Greeks were utterly set in their ways to be assholes to their daughters. Besides, she sounded like she wasn't one. Still, the healthy skepticism was refreshing when most people didn't react outwardly and many just indulged me because I was a little girl. I cast the summon monster II spell, and a giant spider appeared beside my wagon. "It was like this one right here, except it was about twice as tall and twice as wide… and twice as long too."
A weird squeaking sound escaped the girl's lips. Her father blinked several times and clapped his hands. "That is an amazing thing. Will you tell me your story, little girl? I wish to record it!"
"… No. I'm going to sleep. Long day tomorrow, have to go stop the risen dead," I muttered and climbed into the wagon after dismissing the giant spider. With the amount of effort I had put into the wagon, I had found it a cozy and comfortable place to sleep.
I had figured some things out as we progressed. Masterwork transformation, and indeed the very label of masterwork, were both misguided in a sense. Most of the crafting magic relied on my own internal ability to make things, which on the surface didn't affect if something was masterwork or not—but the way the game displayed the idea of 'masterwork' was very binary in its either yes or no answer.
In reality, the world didn't work this way. A master could put an extra day's effort into making a clay cup by spending a day to even out the air pockets and air bubbles in the soft clay, and that alone affected the longevity and glazing of the pottery. Indeed, that binary difference could pass for whether or not something was a masterwork.
But then I could also use standardized measures, cut-outs, and molds, to make the clay cup like every other clay cup I made with only the minute differences that came with especially handcraft artisan works. Then, wouldn't that extra investment make my cup double masterwork?
That also didn't make any sense, because the truth of the matter was every craft was constantly improving. Humans kept finding new ways to do things better, and yet 'mastercraft' seemed to belie only the idea of being slightly better, when the difference between a mastercraft clay cup found in a boutique New York restaurant and a regular one made by any idiot journeyman from this classical era couldn't be summoned as simply slightly better.
So did this end up being a matter that relied on my crafting skill?
That was also a no—especially since making molds and using innovative tools in crafting said pottery piece didn't require the crafting skill to begin with, but knowledge. It was there that I had found that mastercraft was arbitrary. All that mattered was that I had expanded my knowledge such that I knew the methods the moment I cast the spell.
An interlocking set of carvings within wood that used its own tension to hold everything together? The crafting of specific woodworking tools that shortened the work by weeks simply in how the process was done? The new ways of levers, wedges, hinges, and other such things that made a wagon move faster, with more stability, and last longer?
As long as I knew how I could accomplish those things, all of them were included in the masterwork transformation spell, as long as I had already put together a rudimentary form of what I was making, and included all the necessary supplies.
In other words, the more knowledge in engineering, the more overpowered making something into masterwork was.
And that was why my wagon was so comfortable!
*
"… why are you following us?" I asked to the pair following on their camels.
"I said I wanted to tell your story, little girl!" The old magus called as he raced after us. "I'm not taking your answer unless it is your agreement!"
"If you follow us to Egypt, you will see horrific things! Things that will cause the end of the world if we don't stop them! Why do you want to put your life at risk? Didn't you just escape Egypt?" I called back.
"That was when I thought it was just a mundane war between Libyan raiders and a Persian King who didn't care! Now I can't believe that it isn't the surface of a hidden war between good and evil, the righteousness of humanity against the unrest of the dead! An epic!" He laughed.
"Well..." I looked over at Alexander. He was the worst type of conversationalist… but I really wanted someone to just talk to, even if it's for the little things. But more than that, if he was magus, then I could use his aid looking for other magi in Egypt—local aid would be worth an extra magic item on a quest like this one. "Alright, but you'll need to pull your own weight."
"Are we really letting random strangers join us?" Alexander muttered.
"That's not the question," I replied. "All that matters is if their joining would help raise the chances of our success even a little bit."
He didn't spoke for a while, as the sands worsened our speed such that even mortal creatures like camels could catch up and keep up. "I don't know about that, Aisa. It sounds so desperate, like you don't care about honor and you only care about victory."
"Because that's all I care about it, Alex. You… don't know. Maybe it's just how much we need this win. Maybe, more likely, the Priest of Set has already learned how to best exploit the dark grimoire." I said to him, "If that is the case, then even having a slightly higher chance to victory would be all we have in our bag of tricks. Well, that and lightning bolts. A lot of lightning bolts. I'm going to light up the night sky with lightning bolts, if that'll help us win this one. Hell, if it'll help, I'll summon so much lightning that the sands will blacken and melt into glass, Alexander. Do not doubt my resolve in this matter."