No wizards? What’s up with that?

Senkar was put down less than five minutes later. In different circumstances he could perhaps even enjoy the experience. However, flying face-down at an altitude of a hundred feet and seeing the ground speed past was panic-inducing, and he could not help but try to wriggle out, but the grip of a gryphon's hind legs was iron. They could lift and carry a cow, after all, so what was a human to them? Still in flight he tried telling them what he thought of the abduction, but the wind stole the words from his mouth. By the time they landed, he was calmer and held his tongue. Finding people was his goal, after all.

Two riders and two gryphons set down on top of a lone, derelict tower in the middle of wilderness, its crenellations providing some sort of reassurance against the feeling of vertigo that apparently even technically immortal people had. The subconsciousness can’t be so easily overwritten, he remarked. The space was large enough to contain three men and two lion-birds, and those were really big, Senkar noticed. White and gray feathers, powerful claws, razor-sharp beak, and forward-facing eyes that give away their intellige-

The majestic beast rose to full height, spread its wings, and turned its entire body to Senkar. One of the riders reacted immediately, visibly distressed, and pulled the ropes and appeased the gryphon. ‘Whoa, easy, easy!’ He kept saying. ‘It’s all right, calm down!’

‘The hell are you doing!’ hissed the rider who carried Senkar. He wore wool garments and furs, likely to insulate against the cold of the flight, but the wicked, jagged black sword on his back was unmistakenly of a Dark Knight. ‘Is your memory gone? Hit your head too hard?’

‘What?’ was all Senkar could say, caught off-guard by the whole situation.

‘What what? Don’t. Make. Eye. Contact.’ advised one of the riders, and Senkar hated his tone. The speaker removed his goggles. He was a well-built man whose unshaven face was a tell-tale sign of someone who had not been home for a few days. Definitely a Player. A player using Riding! He approached Senkar, likely to give him another lecture. Senkar spoke first, temper rising again. He has been through so much over the last two days.

‘How the frakk was I supposed to know?! I’ve never seen them before!’

This seemed to take the rider by surprise. He looked at his colleague, and that one’s eyebrows were raised too, although it was hard to see through the goggles.

‘You… never saw them? How did you manage that?’

‘You’re not from Tarragona?’ interrupted the other rider, just as Senkar was opening his mouth to let loose a volley of profanities and insults. The other rider also removed his goggles, and approached Senkar to carefully study his face. He definitely looked like a Naturalist, and his affinity for beast-handling was an indication too. ‘I’ve never seen him before,’ he said.

Senkar took a deep breath and did his best to speak calmly, hoping he was not hissing too much.

‘I don’t know what Tarragona is, or who you are, or where we are. But I’m a Player like you. I’m from Rockb… Sorostade kingdom.’

The gryphon riders exchanged looks, and the first one turned to carefully observe Senkar again.

‘We never heard about that kingdom. But if what you say is true, then you are the first person we met who came from outside this land.’

‘That’s why I’m here. To find people - no, Players - from outside my land.’

‘That explains why he was here, on foot, and near the damned thing. We better take him to the boss immediately,’ said one to the Naturalist, then turned to Senkar and extended a hand in greeting.

‘Sorry about that incident, and you know, the rest. I’m Akshal, and he is Basil.’

‘I’m Senkar. No hard feelings.’ Then, to break the ice, he said: ‘You know, I almost had that Warp Predator.’

‘What do you mean? They’re not that tough,’ asked Akshal.

‘For an unarmed person at level thirty-something?’

‘Whoa! That low?! Bloody hell. Then we were right to pick you up. You were as good as dead.’

‘Why?’

‘It had to be quick. The Predator could still blink again, even from far away, and would not be fooled twice.’

‘I already had a plan for that. Put a stake in the ground so that he teleports into it and the stake nails it to the ground. Then crush its head with a rock.’

‘Nice idea, but no. It works the other way around. Whatever exits from a warp, destroys the object that stood there first.’

‘Really? Frakk. I was so proud of myself when I came up with this on the run.’

‘Killing a Warp Predator bare-handed would deffo be a sick story to tell,’ admitted Basil. ‘I’m glad we didn’t ruin that in the end.’

—

‘We’re almost there,’ Basil told him. Senkar was sitting behind him, holding the saddle as hard as he could, all the way thanking whoever decided that every gryphon saddle should allow for a passenger. The flight by that point lasted for hours, and the distance they covered was great. Earlier, Basil informed him that they had been routinely patrolling the “cursed pyramid” area, and that this one was the most distant one. So there are more of those, Senkar realised.

He already suspected they were close, judging by the increased frequency of seeing roads, bridges, watchtowers, farmland, orchards, even a few other gryphons, saddled or not. They were heading northwest, straight towards a coastline and an island connected to the landmass by a narrow, paved land-bridge. The city proper began immediately beyond the land bridge, protected by a massive gateway with a very respectable portcullis, and the picturesque rooftops painted in every imaginable color dramatically rose higher and higher in altitude the deeper the city went, suggesting Tarragona was built on a steep hill or a whole set of hills.

A keep stood at the center, and a vast platform crowned its top like a helipad on a hospital. It is there that the riders were heading to, and upon a closer look, Senkar could see that it was where the gryphons came to and from, not that they were many. They landed with well-practiced smoothness.

‘I’ll strip the mounts, you go inform the boss,’ said Basil to Akshal, and began removing the saddles and the saddlebags from the gryphons while Akshal disappeared into a staircase. Basil finished with the gryphons, and gently clapped the neck of each. ‘Off you go,’ he told them, and the creatures bolted into the air like rockets. Basil dumped some sacks and saddlebags onto Senkar’s arms.

‘They’re not even a little tired?’ Senkar was impressed.

‘No, but we had only just taken off before finding you. They did not fly much today at all.’

‘Amazing. Where I come from, we don’t have any mounts.’

‘Really?’ Basil was surprised. ‘Nothing at all? That must suck.’

‘Yeah. Everyone is wondering why we all have the Riding skill, but nothing to ride on.’

‘Downstairs, this way. We store the gear, then go to the Old Monastery. That’s where we stay, most of us. If our Boss wants to see you immediately, we will go, but until then we will wait there. There will be food,’ he assured the guest. ‘The baths are in the city, so that will have to wait. Turn right. Yeah, over there, through that door.’

‘Who’s this “boss”?’ asked Senkar, placing the saddle on a rack. ‘A Player, or an NPC?’

‘Just the boss of our little group. We defer to him because he’s less dumb than we are and he knows how to play nice with local politics. By the way, we’re called “Heroes” around here. Yeah, I know, but we didn’t ask for it. The locals just called us that as if it was the most normal thing ever. We told them not to, but… eh, whatever. No, wait, this sack is mine, hand it over. Thanks. The real ruler is the Queen, and she rules from somewhere else, far from here. The royal family here, they are odd, you know. Eccentric. Apparently they speak an ancient language only, and there’s always someone interpreting their will for the rest of the people, and for us. Anyway, she gave us the Old Monastery to use. It has kitchens, rooms, baths, tons of space outside… It's rather spartan, but it has everything. The Queen gets us to keep us away, and we get to have a place to stay. Good deal.’

‘Ah, so this is not the capital? It looks so vast.’

‘It’s an illusion created by the hills. There’s less than twenty thousand people here. But it used to be the capital, a century ago or so. More people lived here then.’

They left the tower’s storehouse and continued descending the massive, spiral staircase. It was built into an outer wall, so there was plenty of lighting coming from windows placed around it. Then Basil led the way through a few corridors and large halls, and the architecture and decoration style changed a few times.

‘Is it just me or this place is confusing?’ asked Senkar.

‘Oh yeah. This whole complex is a damn interconnected sprawl, it’s impossible to know where it ends or begins. It grew into the city below it, and merged with it. We were really lost when we first came here, and I still know only a few routes by heart. Rule number one: don’t go where black-helmeted guardians stand.’

They emerged from a doorway into a courtyard with a fountain, passed under another gate, another courtyard. All along the way they were watched by royal guards, It finally felt like they were fully outside. The Monastery was visible a few hundred metres before them.

‘How many Players around here?’ Senkar asked. ‘Hope you don’t mind all the questions.’

‘No worries. There’s like two hundred and twenty of us. Maybe another hundred spread across the kingdom. Akshal would know better. How many at your place?’

‘At least twelve hundred.’

‘Whoa! This many? Insane! It must be cramped, no?’

‘No, why would it be? There’s tons of room. We live next to the kingdom’s capital. We basically built a new district adjacent to it for ourselves.’

‘How cool is that?’

—

Akshal found them within half an hour, and said that this “Boss” was happy to talk soon. Senkar managed to eat something and clean himself a little bit. He refused a change of clothes, because if he was to tell someone he came from far away, then he should look the part.

So the three of them went back to the Keep, as that was the complex's name, Senkar was told. Again they would traverse courtyards, gatehouses, staircases, halls. But in one of the courtyards Senkar’s jaw dropped, and he stopped. He ignored Akshal urging him to keep walking, and followed a wide alley towards an object he could not believe was there. There, under an open sky, on a wide cobbled plaza, stood a Waygate.

It was entirely carved inside a single slab of runestone. Intricate sigils adorned the entire rim of the two dozen-feet wide portal, and were inlaid with a faintly glowing metal. The inside surface, the gaping hole was like the Dimensional Rift that brought Senkar to these lands, except gentler, more tranquil. Moss grew on its sides and tiny surfaces where erosion ate even this rare mineral. It was very dark, and in fact, its surface seemed to be like the opposite of a mirror - it resisted the light. But perhaps most surprisingly, there was nobody near it. Shouldn’t this be the center of activity?

‘No way,’ said Senkar. ‘That’s unfair. You have flying mounts, and also a Waygate?!’

‘So what?’ asked Akshal. ‘It doesn’t work.’

‘It looks like it works to me,’ Senkar disbelieved.

‘It’s active, but it doesn’t take you anywhere. You can walk right through it if you want.’

‘A lot of people tried to figure it out. So far, no luck,’ Basil added.

This crushed Senkar’s heart. The loss of the Scroll of Town Portal weighed heavily on him, and a Waygate would be a perfect solution to his problems - and now it too was not an option.

But then he realised, that Sorostade did not have a Waygate for him to exit from. But… if this city has it, and is not the capital, then maybe another place in Sorostade kingdom has it but not the capital? Hmm…

‘We gotta go. You can stare at it later,’ Akshal urged. ‘There will be plenty of time.’

‘Right…’ Senkar followed, deep in his own thoughts.

—

Akshal had found the man whom they called the Boss as he had himself only returned from a dungeon, and was likewise tired, messy, smelly, and needed to relax. The man had invited the group into the baths. ‘A good place to talk,’ he said. The Boss, a bear of a man with beard and long hair to match, but a surprisingly demure person in reality. He had introduced himself as Xem, and said that the longer he was in this world, the more he started to look like himself in real life. And in real life, he was your typical basement dweller, but with a scary look. He played mostly as a Hunter, and back in the day, an extremely accomplished player of NAVIS Online. Well-connected and skilled too, but devoid of greater ambitions.

‘There’s really not much to do for me here,’ he would say when asked about being a “boss”.

‘Don’t let my boss hear you say that…’ Senkar would mutter in response.

Naturally, they had many questions, but at no point did they make it like an interview or an interrogation. They were very laid-back. He told them about the Rockbase and Sorostade, about their idea to go far and wide and see if there are others to find, and to see if there’s an exit from the world, about the mental preparation, the training, the research they did, the best practices asked from those who privately were military people, hikers, specialists in their fields. Which was not that many people, given that they met in a video game. Most people were just kids.

‘The Portal Divers? I like the sound of that. Sounds like a video game title, right? And we’re in it, wink wink?’ asked Xem.

‘How long has it been now, more than two months?’ asked Xem’s buddy, Zoos. ‘We make jokes about it now. It was not funny on day one.’

‘What was it like for you?’ Senkar asked, with only his head above the hot water’s surface. The other four men were on the opposite side of him in the pool they occupied.

‘Madness,’ reminisced Xem, ‘but it was probably the same everywhere. I was somewhere up north from here, near a wheat farm. I thought I’m dreaming, so I just stood there, waiting to wake up. Because you know, normally in a dream you wake up when you realise you’re dreaming. But it would not happen, so I slapped myself, pinched, blinked like a moron. I was, like, looking down on my hands and not recognizing them. I went down on my knees in disbelief. What happened next, I can’t say. It’s a blur and dark fog over my memory. But eventually, I got up and started walking. I met another person, and from the look in their eyes, I knew they were the same,’ Xem told the story, but without a trace of levity. He had been staring at the water all that time. ‘By the time I made it here a day later, we were a larger group and already started accepting the truth.’

‘What about you, Senkar?’ asked Akshal.

‘I remember screams,’ Senkar said. ‘A lot of us spawned inside the city. My earliest memory is hearing the others. Somehow, I was not focusing on myself at all, as if I was only an observer, not affected. But the others, they were upset or… empty. I saw some disturbing shit, I tell you. A few were enraged and decided to hurt themselves, to feel pain. They clawed at their faces. I mean, I can’t blame them. Imagine you wake up in a prison cell and there’s no door. Horrible stuff,’ Senkar shuddered. ‘Some townsfolk saw all that, and they still give us a wide berth. Ugh. You know, every person has a different coping mechanism. Some get extra-rational, some just… shut down. I feel it’s best to keep pushing forward. That’s how I got here.’

‘Ah,’ mused Xem. ‘You guys put us to shame. We didn’t do all that much with all this time, to be honest. We didn’t have to figure out housing, laws, anything. We received handouts. Of course we wanted out, we still do, but we just… don’t know what to do, I guess?’

The Tarragona team nodded their agreement.

‘We tried really hard with the Waygate, though. We tried everything to make it do something other than just standing there. We tried talking to it, asking it nicely, kicking it, hitting it with magic to awaken it, anything. We still don’t know why it won’t work. Maybe this is only an exit gate? For a time, we had someone watching it around the clock, but we gave up on that after a week.’

He continued.

‘Of course, we also looked for some kind of old wizards, because that’s a safe bet in a fantasy world, right? Well turns out, there are no wizards. There is magic in this world, but no native wizards. What’s up with that?’

‘Part of the puzzle,’ mused Basil.

‘But there can be wizards or sages or something on a continent we haven’t reached yet,’ Senkar pointed out. ‘Until I came here, we thought there were no flying mounts or Waygates. Did you not fly out as far as possible to see if there are other groups, other lands?’

Xem glanced at Akshal, letting him answer that.

‘We tried,’ Akshal said. ‘But the problem with gryphons is that they always seem to know how far from the nest they are, and at some point they refuse to fly further. They also refuse to fly over the mountains to the south for some reason, and they feel uncomfortable over the sea.’

‘They’re living beings, not pocket summons, so that makes sense,’ Basil agreed. ‘We can’t force them to work for us. We learn to work with them.’

‘Also,’ Xem added. ‘Some people here are unhappy with us even getting close to them. They’re a symbol for some locals, not a pack mule. It’s part of my job to manage that, but for the time being, the Queen allows it so the people have to shut up.’

‘I want to experiment with an idea to basically relocate an entire gryphon family somewhere far away, nest, eggs, and all, but I don’t know how to do that yet, and secondly… see above,’ Akshal gestured towards Xem. ‘It’s funny though, it’s like building an airbase, haha!’

‘How much further north does the land go?’ asked Senkar.

‘Not much. You can fly there and back in one day. I will show you later what maps the Tarragonians have, but beyond some habitable land to the north there’s only frozen wastes,’ informed Xem. ‘But… sometimes monsters come from there. Big and mean ones. Ice Wights, Alpha Howlers, Shatterspines… something has to be there.’

—

Night had come by the time the talk ended, and they moved from the baths to private rooms and then to the kitchens. Senkar hid nothing, and in return, he learned much himself. Not only strategic things like local monsters, geography, and how Tarragon Players learned to use Riding, but also the fact that Xem had known his friends, Nob and Iyola, from playing the game for years.

‘She never mentioned you,’ Senkar had said to him.

‘Of course she hasn’t,’ Xem had replied. ‘She stopped talking to me years ago, too.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows… who knows why a teenage girl suddenly stops talking to you?’

This little touch of innocent humanity put a smile on Senkar’s face. It had only been two days since he had last seen her - her and Nob - but he already felt like it was a long time ago. But now he had something to return home with. Something useful. The Administration will make good use of the information, he trusted. I don’t know what, but something. He would stay at Tarragona for another day or two, and head back.

I don’t know how, but somehow.

He promised this to himself as he made his way to the monastery’s cell that would be his new home. Over the building tops to the north, several hundred metres away, he could faintly see the towering, monolithic silhouette of the very reason he actually was unable go home. Well, the newest reason.

He was assigned the same type of cell that others had. Sparse in comfort, but it was better than his sleeping conditions of the previous night. This made him chuckle at the irony. I was prepared for weeks of living in the wilderness. In the end, it was less than two days. So much preparation… wasted. I liked sleeping by the campfire, though.

Lounging at the bath with the “boys” had washed away most of the stress and tension of the last two days, and of the training before. A day just for chilling would be nice.