Othrys, Twenty-seventh World of Its Name

Aethra, Twenty-first Continent of Her Name

Goldcourt City

The frontier city had a grandiose name that both fit and was ill-fitting. Rich veins of the ore could be found streaked all through the snow-covered mountains to the north for the former. Its general condition for the latter.

The last great war nearly three decades ago had leveled much of the city. The only thing that had survived was the inner city where the great temple complex of Aethra the Goddess of Glittering Glory kept the white-skinned hordes at bay for years.

Sieges were less devastating when the Goddess gifted the defenders with divine food and drink.

Rebuilding had been slow.

Goldcourt was the furthest northern settlement in the entire continent and it struggled to attract permanent settlers. As such only a small portion of the land around the temple had been rebuilt. The remainder of the sprawling city was filled with ruins and blasted landscapes.

Further out in the wilderness, spawn zones had grown rampant while remnant whiteskins periodically emerged from hiding to launch raids even though the Olympians had long abandoned their goblinoid thralls.

Al disembarked from the skyship with a pack over his shoulders, a bag of holding on his belt and a wheeled trunk trailing behind him.

He had spent seven years hunting the great forest. Four traveling with an adventuring band to plunder encounter challenges and face spawn zones.

He had only seen Theron once during that span, which was when his eidolon mentor told him about an opportunity to broaden his class base and perhaps, fulfill another one of Adras’ 13 Labors.

The God of Strength was not the God of Violence.

There was a story of a fallen city, whose name only the Gods remembered. It was said that Adras guided it back to prosperity. Not with his incalculable strength, but with his unending wisdom.

Al arrived with a magically sealed scroll from the Administarium along with an additional class.

Magistrate Level 1.

The current magistrate was an old man who longed for a warmer clime to thaw out arthritic joints.

So eager in fact that he met Al at the ship berth with his own luggage ready to be loaded.

“Magistrate Lysikrates, it is my honor to carry on your great work,” Al had memorized what to say.

“That’s soon-to-be retired magistrate,” the old man grinned as he took the scroll and quickly opened it. He took a pre-filled ink quill from a pocket in his thick coat and signed with more haste than flourish. “There. It’s official. The Administarium will receive my resignation shortly. Goldcourt is now in your, I’m certain, capable hands.”

“If it please you, elder Lysikrates, may I ask a few questions?”

“It doesn’t. I’d like to get on the ship and be on my way.”

“Ah, the crew will require a full days rest and the gems need recharging.”

Lysikrates frowned then sighed.

“I suppose I can help you. Although, I’m not risking anything. I am not moving out of the ship’s sight.”

“What are the greatest concerns facing Goldcourt?” Al went to the same place he placed his arrows, straight to the heart.

“I’ve left you detailed notes. The staff at my— your office has been instructed to share them with you in full. But, since you don’t look like the sort to take a hint, then I’ll give you a quick version, so I can get on that ship and find a seat. This cold has been goblins on my knees for the last twenty years,” Lysikrates spat. “Problem number one. Population. Doesn’t shrink. Doesn’t grow. If you want to turn this place into something more than a frontier town then you’ll simply need to attract more people. Problem numbers two and three are large factors in problem one. Monsters and whiteskins do well at attracting killers looking for levels, but they aren’t the sort to stick around once they’ve gotten what they came for. They’re also a headache, but I’m certain that someone of your level will have an easier time keeping the damned adventuring bands and murderwanderers under some semblance of control.”

“Thank you, elder. I shall leave you to your wait. May Aethra’s glitter be dust upon your path.”

“Eh,” Lysikrates raised a brow. “May Adras’ strength hold you up on yours.”

Al understood the dismissal for what it was.

He bowed and bid the former magistrate a fruitful retirement.

The first stop was his new office.

He had spent the last few months studying Goldcourt’s history going back to the last war, thus he already knew the challenges that he faced. Asking was a matter of fulfilling expected social interaction rules and gaining insight from those that experienced the issues firsthand.

The texts inside the Administarium’s central archive in the region could only take one so far when many of them were written from second or even third sources removed from those that had witnessed them firsthand.

He had decided that the first problem couldn’t be solved without first fixing the problem at the root of it all.

It was why he had devoted a lot of his study time to the whiteskins’ culture.

“Magistrate Alcaestus?”

A young men approached him as he exited through the gates.

“I am him.”

“Chief of Staff Timotheos at your service,” the young man bowed. “Please, this way.”

Al followed Timotheos to a small wheeled cart attached to an automaton styled to look like one of the mighty bladeboars that roamed the vast tundra surrounding the city.

The ride was a bumpy one.

The street wasn’t maintained as well as in most other cities he had been in.

“Most of our automatons have been modified to supplement our defenses rather than for comfort,” Timotheos apologized as though he had sensed Al’s thoughts. “We’ve prepared a welcoming ceremony,” he hesitated, “Magistrate Lysikrates… will not be there. He, uh, insisted that he was done.”

“I encountered the former magistrate.”

“Ah… good… I suppose.”

“I will need five boars prepared. Skinned and gutted. Place the offal of each animal inside a separate golden bowl, each. Include the brain, tongue and teeth in the bowl. Do not clean the furs. Set up five large fires to roast the meat outside the old walls near the ruins of barracks number nine. How quickly can all this be done?”

Timotheos’ face clenched in concentration.

“I don’t know if we can obtain five golden bowls large enough, but the rest can be done immediately. Though, perhaps, you’re unaware, but our scouts are fairly certain that the largest, fiercest tribe of whiteskins have a forward warren in the area you want to use for this…”

“The ritual peace offering will stay their hands if they haven’t devolved into a primitive state.”

It said much about the weight an eidolon’s backing carried that Timotheos didn’t question the instructions. “Your will be done right away, magistrate.”

“You may wait till after the ceremony. I’ll need to speak to the garrison commander to secure an escort. I imagine that she won’t authorize soldiers unless I speak with her directly.”

The ceremony was adequate.

The office had clearly put in effort with the welcoming speech, food and drink.

Introductions were amiable.

The entire staff displayed eagerness.

For his part, Al didn’t speak further about his plans.

That would’ve been a breach of social interaction rules.

First thing the next morning Al met with Commander Telesilla in her office.

“You’re a young one to be appointed magistrate,” she said.

The older woman’s gray-streaked straw-colored hair was tied tightly at the back of her head. She sat tall and straight in her impeccable uniform.

The long-sleeved tunic and long trousers were black with white glitter falling from the shoulders like glittering stars.

Aethran military dressed ostentatiously when compared to the Adrasians, who wore undyed cloth unless they were in the field where they wore clothing with patterns that blended in with the environment.

“An eidolon… that explains that,” she rolled the writ closed and pushed it back across the desk. “Adrasian,” she mused. “We’ve been allied since our ancestors’ days.”

Al nodded at the facts.

“Still, it is odd that an Adrasian would be appointed magistrate of an Aethran city.”

“I undertake 13 Labors in homage to Adras.”

“So, it said in the writ. Very well, I officially welcome you to Goldcourt. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a busy day—”

“I accept your welcome and present a request,” he slid a second scroll across the desk.

The commander’s jaw worked, growing progressively tighter as she read.

“This is… a plan. Peace with the whiteskins? Safe passage to their homeworlds? Impossible. If they were civilized once, they are most assuredly not anymore. You would’ve been a child, perhaps not even that, just a gleam in your father’s eye when the Olympians brought them to our world like vermin stowed on a ship.”

That was far from the truth.

The white-skinned goblinoids served a valuable role in the rival pantheon’s armies as infiltrators, sappers and general rogues. Credible historians agreed that they likely had a comparable level of civilization back on the worlds they called home.

However, Al sensed that reciting facts would only fall on the commander’s deaf ears and lead her to tighten her grip on her soldiers.

Soldiers that he needed.

“Nevertheless, Eidolon Theron agrees with my plans. As does the Administarium. Funds and safe passage have already been arranged for the first one hundred whiteskins that wish to depart as a trial run. If it proves successful then the program will be expanded to all whiteskins that wish to accept our generous boon.”

“They’d just as soon dance in your entrails as talk to you. Plenty have tried over the years. We’ve been willing to assimilate them into our forces, yet our generosity has been met with arrows, spears and poison. But…” she sighed. “An eidolon has spoken and I must obey. You’ll have your company. Three, actually. I won’t send my soldiers out to die for nothing when the fighting breaks out. For your safety as well, magistrate. I don’t wish to explain why one favored by an eidolon ended up skinned and roasting over a whiteskin’s fire.”

Al thanked the commander and departed without explaining why he thought that he had a good chance of success despite the decades of failure.

It was simple, really.

No one had ever thought to speak to the goblinoids in their language.

It took two weeks to get ready.

The sticking point had been golden bowls large enough to hold a fat child’s weight in boar offal.

Fortunately, gold was plentiful in the city’s stores.

Unfortunately, only one smith was skilled enough to make the bowls with adequate artistry, which was important.

Any smith with a forge, hammer and anvil could pound out a rough bowl, but that would’ve been insulting.

Al stood in the biting chill smothered in a thick coat.

He wore no armor, bore no weapon.

Five roaring fires on which massive boar carcasses roasted did little to warm him.

Hardy winter gnats and flies buzzed over the bloody golden bowls while young soldiers cursed as they fought a constant battle to fan them away.

“There is nothing I enjoy more than a winter roast out in the elements,” Telesilla said.

Al waited for the hammer to drop.

His short time in the commander’s presence had taught him that she liked to set verbal traps as though conversation was a battle.

“Oh, me too! Especially with a lemon ouzo!” Timotheos, callow young man that he was, fell for it.

“Yes, I agree. A boar on the spit. Drink in hand. Inside the city walls. Safe from the elements, the monsters and our enemies,” she snapped the trap.

Timotheos reddened.

“I understand that the whiteskins do well to keep the monster population in this are down,” Al decided to extend a branch for his chief.

“Er… yes, magistrate, that is what we think.”

“Like they have much of a choice,” Telesilla snorted. “Kill or be killed has always been the rule of the uncivilized lands.”

“I’m not concerned with monsters or beasts. The boars have been roasting for over an hour. Any curious ones would’ve made their presence known by now,” he glanced at the three companies of soldiers a bow’s shot away, “the scent of man, oiled weapons, armor and magic sours the sweet ones rising with the smoke.”

“Not to mention Skills,” Telesilla snorted. “Relax Timotheos, you only have the whiteskins to fear. Well… and a wandering monster strong or mad enough to attack, but if that happens then we’re the ones ending up in something’s belly, eh? Unless the magistrate has a secret up his sleeves?”

“I don’t.”

“Refreshingly, straightforward,” she grunted.

They stood in silence for another hour as the sun continued its slow journey across the sky.

Al stood motionless.

A high level hunter’s ability.

Telesilla seemed determined to out do him for some reason.

Timotheos paced, sat and stretched. Constant motion betrayed his nerves.

Odd that he had insisted on accompanying them.

Al decided that the young man had wanted to impress with diligence and toughness.

The high-pitched scream would’ve erased hours of Timotheos’ efforts had Al been a typical person.

Instead, he understood the reaction.

It took a certain strength of will to avoid reacting to several dozen whiteskins seemingly materializing up from the cold ground.

The largest bits of cover were the knee-high berry bushes.

Al had failed to notice them coming despite his hunter’s Skills.

Telesilla stiffened, yet she stayed her hand from the combat spell stick in her thigh holder.

The goblinoids stared with dark eyes.

Their white skin made them nearly impossible to spot without Skills or spells against the snow-covered landscape.

Blade-like ears pierced out from beneath fur-lined helms.

Thin-lipped smiles revealed small, sharp teeth.

He could barely see the hot puffs of breath from their small, button-like noses.

They rose nearly as one.

The hairless head of the tallest one would barely graze the bottom of Al’s short beard.

Al kept his features neutral as he removed his coat, then his long-sleeved tunic, and finally his woolen undershirt.

He stood bare-chested in the biting chill, struggling to keep from shivering.

At his gesture a soldier carried one bowl of golden offal over.

He took it and carefully brought it exactly halfway to the loose line of whiteskins where he placed it on the ground.

He returned for the next bowl and the next until all five were arranged in a tight circle.

The whiteskins suddenly melted back into the ground.

To be replaced by a massive whiteskin clad in only a dirty loin cloth.

The goblinoid wouldn’t have looked out of place in the wrestling pit. He approached with open hands, slowly, as though Al was a skittish baby calf.

Al matched the pose.

The whiteskin stopped close enough for Al to feel the heat emanating from the massive, muscled white-skinned body.

“I, Magistrate of Goldcourt. I, Alcaestus, hunter. I greet the elder with an offering and an offer.”

“You smell more the latter than the former,” the whiteskin said in a deep and surprisingly clear voice. In Al’s language no less. There was none of the tell tale signs that the universal translation system was at work.

“I’m honored that you use my tongue. I didn’t have the time to learn yours.”

“You learned our ways through your Administarium capturing and torturing us.”

“Yes.”

“The offering earns you safety from the rise of the sun to its fall or for as long as the fires stay warm and meat remains outside our stomachs. Speak your offer.”

“I speak with an eidolon’s hand on my shoulder. We offer free and safe passage to your home world. You pay nothing. One hundred of your chosen people to start. The rest will follow.”

“Home?” the whiteskin mused. “I was a child then. Many of us know only this place as ‘home’,” the word spat out of his mouth like a bitter fruit. “I require information about our ‘home’ before we make a decision. For we will not jump from one shit pile to another.”

Al pulled out a hand-sized crystal from his bag of holding and held it out.

“Everything we know about your home world and its current situation in regards to your people. You have the means to access the information?”

“We aren’t primitives,” the whiteskin plucked the crystal.

“May I inquire as to the size of your family?”

The whiteskins in the region were not a unified entity.

The one in front of him represented the tundra south of the city.

There were unknown dozens in the northern tundra, all the way up to the dense pine forests that started at the foot of the mountains and into the snow-capped peaks.

Rumor even placed a few scattered families all the way out in the frozen seas off both coasts and at the very top of the world where the great ice grew unchallenged.

“You may, though I won’t answer. What I will share is that I shepherd all of my people that may or may not dwell in the lands that we can lay our eyes on at this very moment.”

“Can you spread the word to the other families?”

“I can, but I cannot command them in the way of your people.”

That meant the ritual offering would need repeating, perhaps dozens of times.

No matter.

The costs were irrelevant.

As an eidolon Theron exerted gravity, literally and figuratively, the latter had meant that the Administarium had essentially provided Al with a blank writ.

“I accept your offering. You may depart. I’ll await your presence in this place after the yellow orb has completed thirteen cycles in the sky.”

The whiteskin bared his back and stalked off into the flat tundra.

Just like before, he seemed to melt into the landscape.

“Whiteys have good stealth Skills. You have to give them that. Biggest bastard I’ve ever seen up close though,” Telesilla said.

“I had no idea they got that big,” Timotheos’ eyes were wide as saucers.

“Let’s return.”

“Seems like a waste of meat,” Telesilla said.

“They will return for it once we’re gone. Don’t attack.”

“I’m not a fool, young magistrate,” Telesilla scowled.

“Hands itch when fear and old hatreds rise to the surface. My concern is with the young hotheads amongst our soldiers and adventurers.”

“Is that why you confined them to their homes?” Timotheos said.

“It’s crucial that the whiteskins are unmolested for the next twelve days. An eidolon’s wrath on it.”

“My soldiers obey orders. The adventurers, however… well… that’s why I have each and every one of them under guard, as you asked.”

They marched across the tundra to rejoin the companies before crossing the several hundred meters back to the old wall.

A large swath of the outer ring of the city had fallen into ruin from the war, raids and monster attacks. There had never been enough of a population rebound for them to rebuild.

“Why was it so big?”

The walk back was long, so Al decided to indulge Timotheos’ curiosity.

“He, is the leader and old. The goblinoids are like us in many ways, though different in others.”

“They mature quick and breed like vermin. They can start popping out young in less then five years. To make it worse, twins are common, three or more less so, one is the rarest of them all,” Telesilla said.

“They grow to maturity quickly. Then they age slower. When we enter our adulthood, they are as elders. Except, they don’t grow weak for decades. They grow stronger. Age and class intertwined in a way that the Administarium’s researchers have never managed to penetrate beyond the shallowest of stabs. Left alone, a goblinoid can live thrice our spans.”

“They’re stronger with age. The different breeds,” Telesilla said.

“I believe it’s a misnomer to refer to the variety of higher forms as separate breeds.”

“I’ve seen ones like that big bastard back there shrug off a dozen arrows to rip heads like plucking grapes from the vine. Lucky that we got most of them in the war.”

Silence carried them back to the inner wall and the inhabited part of the city.