“I thought pain would feel different, its the worst feeling imaginable. In a way, that only makes it better. To feel something is wondrous, perhaps I have something to learn from humans.” - ɮɛȶʀǟʏɛʀ օʄ ȶɦɛ ɨռʄǟռȶ

Kestel woke again, the pain having somewhat subsided. He rolled off the bed and laid still on the floor, his ribs felt like they had been hit by torn out and then put back in. He slowly pushed himself up and crawled over to a stool that sat in the corner of the room, after taking a moment to gather his thoughts the door burst open and a hefty man stepped through.

“Ohh back to the world of the livin’ eh?”

He pressed a hand to his belly and let out a hearty laugh, slapping Kestel on the back which sent shivers of pain down his spine. The innkeep sat on the edge of Kestel’s bed and it noticeably sunk down, groaning under the weight of fat and muscle.

“Not goin’ to collapse on me again are ye?”

Kestel groaned running a finger down his sternum, the pain flaring when his nail reached the centre. He shook his head, but say with certainty that he wouldn’t collapse again. For starters though, he had to figure out why he had gone unconscious in the first place.

“Great, good, good. So, got a name I could put down in the ledgers?”

Kestel blanked, still unsure about his new name. He tried hard to remember what he had been called before but trying to recall only elicited a whole new kind of pain, like trying to break through a concrete wall with a pinhead.

“K-Kestel.”

The word flowed out of his mouth and a quiet noise could be heard whistling outside the window, the crash of powerful waves, the crackling fire of a desolate hellscape, the grumble of a titanic tempest and the unearthly stillness and solidarity of a world that contained them all. Kestel’s attention snapped back to the innkeep, just in time to hear him introduce himself.

“Well fair’s fair, the name’s Rult. Though innkeep works just fine. Breakfast is being served in a minute if you’d like to join me and the corpse.”

Suddenly Kestel remembered the hideous beast from yesterday, his actions hadn’t fully hit him due to the adrenaline rush but now he was able to process everything that happened. His hands begun to shake uncontrollably before he found purchase on the stool he was sitting on, appearing as if he was bracing for impact. The shaking past and he stood up to be greeted by a dizziness that quickly faded and was replaced by hunger.

Kestel glided down the stairs and trotted over to the bar where a plate of sausages and eggs had been laid out, sitting next to it was the shattered body of the gremmel he had killed yesterday. Rult appeared from behind the bar and began rifling through the innards of the gremmel. He grunted towards Kestel and then pointed towards the food, beckoning for him to eat.

The now significantly fresher looking man sat down and tore into the breakfast without saying a word. He only lifted his head once every scrap of edible material was cleaned off of the plate, after waiting a second for the food to settle he finally began to watch Rult.

The innkeep had his arm plunged halfway up the gremmel’s severed chest, fiddling around and producing a fleshy sound which was quickly accompanied by the echo of snapping ribs.

“Ah! There we go~”

Rult pulled his arm back from the monster which had now been covered in blackened blood, curiously in his hand however was a small grey-tinted shard. Rult cleaned off both his arm and the shard before placing it on the bar and pushing it towards Kestel.

“I don’t really have use for it, if you’d like you can… use it or somethin’”

Kestel considered the shard before picking it up between his fingers and feeling the slight heartbeat that it emitted, he was drawn to it somehow. It called him forward, into the spiral of energy that was contained inside of it.

“By the way yer looking at it I’m sure yer familiar with the Shard doohickey, out here we don’t really see them.”

Kestel had no knowledge about the geography of the world and so he could only respond with a blank stare, Rult quickly caught on and rustled around in a back room before coming back with a crudely sketched map.

“It’s quite a beauty this map, had to pay quite a pretty penny fer this.”

He unfurled it and revealed all of nothing, there were symbols on it and roughly drawn outlines which Kestel assumed where the nearby landmasses. In the middle of the map was a large blob of ink that had dried into a slightly convex shape.

“So this is us?”

He said as he pointed towards the blob of ink.

“Aye, it is. Everywhere else around us is mountains and forest, I have to say it is nice seein’ travellers comin’ around these parts. We’re pretty far out from flat land or the ocean ye’ see, so there’s not much in the way of adventurers other than the caravans that stop here on the way to...”

Rult looked up towards the door which had creaked open, revealing a group of sopping wet traders. Their packs were luckily covered with their bedrolls which somewhat protected their important supplies, the less important goods would be stored in the large wagons they most likely left outside.

Kestel eyed them curiously, to his knowledge it was the first time he had ever seen traders that crossed the continent. Though there was a sense of familiarity in the back of his mind, he tried to remember where he had seen them before but was met with the same kind of pain as before. He shrugged and went back to fiddling with the Shard while Rult attended to the new arrivals.

“Welcome to my humble inn weary travellers! Come, come!”

Rult pulled some tables together allowing them all to sit together, the group sat down silently in an enclosed circle evidently shutting Rult out. The innkeep blinked confusedly before his merriness came back and he returned to the bar to chat with Kestel, though the traders were always in his peripheral in case he could siphon some coin from them.