Fantasy Economics 101 - Chapter 4

A quiet evening in a peculiar hermitage

"We're close. My house is right over there."

"I can't seem to find it."

"It's because I hid it!" the young lady declared with a proud smirk and rested a hand on her hips. "A girl like me has to protect her privacy."

She leaned forward, and just as her pose was about to get suggestive, she shuddered and hastily stood straight again. Looking oddly mortified, she sneaked a peek at the skeleton's face, but Raol was too preoccupied with his thoughts to pay any attention to her small gestures. Nevertheless, she let out a relieved breath and gestured for him to follow after her, and he complied without a word.

On the surface, Raol seemed absent-minded, but in truth, his mind was still a jumbled mess. He had only shared a few more words with the young woman before they set out towards her home, but they were enough to rattle him to his core, and his inner turmoil would simply not abate, even after taking a meandering route to their destination.

If Elkayla's words were to be trusted, going the long way was necessary to pass through the warding she placed around her home to deter unwanted visitors. Under less dire circumstances, he would not have taken her words at face value, but he was in desperate need for information, so he felt like he had no choice but take the plunge and follow her.

"Ah, wait. This is a tricky part. Please give me a moment."

The two of them stopped, and she rummaged through the insides of her long sleeves. Did they hide pockets, he wondered?

His question was soon answered when she retrieved a folded up piece of parchment and, after intensely studying its contents, she let out a relieved hum and pointed at a pair of crooked trees nearby, leaning against each other to form something resembling a triangular gateway.

"A-ha, I was right! We have to pass under those threes, and then we can go straight to my house."

Raol's eye-lights involuntarily narrowed into a skeptical squint, yet the young woman remained blissfully oblivious and seemed awfully interested in the way he expressed himself instead. In the end, it took her a couple of breaths' time to successfully deciphered the emotions behind the act, at which point she awkwardly hid the parchment in her sleeve again and flashed a bashful smile.

"I-It's not like I don't know my own wards. It's just that normally I tend to bypass them altogether, so it's been a long time since I last had to go through them properly like this. I'm not a scatterbrain, I swear."

"I never meant to imply that. Please don't take offense."

Raol's diplomatic response took Elkayla visibly aback, but then she let out a delighted chuckle and lowered her voice into an alluring purr.

"Aw. You're such a nice man."

Now it was the skeleton's turn to be taken aback, which was further intensified when she let out a strange noise and pulled her wide-brimmed hat over her face.

"D-Don't mind me! That was just a slip of the tongue! P-Please follow after me!"

Saying so, Elkayla hastily turned on her heels and headed towards the crooked trees. For the moment, Raol only stared at her retreating back, his eye-lights still narrowed into suspicious lines.

He found the young woman peculiar from the first moment he laid his non-existent eyes on her, but the longer he observed her, the stranger she felt. The faint yet persistent glow she emanated was odd, to begin with, but there was also something ephemeral about the way she moved. Her hips swayed with every single step, and even though she was barefoot, she showed no sign of discomfort despite walking on rough terrain. In fact, he could've sworn that soles remained immaculate, as if they never even touched the damp fallen leaves littering the forest floor.

Was she maybe an elf, Raol wondered as he finally followed after her? On closer look, her ears did appear to be ever-so-slightly pointed, but it wasn't to a degree one would expect. An average elf's ears were easily as long as a handspan, and grew longer as they aged. It was something he had learned during his years at the Academy, but in turn, it meant his knowledge on the subject was entirely theoretical. The Fair Folk of the North rarely ventured out of their island nation, and he had yet to meet any of them in person, so for the moment, he withheld his judgment over the young woman's ancestry.

While he pondered, they both passed under the natural gate formed by the tree trunks, and the moment he stepped past the threshold, he was surprised to find that the ever-present fog receded and formed a solid, sluggishly swirling wall surrounding the area.

"Here we are!" Elkayla exclaimed with a bright smile and pointed at a structure that became visible due to the retreating fog.

The square cottage sat on top of a small hill, and was surrounded by a short wooden fence. Its thatched roof had a single chimney, and its walls were enveloped in ivy, except for the round windows and their shutters.

The closer they got, the more peculiar the building felt to Raol. For his whole life, he was trained to pick up on any and all incongruities in his environment, as they could not only serve as a source of information, but would often determine the difference between life and death. As such, he soon concluded that both the cottage and its environment felt distinctly artificial. It was as if someone was trying to mimic the appearance of a rustic peasant house, but the precise construction, the elegantly carved beams and joints, the engraved shutters with symmetrical heart-motifs, the well-kept lawn, and the elaborate dragon-head brass knocker on the front door told him this was not only a recent construction, but a deceptively luxuriant one at that.

"What do you think?" Elkayla sudden question finally made him tear his gaze away from the building and he directed a questioning look at her. This time, it only took her a moment to read his expression. "I mean, what do you think about my house?"

"It looks… welcoming," Raol answered in a level voice, doing his best to hide his real thoughts on the subject. It might have been unnecessary though, as Elkayla responded with a perfectly innocent, delighted smile.

"I'm glad you like it! This type of hermitage was really popular about fifty years ago, and my friends back home would probably considering it awfully dated, but I really, really like the earthy feel it has! It's just so comfortable and unassertive, right?"

"Yes. My words exactly."

Raol nodded along out of obligation, but Elkayla still acted like it was a grand validation she was desperately seeking all this time.

"Give me a moment to open the door."

While she fiddled with the lock, the skeleton used the opportunity to observe the building from even closer up, and doing so only reinforced his initial assessment. This cottage was definitely made to look like it was old and decrepit from a distance, but he couldn't see any signs of wear or decay on the door or the nearby walls.

"Come in. Don't be shy."

Raol hid his misgivings with an amicable hum and stepped into the house. The front door opened into an equally rustic yet also inexplicably well-crafted main room. The space was dominated by the brick hearth at the back, with a lively fire already burning inside. However, the first thing that drew his attention wasn't the fireplace, but the odd torch scones that lit the chamber. At first they appeared entirely ornamental, yet when Elkayla snapped her fingers, it sent a barely visible wave through the air, and when it touched them, the torches lit up one by one.

Except, they weren't really torches. Each of them had a flame enclosed in a glass ball with a tall chimney at their top, and while he could see the fire flicker in them, they glowed altogether too brightly. Squinting, he soon realized that the source of the light wasn't the flames themselves, but some sort of woven, bell-shaped material that was suspended on top of them. The strange, incandescent light sources were both fascinating and alien, but he soon tore his attention away and glanced at his host.

Elkayla had just hung her large hat onto the antlers of a deer mounted near the entrance and looked back at him questioningly. They locked gazes for an awkward moment, but then her eyes opened wide with recognition and she hastily waved her hands.

"Ah! P-Please excuse me! It's been so long since I last had a guest, I completely forgot my manners! Please sit down! I'll go make some tea!"

Raol nodded along and glanced at the table and chairs on their left. As with everything else in the room, they were trying to mimic the kind of furniture an average peasant house would have, but then halfway through the process the carpenter decided they were too plain after all, and engraved so many decorative patterns into the wood, the original concept completely lost its meaning. The same applied to the thick beams over their heads, the wrought iron chandelier, and the carved wooden counter . The latter consisted of a countertop shaped like a grotesquely elongated turtle set on a brick half-wall, and it separated the main room and the small kitchen area near the hearth.

That's where Elkayla headed, and after the door closed behind him on its own, Raol cautiously walked over to the table. On his way, his eyes flickered across the various decorations of the room, ranging from the engraved deer antlers mounted on the walls to the wolf pelt rugs on the floor and the bundles of dried flower bundles hanging from the ceiling. He couldn't see a bed anywhere, so he presumed that it was in a different room, which meant that the cottage had to be larger than it first appeared from the outside.

All such thoughts were soon put aside when the owner of the house returned with a round platter carrying a bulbous metal kettle and a set of simple cups. She automatically set them out, and it was only when she already poured the steaming hot drinks out that she let out a startled gasp and practically dropped the teapot back onto the table.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry! I forgot that you were… you know?" When Raol didn't respond right away and only stared at the mug in front of him, she hastily added, "My apologies! I'll put it away!"

"No need," the skeleton dismissed her concern and curiously leaned over the mug in front of him. "I can't drink it, but it smells rather pleasant."

"Oh, you can smell it?" All of a sudden, the young woman's eyes lit up and her attitude took a complete turn. "I knew it! You aren't just a common skeleton, are you, mister Raol?"

"I believe that is self-evident," he noted absently, which earned him a mirthful chuckle from the woman.

"This is my own blend," she explained as she sat down and wrapped her fingers around her mug. "The recipe is a secret, but I can tell you that I used eleven different herbs and spices, and that the secret ingredient is wild honey."

Elkayla proudly puffed up her chest and took a sip from her drink, followed by a delighted sigh. Raol, naturally, could only stare at his own cup with mild dissatisfaction. He was planning to wait for his host to initiate the conversation, but when she only continued to leisurely drink her tea, the skeleton ultimately let out a soft harrumph and began to speak, as if only musing to himself.

"So you live all alone in a hidden cottage in the middle of the woods, you work with herbs, and you can use magicka." He paused momentarily to gauge her reaction, but she was only looking at him with curious eyes, so he soon resolved himself to ask the question that had been on his mind ever since he laid his eyes on the building. "Miss Elkayla? Are you, perchance, a witch?"

The young woman first looked startled, then thoughtful, and then finally reluctant.

"You could… say that, though I personally prefer the term 'hermitess'."

"Hermitess," Raol repeated after her, tasting the unfamiliar word.

"Yes. If I was a man, and I lived in a hermitage, you would naturally call me a hermit, but just because I'm a woman, people would call me a witch instead. Does that make any sense?"

There was no reason to antagonize his host, so Raol responded with a diplomatic, "It does sound rather arbitrary."

"Precisely! That's why I'm a hermitess instead."

After this point, she spent a minute or two complaining about how witches were old-fashioned, and how hermits and witches were really two sides of the same coin, and something about 'unionizing', but Raol's mind was already elsewhere.

He was initially reluctant to ask the question, because the witches in his time were outcasts. Their practices were considered to be unsafe at best, criminal at worst, and they were heavily sanctioned by the Seven Temples, especially Alma's, who didn't approve of their healing concoctions. Elkayla did not mention anything regarding that, and talking about both witches and hermits as if they were popular professions made him question just how much the world had changed since he last walked on it. Then he recalled the strange mercenaries and the bear that exploded into gold coins, and had to realize that his concerns might have been misplaced.

"Since we have settled down, can we continue our previous discussion?" Raol inquired in a low, level voice, and while Elkayla still had many things to say about witches and hermits, she agreed with a shallow nod. "Thank you. So, just to make sure there is no misunderstanding between us, can you tell me the date again?"

"It's the sixth of Newbread, 1789," she answered naturally. "I have a calendar somewhere in the bedroom. Do you want me to bring it over?"

"No, thank you. I believe you."

In a way, he wished she was lying, but so far she gave him no reason to think that was the case. The young lady, while peculiar in many ways, especially how she sometimes swung between seductive and mortified in the span of a few breaths, did not strike him as the deceptive type. Raol still didn't entire trust her, but at the very least he was sure she had no ulterior motives. That was good enough for him.

Yet, that only increased his distress, as if it really was the year 1789, it meant that it had been well over three hundred years since he died. That was considerably longer than he could've ever imagined, but it did put some of the changes he had experienced into a new perspective.

For one, he had already noticed that the way people pronounced some words were different from the time when he was alive. On the continent, everyone was required to speak the official Holy Language of the Seven, and it was enforced not by law, but by divine providence.

Back in the primordial age, all of humanity spoke the same tongue, yet as humans spread out across the continent, their dialects fractured over time. The Seven could not tolerate that, as these changes introduced ambiguity into their contracts, and if there was one word that definitely fit all the gods, it was "pedantic".

Overnight, their power enveloped the whole continent, establishing a universal standard no sentient being could deviate from. It being fundamentally the same was what allowed Raol and Elkayla to communicate, yet it being subtly different also told him that a long time must have passed since he was alive.

However, he did not dwell too long on this. He had already done that on his way to the cottage, so this time, it was much easier to accept it and move on to more important things to consider. Such as the pair of curious amber eyes that were practically drilling a hole into his skull with their intense gaze.

"Mister Raol? How old are you?"

The skeleton found the question inexplicably amusing, and after a soft snort, he began to weave his tale.

"If you mean when I was raised into my current form, it happened but a day ago… but I presume that's not what you're curious about." The young lady shook her head, which elicited yet another thoughtful sound from him. "I was born in the capital of the Attusian Empire, back in 1431."

"It's called the Attu-Sevrian Monarchy now," Elkayla chimed in, causing the skeleton to pause with his jaw hanging open.

After the first shock passed, he closed his mouth with an audible clank of teeth and muttered, "Since when?"

"I'm… not very good with my dates, but I think it happened in the early fifteen hundreds. There was a civil war, and the Sevrians won, but then there was a lot of negotiations afterwards, and instead of seceding, Sevria became the empire's partner in a new union."

"Does the Attu dynasty still hold the throne?"

"Naturally."

Hearing that, Raol exhaled a relieved sigh, however little sense that made considering his current condition.

Sevria used to be a large country southeast of the core Attusian territories. Due to a series of political marriages, the Attu dynasty managed to grab the crown of the country in exactly 1400, and it became yet another territory added to the empire. However, there was strong resistance against the merging of the nations, and before the Kelani threat caused him to be reassigned, Raol was tasked with rooting out the secessionists in the midst of the Sevrian nobility. Apparently, after his demise, the Imperial Secret Service failed to complete the mission.

"Is the capital still in Luteanum?"

"Yes, though Aquincrest is considered to be on equal level."

The latter was the capital of Sevria, and if what she said was true, it made sense. After absorbing all the news, Raol couldn't help but sigh once more.

"I'm afraid I will need to learn my history all over again."

"Would you like to borrow my history books? I should still have them somewhere in the attic."

"It would be much appreciated."

Elkayla flashed a delighted smile.

"Don't even mention it. More importantly, you said you were a secret agent of the old empire, right? What were you doing here? Were you one a secret mission?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I was."

She continued to look at him expectantly, but when he didn't continue, she clicked her tongue and shook her head.

"Oh, you tease! Please continue. I'm terribly curious about your story."

Raol weighed his options, and after considering everything he'd heard so far, the realization that his life was ancient history finally gave him the resolve to share some of his background.

"Very well. I think I owe you a tale in exchange of your hospitality." Elkayla's eyes narrowed, and she was about say something in response, but Raol's voice cut her off. "As I said, I was born in Luteanum. I knew not of my parents, and was taken in by the Viserwright Institute for the Gifted as a young lad. There, I was trained to be an agent of the empire from a young age, and once I successfully graduated the Imperial Academy in Luteanum, I received the surname Viserwright. After that, I was immediately hired by the Imperial Secret Service, and after a decade of active duty, I was sent to the east to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the growing Kelani threat."

"You infiltrated the Kelani?" The young woman across the table sounded skeptical of his claim. "I thought the Kelani were all huge, dark-skinned brutes back then. How did you fit in?"

That question touched on a sore spot, but Raol remained calm and slowly explained, "I always had a rather… unconventional appearance, so to say, but it was something I used to my advantage. Most noblemen did not suspect a keen mind would be hiding behind my face, and by using certain concoctions to deepen my skin color, I could pass for a short Kelani. As a matter of fact, I was likely the only man in the entirety of the Imperial Secret Service who could achieve something like that."

"Now that you mention it, you do have a really strong, manly jaw," Elkayla noted, almost absentmindedly, and while at first he didn't know what to make of it, Raol still took the compliment.

"Thank you."

Chuckling, the young woman hid her smile behind her curled fingers, but then she realized something and pointed at the skeleton.

"You said you spied on the Kelani, so does that mean you crossed the mountains to get here?"

"No, not quite. I died nearby," he answered without much thinking, and it caused her brows to descend into a troubled frown.

"You did? But the only time the Kelani breached the borders of the Monarchy was during the invasion in—" Once again, the young woman's eyes lit up with undisguised glee, and she slammed her hands against the table, startling Raol in the process. "Oh! Could it be that you were with Rakan's army? Were you?"

"… Yes. In a manner of speaking," he responded with well-disguised reluctance, but the excited woman didn't pick up on it at all.

"I can't believe it! That's so amazing! Did you actually meet Rakan? Did he really have huge fangs like a wild boar and a face painted with the blood of his enemies? Did you spy on him?"

"No, I did not," Raol responded flatly, and he could see Elkayla's excitement wither. He almost felt bad about it, but strictly speaking, he wasn't lying to her.

After all, she was talking to none other than "Rakan" himself, so he could not spy on "him", by definition. It was a long story, involving certain Kelani traditions, a positively senseless succession system, as well as the well-timed demise of the previous warchief… but it was a tale best saved for another time.