A Dragon God’s Blessing on This World

When I awoke, the rain had stopped, and the sky was clear. Dew covered the ground. Looking up, the curve of a rainbow was barely visible.

Nadine was still laying with her head on my shoulder, eyes closed, chest moving slowly up and down. And… was that some light snoring I was hearing? Adorable. She looked as happy and innocent as a child while she slept. You would hardly believe that she had experienced such unfathomable loss just the previous day.

I wished I could let her stay that way forever, but she had to wake up eventually. Plus, as long as she had her head on my shoulder, I was completely immobilized. I couldn’t just stand up and let her fall face first in the mud.

I reached my arm around and gently shook Nadine’s shoulder that wasn’t flush against mine. She stirred, blinking the sleep out of her eyes.

“What time is it?” She asked, stifling a yawn.

“After sunrise,” I said. “Look.”

Nadine looked up and saw the rainbow above us in the sky, half hidden behind the portion of roof we were sitting under. She rubbed her eyes so she could see it better.

“It’s a beautiful morning. Perfect conditions for dragon worshiping, I’d bet.”

Nadine smiled thinly in response to my joke as she stood up. I was kind of sad to lose the contact between us.

“You’re right, it is perfect. See that?”

She pointed outside of the main building where we were sheltered. I stood and looked in the direction her finger was indicating.

Across the shrine grounds, dozens of small, round, blueish creatures had gathered. I could tell they were creatures only by the amount of spiritual power they contained. Their featureless, spherical bodies were fluid, and they expanded and contracted as they moved, like a jellyfish propelling itself through the water. I was pretty sure I had seen something like them before, though not in real life.

“Are those… slimes?”

Nadine nodded. “They are naturally drawn to Lord Aquariod’s residual power, but the damage to the site as well as its villainous inhabitants kept them from coming close. The fact that they are here now is a sign that the shrine is healing.”

It was definitely nice to have such immediate evidence that our efforts to cleanse the Water Dragon’s shrine had made a difference. What was less nice was the handful of nearby slimes that were slowly meandering toward us.

“Um, should we be worried about being attacked? They are monsters, aren’t they?”

“Well, yes, but they aren’t all that dangerous. Slimes are generally docile, and even if they do decide to attack us, they won’t be able to do much damage. The worst they can do is suck some of the water out of your body and leave you feeling dehydrated. They are generally considered to be one of the weakest of all monster species.”

That did sound familiar. I didn’t think I’d ever struggled against a slime enemy in a video game, even at level one.

I spent a moment thinking about how to word my next question in a way that wouldn’t come across to Nadine as blasphemous.

“So if the reason the slimes are attracted to this place is because of the Water Dragon’s power… how exactly does that work? You know, with him being, uh, dead and all.”

“That is a good question,” Nadine said, to my relief. “I don’t understand it perfectly either, but somehow, even after he died, traces of Lord Aquariod’s spirit were left behind in his holy places. I like to think of it as his will, which remains in this world to guide us in his absence. Tomas says…”

She paused, and her face briefly betrayed her emotion before she took a deep breath and went on.

“…He said that he couldn’t sense any intent from the magic of the shrines, but he also couldn’t sense the intentions of plants and animals. It’s not too far-fetched to think that a divine being’s intent might be similarly distinct from the mortal races and therefore undetectable to him… Don’t you think so?”

Nadine looked at me expectantly. She was clearly hoping I would agree with her.

“I don’t know that much about it, but it sounds plausible.”

“Right?” She nodded in a self-satisfied manner. Apparently my non-committal answer was enough for her.

The first thing Nadine wanted to do was pray to the Water Dragon, so she had me help her push his statue back into place before we did anything else. Fortunately it wasn’t so huge as to be impossible to move, but it was still pretty damn heavy. My shoulders heaved from the exertion once it was finally upright.

When that was done, Nadine knelt in front of the statue and closed her eyes. She started to chant something in the language of magic. I didn’t understand many of the words, but I recognized it regardless. At first I thought it was an incantation, but it had no magical effect. She wasn’t casting a spell. I remembered that she spoke that way when blessing her servant’s grave as well. What was that about?

I waited politely until she was done praying to ask her.

“Sorry for prying, but I recognized some words in your prayer from spell incantations. Is there a reason you pray in the language of magic?”

“You’ve got it a bit backwards, actually. The language we use to cast spells is Draconian, an ancient tongue that was first spoken by the dragon gods themselves. As a priestess, I have learned to speak it fluently.”

“Wow. That must make your magic really versatile,” I noted in awe.

Nadine looked a little embarrassed. “In theory it could, but I always end up falling back on the same handful of spells. I’m afraid I’m not very creative.”

Following that, it was time to eat. After yesterday’s singular meal of burnt meat and mushrooms, I was about ready to eat anything as long as it filled my stomach. I was starving.

Finding and preparing a good breakfast wasn’t difficult, since the bandits had all our supplies, plus a decent store of their own food that they had most likely stolen from traveling merchants. I took charge of cooking because Inna and Tomas weren’t here to tell me to buzz off. I wished they could have tried a meal I made at least once.

Nadine tried to mask her fascination as she watched me expertly chop up the potatoes and vegetables, slice thin sheets of what I believed to be jackalope meat, season them, and lay it all out in a pan to simmer with some oil that she used her magic to heat. There was something particularly cute about the way she tried to act disinterested.

I sighed. Milos would have loved to see her like that.

Once the food was done, we sat on the dilapidated steps of the shrine’s main building and ate. I watched the slimes ooze by as we did. Their smooth, unhurried movements made me feel both peaceful and melancholy.

“You know,” Nadine said suddenly, “those slimes out there… are kind of like kin to me.”

…

“What did you say?!”

“I said that those slimes are like—”

“I heard you the first time,” I said, holding out my hand to stop her. “It was completely out of pocket, but I heard you. So what, those things out there are supposed to be your relatives?”

“In a way. Monsters are sometimes referred to as pseudo-elementals, because they are born from and made up of basic chromatic elements, the same way true elementals are. Of course, there are also many differences between them. Elementals are spiritual beings, for one thing, while monsters exist more firmly on the physical plane. But those slimes and my mother share the same origin: water. Every time I see one, I feel a certain kinship with it. Is that strange?”

In all honesty, yes. It was pretty weird.

“Having an elemental for a mother in the first place is unusual,” I said diplomatically. I’ve never heard of anyone like that except for you.”

“Neither have I,” Nadine said quietly.

There was a lull in the conversation, so I decided to ask another question to keep it going.

“Does that mean those wulfs we fought the other day are distantly related to you too? Like a third cousin twice removed kind of deal?”

“What? No, not at all. Wulfs aren’t monsters. They’re just regular animals.”

“You could have fooled me!”

Regular animals my ass! Those things were freaking enormous! I’d hate to see what the rats look like around here.

I guessed the term “monster” must specifically apply to pseudo-elementals in this world. Any dangerous beast that had no elemental qualities—like a jackalope or a pinionape—was just that, a beast.

Unable to hold it back anymore, Nadine burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?!”

“Haha, haha, I’m sorry but, I’ve never met anyone who confused animals and monsters. The difference is too obvious for most people. You really do come from another world, don’t you?”

I wanted to be mad at Nadine for making fun of me, but I couldn’t. She was laughing for the first time since her friends were killed. It didn’t matter that it was at my expense.

Of course not much time had passed, and I could tell she was far from over it. This was a diversion, nothing more. But even a small distraction was valuable, in its own way.

I noticed the slimes that were near each other had started to come together in small groups. They seemed to be congregating around puddles that had formed because of yesterday’s rain.

“Are they drinking the water?”

“Uh huh. Monsters sustain themselves on the elements that they are made from. Slimes drink water, brownies consume earth, and so on. They don’t need any other form of sustenance.”

That had the potential to be all kinds of convenient. Maybe in my next life—if I got one—I would ask to be reincarnated as a slime instead of a tortoise.

We still had to burn the bodies of the bandits we slew, which wasn’t going to be a simple task after all that rain. I cooked up an MP potion with our leftover recovery herbs while Nadine dried out the pile of corpses as best she could, then we switched and she finished watching the decoction while I lit the bandits on fire. The resulting blaze was so hot that we had to stay far away from it, and one poor slime that got a little too curious was vaporized in the heat.

About three hours later, Nadine extinguished the remaining embers that used to be an entire bandit gang. We couldn’t leave the pile burning, since a bonfire that big had a major risk of spreading to the surrounding trees. It wouldn’t do to burn down the forest that contained the shrine of Nadine’s patron deity.

Finally, there was nothing tying us down to the shrine anymore. Though falling apart, it was alive and strong when it came to the “will” of the Water Dragon, as evidenced by the influx of slimes. It was time for us to leave.

***

Our horses had been spooked and ran away during yesterday’s fight, so we had to walk the whole way back to Debustadt. That meant it would be a long journey back, but we had been expecting that from the beginning, so it wasn’t too big of a deal. Besides, I didn’t know how to ride. Once we had packed up enough food to get us back, we set off.

We stopped by the site of the caravan attack on our way to give Nadine’s friends and crew members a burial, as I promised. It was hard work digging that many graves, but Nadine insisted that they all be buried separately.

We went through essentially the same process we had when we buried the man who died in the skirmish with the wulfs, only a half dozen more times. Nadine carved the names of each of the fallen into their headstones with her magic, and I was surprised to learn that she remembered each of her crewmen’s names in addition to those of her friends. There hadn’t been that many of them, but a woman of her supposed rank wouldn’t be expected to care about them on an individual level.

Once the burial was complete, Nadine prayed over each of the graves, one by one. When she got to the final grave, the one belonging to Inna, she stood over it for a while in silence after her prayer was done.

“…Inna started working for my family when we were both only eight years old, so she could help provide for her younger siblings,” Nadine said suddenly, startling me a little. “She has eleven of them—though only seven were born at that point—so her father was struggling to make enough money for the whole family, and her mother couldn’t go work somewhere and leave all those tiny children at home. It just so happened that my busy parents were looking for a playmate for me, and were willing to pay for the position. They ended up hiring Inna, and the two of us have been best friends ever since.”

She looked like she wanted to go on, so I stayed quiet. In my experience with her thus far, Nadine never talked about herself or her past unprompted. Her friendship with Inna must have been very important to her. Out of respect for that, I listened to her story attentively.

“There was this one time, I went with her to visit her home. All her little brothers and sisters came crowding up to me at once, talking over each other and trying to get my attention. It was like a sea of waving hands and bouncy bunny ears. I wasn’t used to being around so many children, so I froze up. But Inna quickly and calmly got them under control, introduced them all to me, and somehow made sure they all got a turn to talk without being quite so overwhelming.”

“I honestly thought she was amazing,” Nadine continued, her voice displaying the admiration she was describing. “I told her as much on our way back to my home, and she said, ‘that’s just what big sisters do, right?’ I didn’t say so, but I disagreed. I have an older sister, and she’s nothing like that. Inna was special.”

Having someone special like that in your life must be nice, I thought. And it must be especially hard when they leave it. I imagined how I would feel if, in my past life, my sister Hana had died before I did. I might have turned out even worse than my present self.

“Your voice sounded scarily close to Inna’s when you quoted her there,” I said. “Right?”

Nadine glared at me, but there was no real menace in her eyes.

“I knew that voice very well,” she said.

Nadine and I traveled alone together through the forest for the next five days. During that time we established something of a routine. Her water heating spell and my cooking skills combined to create a satisfactory breakfast, then we’d start walking right away. We stopped every hour for a brief, five minute break, and to refill our water supply if it was running low. We didn’t eat again until the evening, and after dinner we took turns bathing on alternating days. I had been starting to smell like an actual feral cat, and Nadine wouldn’t walk near me until I washed up.

One time she got an accidental eyeful of me with my shirt off when I was stripping down on my bathing day. She definitely noticed the scar on the right side of my torso, but she didn’t ask about it. I wouldn’t have told her where I got it from if she asked, anyway. It was too humiliating to admit that on my first day in this world I had been defeated by a giant bunny.

Since it was just the two of us and our only shelter was the trees we rested under, one of us had to be awake at all times in case something decided to attack us while we slept. The night was divided into four watches, so we alternated and took two each. I admittedly spent more time looking at Nadine’s sleeping face than keeping an eye out for monsters or wild animals, but I had my spirit sense, so it wasn’t like I was neglecting our safety.

Beast attacks during the day were rare, but we were exposed and appeared vulnerable to the more dangerous creatures of the forest, so they did happen. Fortunately, together Nadine and I had no trouble fending off anything that tried to take a bite out of us.

We talked a lot without really talking about anything. Serious topics would only serve to bring our spirits down (not in a literal sense), and the last thing I wanted was to make her think more about the loss of her friends than she was probably already doing, so I described things from my previous life to her instead. Mostly trivial things, like ice cream, cameras, pop music (she made me sing a few songs for her, which was seriously embarrassing), and so on.

She seemed to find it all very interesting, and that was enough to make it feel worth talking about, even if to me they were all mundane concepts. She even got comfortable enough to tell me about some of the neat things she had discovered on her pilgrimage, like the people on the Felsen islands who used magic to build populated city-bridges over the ocean, and the surprisingly diverse monster cuisine in the country of Pontmercy. How many different ways can you eat essentially just water and dirt? I couldn’t even start to imagine trying to cook and eat fire or wind.

But all good things must end, as must things that are hard to see as fully good but are at least a nice escape from all the death and loneliness that you would rather not think about.

On the evening of the fifth day since leaving the shrine, we reached the edge of the forest. Just beyond that, the river wound its way into the walled city of Debustadt.

Our journey had finally reached its conclusion.