In the Sun
Radiane 2, 832 I. E.
15 Years after Albert's Exile
Passage to Surface
Albert hurried ahead, faint echoes of his footfalls carrying in the narrow tunnel.
"I want to get up there before nightfall! We have to see the sun!" Albert insisted.
Helen considered pointing out that it might be nighttime on the surface already - they couldn't know with Upper Avernum's cavern ceiling still overhead - but said nothing instead.
Just a few paces later, they came around a bend. There was faint but discernible light coming from ahead in the tunnel from around another bend.
"Wait, wait," Albert said, but his own feet were practically dancing in anticipation. "We've got to let our eyes adjust. I think it's day up there."
"Day," Sschass said, "so we'll finally see the sun."
He and the others said almost in unison, "But we won't directly look at it." Their instructors had been very firm on that point.
Helen had, in fact, been wondering if not looking at the sun were more like a ritual, or perhaps a precaution one took, such as not entering unknown caves without lights, weapons, and food, but which could be done at utter necessity. She began to doubt this as she looked down the tunnel, towards a surface she had never seen, and saw light so powerful that even around the corner it was visible. Already it strode blithely past her ideas of what "well-lit" was, then stopped to paint on cave walls with colors she didn't know existed.
Albert, either convinced that their eyes had at last adjusted, or too impatient to wait longer, finally rounded the corner, shield at the ready, but eyes on the floor. He slowly lifted them into the light, then stepped forward. "Come on, but carefully," he called out.
They all began to step forward. Albert, practically skipping ahead, found that the tunnel eventually lost its ceiling, becoming a ravine. After curving around another slight bend, it led directly onto the surface, and he laughed aloud, the sound echoing slightly for those behind him.
"Wait up!" Helen called. He did, a moment, and then he was out there, and he felt a light breeze caress his face, and he looked up (but not directly) at the sun, and he laughed and cried and whooped, and even leapt slightly on the sloping ground.
Helen walked out, wide-eyed, then turned and urged Sschass on.
He steeled himself before letting the light of the sun fall on his skin. It didn't destroy him. Instead, he felt warmed. Within moments, he felt fully alive, wondrous heat caressing his skin, an unending cascade issuing from the sun he couldn't look at. This place was for his people, too. Sschass stared around him, agape, trying to drink in all the details, match the thousands of unfamiliar sights and smells with the things the instructors had tried to explain or draw. He might easily be the first slithzerikai on the surface of the world, and he needed to describe it to the others.
Shaking her head, Helen put her hands to her cheeks, moved to tears. The grasses, the sky, the trees - now she could see what her parents had talked so fondly of, and why they felt so sad when they could not convey what it meant to their children born in Avernum. This was why Avernum's symbol was the sun. Above here was not a dim sensation of a roof, but an incredible height, and those things called clouds so far above them. There was now both terror at being exposed, and amazement at finally being uncramped. It was all so beautiful, and so fierce, and so free, and so real.
Frruh joined them. His people had come from somewhere up here that he had known only in song, but his breath was taken away by the vastness and majesty which minstrels could only intimate. Above, in a dome larger than any cave ceiling, burned a fireball brighter than any mage had ever cast, with a heat he could feel from here, far below. And the area around them was almost perfectly deserted. He could see human towns and fields in the distance here and there, downslope from their position, and one small city, but they were far off. Furthermore, the copious grasses and majestic trees showed that one inch of this land matched ten inches of soil in Avernum.
There might be a place for them here.
Albert looked up at the sun. "Early afternoon," he said aloud, "good, plenty of daylight to explore in! This looks like some sort of hill or mountain we've come out on. We should try to find some water to camp near, if we can."
Sschass was fairly sure he was the first to look back at the ravine they had come from, but he saw the others look back, too, even Albert, eventually. Behind them rose mountain peaks, astonishing to Sschass, and with no apparent gaps, at least not here. But there was plenty to explore on this side of the mountains yet, and there was no detectable danger of foes or nature cutting off their retreat back to Upper Avernum, so he pressed on, jogging slightly to catch up to Albert.
Albert started working his way downslope, but after a few paces to come around a tall tree, he stopped just before a cliff. When Helen came to join him, what they saw there took her breath away.
Albert laughed in delight. "That must be the ocean!" he cried.
The vastness of it flooded their view now. Helen stood amazed as the sun sparkled on the water. She noted strange turbulence on the water near the shoreline (later she was to hear the name of this turbulence, waves, and to hear them speak for themselves.) Across the ocean, farther than she knew any expanse could stretch, Helen saw the horizon, flat and sharp as a blade.
"How big is the surface?" she asked suddenly.
Albert laughed. "Even I haven't seen most of it. I lived on one continent, and I didn't see half of that. It takes weeks to ride across a continent, and there are four, and the seas between them are vast."
"I suppose I thought it was perhaps twice the size of Avernum and the Abyss combined, but this..." Helen drew in a breath and continued staring. She then added, "There's barely light to see the cave lakes, and though there are large ones, they can't be nearly this size." She turned to Albert. "I thought I knew with the sun, but this - I really begin to understand why you've always wanted to come back here."
"There were a lot of days I wasn't sure I was going to come back," Albert admitted, to his own surprise. "And happy as this makes me, I keep wishing I could show this to people who aren't here. And I wish I could bring all the family back here, but Carl can't ever return. Many people deserved Avernum, but our family didn't."
Everyone stared out at the vista below them quietly.
Frruh asked, "Albert, you said it would take days to ride across the continent. What do you ride on?"
"A horse," Albert said, somewhat off-balance.
"What's a horse?"
"You remember, they use them instead of giant lizards up here," Helen told him.
Frruh blinked. "You can ride them, too? They aren't just draft animals?"
Albert laughed. "No, no. They're much sweeter tempered than the giant lizards. I've only ever seen a few, but in some places, there are whole herds. Oh, we have to see some of them while we're here."
Sschass reminded them, "It'll be harder to find our way once the sun is down, right? We should get moving if we want to see more."
"I was about to say that," Albert huffed.
They did get moving, and Frruh asked, "Albert, I take it you never saw the ocean, but does anything else here look familiar?"
"Only in a general sense," Albert responded. "Trees are trees, but we don't have trees like these near the place where I was born. We must be far from any land I knew." They found a way off the rock shelf they stood on to a place further downslope, and continued their journey.
They first sighted them as continued into the sparse but verdant forest downslope from the crack whence they first emerged. There were gelatinous masses, crawling along the ground under their own power. From a distance, they were easily visible for several reasons. First, they were brightly colored. Some were masses of luminous purple, others were ochre, and others were bright green. Second, each creature was entirely solid in its color, with few variegations. Third, there was a slight sheen as their wet surfaces reflected the sunlight. Fourth, each left behind a trail like a thousand ruinous slugs, a trail that bubbled on the rich grass they crawled over, dissolving the vegetation before their eyes.
"Albert, you didn't say there were cave slimes on the surface, too!" Helen exclaimed. The group had their weapons ready while the slimes were a long way off, most of them having had some experience of slimes in Avernum. Helen glanced over at Albert, who was staring in horror, and he finally replied, "We don't. I mean, maybe in caves. But not like this."
"The sunlight doesn't change colors we see that much, does it?" Sschass asked, confused. "I've never seen slimes that color."
Frruh suddenly exclaimed, "Do not let your guard down, fellows. Something's wrong here, and these may be why no one's heard from the first surface exploration team."
The slimes had no visible orifices or antennae, but they seemed to have sensed the adventurers, and started undulating toward them. They met in battle soon after, the slimes attempting to fling pseudopods onto the adventurers and dissolve them, or perhaps eat them whole. This the adventurers were prepared for, as cave slimes behaved similarly. However, the purple slimes, just before their fellows charged, cast spells (with no words or gestures), launching projectiles at the adventurers. Startled, they intercepted these with shields, and sometimes their bodies. The pain and distraction nearly allowed the other slimes to overwhelm them. With hacking and spells they finally reduced the slimes to bits that stopped wriggling.
Frruh stared down at the last bits of slime as the adventurers rested. "These slimes," he finally said, slightly startling the others, "are not natural."
Sschass countered, "Frruh, eyebeasts can cast spells, too."
"I'm not always sure eyebeasts are natural," Frruh returned. "But these creatures are less so. They feature in no one's lore, and their coloring - it's too uniform."
Helen said concernedly, "Back upslope, I thought I saw some diseased patches of land. If there were enough of these slimes out there, maybe they did that."
Albert protested, "But Frruh, why would someone make something like that?"
Frruh said simply, "I do not know. And I hope I am wrong. We would have to risk contact with the locals to know if they are natural."
There weren't any locals in the vicinity, and it was getting dark, so they set up camp. That evening, they watched the sunset in awe, some of them for the first time in their lives. When the moon and stars came out, Helen began to cry with joy. While Sschass kept watch for more slimes, Albert and Frruh and Helen lay on their backs, and Albert began to identify the stars to his friends.
When he paused for a bit, Frruh sat up and said quietly, "Thank you, Albert. I feel like I'm on the first expedition to Avernum, or to the vahnati caverns. Wonders and dangers around every corner. Or maybe it's more like the time of the Holy Heroes. Perhaps they saw such wonders in the remote caves they explored while they did their quests."
Albert said rhetorically, "I dunno, why do we call the Tamers of Avernum the Holy Heroes, anyway?"
Helen said emphatically, "They are not the Holy Heroes. I get so upset whenever I hear people saying that."
Sschass stopped near Frruh and noted, "They did kill Grah-Hoth. And one of them was a priest-" but he was taken aback here by Helen's barely-suppressed laughter, which was coming out as snorts. Sschass was distracted back into awareness by Frruh using his elbow to bump Sschass' leg, then gesturing to Albert. Albert was gazing at Helen with a mushy expression - apparently he thought this was a cute side of her. Sschass supposed there was no accounting for taste.
"Yeah, and defeating Grah-Hoth was awesome," Albert agreed, "but they proved that you don't need to be holy to kill something unholy. It's a shame. I mean, it'd be nice to have heroes you could look up to!"
Helen put in, "I don't mean to take away from the courage it took Nathan and Warren and the rest to face Grah-Hoth and his hordes-" and here Albert put in some words of agreement, "and their other services to Avernum. But really, when you look at it, we're still dealing with a lot of what they left behind. Assassinating the Emperor? Vengeance isn't right, and the war proved it."
Albert continued, "Yeah, and I never heard whether they even wanted revenge, so it was really Erika's vengeance that they were doing it for, wasn't it? How many people died for that? I mean, I lost a brother to the Empire in the war, so I still hate them - but looking back, even I kinda see the Empire's point. A band of crooks teleports in and kill people? You can't just let that go."
Frruh noted, "But you can't just let go how the Empire treated us, or our ancestors, by tossing us down here, many of us not even for real crimes, either!"
Sschass gesticulated and said, "The war was horrible. But really, killing Sss-thsss, and many of the other wicked slithzerikai - that was good for everyone, slithzerikai included, more than most people realize. I hope you'll think about that and consider the Tamers more kindly."
Albert put up his hands and said, "No, I know. I mean, I still love a lot of the stories about them. Nathan, Warren, Derek, and Ribaldi - I still want to be like them most days." He chuckled. "It's just, I grew up, and I realized that there were other days I hope I'm not like them. And then I grew up more, and I realized they were just folks trying to get by when things were even wilder than they are now, and they helped make things less wild. It's only thanks to them we have enough security to get to the surface. But that doesn't mean I have to approve of everything they did."
"There are a lot of things we don't have to approve of that they did," Helen muttered.
Leafloss 22, 815 I. E.
2 Years before Albert's Exile
Fort Avernum
When Nathan had woken up, Warren had begun following him, annoyingly and obtrusively. They met Derek as they left the inn's common sleeping area and entered the common eating area, and he followed them naturally, saying something ruefully about "not having anything better to do."
"So, where are we going?" Warren asked Nathan as they left the inn.
"Somewhere we can get work, and food," Nathan said, looking at the job board as he walked towards it.
"In that order?" Warren sighed. Derek chuckled, and Nathan insisted, "Yes, in that order."
The job board was located in a central spot in the fort, and, so they'd heard, in many of Avernum's towns as well. People would post work that they needed done on scraps of paper, on the board, and adventurers or other folk would take them and try to fulfill them.
Nathan looked at the job board a bit longer, then took one paper off the board. Derek made a face, and Warren, noticing this from a few paces back, asked, "Uh-oh, what is it?"
"Package delivery," Nathan said simply.
"Oh," Warren said, considering. "A valuable package, no doubt. Could be very useful."
He blinked as Nathan's suddenly livid face nearly pressed into his own. "Listen close, Warren," Nathan growled. "That package is going undisturbed to its intended recipient. And if I hear one more bright idea about it, I'll bash you in the face and leave you here. This is a fresh start for me, and I don't intend to (expletive deleted) the good people here."
It's said that the eyes can be windows to the soul. Nathan, peering into Warren's eyes, could not only see the comebacks, he could see that they had already pulled on their boots. There was one comeback in a jaunty but well-worn hat who was going to remind him that a bunch of exiled crooks were not good people, and another in a threadbare traveling cloak who would hint that the package likely was for a rich merchant or uncaring bureaucrat, and a few others whose faces were familiar but whose names Nathan couldn't place. Under Nathan's fixed stare, the comebacks wisely gave up their expedition out of Warren's mouth, and commiserated with each other in his head. Derek raised an eyebrow at the colloquy, but that was the way his eyebrow laughed, and all of Derek joined Warren in following Nathan as he fetched the package and headed out of town.
Author's Note: I'm fairly sure that letter-carrying or package-carrying is one of the first quests in Avernum available on the job-board, but I'm not quite sure at this point.