Growth 2.6
*
The benefit of aid weighed against slowing down for just a moment, we ended up taking the rest of the week to arrive on the shores of Canaan. Egypt was well without our reach now—the lands of Sinai laid south, and beyond those to the west rested the Bitter Waterway, a natural passage that had been expanded by the previous Shahanshah, Darius the Great, and would one day be expanded again to become the Suez Canal.
"What city is this?" I asked Farhad the Magus and his daughter, Roshanak, as we edged closer to the watery port sitting on a patch of earth that jutted out of the coast line like a tiny penis to the vast Persian Empire. We had just passed through the desert and the subsequent valley known to the Greeks as Koile Syria, which held a rather rough passage when we crossed the River of Lions within. There, the native Canaanites worshiped the God Lotan, a seven-headed sea serpent that could have jumped out of a fantasy novel… and that was about the limits of my knowledge.
"It is the City of Sur," Farhad responded generously as we waited in line to enter the city. "It is called Tyros by you Greeks, or Tyre, but the Canaanites just named the place after its foundation. They built it in a safe place, onto of heavy rocks and surrounded by water, so they called it stone. Crafty, shifty folk, those Canaanites… but they have a terribly unpoetic naming sense."
"Ah, built on rocks, so it is called a rock. I think there's a beauty in its simplicity," I remarked and I saw Alexander had mostly been ignoring our chatter by opting for trying to secretly ogle Roshanak's body. The boy was so subtle it took me nearly a minute to notice after he started. He couldn't really understand what we were saying as we switched between Babylonian, Avestan, and Persian without my noticing half the time, so it was excusable.
The city itself was an interesting sight.
It was split into two parts. The first laid on the coast, which was the 'low city', and the other was the 'high city', which sat upon a peninsula stretched out of the sands. It almost looked fantastical from here.
"Yes, much like how they founded a new city, and then called it the new city. Qart Hadast, or Karkhedon in your tongue, it was named that way to become a new Tyros. As I understand it, some of you Greeks even believe that those Canaanites who live there are scheming with Persians to eradicate all of the Greek peoples, little girl," He chuckled.
Qart Hadast or Karkhedon, they were the same name for the city of Carthage, the city that had gained power after its parent city of Sur had been conquered by the Achaemenids and also the future rival of Rome. I found myself shrugging. "It is easy to rally a peoples if they are faced with an overwhelming enemy, else they will be more keen to struggle with each other for the mere scraps on their table while their city burns around them."
"That… is not incorrect," He allowed, and his eyes darted back to the ghostly form of my phantom steed pulling the wagon before turning back to me. It seemed he shared that habit that Alexander had, but he liked looking at horses or something rather than cute, dusty girls wearing pretty half-face veils.
"What can you tell us about Tyros?" I asked. Too many people didn't ask for help when it could have saved years of needless effort from their lives. "This is the city that spawned Karkhedon, so it must be rather mythical?"
"It is!" He slapped his thigh and nearly fell from his camel before he righted himself with a nervous laugh that shouldn't belong to any magus. These little actions made him friendly, kindly, and the opposite of the arrogant men that my thoughts built up to be magi. "It is one of the oldest cities in the world, by my thinking. This is the city of Melqart, the Ba'al Sur… King of Sur, God of Warriors. He is the inspiration for your Greek God, Heracles, I think."
"What's that? I heard Heracles," Alexander snapped up from his daze.
"Typical Greek," Roshanak harrumphed. "You only pay attention when you think it matters to you, rather than respect your elders and listen at all times."
He looked hurt when he heard the girl's tone, but Alexander quickly rallied himself as if he was just happy the girl was paying attention to him. He was never this respectful even when talking to me, so it must have been the hormones. "I'm sorry, but I can't understand what they're saying."
"I will try to speak in the tongue of you Greeks, then," Farhad laughed. It must not have been the first time someone was smitten with his daughter, but as a member of the magus caste, she was mostly untouchable by the common man within Persia. "Tyros is known as the birthplace of Elissa the Dido, founder of Karkhedon, but it is also the birthplace of the Goddess Astarte, according to the Canaanites. Though, I understand you Greeks call her, ah, Europa."
"Oh, I know that one! She's the one that Zeus rutted with to make the King Minos of Krete." Alexander perked up and looked sideways to see if that impressed Roshanak.
"Typical Greek," Roshanak hissed under her breath. "Always saying your God Zeus raped this or that Goddess to make yourself feel adequate and act as if you were superior to other peoples. This is what's wrong with you Greeks. There is no respect for truth in your mythology!"
I was going to refute her, but she wasn't necessarily wrong. Even the Romans held this same idea, attributing various Celtic deities to Latinized forms… and then having Jupiter Optimus Maximus rape them. It was standard practice with all hegemonic powers, no different than America attacking a nation and taking its leader's face off their money and putting something else on it in the modern day. But that was a sort of whataboutism, the sort of 'so Persians did it, why can't Greeks do it' bullshit that I didn't want to sink into. Instead, I turned back to her father Farhad. "So what actual information can you tell me about this place? Can we get a ship to Egypt from here that would be faster than land travel?"
"It is possible," Farhad rubbed his chin and squinted at the packed city gates. "I will need to ask around on the docks first, but I think many ships are currently avoiding Egypt. Even without your word, there have been signs of… something wrong in the air. Animals fear and escape from the Nile, even if it means dying of thirst in the desert."
"Maybe a land route then." I sighed, but it was probably better that way since I didn't want to just abandon my wagon. "I know that there are still trading relations between Tyros and Karkhedon… and Egypt sells plenty of grain to Greece. Well, let us enter the city and see!"
"I do have a question, Young Aisa, before we go further," Farhad said.
"Go on?" I prompted him.
He looked back at the canvased arch of the wagon and frowned. "It is your companions, why do they not speak? You have not introduced them, and had I not sneaked peeks within, I would not have even known their existence!"
"Ah. That." I shrugged. "I made them from wax and wicker. It isn't anything wrong with them that they do not speak, it is just a limit of my capabilities. Maybe one day I will grow strong enough to breathe true life into them, but for now, this is the best I can do. I might as well introduce you to them. Come on, girls, meet Farhad. Farhad, meet Galatea, Enkidu, and 2B."
"But Enkidu is… er, well, huh, I see. This is, oh, oh, I see. So both Galatea and Enkidu are names of myths that had life breathed into them by the Gods, but what myth is the name 2B from?" He asked with furrowed brows.
"Uhhh… it's a very convoluted story about, well, the end of the world, the end of humanity, and stuff like that." I blinked. "Oh, hey the line is moving again, let's go!"
*
We entered the city easily enough, having paid only one silver coin for the entire tax, which was for having a wagon to begin with—people with only a camel or a horse were seen as too poor to have much on them to pay taxes for anyway, and there was a special rent cost to setting up shop in their markets that was separate from a passage cost.
I had already been on the edge, having derived so many spells of the second and third level and crafted so many pieces and things, so it wasn't much of a surprise that the exploration experience finally gathered enough that I reached level six wizard. Exploration seemed to be rather a stagnant form of growth, so I vowed that after this was over, I might actually take up that traveling thing, before traveling gave so little experience that it wasn't worth it to travel just for experience.
Level six felt rather lackluster. It didn't have any feats or other forms of advancement that were knowledge or skill ex nihilo. It didn't come with a new level of spells, just a little more of the same. It was just… skill points, and an extra slot, and a few new spells, a little more power.
I decided to get a couple of new spells; Mad Monkeys, a funny conjuration spell that summons a swarm of monkeys to attack whatever I wanted, Storm Step, also a conjuration spell which allowed short-distance teleportation by transforming myself into a sizzling bolt of elemental electricity, and finally, I took Minor Dream, which was a good way to just send a message to Xerxes since we were going faster than I had anticipated. He would get a message, provided he wasn't awake in the middle of the night… though, maybe he stayed up later than I did?
There was no way that any message I sent to the Persian King of Kings could have reached him already. It would have to reach Smyrna first, pass through the chain of command, reach the Satrap, who then needed to verify its authenticity, and then it would be sent to the man who amounted to the Court Vizier, who would then pass it onto Xerxes' mom for all I knew, and then it would reach Xerxes. Each step took anywhere between a few days to months.
Anyway, as we traveled from the gates of the City of Tyre to its port, we were met with some stares and whispers, which was probably because of how pretty my wagon was. Even after ten straight days of hard-pressed traveling, it still looked almost brand new. This was because I had used the masterwork transformation spell on the oils and the dyes I used to make the canvas roofing, which allowed it to not just resist sunlight weathering, but also things like winds and dust. Its titanium white look was also something special, considering everything else looked just a little dirtier in comparison, sort of like how toothpaste commercials always bleached teeth white even though that was an unnatural look.
And obviously because of how unnaturally pretty my wagon was, some guy stumbled in front of us. Farhad tried to get a word in, but those men came in a small crowd, with five of them dressed similarly like they were some kind of priest or something out of a Biblical kid's story that could be seen from some Sunday school coloring book.
"I am the Priest of Melqart, and I see before me a dark omen! You there, there is to be no dark mysteries practiced within the city! I command you to begone from the city!" The old man with balding head and white beard, covered in dark clothes and many shining trinkets and jewelry demanded.
"Good Priest, my friend," Farhad led his camel over, having dismounted within the city as was proper manners, and smiled with the look of a diplomatic man. He even winked at me. "My friend, we are trying to leave the city, this is so. We are simply asking if any ships are traveling to Egypt that we can board."
"Pah! Of course there are ships to Egypt! This is Sur! We have not fallen so much with Persian rule that we have no ships, but none would take on someone who practices the dark arts like yourselves!" The elderly man declared, much to the cheering and harrumphing of his fellows.
The way I saw it, the city's economic status had fallen with the expansion of the Achaemenids, where Tyre used to hold hegemonic rule over all Canaanites or, as they were called by the Romans, the Phoenicians, but now that it was occupied by Persians, Phoenicia based in Carthage had risen in independence, wealth, and status, becoming a mighty merchant powerhouse that ruled practically a third of the Mediterranean Sea, everywhere from Libya and further west.
But this was one of those moments where I could have solved things diplomatically. I even had a total of four points in diplomacy! Yet, I wasn't sure that was the right path. The way he said it meant that we would have a hard time looking for passage, so we needed one of three things. We could have violence, money, or sociopolitical pressure.
I wasn't about to dump more money on something even if it could lead to slightly nicer people. Much like how I first did when I played the Witcher games, I needed to fleece everyone for everything they had because that was how much it cost just to advance and make my implements. Similarly, I knew trying to invoke Xerxes' name didn't do any good… no one would believe a little girl anyway, and from the looks of the slowly forming mob of people, even if I did invoke the name of the Persians, that wasn't going to end well.
So a small wooden wand—twelve inches, thick, veiny and rather girthy, with a supple flexibility that hard wood often lacked—slid down and out of the trick sheath under my wrist much like how a blade might thrust within Assassin's Creed. I pointed it at the elderly priest, his posse, and those behind him, who seemed to look on as an old, privileged man bullied us, and uttered the incantation key words that triggered the wand.
Crackling electrical lightning burst from the tip of my wand, twisting and wreathing like an angry water serpent, howling through the air in a single instant but lingering with such blinding flash that I was seeing spots. Little fact of the lightning bolt spell—it was one hundred and twenty feet in range, but this meant it struck everything in a one hundred and twenty foot line.
Roadside stands that were within the vicinity were shattered into a shower of merchandise and wood, thrown into the air, and burst into flames. Men directly in its path felt the fury of a natural force hotter than the surface of the sun, thrown back, pierced, hollowed out, burst into gore, or so many other strange effects that came when meat came into contact with lightning. Even those golden rings and tinkling necklaces the old priest wore melted into red-hot, molten gold.
The crowd cried in a disorderly mess, many were laying on the ground moaning or screaming in pain, and many close enough to see but not close enough to feel much more than the electrical currents tickle their nose hairs turned tail to run or fell to their knees and pissed themselves. Old women who watched made protective signs to their gods, and young children, well, kids around my physical age started crying.
Either way, the road was cleared through fear or through violence. But it would save us a day or more, and perhaps this single act of killing so many indiscriminately in the streets would even elevate our bargaining position if we could get the attention of a captain to bargain for passage.
To those that remained as much as to those companions who couldn't peek into my head like my familiar or puppets could, I spoke in a calm, loud voice. "No one stops me. No one threatens me. I want to be in Egypt sooner rather than later."
Some of those people who had been thrown aside by the lightning bolt nodded, perhaps to me or perhaps to themselves. More than a few grown men whimpered and started to clasp their hands and kneel in supplication. A few children even found the strength and bravery to look at me directly, unlike their parents who huddled together and tried to act like ostriches with their heads buried in sand.
Whatever the case, no one approached us. "I think they've got the point. What's the weight of a few more on top of all those I didn't save when I never bothered to go to Sardis for the better part of a year? I'm sure Xerxes will say that this is fair. Let's go, Farhad. You said you knew someone in the docks, was it?"
"Ah, erm, yes, one of the men who oversees the unloading…" For some reason he shuddered as we passed the road. It must have been because of the smell of the roast, someone was cooking a mean pork belly around the street. I made a note to return some day and taste the local dishes. "I do not know if he is there today, however…"
"If we can't find your friend, we can still ask around," I reasoned. "And if we fail that, then all we can do is see if there is another offering passage or try our hand in the desert again."Like
Growth 2.7
*
Hiram was a thin man with the complexion of clay and a dark beard that reached near his elbows. His hair, like most of the men on the ship, was bound by a tight, violet hat that only allowed his curled locks out at the hind end of his head. He stood with vim atop the rocking waves even at dock, with his hands rested on his hips and an eternally smug expression on his face.
This was a man who owned his own life, and for many Phoenicians, his life was his ship. After Cyrus the founder of the Achaemenids had conquered and then divided Phoenicia into its four sister kingdoms of Sidon, Tyre, Arwad, and Byblos, all many Phoenicians had was their life at sea. Carved of their famous cedarwood, these round ships with spherical hull and curved sterns held a single rectangular sail at its center, but it was the experienced sailors and oarsmen who truly navigated the Phoenician seas.
It wouldn't be an understatement to say that within the Persian Empire, the best ships came from Phoenicia and the best sailors came from Tyre. Furthermore, unlike the often biased and misrepresented ideas of slave galleys filled with chained rows, each rower on such a Phoenician ship prided themselves in being the best of the best, and rowing was a job only allowed to the citizenry.
Glassmakers, scented wood carpenters, dye makers and cloth sowers, they all came to and from the lands of the Phoenicians. Yet all of them fell beneath the standing of the sailor, whose value to the cities could never be matched, with valor, honor and courage that only the noblest of heroes could attest. That was how the Phoenicians saw themselves, and that was the self-superiority that such a captain of a ship must feel.
Which was why Captain Hiram did not disembark from his ship until we started talking and the spell that summoned my phantom steed had already passed. He stood a bit shorter than Farhad the Magus, but was similar in height with Alexander.
Farhad arrived first, having asked me to let him do most of the talking. He clasped his right hand on the wrist of Hiram and Hiram did the same, which seemed to be the version of the handshake of the day. From there, Farhad introduced us, "You remember my daughter, Roshanak?"
"Ah, the little Roshanak, now a grown woman! With such strength of body too!" Hiram seemed much less arrogant off his ship, probably due to the friendly greetings we offered him.
"It has been something like two years. It is not so long." Roshanak replied with a rather subdued tone. She seemed to be that way ever since the market incident, much like how I would feel in the morning if I didn't get my coffee or tea at her age. Come to think of it, we hadn't had a proper breakfast yet.
I resolved to see to it that we got her something to eat later, because this almost demure and shy-sounding girl didn't seem like our traveling companion for the past few days at all. Farhad seemed to pay it no mind, or perhaps he had already known about his daughter's rather pale complexion from not eating a hearty breakfast. He was her father, after all. "This is young Alexander, and his friend, Aisa of Troias."
"Troias?" Hiram's eyebrows rose to make his eyes look like how those massive things painted on the side of his ship looked. "Then why do you two seem so… Greek to me? If you are truly of the Troias, should you not hate the Greek?"
"Hate the Greek? I thought we were Greek," Alexander answered the question by putting his mouth on his foot.
I rolled my eyes. "He means our heritage."
"Yes, heritage, that's the Greek word for it. I never used much of Greek outside of 'how much?' and 'no deal!' but I know that word, yes." Hiram chuckled to himself, though the humor was shared with the other older man in the group.
Farhad took pity on Alexander so he turned to him and answered, "Darius the Great once offered sacrifice in Troad before he left for Greek. It might have been too long ago for you to remember, but many who go to fight in Greece do so. For you see, a long time ago, your Troad was a prosperous trading city at the crossroads of empires much like Phoenicia was in the time of Cyrus… and then the Greeks came to slaughter your men, throw your male babies from the walls, and rape and enslave your women."
"How come I never heard of this?" Alexander gasped, bewildered.
"It's the Iliad, Alexander." I reminded him, "You studied the work learning how to write in Greek, or did you already forget after ten days on the road?"
My traveling companion had the decency to redden and stammer, "I may have put more focus on the warlike ways than the study of scribbles on the page. It's all so complex, Greek. You have to write it winding like trying to plow a field. I get headaches trying to read."
"No matter, no matter," Hiram interrupted the younger man's embarrassment. "I am sure you will learn well enough, in time, that the Greeks are a hypocritical people, selfish, hateful, unbrotherly, and greedy, much like it is written in your Iliad."
"Hiram just doesn't like the Greeks because they all know the myth of the Argonauts, but never mention that much of that myth was inspired by Phoenician exploits at sea," Farhad stage-whispered to Alexander.
The ship captain grimaced at the Akkadian magus before shaking his head. "Alright, you drunken singer, what is it that you want? You're a terrible customer, so I'm not giving you any discounts."
"Ah, well," Farhad's eyes darted to me for a brief second. "It's just, we're on a holy mission, you see, to…"
"Will this offend my God?" Hiram frowned, eyes turning to me after Farhad's signal.
"Why?" I asked, "Does your God wish for the world to be overrun by the dead, for maddening evils to enter the world, for curses of dark mysteries to course through the land like rivers as the actual rivers become red with the blood of mortals?"
"How much are you paying, girl?" A voice called out from a neighboring ship. It was a rather barrel-chested man with similar ethnicity to the captain we were speaking to. "I might be Hiram's rival in seacraft, but I, Abiff, am a fair and honest man! If you seek to cheat my rival with tall tales of some nonsense, then be prepared to be rejected by the city of all Sur!"
That brought up a good point, in actuality. I couldn't just force these men to ferry us with nothing but magic… it wasn't like holding someone at gunpoint and making them drive, since it was a job of many rowers at the same time. Any one of them could mutiny, or worse, toss me overboard in the middle of the night, or something else!
I had noticed that Farhad had been shaking his head at this new captain, Abiff, but I didn't want the old man to actually pay the fair, whatever that might be. We had only traveled together for a little while, but he had sort of grown on me with his enthusiasm for stories. I had only gotten so far telling little stories from my past, and that had evoked a sense of nostalgia in me. Me? Nostalgic for all the problems of modernity? More likely than I thought!
Farhad looked like he only owned the two camels and his daughter, and the clothes he wore. He was probably one of the poorest magi in the world. It wasn't right to force him to do something like that, with his impoverished state, especially since such trips were expensive and could only usually be paid for by the trade made along the way.
A trade, huh? Well, I could offer them something at the end of the journey. I slipped a thin wand out of my sleeve and waved it above my head. "I can give you one of these, it's worth thousands of pieces of gold, er, I'm not sure the exact talents, minas, or shekels conversion, but it's a lot."
"It's a stick," the man blinked.
"It's not." I pouted.
"Hiram, it looks like your terrible ways of helping strangers have led you to meet only the poor, the false, and the simple in the head." Abiff guffawed along with many of the men who were on his ship doing various labors.
I flicked it the air, and a lightning bolt flew forth into the skies. Its crackling energies thundered throughout the entire dockyard and lit up the cloudy late afternoon as if it was bright and mid-morning. Such force shimmered and left an energy in the air that caused the hair to rise and the skin to tingle, especially for someone who stood in the front row… me. Ugh. I needed to do something about my hair again, it was getting static and sticking to my skin. "It's not a stick. It's a wand of my magic."
I had immediately made a mistake there—the word for magic wasn't like how in modern Earth, where magic had no connotation with the divine. In this era, 'magic' was 'strength of gods' or 'mystery of gods', basically, I had accidentally claimed to be some kind of shitty priest or something.
Now, normally, this wasn't a problem. I had indulged in it enough at Troad, after all. Using local superstition to my advantage was something I would never balk to do.
However, not every claim to divinity held a sort of favor with the common people. This was a time when people still actively worshiped and sacrificed people to gods. I was literally going to Egypt because someone had a dark grimoire, a cursed book that allowed people to sacrifice lives to cast practically any spell they could think of, all the while driving the wielder insane. I wasn't about to turn around and become the same kind of person… and more importantly, what would people think if they knew I was some asshole who liked to watch people bleed for me?
Not only that, but the way sacrifices worked in this ancient world was that many times after a sacrifice was held, people would eat. Usually, we sacrificed a cow of some kind to our gods, but then we were the ones to eat after. Sacrifices were basically the ancient world's version of a weekend barbecue!
… but sacrifice a person? The end result could be anything from something innocent to outright cannibalism.
"N-no, that wouldn't be necessary," Hiram stuttered immediately, probably thinking I was some insane, power-hungry cannibal. He waved his hands in quick submission, "I shall, ah, we, my men, will take you to Egypt, was it, Farhad?"
"No, your God is weak! El cannot hold against the might of my God, Dagon!" Abiff claimed suddenly and approached us with vigor. He jogged over eagerly and slapped his chest. "My God is the God of Seas and all sea creatures obey him! It is why even if we have less people on our ship, we can always be as fast as Hiram!"
"El is the true father of the Gods," Hiram made a gesture of supplication and another over his own head. "Do not bring the Gods into our arguments again, Abiff. We worship all Gods, and that is how it should be, ah… little girl, I mean, honored lady, what is your name?"
"I am Aisa," I said it slowly, knowing that it was a foreign language to them. I had spoken to enough Chinese and Spanish people to know speaking to others who didn't know the language well enough would cause all sorts of misunderstandings. So I slowed my tongue and explained. "It is Aisa as in the other name of Atropos."
"Lady… Lady Aisa, please, I will kill a sea cow for you, it will be my honor to take you to Egypt!" Abiff claimed.
Not to be one-upped, which the direction of this conversation had taken a strange turn to, Hiram growled and claimed, "Abiff! You! Argh! Lady Aisa, you may cease worrying. I shall ensure your noble labor be accomplished! I shall even sacrifice a relative at the altar if it be your wish!"
"No!" I shrieked, eyes wide, before forcing myself to calm down and not overreact like that again. That would be horrible for my bargaining position. "No, no. You don't need to sacrifice anyone. I'll go with you, right, Farhad?"
"… yes," he nodded slowly, almost as if he was displeased that we didn't have a human sacrifice!
Whoever I had just saved from the altar better pray to me or some shit, I vowed in my head as the sense of dread seeped into my tummy. I didn't want to get on a ship with a guy who sacrificed people to stupid superstitions! I didn't wanna!
But… but… I needed to stop the zombie apocalypse. I needed this. I…
… I could only look at the bright side of things. At least with me around to keep these lunatics in check, everything would be fine. Who knew what would happen if I went with the other guy? What if they sacrificed someone anyway? Really, someone ought to thank me for doing the world a favor here.
*
After we boarded the ship and everyone settled in to do their own thing, I was feeling like I was in a Larion Studios video game; those usually started with a ship wreck much like how Elder Scrolls games usually started with being a prisoner or something.
Farhad had gone off to drink wine with the captain, Alexander went off to comfort Roshanak for some unknown reason. Farhad's action I could understand, but I didn't know what to make of Alexander's behavior. Maybe Roshanak was easily sea sick? That could be why she hadn't been feeling good all day after we entered the city. Poor girl, she looked like she was going to throw up at any moment.
Captain Hiram and his crew were really accommodating, going so far as to load my enough wagon onto their ship. I tried to be helpful, but in the end, it was my puppets who lifted it up anyway. The sailors would be happy to know that my puppets didn't need to eat their rations, and that'd be a decent saving, if nothing else!
It was probably a bad time to start contemplating on how to change my arcane school of magic. After all, the school of ice was still under the schools of air and water. Those would be important in a place like the ocean, even if we were just drawing around the coast at a decent speed. All things said, however, it would be at least a week before we made it from Sur to Pelousion, the eastern most city of Egypt… and who knew how long it'd take for us to reach Memphis?
In the end, I had come to the conclusion that I couldn't do much—there was simply no time to do something like change my school from ice to, say, transmutation. However, there was enough time to become a universalist… because universalist wizards were wizards who didn't specialize in any school at all.
I decided it this way because it was a fast route. I could only be more vigilant against someone throwing me overboard without the extra skill points in swimming that the ice school of magic gave me. That was fine. This was fine.
I had changed into an Arcane Crafter (Universalist), and in doing so, I took the time to look at the waste of money that were my five rings of energy resistance. I could probably use them if the bastard was going to throw magic at me, but I doubted it. A single fireball would take him, like, three or four hours to cast, in addition to the human sacrifice needed. I had been anticipating that my next challenge would have magic when I made these rings, but this…
… ugh, fuck it. Over the journey, I melted it down and with the help of my puppets and Nevermore, we made something decent from it—a headband of mental prowess +6, with both charisma and intellect!
I was just soothing myself by saying it like this. I hated this. I hated it.
Damn it. I lost a fourth of my resources doing this!
I could have just made this to begin with, and then still had something left to make another item! Bastard! You damn Bastard, you knew didn't you? You, you, you… argh! Alright, calm down, Aisa.
Accordingly, at my current level of intelligence, I had two points above what was labeled as 'world-famous level intelligence' of the level of immortal demon lords, angels, and great wyrm dragons… like, what, superior to minds of Einstein and Hawking? I didn't know. Similarly, my current charisma made me 'life of the party', two points above 'immediately likeable by many people'. There wasn't any way to accurately test charisma, considering I barely talked to Alexander to begin with and I didn't know anyone else on the ship well enough, but I could test my intellect.
As I dove into the mysteries of magic more and more, I had come to realize that most of what I was doing was simply filling a mold. It was like those shitty action roleplaying games where all that mattered was the higher number… until I realized that wasn't the case. With more pure knowledge, I found that magic was magical. Not in the way of an exchange between arbitrary magic points and effect, but actually making energy ex nihilo from what I could tell.
It was the usage that really stumped me—all arcane magic seemed to focus on imposing my will on reality. That didn't seem like the right way to use excess energy, considering the properties of entropy. It was from this point that the points I put into knowledge (past life) seemed to gain some clarity.
One of the reasons why 'unlimited power' was an impossible concept to the quantum physics of modern Earth was because of how we pursued it. We sought it every place that might have been sensationalized into a sort of mythological source of power, when it couldn't be harnessed this way. Of those, one of the more famous was the idea of zero-point energy, which was bullshit and wanked up into something that it wasn't by science fiction writers.
That was beside the point; what mattered was the 'orthodox' way of using arcana fell under using the arcane energy to arrange what was available in the 'material plane' in a way that seemed like 'bending reality to my will', when in truth it was the path of least resistance, and also lazy.
Whether it was E=mc2 or m=E/c2, the measure of energy was mass. When wizards rearranged what was already there in a way, for example, like polymorph, it would eventually run out. Sure, there were spells that could be held in place with permanency, but there was a limit to that spell too, even beyond the concept of game balance. Similarly, making mass of sufficient power would eventually run out, and couldn't be used for magic, like in the spells minor creation and major creation.
I couldn't fall under that path, because it was a tried and failed path. When we arranged matter in a way that fitted our spells, the way entropy worked meant that eventually chaos would undo that order because that was the energy missing, in the conservation of energy, no?
So instead of trying to do something easy and prove, with knowledge conjured from nothing, why couldn't I try something not done?
Instead of using that energy to rearrange the universe, why couldn't I make more of the universe?
… I didn't get any sleep that night.
*
"Aisa, you don't look so good..." Alexander stared at me on the final day of our sea voyage.
"Shut up." I grumbled while cradling my forehead, and somehow my voice still echoed like thunder, at least in my head. It felt like an awful hangover.
My male companion wisely decided to nod and look for someone else to bother, but he wasn't fast enough.
I probably had rings around my eyes too, having gotten no sleep trying to keep calculations all memorized in my head. I turned to him with the sleep deprived maniacal madness seeping into my consciousness and promised, "When we get to Pelousion, I'm going to take a walk."
Growth 2.8
*
I didn't go for a walk after we arrived in Pelousion.
As we pulled into the harbor, a gloomy fog fell over us. The density of the vapors veiled anything but the most ominous dark silhouettes of the city from us. Perhaps people could go on a break and cause no sound, but as Nevermore flew back, not even the sounds of animals could be heard.
Only the sound of creaking wood from the Persian trading vessels docked at port could be heard over the voice of the rocking waves. They roiled back and forth like an old seesaw, a sound that echoed into the dim gray skies and seemed to scrape against the mind like old, uncut nails against a chalkboard.
"Caw caw," Nevermore landed on my shoulder, her grim feathers heralding a dark time to arrive. I tried to calm her, but she could feel it in the air, and she shuddered at my touch.
"Something's not right," Hiram uttered as his twenty sailors worked to slow our arrival. His hands tightened on the ropes as he furled the sail. "Hold on, stop rowing! Where are the people?"
"I've a bad feeling about this," Farhad muttered before uttering an Akkadian prayer to Sin-Nanna.
I looked over to Hiram, who almost looked as if he wanted to regret his decision to take the trip. He hesitated, and as our eyes met, I felt I could understand. I too was a coward who wanted nothing more than to be a shut-in for the rest of my life. Goosebumps grew on my forearms and I felt like we had entered the beginning of a horror movie from the 1900's… anywhere from 1900 to 1999, really.
If our arrival had been heralded by a violin solo, or heavy, sudden slamming of a piano, I probably would have jumped right off the ship.
But I turned my gaze away from the captain, knowing that I couldn't hide my own fears much longer. I had to act strong, if nothing else than to make sure they didn't jump off the ship before me. I knew what happened to the fat kid who couldn't keep up with the group; my physical attributes were still shit.
Dark husks of withered trees without a single leaf dotted the shoreline. Being in Egypt and in the middle of summer, this reinforced that sense of something twisted going on. Those trees didn't look like they died—they looked more like the hollowed out gnarls were dozens of spider-like eyes, crawling up and down the bark. Whenever my attention turned away and my gaze returned, I felt as if they had changed their place. My mouth was dry. "Captain, we still need to land."
"If nothing else, we do need to restock our food supplies," Hiram agreed with me. He turned to his men, and pointed towards the shallows—in this era, ships were more like simple fishing boats, and they could get close the shore with little trouble. "Let's pull in over there."
"How are you feeling?" I asked Alexander, who had joined as one of the rowers. He had not the practice to row with such power and stamina, but what he lacked in practice, he tried to make up with fervor.
And now, he looked rather a sad sight, with his tunic colored by flaked specks of dried, salty sweat. His hair gained a greasy sheen, and gray circles rimmed his eyes. "I… don't think I'll become a rower."
"It is a rather Athenian thing, isn't it?" I responded with his sentiment.
"Yes, I'd rather not bugger little boys," He tried to laugh, but as we drew closer, it became apparent that the wrongness lingered in the air. An awkward silence fell onto us, so we turned our attention back to the tasks at hand.
I checked the wands I stashed with me, my puppets stopped rowing beside Alexander and readied themselves. Looking back, it seemed unwise to not outfit them with something thicker—combat in real life never worked like how armor class worked and a layer of bronze scales and a couple axes could have made such a big difference.
No one said anything as we drifted closer to the shore. It looked close enough to jump off and wade over onto the beach. Had they been waiting for me to do something? I shuddered at the thought—we rushed down as fast as we could, knowing how bad it could get, and yet it had already grown at this rate. If we somehow turned around, I couldn't handle fucking outsiders invading this Earth.
No, it had to be me, it seemed. I just needed to make the gesture, and then they could do the rest. So I climbed onto the edge before jumping down into the waters, which rose high to my chest. The ship wasn't getting any closer to the shore.
My puppets dragged me up and helped me to the dry land. From here, even the waters looked black and bottomless. I looked around me, and waved at the men on the ship. "Come on. The world is waiting."
"Do you know what is… what is the ghostly feeling in the air?" Farhad jumped in after me first. Out of all of them, he seemed most eager. It must have been that story he was chasing.
I had been scanning the beach. Fishing nets laid around unattended, buckets left to drift, and half eaten bread rotting in the wind. The closer I looked, the more I saw the signs of something terribly sudden that caused what was probably the disappearance of a whole city. It was like those unclaimed disappearances of cities, these mysteries could go on unsolved for hundreds of years if not forever. I pointed around us, "Whatever happened, happened quickly. Foot prints in the sand… possibly only three or four days old."
"Then if we look within the city, perhaps there may still be a few people left. They would not have starved to death too quickly… would they? What came through Pelousion?" His gray eyebrows came together in confusion.
"An army, if we're lucky," I decided.
"And if we're not?"
"Something worse."
*
The southern half of Pelousion had been buried in sand. As we drew closer out of the beach, we found ourselves on what looked to be an ancient battlefield. It was only so old that it could have been something from a fantasy movie, but traces remained that showed the battle couldn't have been more than a few decades ago. These fields were strewn with scattered bones, some of which looked like they had only been recently unearthed by the shifting sands.
"Father, what is this place?" Roshanak asked. Though we had dragged the ship ashore, no one wanted to stay with it for some reason—they were probably as hungry as I felt, and there was only bad, dried stuffs left onboard anyway.
"An old scar on Egypt. Decades ago, just a few years after I was born, the King of the Persians came to this land with war in mind, and a great battle was fought here." Farhad sighed. "I avoided places like these. They are not good fortune."
"Interesting," I sighed and gestured to 2B. "Go over there, the well at the side of the city. See if there's anything to drink to be drawn up."
My puppet strode over robotically. She turned around, "There are children."
"What?"
"In the well, Mistress," She answered.
"G-Go away!" A gasp cried out from within the well in Egyptian.
"It's alright. I'm here to help." I called as I walked over.
"No! It's safe in here! We can't go outside! Go away, you'll get them to know we're here!" The child's voice grew fast and desperate, begging me to turn around.
Now my curiosity was piqued. I peered down into the well, and I saw a boy who looked only a few years older than me and another boy around my age. The younger was sitting in the edge of the well, but the other boy stood where the light was defiantly. I waved at them, "Hello there. Can you tell me what happened to Pelousion?"
"Huh?" He blinked dumbly.
"… Pr-Amun, your city," I said the name of the land in Egyptian. Pr-Amun, house of the God Amun. "What happened here?"
"You… you're a girl!" He gasped as if that was what was so surprising.
"Yes?" I frowned.
"Girls can't be heroes! You're going to… to… something bad will happen to you! You need to leave right now!" He urged, suddenly interested in my welfare.
Except I knew what was good for me. I knew I couldn't run away from this fight… I could only do what I could to prepare. "You're at the bottom of a well, boy. You're not in any position to complain… I'm the only hero you're going to have. Come on, I'll have them pull you up."
"No! S-Stay away!" The younger of the two boys cried out. True terror colored his voice. It was the sound of raw, dry fear, tainted with sleep deprivation and dehydration. I knew it, because I've been there.
"Alright, we won't pull you out, but I need to know what happened here," I bargained.
"You promise you aren't an evil daemon?" He asked.
The older boy turned and pushed the younger boy. "Don't ask that! If she's an evil daemon, she'll know we know!"
I wanted to slap my forehead. Daemon was the term in this area for any supernatural entity. It wasn't until the advent of Christianity that the term had perverted itself into representing something worse. However, even in this time, there were good and bad daemons, and each person had their own personal daemons. "Look, we got off on the wrong foot. Let me try again. I am Aisa, and I am pleased to meet you. What are your names?"
"I'm Den, and this is my big brother Abyd!" The little boy answered immediately before his older brother could do something about it. He sounded so innocent despite whatever they had been through.
The older boy, Abyd, slapped his palms over his younger brother's face. "You stupid! Daemons can curse you with your name!"
"Alright, that's just getting annoying. I'm not an evil daemon," I said.
"That's exactly what an evil liar would say!" He shouted.
"Fuck it, levitate."
"Levi-what?"
That was about as far as he got before both boys were lifted out of the well by an unseen force. They wiggled and struggled against my magic, but they were powerless as the invisible strands of the might of arcana pulled them through the air and made the land onto the desolate sands in front of me, with all the sailors and traveling companions behind me. "Levitate. It is one of the simpler applications of my magic."
"Y-your magic?! I knew it, you're an evil daemon!" Abyd scrambled up to his feet, but not before bumping into the burly and muscled Phoenician sailors who came onto the land with me. "… Uh."
"Now then," I knelt beside his little brother. I didn't want be forced to use another spell, so here was me hoping diplomacy worked. "Den, is it?"
"Y-Yes! P-Please don't eat me!" He still had the moisture for tears, he wasn't going to die from dehydration. He wasn't in danger of something before he answered my questions anyway. "I'm not tasty."
I patted him on the head, which didn't seem very right because I was only two inches taller than him. "Look, I just want to know what happened to this city. Why is it empty? Where are the people?"
Den looked over at his struggling brother before wiping away his tears. "It came in the night, from the water. It came and took people, and then the next day, more came. Everyone came back, but they were like it."
Son of a bitch.
I wanted to cry. I really did. I almost broke down right there.
It wasn't even me, but the men behind me, who should have been so much stronger than this, who tensed first. I resisted the urge to turn and tell them to shut up and man up, and kept talking. "It? They? Where did they go?"
"They're all around us," Den answered helpfully.
Clack, clack, clack.
"Oh."
*