Chapter 72: Arthur

The fresh morning air of Velmora carried a pleasant scent of the evergrowing pines outside the village, forest floor and wood smoke. Wispy pale tendrils of morning vapour curled around the cottages and fields near the borders of the settlement.

In the small wooden shelter at the edge of the farm quarter, Shadow One slowly opened his crimson-tinted eyes.

There was no drowsiness, no signs of his waking up near his wooden pallet at the floor.

A second passed, then another – and Shadow One’s synthetical mind processed every detail, every sound in the vicinity perfectly.

Peeping through the narrow, glassless window opening, Shadow One took in the sky above the familiar, yet strange village.

Far above the horizon, the two purple moons hovered in the heavens, steadily growing fainter as the first hints of morning started to appear in the sky.

Though the sight of the violet light floating in the sky had initially been quite a strange experience for Shadow One, he had quickly grown used to the unusual spectacle.

Morning smoke rose lazily from clay tiled roofs of nearby cottages, curling and vanishing into the morning sky.

A faint noise of animals being tended to in the wooden corral, accompanied by the distant sounds of sweeping the wooden floors in the front porches of the village.

The calm of a small village morning lulled Shadow One into a strange sense of contentment. No loud battles of cultivators raging across the fields and mountains, no ambitions of silver-helmeted mages trying to bend the whole world to their will – only simple needs of food and shelter, and backbreaking labour to meet those needs.

The everyday life of a frontier village had little in common with the intrigues of Silverwood City and the Thousand Mountain Cultivator Trial.

The simple villagers living in the far corners of the Empire were barely aware of the events transpiring there, and for Shadow One, this morning was as unreal as the floating moon above the settlement.

The new day had scarcely begun for Shadow One – and not a single hint of drowsiness remained in his system.

He rolled out of the narrow wooden pallet, stood up, and moved closer to the window opening. His crimson eyes turned to the distant horizon.

Beyond the sloping northern mountains, the two purple moons floated across the sky.

Their pale lavender glow had begun to fade away, chased out by the rising sun. Shadow One merely watched the moons.

To him, not a single bit of wonder remained in what he was seeing.

Like many other things peculiar to the world he had woken up in, the glowing orbs orbiting the distant planet had long ago ceased being sources of mystery for Shadow One.

They were simply a part of the environment he had learned to navigate.

As the first hints of pale sun appeared on the horizon, another revolution of Velmora – however the planet might be called in this world – was already finished. The corresponding note was neatly filed somewhere in the depths of his mind.

Not for the first time, Shadow One wondered at the strange and uncanny significance of the floating moons.

They had been there, patiently hovering over the land every single night since he remembered – which, thankfully, was before the morning storm had appeared on the horizon.

A rooster somewhere in the village lane clucked in response to the rising sun, and shortly after, a rough wooden door was pried open with a creak.

The first animals in the village square were roused from their morning torpor, and several people exchanged murmured good mornings with each other in the morning haze.

The village was slowly opening up to the new day.

Shadow One undid the heavy wooden catch on the shelter door and opened it.

Morning air rushed in, filling the wooden shed with a mix of rich loam, woodsmoke and resinous scent of crushed pine needles.

He needed to remain unnoticed among the villagers – and not just passively, but actively participate in their every life facets, as if he truly belonged there. A man of his bulk would certainly stand out anywhere, but he was not the only one in the village who had seen too many mornings to count.

With that thought in mind, Shadow One stepped outside the shelter and into the village lane.

Several farmers who had risen before dawn greeted him with quiet murmurs and faint smiles as he passed by their cottages on his way to the village square.

To them, the strange giant of a man had long since stopped being a novelty. Even the initial politeness and caution had evaporated the day after yesterday, replaced by the friendly acceptance.

Among the villagers, he was known as Arthur.

The villagers had given him that name a few days ago, when he first arrived in the village, and never asked where he came from – probably because a mountain of a man such as he could not speak of his origin or his name.

It might never have been a question at all – for in Shadow One’s experience, there was no reason to conceal or hide the things that were rightfully his.

The only reason he wore a rough homespun tunic, a hooded cloak and trousers stitched from rough local wool was because that was how everyone else dressed here, and a man who wanted to fit in needed to understand the rules of how society operated around him.

It was not enough to simply observe.

Once outside the shelter, he slowly walked towards the centre of the village.

His walk was ponderous, but no heavier than any man’s gait accustomed to walking the mountain paths.

Halfway along the village lane, the familiar smell of pine wood smoke mixed with wood pulp, wet stone and the acrid tang of pitch. A group of men and women gathered around a short young man, who was trying hard to convince his listeners of the virtues of the woodsmoke as a preventive measure against forest insects.

Shadow One paused by the thickest of the stumps of pine trees felled to build the shelter. It remained an inconveniently placed obstacle, until a villager approaching with a wicker basket of livestock feed noticed it, and with a chuckle, pushed Shadow One aside.

Without a word, he picked up the huge double-bitted iron axe at the nearby pile of firewood, ran his fingers over the worn but sturdy wooden grip, and waited for several seconds.

When the last villager had turned around, Shadow One tightened his fingers around the axe grip.

The pale morning sky seemed to grow impossibly greyer, when a heavy wooden door creaked open with a shudder.