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John walked down the dirt path through the forest using his spear as a walking stick. The sun flickered between being covered and uncovered through the leaves. His head turned to and fro, eyes sharp and alert.
In contrast, Kalé on his donkey beside him was as relaxed as a man in a saddle could be and if his eyes weren't open, he could be mistaken for having fallen asleep there.
Kalé looked at John and tilted his head slightly.
"What are you looking for?"
"Patrols," John responded. "Aren't there patrols of Godrick's soldiers in this forest?"
"There may be," Kalé said, "The garrison sends out regular patrols all over Limgrave. To keep down monsters and bandits and such. I've met a few coming through this forest before who quell the wolf population that seems to often grow too numerous in this area. Why are you looking out for them John?" Kalé questioned.
John just shook his head.
"Just paranoia I guess. I've had enough bad experiences with authority to know better than to just trust them."
"John, the only people Lord Godrick's men attack on sight are his enemies. The men of other demigods and the tarnished. You are just a foreigner. They may not like you but they won't attack you."
"Fine, fine." John relented holding up his hands and stopped outright looking around as if expecting an ambush and instead kept a watchful eye on the road.
They kept traveling through the forest in companionable silence for a while before a memory popped into John's head. A mischievous grin came over his face and he suddenly began singing.
"Oh, we're on the road again! On the road again. Goin' places that I've never been. Seein' things that I may never see again. And I can't wait to get on the road again-"
John continued with the song, and his singing voice was without peer. For every line that he got the tone right, he got another three wrong. And it was a coin flip if he would get the tone right again when a line came back around.
When he was done he turned a shit-eating grin towards Kalé who's expression was granite.
"I do not know why you insist on referencing things that only you know."
"Come on Kalé," John insisted, "If I don't make cryptic disconnected references to jokes only I know, then who will make these references? Isn't this a tradition in the Lands Between? Maybe it is my true calling and why I was even why I was brought here in the first place."
Kalé's face broke into a pained smile.
"It is confounding to me that I cannot completely deny your accusation."
John laughed.
"I should write them down on some tablets and scatter them through all these ruins. No doubt some scholars will eventually come across them."
"Please do not." Kalé begged with a note of pain.
John laughed again, while Kalé broke into a rueful chuckle.
As they continued their journey through the forest, the light winds gently shaking the trees' leaves and the sun slowly made it's way across the sky, they kept a comfortable silence between them that was only interrupted by the occasional question from John.
Question such as:
"Kalé, what is the name of the instrument you play?"
"It is a rebab. It comes from the original homeland of my people before they arrived on the Lands Between and made them our home."
... or ...
"How long does it take you to get from Stormveil to Castle Morne?"
"Just traveling from one castle to the other without stopping at any villages or trading? Spending almost the entirety of your day journeying? About a month at a normal traveling pace. Maybe twenty days on a terribly hard march. A month and a half if I make stops to peddle my wares along the way frequently. Why do you ask?"
"Just satisfying my curiosity. I have a vague idea about how big the regions in Lands Between are compared to each other, but you know I've never walked more than a day or two away from the Church of Elleh, so I don't have a reference for how big any of the regions actually are."
... or ...
"Hey Kalé, a few years ago I found a cave along this cliffside that had a pack of wolves led by a single wolf the size of a bear. Why was that wolf so much bigger than the others?"
"What are you asking about 'why was the wolf bigger'? I am not sure what you are asking exactly? That is just how things are. Just like with people, some animals are born more blessed and with stronger vitality than others. Why would some of them not be bigger?"
"Speaking of animals, aren't animal attacks one of the major dangers that people worry about? Why doesn't everyone learn magic or something to fight them? Wouldn't that make everyone safe from animal attacks?"
Kalé looked at John as if not understanding why John thought regular people would learn magic.
"People do not need to learn because their Lord's men protect them. Very few people die from such things in lands that are run by competent lords.
"And they do not learn magics themselves for a few reasons. One is the same reason why lords do not go out of their way to give all their subjects powerful blades reinforced with smithing stones. It breeds rebellions and removes the proper role of the lord as the leaders of society. If a lord does not ultimately hold the strength of arms, then they are ultimately not truly the lord, but are instead civil servants that serve only until those with the strength of arms decides to be rid of them.
"Sorceries and incantations are arguably better as sources of power for lords of the land than weapons because one can maintain better control over magics than one can weapons. Noble lines take care to make sure they and those loyal to them remain the only ones who know their unique magics. Some houses have their own unique magics that their founder created that allowed them to establish their noble lines.
"Any man can pick up a weapon easily once a weapon is made. Once a powerful weapon is made, it is easy for it to fall out of the grip of a lord. Wars, battles, rebellions. It is common.
"But knowledge and skill of a magic is much harder to transfer than it is for a man to lift a sword from a corpse on the field of battle or from an armory when no one is watching.
"This control of magic is not perfect however. There are plenty of magics that were once closely held secrets and now are in the hands of many. Some lords even volunteer their secret magics to strengthen their own men, like the Carians of Liurnia."
Kalé looked at John who nodded his head in understanding as Kalé continued.
"Magics also need the correct sort of catalyst along with knowledge and skill to use. This presents yet another barrier to those looking to steal the power of a lord or remove themselves from his dominion.
"And finally, not every man is capable of learning a particular magic, whether it is because of their lack in sharpness of wit, or strength of mind, or innate aptitude.
"Most men can learn most magics if they try hard enough, but not all of them, and most men are not willing to put in such efforts in areas they have little talent for. Studying for a year to be able to learn a spell of glintstone sorcery and paying a high price for a rare glintstone staff as a catalyst when a spear is just as good for killing a wolf that is preying on their livestock.
"Most are content with their lot in life. Besides, why would they want to know these things or put in such time and effort for something their lords men are charged with and better at? Do you make everything you wear, use, and eat yourself? No. Every man has their role in society. A soldier does not farm and a farmer does not hunt bandits.
"What use does a farmer have to be able to look to the stars and read the future, or pull upon the strength of the Erdtree to infuse his shovel with gold that banishes Those-Who-Live-In-Death, when that farmer could spend the time and expense that he would have on that to instead expand his farmland to trade for more goods at town or learn to grow a different crop to grow his family's and the village's prosperity?"
Kalé finished as John started wrapping his mind around what he had just been told.
"Really? They are living in a fantastical land filled with magic and they don't want to learn any of it? I can't even imagine..."
"Fantastical?" Kalé snorted in amusement. "The Lands Between are indeed blessed in many ways compared to most lands even in our reduced state since the Shattering, but I do not see how it is fantastical. Why would everyone wish to learn magic? Why this fixation on magics with you?" Kalé shook his head in exasperation.
And so on and so forth John's questions came and went as they walked through the shaded forest path.
Questions John had slowly built up over the years since his arrival, but had put off asking for later. Some things Kalé knew and explained to John, but others Kalé didn't have the answer to.
When the sun was high in the sky, they stopped to break and eat.
As they were eating a light lunch of rowa fruit and sheep jerky from the stores John had built up over his time at the Church of Elleh, John had drawn out a map a rough, undetailed, and poorly proportioned map of the Lands Between, and was gesturing to it with a stick.
"Have you ever noticed something weird about the coastline Kalé? See how the Lands Between have a roughly crescent moon shape? All the beaches are on the outside of the crescent while on the inside of the crescent are just sheer cliffs."
John gestured towards the bottom left and bottom center of the map.
"Even here in Limgrave, the beaches are on the southern coastline, but the northern or inner coastline is just sheer cliff-face."
"I have never thought of it before, but yes, now that you point it out, it is indeed like that. Why do you say that this is strange? I do not see how beaches being at one place and not the other is strange."
"You know how I told you I was a scholar before waking up in the Lands Between? Part of my studies included the natural states of the earth and how it should be. The coasts on the inside of the crescent are unnatural. There should be beaches there as well, but there aren't. It's like there used to be land here that was suddenly ripped away."
Kalé looked at John skeptically.
"Alright, look at these little bits off the inner coast here." John tapped the stick on the little bits of land jutting off into the center gulf from the bottom half of the landmass.
"These three Divine Towers and this coliseum. See how the land they are on juts out into the sea like small but strangely steep and tall islands? Are there any islands on the outside of the crescent like that?"
"Not that I can recall. None as stark in the peculiar way they are."
John brandished his stick.
"Exactly. And look at this isolated tower here completely off in the ocean by itself."
John continued.
"How and why exactly was this tower built here? Did they ship all the stone over there? Why here?
"Now watch," John said as he drew a line between all the tower locations on his map.
"The towers are all perfectly spaced to form a hexagon," John traced with his stick. "This type of thing isn't an accident. Why would the builders place them here in a hexagon formation around the gulf where it looks like a lot of land was supposed to be there? Especially the isolated tower in the ocean. It wouldn't be in such a difficult place to get to unless they needed to put it there, or it used to be attached to land.
"This all points to there once having been land alongside the inner coast here."
"How curious."
"Curious?" John repeated jabbing at Kalé with his stick, "That's it?"
"You have convinced me John, but I am not sure what you want me to tell you about this."
"I want to know what happened to that land. How was it all destroyed? Do you know what may have happened?"
Kalé put his hand to the side of his head for a minute.
"Well, there are ancient legends of a cataclysm like no other. The world being cleansed by an ocean of fire as a punishment by the Greater Will for the Giants worshiping their Fell God.
"With time passing so easily, knowledge of history, myths, and stories passed down the generations in the Lands Between often have their details change over time. Only the demigods and the oldest of champions know the complete truth of things having seen these things with their own eyes.
"Maybe the tales changed over the years. Instead of an ocean of fire cleansing the world, it may be the original myth may have been much of the Lands Between sinking into the ocean. If that is true, it could be that the entire gulf in the center of the Lands Between had been land."
John shook his head and crossed his arms.
"That doesn't add up. Myths do change over time, but going from 'Most of the land sinks into the ocean' to 'ocean of fire' is a very extreme change. And whatever myths may say, earth doesn't just 'sink' into the ocean. The rain slowly washes the mountains away and carries the dirt to the ocean. That much earth doesn't just 'fall into the ocean' like a crumbling cliffside. That just isn't how the earth works.
"There is even more earth under the earth that is above water. The continent isn't just floating on water. Land only exists outside the ocean because it is a pile of earth big enough to rise above the water level. It can't just magically 'sink' unless you use, well, magic."
"So then we are at an impasse with this John? Because I know of nothing else that may be relevant to this except that myth."
John hung his arms and head in disappointment.
"Shit. I guess we are stuck. I really had hoped you would be able to tell me about this. It's a huge mystery that I suspect connects to other things like the true purpose of the Divine Towers. That hexagonal arrangement of them just screams some sort of magical or symbolic purpose."
Kalé looked amused.
"There are many mysteries in the Lands Between. It is just how things are when the lands are so ancient. And I know of one more mystery that can be added to the total now." Kalé made a show of eying John.
"The land being destroyed?" John asked, confused.
Kalé chuckled ominously.
"No. The mystery of how you, a man who has barely left the area near the Church of Elleh, noticed something about the coastline of the Lands Between you have not seen than I, a Nomad Merchant who has traveled more of these lands than most who have ever lived on them."
John began sputtering-scrambling to explain when Kalé just laughed, interrupting whatever John was going to say.
"Do not worry John. I know you wish to keep some secrets to yourself. I will not pry. I have my own secrets as well. It is just amusing when you accidentally reveal something like this when you normally take such great pains to not reveal anything.
"I do not demand an answer from you. Unlike yourself, I am content to leave mysteries be. Much less dangerous that way."
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John and Kalé were still steadily making their way along the forest dirt path when John suddenly stopped and readied his spear.
"Did you hear that?"
Kalé pulled back on his donkey's reins and cupped his hand to his ear.
They both listened quietly as they heard sounds of something shuffling in the brush off the path to their left and turned to face the noise. The warily tried to pin whatever it was. Kalé was the first to place the noise grabbing hold of his reins as he whispered to John.
"It is a-"
An angry ungodly squeal erupted from behind them on the other side of the path!
"CURSES!" Kalé shouted as his donkey panicked while John spun around speartip forward!
A boar that came to John's knee charged out of the brush and was nearly upon him, and it was all John could do to try and get his spear between them! John's spear struck true, sinking the entire hand's length of the spear blade into the boar until the spear's wings slammed into the boar's body.
Seeing this, John felt an instant of triumph, but the boar stubbornly didn't stop for John's feelings as it kept charging, ignoring its wound. Its charge shoved the spear back in John's hands, and he stumbled, his footing poor after the quick spin. His spear was ripped from his hands, and John was tossed off to the side as the boar ran past him!
Landing hard on his shoulder, John grunted and rolled back onto his knees in time to see the boar turn around lining up to charge him again as his stuck spear was dragged behind it. It charged at John again! and he rolled at the last moment grabbing hold of his spear once again! The boar turned trying to follow John, but John kept hold of the spear and was drug around with it.
John and the boar began struggling on the ground, John holding and pushing on the spear to keep the boar facing away from him and the boar trying to face John to charge again unleash its wrath on him.
They spun around each other pitting their strength against each other. Despite its much smaller stature, the boar was more than half of John's weight, most of that pure muscle, and while John had gotten a boost in strength yesterday, it was very slight.
As the boar spun and dragged John in a circle across the ground, the boar kept bleeding profusely from its spear wound. It spilled blood onto the dirt path that John and the boar were rolling around in, clumps of bloodied dirt smearing into John's armor. In the background John could hear Kalé was still struggling to get his donkey under his control.
John got his footing and was able to arrest the boar's spin and use his strength and weight to directly pin the slowly weakening boar in place despite being stuck on his knees on the ground.
Just as John got the upper hand, he heard another squeal and looked to see another pig charging at him out of the brush they had heard the original noise from, its face level with his stomach only protected by a gambeson.
John nearly let go of his spear and jumped to the side when Kalé's donkey kicked the second pig right in its thick head as the boar passed by it. The boar stumbled from the blow and the donkey stepped backwards following the fleeing pig. The donkey kicked it in the head again and again, the donkey's hooves more accurate and unerring than John's spear had been.
John kept his own squealing boar pinned as the boar under assault from Kalé's donkey completely collapsed after a series of blows. But Kalé's donkey was a vicious thing and despite the pig's form not moving it delivered another half dozen meaty thwacks to its head.
Not at all embarrassed about being outdone by a donkey, John kept his boar pinned until a minute later it had fallen silent as runes rushed into John, the boar's fury leaving it as it finally bled out.
John wrested free his spear that was stubbornly stuck in the thick armored hide of the boar.
Breathing in and out as the adrenaline started coming down, John began cleaning the blood and bits of flesh from it using some cloth as Kalé finally calmed his donkey down and dismounted.
"Those were angry little buggers were they not John?"
"A pain in the ass is what they were. Now I have blood in my gambeson. I'm gonna have to wash it if I don't want to stink like something rotting by tomorrow."
"I do not understand your obsession with being overly clean, but you would not have a dirty gambeson if you had not scuppered it when you stuck that boar and ended up on the ground.
"It got a little dangerous there at the end. If it was not for the ever dependable Rabbit here," Kalé patted his donkey on the side, "that second one may have got you a little. Your plate greaves could handle the tusks, but I would not trust a gambeson to completely stop them."
"I know. I knew pigs are deceptively strong, but I wasn't expecting the boar to be strong enough to just knock me over like that. It surprised me. I think now that I know what to expect it wouldn't knock me over again. I hadn't braced myself properly for it's charge.
"I haven't had much of a chance to actually use my spear outside of getting a good feel for swinging it around on my own. I paid you to trade for one because I don't have much experience using a weapon and I had heard the spear is a good option for those like me.
"The bow I had you get I'm much better with, often having hunted animals in the forest and birds and crabs down towards the beach."
Kalé crouched by the pig his donkey Rabbit had done in.
"It looks that this one is a sow. I bet the other one was a boar in rut. If we stick around other boars might show up following the lingering scent of the sow.
"Let us get these butchered. It is unfortunate they took us by surprise, I am sure plenty of the meat is ruined by how sloppily we killed them. Maybe some fortune will come our way and another boar will show up before we are done."
John started making a campfire as Kalé started prepping the tools. They spent most of the rest of the daylight butchering the sow and boar and preserving the pork by lightly smoking and salting it as best they could. Their work was not especially impressive by any means but it was perfectly serviceable.
After they were done, seeing that there wasn't much time in the day, they traveled a short distance away far enough where the smell wouldn't attract animals, and made camp.
As they laid down to rest John thought about everything he had learned that day. Some things were mundane like the true scale of the lands between, but others were more important like how the Lands Between operated on a kind of feudal serfdom system. The fact that Godrick had over ten thousand soldiers under his command.
Many of the bigger mysteries he had hoped Kalé might help him finally figure out ended up being dead ends like the question of the missing land which should have been where the gulf in the center of the Lands Between was.
There was many things that John was unable to ask Kalé at all because there was no way he would know about them, like where all the Two Fingers come from and their connection to the Greater Will or why Melania had invaded Caelid to fight Radahn. It couldn't have been for his Great Rune because she didn't take Godrick's despite the fact it would have been relatively easy for her to do so. John suspected that it might have something to do with the fact that Radahn was somehow preventing fate or something by stopping the stars.
As for the Two Fingers, John wouldn't trust them as far as he couldn't throw them. The entirety of the Golden Order seemed to be stuffed full of convenient lies that justified all the Golden Order's actions, and all the Two Fingers seem to be near the top and majorly involved even if he didn't know how.
The only other 'order' John knew about outside of Marika's was that of Dragon Lord Placidusax, and as far as John knew, the Two Fingers had no connection to them at all. But he didn't know much of the deep lore or if that was accurate or not. John mostly just knew what he had casually gleaned from reading important items and a couple of youtube videos.
Something was definitely fishy between the Two Fingers and the Golden Order though. He had no evidence for it, but John's gut just suspected they weren't actually hearing the Greater Will at all and were just saying whatever suited them. Religious charlatans claiming to hear God to get whatever they wanted were a dime a dozen and the Fingers were triggering that instinct for John.
John didn't think asking people who weren't high up the totem pole, like Kalé, would yield any answers to this big picture stuff he didn't already know.
It seemed that much like how it was back on Earth, most of the people didn't know a whole lot concretely about the wider world or history and mostly concerned themselves with whatever was relevant to their local community. Not to be unexpected because they were still people.
As John thought about everything he had asked Kalé, a final question came to mind, but it seemed a bit personal.
John thought about whether or not he wanted to ask this, but decided to bite the bullet and decided to ask as he and Kalé laid down their bedrolls by the campfire.
"Kalé, tell me, what is it actually like to be as old as you are? To be ageless? I can scarcely imagine what it will be like 50 years from now."
Kalé didn't say anything for a minute making John worry he had made a mistake in asking that. Before John assured Kalé he didn't have to answer, Kalé spoke.
"More than anything else, it makes starkly clear what is truly important to you. And these things are often not the things you think are important, only realizing long after they are gone how important they were, or that they were important at all.
"As the ages pass, your mind discards things that aren't important to you, and you learn what is truly important by what remains.
"In the thousands of years since the Shattering, the demigods have enacted countless schemes against each other. In the moment, those schemes and conflicts between the demigods seem so important.
"But for most of those schemes after a century, it will be as if they never happened. A few towns or forts or sections of borderlands change hands back and forth, noble lines change allegiances or die off and are replaced by another, or armies are devastated and brought back to full strength once again.
"Now, after so long, I can only name a few such schemes and conflicts that have had enduring effects and have long forgotten a dozen more for each of those.
"Even the memory of champions who held Great Runes eventually fades.
"I cannot remember the face of the first woman I bedded or what I wished for my life when I had been a child. I can no longer remember the largest amount of runes I have ever possessed at one time or the taste of the finest wine I ever drank.
"But I remember the taste of the stew my mother used to make and the rough calluses of my fathers hands as he raised me up to sit on his shoulders. I remember the mischief me and my childhood friend got up to as young men who had yet to fully grow. I remember the names and the deeds of people that were important to me and the bonds we had shared.."
John stayed up for quite a while thinking on Kalé's answer as the campfire crackled nearby before eventually going to sleep.
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