Blink and I pushed on till an hour before nightfall. We didn’t see any place to ford, but we weren’t attacked again either. This river had turned from being a broad river to much more narrow across the four hours of hiking. We were following the river almost directly west at this point. Which meant that we were moving further away from Essex and Lannah.

We settled in at a point where the banks of the river had risen sharply, and the river had been pinched in. The water was flowing deep and swift, but it was where we ended the day. Before I got to work and completely forgot, I had a follow-up question for Sam.

Oh great and mighty greeter Sam, I the lowly Arn beseech you to answer my question. Where did the quest givers go if there are not many around anymore?

When I came to from the mana drain, I started to think that there had to be a way to make this spell link over to an item that had enough mana so that I wouldn’t drain everything out of me.

Then I got started on building my underground room. Where we were was a much better place to build than in the forest as there weren’t many roots. It was like back at my camp. I was able to quickly get the room handled and even had enough mana to get the added air holes put in. I didn’t go all out with this one to create another cluster core as I just didn’t have the energy to stay awake nor the mana to push.

Before going to sleep, however, I marked out 10 spots in the ground and planted seeds. I needed to check to see if I could get them growing or not. When I checked my quest log, I still saw that I was sitting at 1/30000. I chose to leave them in the ground overnight after watering them. I didn’t know if I had to go to sleep for them to count or not.

That night Sam drew me into his office. It was different; he was sitting at his desk, and I was in the chair that I had never used before. He was sitting there in a yellow and green tabard with four alternating color blocks. In the middle of it was a crest that had a sheaf of wheat in front of a tree that had four branches, each in its own season. On the desk were a growler and a tankard with one of those cool flip-top lids next to it. Sam already looked like he was about eight drinks in at this point. Sam picked up the tankard and started to talk. He didn’t sound like the Sam that was mad at me all the time and just wanted to mess with me but like a real person. Almost a melancholy person about to tell the bartender why life sucks.

“I considered not answering your question. I thought long and hard if it was worth thinking about the things that you asked. I wanted to just blow you off as your question was one that might not be completely inside what I have to teach you. I considered if by teaching you this I would get in more trouble then I already was in or if the punishment I was given could be worse. In all I figured that if I was given the chance to tell you what happened to the quests then it might hurt someone else. I also figured that it was unlikely after almost a thousand years I was still being watched so closely that they would notice this conversation. But if they did then it would be okay because while it might not be fully inside the ruling of what I had to teach you it was close. That is because you’re a Wild Human and so I’m able to teach you where your quest givers have gone.”

Sam sat back and sipped on his ale slowly before speaking again. “You are undoubtedly very familiar with the concept of a Pantheon from your Greek and Roman gods. We have one here as well and just like your Zeus killed his former king Kronos to become king of the gods so we’ve had several such shufflings here. However, our gods don’t die so much as lose access to this realm. When this happens newer deities take their seats to keep things moving. Now there tends to be an order of things that happens and a set of rules that the gods play by to move up and depose the last seat holder or even a whole Pantheon change. This set of rules helps to let those gods that want to move up in power claim new places while still protecting the world and giving access to a new generation of deities. While it may not seem it with gods and goddess for the longest time upward mobility was a huge deal. Not just for them but for you mere mortals as well. There would be a shift about every 500 years or so and new gods would shift around and pick up other things they were responsible for, and others would move on to other planes where they could be more engaged with what they were doing.”

Sam had, by this point, drained his tankard and refilled it to keep going. “Quest givers are those who have the power to offer a quest either by right or office. There have been those who have tried in vain, I might add too, to twist the rules of office to gain access to offer quests, but that always ends badly for them. Those that can offer quests by right are gods of any level or title and demigods. The demigods can’t offer all quests, but they can offer personal quests. The quest givers by the office are the Champions and High priests of the gods along with rulers who have been directly blessed by a god; there used to be others as well, but those ways are closed now.

Now, dear Arn, this is where the problem comes in. You see, for a Champion to offer a quest, then the Champion must be given the ability by their god; the same goes with the High priest. It is part of their office, part of what they do. So as you can see, most quests come from the gods either directly or indirectly by their will!”

Sam slammed his tankard on the desk and stood up, and then started to yell. “994 years ago, the god of your people, your quest giver, the god of seasons and harvest was forced out of the plain. He was a kind man who wasn’t part of the war. He had stood out of all the changes in the Pantheon for as long as any god could remember. He provided the seasons and the harvest. He taught new gods how to offer quests and the need for them and walked the world giving out quests as he saw the need. He helped people elevate themselves, and he created demigods and gods. Yet the new ruler didn’t care that he was neutral. He didn’t want anyone from the old Pantheon who held any power to be left behind. He wanted a change!

See, quests take power; that power comes from someplace, and that place is the god that offers it. This means that they will become slightly weaker when quests are offered, so because the new king thought that quests would take away from his power, he got rid of the quest givers. He didn’t want to lose power. So he turned on the neutral gods and kicked our god out of the realm. Forced him to leave after imprisoning his Champion and holding his friends as hostages. Friends that were then also banished if deities and kept imprisoned if not.” With that, Sam dropped down into his chair.

“994 years ago the last quest giving Champion was imprisoned in this room and forced to be a greeter. Why because the new gods lacked the knowledge of how to bring people through the Gates of the Seasons. They stripped the greatest quest giver of his abilities by banishing his god and then put me here to keep bringing those they summon through. They can’t kill me because I’m the only one left that has access to this. Those idiots didn’t understand that my god the god of the Seasons was left alone because he was the one that made the gate and so he was the one that could grant access. They thought it was part of his office not a side job he was doing! HA HA HA! So they killed off most of those who had access before they realized that they could not use it. I’m the last that can and so they keep me alive so that I can keep the gate open and I keep them open so that I can live…”

Sam stood back up and started to pace in his office. He picked up a snow globe from one of his shelves and shook it, and watched for a while. When he turned back towards me, I could see that his eyes were moist, yet his face showed anger and not sadness.

His voice was almost like steel as he growled, “the other reason they keep me alive is so that they can keep poking me and causing me pain. When they came for me I took more then a few lives of their champions and set a mess going that took them hundreds of years to clean up. Being the Champion of the God of Seasons let me mess with things very nicely before I was locked down in here… But they do keep finding new ways to hurt me. They blame me for you being broken though they don’t care about you one bit. They just saw that there was something that happened that I was in charge of and so they took the effort to cause me problems. They don’t follow the rules very often but they chose to follow the rules about how to balance the scales for you. Then they gave you HIS necklace to spite me and then call it chance!”

Sam turned back away from me again and started to pick up trinkets from his shelves. Each one he would look at and put back down as he physically tried to get his emotions back in check. He sighed and started to speak again, “There are a few gods that might give a quest now and then, and the demigods are still out there though far fewer since it takes a lot of power to become one and without quests it is that much harder. There are only two god blessed rulers in the world both blessed before the current god king was even born. So as you see far fewer quest givers for your people now that your god got beat. He had been in place for over 10,000 years before that happened.” Sam picked up the growler and drained it in one go and then belched.

Chuckling, Sam said, “The only god that still gives quests on a normal basis is the god of Bards of all people…” Sam snapped his fingers, and I was gone.

I woke back up in the morning feeling like I was the one who had been drinking all night. It was odd. I knew that I hadn’t, but that tremendous headache you get from not having enough water in your system was telling me that somehow I was the one that was given the hangover and not Sam.

Not that being a jerk is ever truly something that is okay, but it does make some more sense why Sam acts the way he does. If what he is saying is true, then he has been stuck in that room for almost a thousand years, working for those who killed or banished the people he knew just because they had been part of the last ruling class. While I could understand the reasons for getting rid of your enemies, it just seems like it is far worse when you’re dealing with lives that, I guessed, didn’t end. Life imprisonment for Sam has already been 1000 years.

* * *