bookworm

“You sure have wooed a difficult one,” Ursula said. “I’ll have you know it took a lot of effort to make sure she didn’t get up to any trouble while you were asleep.”
The svartalf sighed with the gravity of a student trying to get the class clown to stop acting up. Uh, I don’t think this is as laid-back as you’re making it out to be...
Why was it here? I’d wrung out every last drop of my mana to send it to the endless grave of faraway somewhere.
“I’m not entirely sure of the specifics,” she explained. “After all, this blade is even older than I. In fact, I’m doubtful we could find many as ancient as her.”
With that shiver-inducing foreword out of the way, Ursula went on to break down the general gist of things. Apparently, alfar could roughly interpret the whims of such living banes. As a mensch, I could only pick up on the raw emotions they radiated...but having an interpreter wasn’t enough to make me want this bothersome blight of a blade.
According to Ursula, the sword of damnation had spawned the ichor maze in search of a new master. It had desired a warrior fit to wield it: the challenger had to be as strong or stronger than its previous partner. Hearing that all that had been caused by this evil weapon’s tantrum locked my jaw agape.
“She wants love: to love and to be loved... She seems to have been acting out of courtship, as distressing as that may be for a mortal.”
Suddenly, a voiceless scream clawed at the back of my mind in disagreement. Needless to say, the source was the relic of unclassifiable danger.
I have no idea how to describe the “sounds” it was making. I heard a cacophony of voices swirl together with screeching glass and metal; the meaningless noise of it all paradoxically injected meaning alone into my psyche.
It was never meant to be heard by the fleshy sacks that walked about the planet. Perhaps that was why my disgruntled brain chose to interpret the sword’s intent in such a horrid way.
“You may claim you cause no distress all you like,” Ursula retorted, “but even we are closer to fleeting life than you.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Do you have any idea how many people died in that labyrinth? I’m sure there were even more than I saw that couldn’t even be resurrected as zombies... I’m sorry, but there’s no chance I can use a sword with that kind of terrible power!”
“But she’s saying that she doesn’t know anything about the undead.”
“Excuse me?”
Ursula continued translating the splintering creaks entering my soul for me. Apparently, the sword itself hadn’t commanded the power to raise the dead; no, that had been caused by the regrets of her former master as he cradled it in death.
The sword itself had birthed the ichor maze to beckon in challengers, but claimed that the zombies and thematic riddles strewn about everywhere had arisen from the late adventurer’s personal obsessions. His attachment had given the concentrated ichor direction, recycling those he felled into further trials of might...until a dungeon was born.
Come to think of it, the journal I’d skimmed through had ended with the adventurer confessing his greatest regret: that he had failed to find a successor to entrust his beloved sword to.
What a pair of lovebirds! Go get a room and lock yourselves in forever!
My heartfelt lament failed to reach anyone else, and the dispassionate explanation continued.
Barring its sentience, the blade itself didn’t have any notable powers...that is, other than its ability to return to its wielder’s side.
The sword boasted the same capabilities as the famous divine blades littering the myths of my previous world. I had no idea how something so magnificent could end up exuding such a deathly aura. Is this okay? Can we trust it? I was sure that wielding it would eat at my mind; I mean, just listening to it mandated a SAN roll.
Ursula went on to elaborate that the accursed blade had used its homebound property to its fullest extent in order to escape the infinite elsewhere of my portal and end up at my bedside. But, you know, I wasn’t quite a fan of being recognized as its wielder without my consent.
No—no way. I don’t need this thing.
“But these sorts of beings are the type to chase you around until the end of time...or space, in this case,” the svartalf said. “You aren’t to go around selling her over and over again to earn extra coin. Am I clear?”
I wasn’t the sort of fool to go around selling invisible knives all my life. Rather, I couldn’t even imagine what kind of lunatic would want to buy something this atrocious in the first place. If I were a buyer, I wouldn’t care how rare or strong the thing was; you couldn’t pay me to take it.
“You may not wish to hear this,” Ursula added, “but I think it pays to know when to fold.”
If a mensch—or at the very least, a mortal being—had said this to me, I might have been able to swallow this truism. But hearing it from an undying phenomenon given consciousness felt like pure mockery.
Sure, I’d gotten this far by accepting some losses. I may not have had control over my hair and eyes, but I’d gotten used to my dealings with alfar—I would go so far as to say it wasn’t all bad.
However, this unadulterated consolidation of wrongness was a different thing entirely. Yes, I had played plenty of characters with literal evil double-edged blades, where I’d found loopholes to use my demerits to my advantage. Yes, I had enjoyed dragging my family in—looking back, they’d all been amazing sports—as I role-played the emotional struggle of wielding such a weapon. But to do it for real was out of the question.
Besides, what the hell was its deal? What did a sword want out of love? What did that even mean? Was I supposed to cradle it to bed every night? Was I supposed to lick it clean?
“Um...” Ursula frowned. “Whenever love comes up, she starts speaking incredibly quickly and it’s honestly rather disturbing...”
The sharp pain of displeasure had stabbed my inner skull; apparently, the sword was chatting up a blue streak. While it was only natural to become livelier when discussing a favorite subject, this was extreme. I would have appreciated it if it quit compressing all its emotions into high-frequency waves that bounced around in my skull.
Barraged by innumerable brainwaves, I grew woozy to the point of nausea. Just as the world began to spin...the assault lightened. I put a hand to my head to temper the lingering headache, and the other remained planted on the bed frame to secure my balance; suddenly, the latter hand began to glow.
More precisely, the ice-blue gem planted in my lunar ring was gleaming. Even after I’d killed her, even after she’d disappeared in my arms, Helga was watching over me. Although she couldn’t block everything, the stinging pain softened considerably. Listening to this “voice” for too long was sure to grind away my sanity, so I was terribly thankful that it was quieter now.
Whether Ursula knew of my plight or not, she continued interpreting the toxic current of meaning without my asking. Hearing her clarify small bits at a time was a serious threat to my well-being on its own. Stop! Don’t tell me any more! Just let me sleep!
Helga’s memory did its best, but covering my ears did little to interrupt the constant voices. Even so, I wished that someone would plug them up just to give me some small feeling of security.
There was a good chance Ursula was only translating because she would otherwise be the one eating the brunt of the sword’s ill will. Unenthused, she explained that for a sword to love, it simply needed to fulfill its purpose to the best of its ability. To offer its wielder an eternally sharp blade that would never chip, bend, or break was its ode of affection.
While its offerings were simple, the dark blade certainly did epitomize what it meant to be a sword.
In this day and age, a sword was a symbol: around the waist, adorned with golds and silvers, it was a marker of authority. However, at its inception, the sword had been a tool to better slay one’s enemies. Thus, the accursed darkness professed its love by means of unparalleled quality to that end.
It cut through the hardest metals without a chip of its own, never succumbing to the force of an enemy blade. It returned to its wielder’s hand in an instant if they so willed it, never to be stolen away by another.
An impeccable edge, indestructible body, and everlasting loyalty were certainly the magnificent traits I expected from the Ascalons and Fragarachs of the world; strangely enough, though, my excitement to wield the thing remained stuck at rock bottom. It was effectively a sword of legend, so why was it so...this? Was this what it meant to say that stats can lie?
At any rate, the question of what it meant for a sword to love had been answered; next came what it meant for a sword to be loved. As one might expect, this was simply to be used as a sword: to kill one’s enemies. It followed that the depth of one’s love was expressed through the art of swordplay; after all, mastery was a bud that could only blossom at the end of a long road called dedication.
Swords are weapons. While they can be used to steal, save, or protect, in the grand scheme of things these objectives are all secondary to the act of killing whoever stands in their wielders’ ways. They are but one of many products originating from mankind’s long quest for blood.
In the end, a sword’s purpose had never been to garnish a nobleman’s belt, nor to rest sheathed atop a fireplace as an unused emblem of peace. To sum it all up, this black lump of doom wanted me to go around slashing people to bits. I knew this thing was a psycho.
The throbbing grew more pronounced: apparently, it wanted me to try holding it. They say you shouldn’t knock it till you try it, but...
“I don’t wanna. I feel like it’ll make me sick.”
“Would it hurt to at least keep your imagined side effects to curses?”
The warbled messages bullied my mind further, and I finally gave up, knowing that leaving it be would do nothing to improve my situation. I warily reached out and curled my fingers around the handle.
Much to my chagrin, the sword was splendid. The grip clung tight, yet it was counterintuitively trivial to roll around in my hand. Its center of mass was concentrated in the center, but the tip boasted solid weight; I could surely swing it with great speed if I ever got the hang of it. The shining dark luster tapered off into edges fine enough to cut the cold air of late autumn in two. Ignoring the overpowering dread for a moment, it was as aesthetically marvelous as it was powerful.
Being a lengthy zweihander, I wouldn’t be able to handle it with the same grace I did Schutzwolfe—on account of my countless add-ons for one-handed weapons—but I couldn’t deny that the sword was superb.
“Hm?”
As I inspected it all over to try and find a flaw, I noticed gold lettering engraved into the hilt. The ancient text was mostly illegible due to wear, but it seemed to be in a language that was adjacent to Rhinian—perhaps its parent tongue. Of all the words, I could only recognize one: “crave.”
Amidst the indecipherable string of characters was the will of sheer desire. Being forged with hunger, thirst, and a pining spirit had likely been why the thing was so mad. For now, I decided to dub it the Craving Blade.
At this point, I was out of options. If the thing could find its way back to me after I sent it to gods-know-where, there wasn’t much else I could do. Had it just showed back up on my doorstep after I’d tossed it in the local dump, I would’ve taken the challenge head-on and started looking for active volcanoes, but this was too much.
Although I had to say, the thought of disposing of a cursed item in a volcano was certainly captivating. I already knew someone with pointy ears—though she’d probably shoot me with a bow if I dared to make the comparison—so I just needed to find dvergar and floresiensis pals to make the trip.
Leaving my escapist fantasies aside, the point was that I could no longer handle this situation on my own. Something of this level called for Lady Agrippina or Lady Leizniz—or perhaps Sir Feige could help. I couldn’t exactly sleep off the mana costs of blowing it to kingdom come every time it showed up, so my only option was to put up with it for a while.
I tossed the damned thing aside in a fit of despair—I felt it complain, but couldn’t care less—and crawled back into bed.
“My, sleeping again, Beloved One?”
“I’m emotionally exhausted,” I answered. “Sing me a lullaby, will you?”
I’d meant it as a sulking joke, but Ursula fulfilled my request with a snicker. She gently landed atop my head and sang like a midnight breeze.
“O quiet night—O gentle night.”
Hers was a kind voice. It conveyed that indescribable feeling of staring up at the stars with a cigarette in my mouth after a long night of overtime work. I relived a scene with the tender glow of a watchful moon and a cool gust of wind that wicked sweat off my weary brow.
Amidst all the fatigue and stress, that had been a true moment of respite.
Was it because she was an alf of the night? I squeezed my pillow tight, its herbal fragrance clinging to my nose. A long sigh escaped my lips, full of intertwining relief and nostalgia.
“O moonlit night—let your caring arms of light hold us—let sleeping souls rest.”
I may have found myself saddled with an unwelcome burden, but perhaps this song could count amongst my rewards.
No, in fact, it surely did. I’d just finished sleeping for eons, but I truly felt like I was going to enjoy this next slumber.
Oh, I forgot. I never checked how much experience I earned for all this...
“Good night, Beloved One,” Ursula whispered. “Don’t forget to rely on us next time.”
...but that can wait for tomorrow.

[Tips] While rare, sentient tools are widely known to exist. Although some are heralded as friends to people for their command of mortal tongues, there is no guarantee that their values line up in any way. They are not animals, nor are they spirits; least of all are they people.

Let only those whose hearts have never skipped a beat upon seeing a girl come back from summer break cuter than she was before throw the first stone.
“Hey, old pal... Um, uh, it’s kind of embarrassing to have you stare like that.”
To say that I was looking at a new person would be an understatement. Nothing fundamental had changed: the morning sun still left a halo upon raven-black hair, and the golden ratio remained ever present in the perfect arrangement of Mika’s face.
However, I was now met with a rounder nose, with plumper lips, with a gentler jawline, and with the slight differences in shadows that came from those changes. The arc connecting neck to shoulder was more slender, as were the contours of the lithe arms that extended like willow branches from it. Lithe legs with unpronounced knees stretched from rounded hips, speaking to an undeniable change in appearance.
The friend who had woken me up was a full-fledged maiden.
“Oh, uh,” I stammered. “Sorry. Er, well, how do I put this...”
“Put what?”
Mika smiled bashfully as he—wait, she? Anyway, she smiled bashfully as she played with her relatively straightened hair. So this is what I thought was off last night.
“Uh... Um...” I searched for words to put in my mouth. “You’ve gotten a lot cuter?”
“You think? I feel like I haven’t really changed at all.”
Watch your mouth, old chum. Claiming that this was the result of zero change was sure to rouse all the ladies of the world to throw things on stage in protest; I would of course step in as a shield, but even I wouldn’t be able to deny their righteousness.
Between sexes, Mika had exhibited a cryptic beauty that played to both male and female allure, but that had been replaced with unmistakable girlish charm. What boyishness remained amounted to less than that of a tomboy, and the usual temptation to stray off the beaten path—as crass as this turn of phrase may be—had turned into straightforward appreciation of an adorable girl.
“Do... Do you think I’ve changed too much?”
Mika’s voice was equal parts reproachful for my unrestrained staring and anxious about something yet unseen. Although I suspected he—ah, crap, she—wasn’t doing this on purpose, her head was tilted, lips slightly pointed, and her fingers were fidgeting as she waited for an answer. Combined, her mannerisms compelled both my sense of protectiveness and an uninvited desire to tease her.
“As if,” I said. “Don’t you remember what I told you, old chum?”
The devil on my shoulder kept blabbing about the psychological effect of cute aggression, but the angel on the other side managed to hold firm and punch its counterpart’s mouth shut. The angel then grabbed the devil by the collar and slammed its head down on the floor a few dozen more times, just in case.
“I’ll always be your friend, no matter what you look like or what kind of world we live in. Everything I said that night is as true now as then.”
I took Mika’s hands tightly in mine and bumped my forehead against hers. Her lashes were longer than before, and the corners of her eyes drooped more gently, yet the intelligent eyes that shone at their center remained unchanged.
Through those windows I could see her dignified soul. No matter how the vessel changed, it was the enduring person within that I held in such esteem.
“Or what?” I asked. “Do you take me for a flimsy sweet-talker who’d go back on his word at the slightest change of appearance?”
“...Heh, as if,” Mika replied. “Thanks, old pal.”
We unclasped our hands and moved them to each other’s backs for a good hug. The warmth I could feel beyond our clothes hadn’t changed one bit since that fateful night. Her shoulders were narrower and the smell tickling my nose was now as sweet as the herbal incense in the air, but none of it had any bearing on our bond.
After a decent while, we both loosened our grips and shared a shy chuckle. We laughed at ourselves and joked about how this wasn’t a moment to share in broad daylight to ease the embarrassment.
“But you know,” Mika added, “it might’ve been fun if you were the one sweet-talking me.”
“Ghft!” I sputtered. “That joke is a bit risqué...”
“Ha ha, forgive me, old pal. The physical changes affect my thinking too, and all. Anyway, messing around is fun, but let’s get to eating breakfast already.”
Still flustered by my unchanging friend’s changed nature, I took the meal Mika handed me. She’d gone to fetch our food before waking me, and the iatrurge had apparently prescribed a plain porridge with an offensively small amount of garum sauce to flavor it. On the side was a single salted plum to sate my desire for savory food. Frankly, it was dismally lacking...
“Don’t look at me like that, Erich.”
I’d been staring at Mika’s tray: she had a classic imperial breakfast of bread, wurst, and butter. Alas, her voice was stern, and she went so far as to hide her meal behind her back to drive home the point that she wasn’t going to share.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’ve been out for six days,” she explained. “The healer said your gut will just throw everything back up if you eat solids right away.”
Mika followed the doctor’s orders to a tee and forced me to take the sad breakfast, despite my objections. Ah, but I did know what she was talking about: it was the fate of many a survivor lost at sea or in the wild. Iatrurges could prevent muscular atrophy while laying in bed, but even they couldn’t reach in to fix my gut; this world was such a mixed bag of convenience and hassle.
“Today’s the first day I’ve gotten to eat solids myself,” she went on. “Put up with it for now, okay?”
Also of note was that Mika’s voice had changed as well. What had once been a boyish soprano now rang higher than ever before. And here I’d thought she’d remain androgynous no matter which way her body shifted.
This made me look forward to seeing her as a boy. I had no doubt he’d be a handsome lad that would draw stares from ladies passing by—all the more reason I couldn’t let Lady Leizniz discover him. Mika ticked two of the wraith’s boxes—in the worst case, an encounter might leave her with a new box to tick—and I could seriously imagine her starting an all-out battle over the young tivisco.
Hrm... I kind of wanted to see that, but also kind of didn’t. Both the nations of Earth and the histories of Rhine had records of ludicrous wars waged over beautiful women, but even so, they were absurd enough to get rarer and rarer as time progressed.
I imagined the conflict between a pervert trying to dress up a cute kid and a decent master trying to protect their student. Depending on what was said, I could see either side exploding in a fit of rage and reigniting the cadre wars.
If that were to happen, fully capable magia would be pitted against each other; keeping the death toll to a few dozen would probably be the best-case scenario. Eventually, that would necessitate the crown’s involvement, and that would then cause the whole ordeal to go down in the official records.
Surely, neither the historians of tomorrow nor the diplomats of today would have an easy time of it: the former would struggle to decipher the preposterous events that the latter would so despondently labor to write in a manner befitting of the imperial court.
“...Old pal? The porridge won’t finish itself, you know?”
“Huh? Oh, right.”
Mika implicitly chided me for staring again, so I hurriedly lifted my spoon. I couldn’t taste the food—though only in small part due to its flavor—but I knew I couldn’t just stay surprised about my friend’s changes forever. While I’d already resigned myself to being shocked again in two months’ time, I planned to get along with her for long enough that I’d have the time to get used to it.
Besides, I wasn’t going to forget my own words: Mika was Mika, no matter the details.
My bland breakfast was finished in the blink of an eye. As an aside, I’d chucked the evil sword underneath my bed before Mika had gotten up—the pulsing emotion was markedly unhelpful for my remaining headache, but I managed to grit my teeth and ignore it—so she didn’t have to deal with any mental attacks as she took away our trays.
“Okay,” she said, returning and sitting on her own bed, “the healer says we have to stay put here for another ten days.”
Apparently, the ability to walk was oftentimes a false sign of wellness. In primeval times, life had equated sickly stillness with death, and our bodies had developed an instinctive mechanism to wake themselves as a result. Thought of in this way, this seemed like a reasonable concern to have.
“We have to spend another ten days in this vat of incense?” I groaned. “I’m going to be bored to tears.”
“Oh, and I don’t think I need to say this, but you’re not allowed to exercise either.”
“Blegh.” I stuck out my tongue and Mika flicked my forehead with a spell.
The way she smiled at me like a troublesome child was picturesque. A normal boy in the midst of puberty would cause incident after incident just to see this expression again.
“But I’ll get rusty,” I protested. “Have you ever heard this saying? ‘One day of rest and you will know; two days of rest and your master will know; and—’”
“‘Three days of rest and everyone will know,’ right?” Mika concluded. “I get it, but this is for the best. The math on sacrificing the rest of your life for one day of training just doesn’t add up. Also, the incense you’re complaining about is for our sakes too. The healer said it’s to fix our lungs.”
“This is medicine?”
“Yeah. You can’t just slather medicine on our throats and lungs, right? That’s why they mix it into the air instead, so it can slowly heal us as we breathe.”
All this time, I’d thought the fragrant candles served the same purpose as the herbs dangling from the ceiling: pretentious artistry. Magia and lowly mages alike loved to embellish their dwellings with this sort of pageantry. I mean, even Lady Agrippina went through the trouble of setting up the (probably) pointless gimmick of turning her atelier into a garden.
Regardless, airborne treatment sounded expensive; just how philanthropic was Sir Feige? He didn’t seem the stingy type, so I doubted he’d hit us with a bill after giving us his word otherwise, but thinking about the total cost of care sent chills down my spine.
I better go thank him later...
“Oh, I almost forgot! Here, I have a letter for you.”
Out of the blue, Mika pulled out a letter from her bedside dresser. The wax-sealed envelope was trimmed with golden foil, and was courteously addressed to “Mr. Erich of Konigstuhl Canton” in elegant cursive.
I only knew of one individual who could pen an address so gracefully on an envelope prestigious enough to warrant several days of hard work for an average laborer. The coat of a silver leaf stamped into the wax was the inviolable proof of aristocracy: this had to be Sir Feige’s reward.
I giddily ran a knife across the top and heard a small popping sound. For a brief moment, I could see the remnants of magic; the treant might’ve rigged the letter with a terrible curse had anyone else opened it.
“You sure seem eager to open it,” Mika pointed out. “Is it...a love letter? Never mind, it doesn’t look like one.”
“This is better than that,” I said. “Come on, old chum. You should be just as excited as me. This is none other than our reward!”
I slapped the spot on the bed next to me to invite her to read with me, and it turned out that she’d been hiding how curious she was, judging by the skip in her step. Her running form was also remarkably more feminine, but perhaps that was an intentional choice. Otherwise, maybe her brain was naturally geared to act out the gender archetype befitting of her current sex, in which case, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Mika’s sexual shifts literally changed her brain.
Although frankly, that was beside the point. What worried me more was the softness of her shoulder against mine and the sweetness that had yet refused to abandon my nose...
“What’s wrong?”
I froze for a moment and Mika peered into my eyes. I told her not to worry about it—I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it, so she probably knew exactly what was wrong—and pulled out the letter from its container.
...Wow, that’s hard!
“Ugh,” Mika groaned, “court process palatial writing?”
The letter was written in an especially formal branch of palatial language known as court process. Letters fit for the Emperor were always written this way, combining delicate complexities with roundabout euphemisms to conjure up a style that was infamous for its difficulty.
“This is amazing,” she marveled. “Wow, whenever a letter shows up, it’s a perfect copy of all the other ones.”
“It really is something,” I agreed. “Wait, look. All the text is set so that every letter is an equal distance apart. This is gorgeous.”
The master scrivener lived up to his name. Gazing at Sir Feige’s masterpiece—it was no longer something I could deride as a mere letter—I could see why his transcriptions could be valued more highly than the originals they mimicked.
Yes, indeed, the lettering was breathtaking. The lettering was without flaw, but...
“Hey, old chum?”
“Stop, old pal. I know what you’re about to say, and no, I only know the very basics of court process writing.”
“Ah... Me too.”
We were a servant without noble tutelage and a fledgling College student. The letter was too difficult for us. If I weren’t already aware that complexity of grammar and speech was a sign of respect in high society, I would’ve thought this to be a mean-spirited prank.
To draw a comparison, this would be like taking an elementary schooler who’d just finished learning all their ABCs and handing them a handwritten Shakespearean manuscript. It was technically the same language and the same letters, but it felt as though I needed a degree just to decipher the first word.
What kind of writing system demands a skill check just to read?!
If fluent literacy and equal skill in writing were prerequisite to nobility, I was fine spending my whole life as a commoner. This was going to split my brain in two.
“Uhh,” I mumbled, “Does this part refer to...wait, what?”
“Hmm... I have no idea what this figure of speech means. If I had to guess from context, I think it goes here?”
“No, hold on, Mika. If you shift that there, then the subject of this other sentence doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh, shoot, you’re right. But in that case, we can take the part that precedes this section and...”
Mika and I bumped our heads together and tried all sorts of combinations to decode this secret cipher. By the time I realized it, the awkwardness I’d felt had given way to our usual sense of distance. I knew it, I thought. The time we’d spent as friends would not bend so easily.
After over an hour of churning our brains at full throttle, we’d managed to convert the wordy lines into something two kids from the boonies could comprehend. We’d only gotten through the first page, but were rewarded with nothing but a boring seasonal greeting, introduction, and a recounting of the events we’d lived through. Oh, come on! How many more pages are there?!
“Huh?”
“Oh? What’s this?”
Totally drained, we dejectedly turned to the next page and were greeted by standard Rhinian text. The simple message didn’t even bother with the palatial dialect, opting to trim all the needless fat, including an introduction, seeing as Sir Feige and I were already acquainted.
What followed were concerns about our health, reassurances that he would foot the bill, and an apology for not coming to visit on account of the need to travel to the local capital and report the incident to the lord in person.
At the very end, he had written this: “Hand the first page penned in court process to your masters as proof of your heroic deeds. I know it can be hard to understand, so I’ve included a version in common Rhinian for you and your friend to read. Make sure to remove that page before you deliver the message.”
Mika and I looked at each other. We looked back at the papers. We looked at each other again. After a few seconds, our eyes turned up to the ceiling and we shouted in unison.
“You should’ve put this one in front!”

[Tips] Court process palatial Rhinian employs the most convoluted grammatical and linguistic devices out of all the palatial subdialects. Unique to the Trialist Empire, it is more a literary phenomenon than a verbal one, and is most often used for imperial correspondence and archiving.
Some linguistic anthropologists speculate that the mounting complexity of palatial language traces its origins to antiespionage tactics in the early Empire. An inexperienced speaker is prone to letting unfitting turns of phrase slip, making it easy to spot an outsider in high society. Even the most carefully camouflaged agents cannot learn the rules of etiquette in a day.
It took a good while cussing out court process writing for me and Mika to let off enough steam to calm down. I genuinely doubted whether a single person in the entire Empire stood to benefit from the existence of the craft; if imperial nobility had to jump through this many hoops just to send a letter, then maybe their titles were more punishment than privilege.
At any rate, we started sifting the palatial letters from the legible ones, and two small envelopes appeared from between the sheets. They’d been slotted into the larger one like a pair of matryoshkas.
“‘To the young and valiant swordsman?’” I read aloud.
“This one says, ‘To the bright aspiring magus,’” Mika said.
Hesitantly, we each took the one that best fit us—if I may interject, I’d been driven by sheer fear of death and valor was the last thing on my mind—and opened the seals. I pulled out the contents: a single strip of paper with some sort of stamp on it.
“The heck is this?” I asked.
I knew from its make that this couldn’t be a mere note or message. Sheepskin this thick was costly to produce, and it was only used for important documents that needed to stand up to long-term preservation.
“I think it’s a bill,” Mika said slowly. “I’ve seen papers like this running errands for my professors. Oh, and it says here that it’s issued by the merchants’ artisan union, so we won’t have to worry about being cheated.”
Ah, so it’s basically a check. Services for money-holders to entrust with liquid assets meant for a third party were about as old as capital itself. This slip of paper represented securities meant to be paid out, clarifying why the material used to create it was of such commendable quality. The recipients—i.e. us—simply needed to take this to the merchants’ union to trade it in for usable currency. Afterward, the union would handle the labor of collecting their dues from Sir Feige, either by visiting him in person or subtracting the amount in question from a balance of banked funds.
Imperial cash was almost always metal, making it a colossal pain to use in large-scale transactions. Coins were heavy, bulky, and became difficult to prove as one’s own the minute they were stolen. Real tender was reserved for personal use; papers representing tens of thousands of gold coins were indispensable in an age without guarantee of safety in transit. Even the Trialist Empire and all its zealous patrolmen couldn’t stamp out robbery on the roads, so the invention of checks was a no-brainer.
Basically, Sir Feige was giving us an allowance. What a splendid guy. The rich really are leagues above us.
“Let’s see, how much—” Huh? I saw a peculiar word on the paper. “Hey, old chum?”
“Give me a second, old pal. I’m busy wondering whether I should go ask the healer for eye drops.”
What a coincidence. I guess good friends are always on the same page.
Jokes aside, I seriously thought that the written value had to be a mistake. The text did not say assarii, nor did it say librae. No, if I wasn’t mistaken, this check paid out in drachmae.
Drachmae—gold coins! Drachmae were supreme among our nation’s currencies, and unlike the festival stall where I’d been duped in my childhood, this didn’t play with any “ten gold coins” shenanigans; no, the check unambiguously specified ten drachmae.
Yet the sum brought no excitement—only dread.
Take a moment to think about this: my family had been relatively well-off, and this was worth two full years of our income. This would be like handing an average white-collar worker forty to eighty thousand dollars.
I wasn’t going to complain about getting a bigger allowance, but anyone would freak out if they found a stack of bills sticking out of their New Year’s money. I knew old men were prone to spoiling children, but this was a bit much. I doubted I’d ever see a payday like this again, including in my future escapades as a professional adventurer. What, was I supposed to go slay a drake—no, a bona fide dragon—to make up the difference?
“Th-This is—this isn’t a dream, is it? I can buy—oh, I can buy a new notebook—no, a robe... I can send money back home too, and I can pay back my student loans, and, and—”
Being a poor student herself, the staggering number had slapped Mika upside the head she was cradling in a desperate attempt to contain her restlessness. Her head was cocked at a worrying angle, her neck twisting in time with the tangled strands of thought bouncing around her head.
“C-C-C-Calm down, Mika. L-Let’s, uh, let’s cool off and, er—we need to calm down and go ask for the correct numbers.” My effort to restore our composure was laughably rife with stutters, and the hand with the parchment in it went numb.
“M-Me? No, you calm down, Erich. Look, l-look! No one with h-handwriting this pretty would make, um, a mistake like that...right? Right?! I’m not crazy for getting excited, am I?!”
Mika’s panic was just as bad, and she desperately clung to me to confirm over my shoulder that we hadn’t misread anything. Had this been a comic book, our watery eyes would have surely been drawn as spinning whirlpools of disarray.
Call us pathetic if you will, but the two of us were working-class kids through and through. I was a servant that scraped by on pennies every day, and she was the sort of student to treat herself to a bath. How were we ever meant to keep our cool when the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars had fallen into our laps? The last time I’d seen a gold coin in the flesh had been that festival incident all those years ago, and the drachma Lady Agrippina had promised me for coming to Wustrow was meant to be broken up into living expenses and savings. But now I had ten of them?
My supposedly healed head began to spin. Who in their right mind would give this to someone that had just woken up from a six-day slumber? As happy as I was, disorientation won out; I couldn’t process my emotions quickly enough to keep up.
“Nope,” I said, “let’s go to sleep.”
“...Yeah, let’s take a nap.”
Mika and I decided to escape from cognizant reality before our brains overheated and killed us. I needed to be in a better headspace for this to sink in—the letters and all. Once I did, I’d stash one drachma for the future and pour everything else into Elisa’s tuition. Totally drained, both of us crawled into the bed we were sitting on and clocked out. Later, I would wake up and read through the letters on my own, only to nearly faint again.
Sir Feige had decided not to hand over the tome in question to my client. No, that would have been too easy. He’d decided to give the rights to the cursed book to me.