Fall fell to winter. South of Bek Tepe, branches were bare, grasses withered, and the monsters hardy or gone. The Roja tribe's home wasn't too cold, because it was right by the sea, but the path to it was terrible. Farther down to the wastelands, the air was so cold you could almost taste it. Or rather, you could taste the blood dripping out of cracked lips. After one expedition, we decided that region could only be explored in the summer.
We mapped the coastline, finding many sandy beaches and quiet lagoons. We marked fruit bearing trees, connected roads to deposits of limestone, iron, or copper as we found them. East of New Cas City, we traveled as far into the wide open plains as we could. Wrapped in fur from head to toe, we tried to follow the rivers and mountains as much as possible, but there was nothing to see. The human Jora tribe who lived in this area, told me the monsters were closer to the mountains around this time of year, but we still managed to hunt enough to feed our party.
I went up to the edge of where the human Jora tribe had explored. Beyond this point, said Priest Mal, there were too many powerful monsters and not enough fresh water. Now that everybody knew magic, we didn't have to worry about monsters and water as much anymore.
As we trespassed into its territory, a massive one star serpent attacked us, but a barrage of spells, iron swords, and arrows annihilated the beast before it could even reach us. I collected its red gem and we kept moving. Starred monsters seemed to be all over the plains, but most of them seemed to be one star monsters, with an occasional two star one near watering holes or thickets of trees.
I found a large standalone mountain in the middle of the plains. Scaling it would let us see for miles around, and help decide if continued exploration would be worth it. But, that place was definitely being guarded by a powerful monster.
Turns out, it was a three star tree monster, which attacked us with its roots. Burning and destroying the roots didn't do much, since the monster's body was far away near the top of the mountain. Any fireballs or slingshots that I threw at it were intercepted by its long and numerous roots, so the whole place felt like an impenetrable fortress. This was the first monster I'd met which focused more on defense than offense, which meant I couldn't be sure about what to do. The tree monster didn't even try to attack us once we left its territory. I almost didn't want to kill it, but I'd seen something underneath its trunk that I absolutely wanted to retrieve.
"Pass me one of those please," I said to a hunter.
The hunter gave me one of his arrows since I'd already used all of mine. My bow was also starting to creak under pressure since I'd used it so much during this expedition. After all, one of the main reasons I was out here was to test these new bows I'd made with the princess' help. It was a recurve bow, which meant its ends had been folded back to strengthen the tension in the skin. Skipping traditional bows and going straight to the recurve bow was necessary because traditional bows didn't offer much of an advantage over our magic slingshots.
I pulled back the string and aimed at the tree monster in the distance. I'd been practicing with the bow for months now, and had already developed a bit of a cheat. I used light magic to reflect light off of the arrowhead and onto the monster. I had to lift the bow up by a lot to account for gravity and wind resistance, but once I had it where I wanted it, I took a deep breath, focused my energy and let the arrow loose.
A burst of air magic spun the arrow in the air, rapidly, and the tip caught on fire because of fire magic. When the monster's roots sprung up to block the arrow, the rotation, power, and fire helped cut right through the wood and the arrow kept flying towards the monster. Startled, the monster tried to block the attack with even more roots, but the arrow punched through all of them. Finally, the monster used its roots to throw a bunch of earth into the air, which finally stopped the arrow in its tracks, while showering the monster with dirt and gravel.
I stabbed my sword through the tree monster's head as the dust cleared. The monster's eyes froze. It had not expected me to rush through the mountain with balance and air magic and appear right under its nose. I cast fire magic to burn the monster to ash, and collected its red gems too.
The rest of the exploration party caught up to me and gasped when they saw what had been underneath the monster's trunk. Piles of bleached and cracked white bones, most of them belonging to monsters but quite a few that were clearly human. I frowned too, as I found a couple of elfin skulls in the mix. I wasn't sure if these were elfin Jora bones, since we knew the ancestors of the human Jora had killed off the tribe, but this could have been from before they'd done so. After all, the human Jora lived in this general direction, so perhaps their ancestors had migrated from the East. They could also belong to other elfin tribes or to any survivors from the elfin Jora tribe, which would mean I didn't have to cross the mountains to the North after all. I could just keep going East.
We climbed the top of the mountain and squinted. The sun was bright and this high up, it was very difficult to see, but with a little bit of light magic, I managed to peer far into the distance. I frowned. I cursed under my breath and told the other party members to follow me down. We were going back. They asked what I'd seen, since they didn't know light magic yet, and I told them it was nothing. Literally nothing. For miles and miles and miles. Despite being so high up, I hadn't seen the smallest sign of life or a river or even a significant change in landscape. If the North was impassable because of how tall the mountains were, the East was impassable because of its width. At least I knew there was something beyond the mountains. We could spend years traveling these plains and not find anything. And so we returned to the city with some skeletons, gems, and an expanded Eastern map.
---
"Logograms?" I said.
"A what now?" said the princess.
"Nothing," I said, "its just a way of classifying written languages. Your writing system uses a different character for every word, right?"
"Sort of," she said, "sometimes a word is made up of the symbols for another word, or is just like the symbol for another word but with a small difference."
"That's okay," I said, "it's still largely a logographic system. Most languages aren't just one system after all. Even my native language, English, uses an alphabet for most things but has logograms like ampersands and dollar signs."
"I think you lost me there," she said.
"That's okay, but can you list some more of these for me?" I said.
"Sure," she said as she drew some more characters onto the stone.
Watching her struggle to write down the characters, I frowned. I asked her what her people used to write with, and she said they used animal hair brushes. She also told me they wrote on pieces of reed-like hard wood, which sounded a lot like bamboo to me.
Over the next few days, I went around the nearby forests and grasslands collecting different types of wood, reeds, and long grasses. I then had Kelser gather a bunch of people to help me beat and wash the various plants inside small ponds of water, after which I collected the mushy plant fibers and let them dry over thin sheets of porous monster hide. I pressed the top of the mush with flat rocks and let everything dry.
In the meantime, I asked the princess how her people made the clothes she was wearing, to which she replied it was a kind of plant that her people cultivated and used to spin into clothes. That sounded a lot like cotton to me, but I hadn't seen anything like it on all my travels on this side of the mountains, so there wasn't much I could do about it.
Soon, the first batches of rough, bumpy paper was ready. I inspected the various sheets and judged which plant fibers made the best paper. After narrowing it down to a couple, I went out to collect more of them, and made some more batches of paper. I also had Kelser collect monster hair from the herded monsters we were managing, as well as from some of the other monsters that we had hunted over the past few weeks. I tied the hair to the ends of strong, straight twigs, and glued them together with hide glue. I experimented with a bunch of different substances to make ink, including things like tar, pitch, burned bones and other strange materials, but ended up using a combination of soot from a fire, hide-glue, and water.
"Right," I said to the princess as we sat down for our next session. "Could you write the letters down for me again?" I passed her a brush. She dipped it in ink and began writing on the paper.