“Woke up?” Cecily asked, not looking at me.
I winced, mentally facepalming. Abyss had warned me not to tell people who I really was, which I could understand and appreciate. I hadn’t even wanted to tell them more than really necessary. But leave it to my overly energetic mouth and my tendency to speak before thinking, and I had already fucked up royally.
I really ought to have thought about some kind of cover story before. But I hadn’t, and now the damage was done. Oh well… Perhaps it was for the better. I wasn’t a good liar to begin with–again, I tended to speak before thinking–and I didn’t really like the idea of lying either. In part because I was bad at it, in part it was a sort of feeling I got from deep down. This, at least, I had expected.
Dragons valued honesty above nearly all else. Serpents were outright incapable of lying. Hydras… well, Hydras were Hydras and were lying all the time, but generally speaking, Dragons were the opposite, so I wasn’t surprised to feel that instinct push hard to have me tell the truth. If I could be affected by Vuthe’s knowledge and personality, then it was only natural to assume that I could be affected by my physiology.
Since I was here already, I decided to just go with the truth and leave out the things that I should probably keep to myself. People waking up with amnesia wouldn’t be weird, nor would people waking up in a place they couldn’t remember how they got there. Magic was a thing, I reminded myself, so to these people I would be uncommon, but not suspicious.
… I hoped.
“Yeah… I don’t really know how I got here. I just… woke up in the palace. I have some vague idea who I am and where I am, but I have no clue how this all happened.” Omitting things was far easier than outright lying, and didn’t make me feel nearly as bad.
“That’s… strange,” Lucy began, eyeing me curiously. There was still some fear there, although most of it was replaced by overly energetic curiosity at this point. “You seem like you’re bursting with history. To the point that it hurts to look at you.”
I gave her a confused glance, raising an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what I had expected in reply, but that certainly wasn’t it. “I’m not quite sure what you mean by that?”
“Well, I-” Lucy got cut off by Cecily.
“Miss Lucy has strange ways to collect information. She also has a tendency to speak in strange ways. Just one of her quirks. You needn’t pay much mind to it.”
There was a moment of silence, before Lucy shrugged, obviously embarrassed and awkward. Cecily seemed to push past the conversation, simply continuing to move, pulling the other woman behind her.
I blinked at the scene. This was certainly interesting. I couldn’t blame them for not trusting me. Hells, I would’ve done the exact same in their shoes. But the implications that that simple statement came with were quite interesting indeed. I wondered just what that was about?
Lucy seemed to just go along with it, either having realised that she had said too much, or trusting the other woman’s guidance. I hadn’t yet quite figured out what their relationship was, but all things considered, it at least fit the mental image I had of the two.
“Alright, then…” I said, trying to get back on track. “Uhm… But, yeah. So, I have no clue what happened, but I’ve done some cursory checks of the palace and the city. Basically every building is pretty damn ruined. The closest things to undamaged rooms I found were in the palace.”
This time I was very specifically keeping an eye on myself to ensure I didn’t say more than I needed to and accidentally let something slip that would be best kept to myself.
“We can make camp somewhere out of the way,” Cecily simply stated. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
I shrugged as I followed them, taking the lead once more. “Be my guest. You can stay for as long as you want. Although, I would love to talk to you a bit before you leave. As I said, my memory is a bit foggy, and I’d like to get a refresher on things before I venture out into the world myself. Y’know, just so that I feel less lost.”
Given my previous fuck up, I decided to lean into the whole amnesiac story a little. It wasn’t like it was completely untrue, after all. And if I could convince them to tell me a little bit more about the world, then that would help.
Cecily turned to me, her masked face invisible to me, but I could feel her eyes lingering. “I suppose we can do that. Although we can’t stay for too long. We still have a contract to complete, and while it isn’t urgent per se, it is time sensitive.”
“Contract?” I hoped that more casual conversation would help break the ice a little, and I had to admit I was curious as to who they were and what they were doing here.
Cecily glanced at Lucy, who was watching us, apparently now leaving it to Cecily to decide when to speak or not. After a minute nod of the swordswoman, the Catkin turned her attention to me with a smile. “I’m a courier. I’m on my way to deliver supplies and a message out west to the village Dussel. Nothing fancy, just stuff for the townsfolk. I hired Miss Cecily as my bodyguard.”
“A job I nearly failed at if it weren’t for your intervention,” the swordswoman added quietly, shifting in a way that made me think she was giving me another glance. “You have my gratitude for that. I’ll put a word in with the guild to notify them of your contribution.”
Their story was just about what I had expected. Although the mention of a guild confused me, so I decided to ask. “Guild?”
Lucy blinked, and from Cecily’s surprised reaction, I imagined she mirrored the expression under her mask.
“Uh, yes. The adventurers guild?” She prodded.
I had to do my best to keep my face neutral, so my groan of exasperation was entirely internal.
To be honest, I really shouldn’t be surprised. For as much as the trope of an adventurers guild in a fantasy universe was entirely overplayed and overused, even I had, eventually, caved and added them in the latest revisions of the world. It just hadn’t been a fixture for so many revisions that I had honestly forgotten about it.
Given how new the idea of the guild was in the revisions, I couldn’t be certain how faithfully it was translated into this world, but the core idea was that it was an organisation that had been built towards the end of the major conflict between Thelvadore and the slavers.
The one to introduce the idea of the guild, and what they were supposed to be doing, had been Tizanta, based on the aforementioned trope of the guild present in so many fantasy novels she had enjoyed reading back on Earth. Given her flair, it felt only fitting that she would be the one to start an organisation like that.
While technically originating in Thelvadore, the guild itself never had any official ties to the Kingdom by design. It was meant to be a politically independent organisation mirroring the one from so many stories, which could act as a sort of equalising force should the war go badly for Thelvadore. With plans to introduce the guild into the kingdoms that Thelvadore was at war with, Tizanta had made sure to keep the affiliation a secret, lest they became a potential war target.
In effect, each branch of the guild would abide by the laws and regulations of the kingdoms in which they were located, but they also formed a wider network to keep an eye on certain things like slavery to ensure things didn’t go out of hand. There was a lot of secrecy involved, inspired by the same fictional character that had been an inspiration for Abyss, and the lore he had in the universe that that friend of mine had worked on.
Predictably, that also meant that there were a lot of cliches from Earth built into the guild, one of which being the name. Of course, there were also supposed to be some differences, although how well that was translated I couldn’t be sure.
Nevertheless, if my rough understanding of the timeline was correct, then there shouldn’t be a widespread network yet. By the time the war came to an end, Tizanta had only been able to establish a few branches, with the organisation itself being new and unproven. Of course, given the obvious differences in timeline, I couldn’t be sure how well my understanding held up, so I wanted to learn more.
“Ah,” I nodded, giving Cecily a smile. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I dimly remember that. If I recall, it’s that newly formed organisation out of Vrona, right? Might be misremembering the city. Like I said, my memories are still foggy.” I gave a small chuckle and a shrug.
Again, the two gave me confused looks.
“The guild’s been around for centuries,” Cecily explained. “I’m not surprised to hear you are long-lived, given your obvious power. But with memory loss that severe I would suggest you visit a healer.”
That had me stop short, and I couldn’t help but let my shock show on my face. “Centuries?!”
Knowing that there might be slight inconsistencies with the timeline was one thing. A few months here or there I could live with. But centuries?! A whole lot can happen within centuries!
Tizanta had started seeding guild branches a few years before the end of the war. Half a decade at most. I was prepared to hear that a few months, maybe even years, had passed since Thelvadore’s fall. But centuries? That was far, far longer a time frame than I would’ve thought.
And it also meant that basically everything I thought I knew about the world could be wrong. Centuries are a long time. Maybe not for a dragon, but for most of the people inhabiting this world. Humanoid species were still the most common, and while dwarves and elves could outlive humans, sometimes by orders of magnitude, most people who would be alive at the time of Thelvadore’s fall would be long dead now.
No wonder the two were confused about my name! The legacy of a goddess is a long lived one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the name Vuthe de Thal had long since fallen into myth! Not to mention that it only made sense that time would inevitably morph the legends told, with influences that Vuthe was well known for bleeding into the myth of Shiarex. The Night of a Thousand Screams was an event that had impacted a continent, and even if the true horror of it was forgotten, the event itself would last for millennia. With Vuthe’s name probably having been lost to history, it only made sense that it was attributed to Shiarex in the aftermath.
Still, there was a silver lining. If Vuthe’s name and tale was truly lost to history, then I could use that to my advantage. Most people wouldn’t be able to remember how she was supposed to act and behave. Even if tales of it had survived, any discrepancies could be explained by overly embellished myths and tellings.
It also meant that I was far less likely to run into people who knew her personally. Of course, there were the long lived folk, the ones she would certainly be acquainted with, but–with Thelvadore destroyed–they were likely few and far between. And, while those people could probably tell something was off, given how long it’s been the differences could be explained by time having gone by and the supposed memory loss. A few centuries weren’t that long for a dragon, true, but even they weren’t immune to change.
“Are you okay?” Cecily’s voice interrupted my internal dialogue, and I glanced at her.
To my surprise, she seemed genuinely worried, although I wasn’t quite sure if that worry was directed towards me or the situation at large.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to organise my thoughts. Finally, I gave her a nod. “Yeah, yeah, sorry… It’s just… I’m getting the feeling that it might’ve been far longer than I originally thought.”
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