Sweetpot Riverport

It was a great 3 days trip, by horse. From Hell to a very nice place.

Sweetpot Riverport is not our national capital, it is just the most important city in this province, but it is a proper city. This is one of those places protected by a level 5 or 6 spell. I don’t know which one, but it definitely shows.

My home village in this world was a small fortified ring of stone, surrounded by a second ring of stone with taller and less fortified towers of guard. There was a pit and drawbridges in all entrances. Two drawbridges for every way inside the village, actually. One between the external wall and the internal one, the other between it and the outside. There was only a little more than 50 houses inside, plus storehouses, granary, Municipal Market, and three temples from different religions. One big for the size of the village, two so small that you could hardly fit 100 people comfortably in their main halls. There was the guard barracks, the Mayor Castle, with was really just another house a bit larger and more strongly fortified.

There was squares. A garden. Big deposits and collective rooms in the underground. To hold people in case of emergencies, and during the worse winters. Sometimes temperatures go so low in the region that everybody how lives in the rural area around the city needs to seek shelter in this underground stronghold. All villages in the mountains have something similar for emergencies.

Most people lived in the rural areas, including ourselves. To own a house in the city itself is only really for the richest families. Most the time almost all those houses inside the fortified walls would be empty except for the servants keeping them clean and ready to receive their masters. Who lived elsewhere, possibly far away in the capital.

I seldom had reason to go into de city, unless I had to deliver a message up there. The village mage herself had her home and school close to the main external gate, but on the external side of it.

Still, there was no actual magic ritual protecting the village.

Hydra Cross was a big place, in terms of population, I cannot begging calculating how many houses of people was up there. Perhaps as many as here in Sweetpot, or almost. However, Hydra is a chaotic and mostly miserable place. Ugly and dirty in 9 to each 10 parts. There was some beauty, some finely decorated streets and buildings. Specially around Main Market. However, generally speaking, the place smells human dejects, urine, and sickness.

Sweetpot Riverport is a Merchant City, a port in a large and intensely navigated river. Clean grey stone and marble everywhere you look. Three meters deep channels where we can see the ground clearly, with multicoloured fishes swimming everywhere, in the shadows of small canoes and rafts. No smell of anything filthy or rotting.

They have piped water, underground sewer and some effective filtering system that keeps the water in the port separated from the canals that serve as part of the logistic net of urban transportation. There are all the medieval structures of defence you would expect, my home village escalated up a thousand times, so to speak. However, their real protection, what makes this place so prosperous and rich people happy to pay to live and do business here, is the magic aura of protection surrounding the entire city.

It protects against plages, diseases, specially but not only the magical ones. Stops most sorts of curses and spells from working inside the city, and burns enemy armies. Grants healing power, super-human strength and speed to the city guard and additional power for every spell used by those who work for the city, or for the Realm. Anyone who wants to be able to cast spells in places like that, without the extra-weight and the unwanted attention of local authorities, need to get register and official license.

Oh, this place has a teleportation ring somewhere, controlled by the Royal Delegate for the city. Possibly a few more, that only the highest authorities know about.

People who live in places like that are either extremely rich, highly qualified, or servants who have inherited their jobs from lineages that go back many generations. Well, there is also the slaves of course. Even them are likely to be more beautiful, and healthier, than their average equivalent in other parts of a nation like ours.

My mentor is the personal bodyguard of a young noble lassie as old as I am in this world. So, ten years old.

As her apprentice I will be living in the house, with access to the kitchen and service areas, but I will not be working for the family directly. The cost to keep me alive was settle between my mentor and her employer. Goes without saying, no one is paying me a single coin. Usually the apprentice pays the mentor for the tutelage, my mentor was taking me under her protection as a favour to my father.

I wonder what sort of relation can qualify some former apprentice to ask a favour like that!

Anyway, my mentor is named Sheva. She is a beast-woman from the demon continent, what by itself already makes she special. Some demon branches are very powerful, by birth, that’s usually not the case of beast-people, who are not demons properly speaking. Beast-people have usually some advantages over normal humans, and most of them do not compensate their shorter life-expectation. Rare exceptions aside they live between one fifth and half the time a human is expected to. Age faster and all that, mostly with very short childhoods and a proportionally longer adult age.

Sheva looks like a very strong human women, easily professional body-builder, two meters tall or almost that. As far as I can calculate sized here without any specific point of reference to use. Light brow skin, yellow eyes, and wolf ears and fangs. A gorgeous woman, if you like the hard, front-line warrior veteran, type. Or mercenary, I suppose, that’s what a sell sword is for better and for worse.

When I finally managed to get reach the Municipal Market of Hydra Cross I was hours late to our meeting.

Not to mention that was over two months after the day when I should have been here. She was still in Hydra, investigating my disappearance. Because, something in the message send to her by a cleric “didn’t smelled right”.

She was already doing a favour, and a very exceptional one in this world, mind you! Still, she put aside her obligations and started this investigation. She had visited my room in the pension, talked with everybody who saw me there, and searched the monastery, but she didn’t managed to find the hidden passage to the lower tunnels bellow the maze of tunnels bellow the city.

Still, she was trying. Had not abandoned the effort.

And every day she came to the Central Square in the Main Market to wait for me at midday.

Se recognized me at first glance, by the resemblance with my father.

The night before that the monastery was attacked, there was fire and that morning all monks were death, along with dozens of blood elves. After that, even my mentor was about to admit defeat.

Fortunately for me, she decided to came to the market one more time.

I could not tell her all the truth, but I stayed as close to it as I considered possible. I told that the cleric who contracted me to carry his books for him was an ice-elf pretending to be a forest elf. That he didn’t paid me, and instead left me to die in the underground tunnels without a way out.

“Those bracelets and anklets I saw in my way out and took with me, as compensation for my troubles” I said. Referring to the pieces of armour the Hydra laide had made as a gift for me, using the chains that had been binding me to a machine draining magic energy from my body.

Looking at them calmly, their aspect was more of armour than of decoration. There was beautiful flame motifs on them, but the size and weight didn’t suggested the intent of being decorative.

“Oh, they are nice! And it is a happy accident that you would arrive to me wearing something like that. Because it fits perfectly our martial discipline of swordfight.

By touching it I can feel the mana in me being pushed back and locked, this is no ordinary metal. If you intend to learn magic you must take those things and lock them away for a few days, before trying. Because just touch them makes your inner mana harder to shape. They are those I am wearing, but even better than mine.

Our technique is based in mana, but it do not use it like spell-casters use it. We do not expend mana, and makes little difference for me if you have almost nothing of it or an immense pool at your disposal. What I teach you isolates our mana from the outside, and then armour like that can help improve it even further.

Is possible to mix this art with conventional magic, your father did it, to some extent. However, cast spells is far more difficult once you start. The Path of Cold-Iron is less flexible than the possibilities open to a Battle-mage, combat-wizard, cleric, Shaman, mage-assassin or arcane-knight. It is not usually a path we recommend for those who have talent for magic, or who have been gifted with a large mana pool.

However, I have tested it and I have found it sufficient. We have defensive and offensive capabilities against mana, and against any other kinds of enemy. If practice our art like I have you will find it an honourable and rewarding path for life.

What your father told about the Path of Clod-Iron?”

“Nothing, really. Not even that it had a name. We just practiced some exercises every day”

“Hum. I should be more surprised than I am, really. You father was never good with words. Unless he was trying to talk his way inside the treasure box of some pretty lassie.

Don’t get me wrong, your father was no thief! As far as I can speak about him. I mean the girls orifices, not literal purses. You know, pussy, mouth, butthole…, for those things he was able to sing like a bard! Teaching, not so much. I did my best to educate him in that part, since ours is an initiatory tradition, but there is a limit for what you can get from some people.

In the end, he was capable to command men in combat, motivate them before battle even when hope was remote and uncertain. More important, his loyalty was impeccable when it had to be. That much I can help to temper, but no mentor can teach”

I was under the impression that warriors would have no chance in a world like that. Nothing a normal person can ever do with a melee weapon and skill, armour or no armour, came close to the power in the hands of a competent spell-caster.

Turn out that I was partially right.

Without the super-human capacities that only exist because of magic fuel, mana, humans are no match for orcs, dwarves and much less for elves. Without spells and limited to normal capacities obtained by effort and training, normal warriors in this world are far inferior to anyone using magic. A weak human can explode an ork twice his size, in full plate armour, from fifteen steps of distance, with one single level 2 spell, four sentences three hand gestures, no weapon needed. Pushes anyone next to the orc to the ground, likely dizzy and possibly injured. That is not fair game, that is massacre.

However, there are practices that from my point of view, considering Earthling parameters of normality, can only be classified as magic.

Practices that are not considered magic in this world.

To be fair, they are as hard to master as magic, if not harder. Possibly that is why is so difficult to find masters of those arts with advanced enough skills to teach something effective.

Most martial doctrines balance physical exercises and martial arts with spellcasting in some degree. Few doctrines ignore enchantments completely, like the Path of Cold-Iron does. This way slows down inner mana, isolates it from the surroundings. What makes the follower of the path harder to detect or read with magic. Far more resistant to spells, and to practically anything else. It makes the body strong and fast, adds to our inertia to put it in simple terms, we must move deliberately otherwise is hard to move us at all.

So, the super human images of epic fantasy manga. When the warrior jumps 10 times his size and cuts stone pillars or tree trunks with one decisive movement, jumps from the street to the top of a 5 floors building, or blocks a fireball with his body. Those things are possible, actually! And blows like that demand a lot of physical preparation, you must have stamina, but those things do not expend mana. Unlike spells. A master of Cold-Iron can keep going for longer than almost any battle-mage, considering also that the Cold-Iron warrior will be wearing a far less expensive equipment, and will not need to burn expensive mana potions and equivalent resources to keep going beyond the first couple minutes of intense combat.

On the other hand, of course, the battle-mage can have a larger variety of tools at his disposal. Reach larger number of opponents in each attack, heal his allies, and far more.

I am not sure if it counts as fair balance, exactly. I suppose that would be open for debate. However, anyway you look at the situation, it is some sort of balance.

My mentor explained those things to me in our way to Sweetpot Riverport. While I tried to understand what kind of person she is.

In doing this exercise I caught myself trying to imagine what kind of relationship she had with my father as well. Or still has. What kind of man he is. By the way she talked about him I realized my father in this world was a strange to me, despite the fact that we expend considerable time together, hunting and practicing. Eating meals around the family table when we were home. I had to know my mother even less, considering all that.

That was not something I had in mind very often when I was living with them, all those years. I was worried about hide my though and my magic practice from them, and about pretend to be the child I was supposed to be. Instead of the adult I actually was inside of my mind, due to my memories from another world.

Don’t think I ever asked myself before that moment if the relationship I had with my parents in this world would make difference. If it would affect in any way the relationship I would be able to build with my own children. If I managed to be a father.

Now, it seemed obvious to me that no one lives a childhood, from zero to 9 years, without being marked by that experience.

Being a lazy son, as I was, would make me inevitably a lazy father? Or just more likely to be a bad parent? I had really proposed marriage to a dragon!?

If so, did she actually accepted the proposal or was she joking?