Finua

Chapter 5: Frax

I think the reason that magic is such a rare and valuable skill in the world is because it makes you miserable. Honesty with oneself is a recipe for cynical nihilism and it's given education a rather negative connotation in most goblin cultures. "Learn and languish!" goblin fathers would tell their wide-eyed sons, usually before beating them to death. Certainly, education in general is a very elvish thing: the great hifalutin schools of Flameeso and Tierena Valley churn out hundreds of uselessly soft-boned badminton-playing poets twice a year. Every tale of the First Siege comes complete with a transcription of some silk-handed elf's doctorate thesis, describing purely from theory the folly of goblin warfare, explaining to us how if we simply gave up our freedom and submitted to our aggressors, the violence can end. It's shit like that which paints education with such a brush of contrivance. Sometimes, if you think too hard, you run the risk of pushing your brain down the path of most resistance, which takes you to ideas that aren't logically sound and aren't meant to be had at all. There's also a reason that the phrase "head in the clouds" exists. Ignorance is of the earth.

But then again, magic is magic. A lot of us see magic users as necessary sacrifices, like waiters.

Two days into the forest, we sat around a campfire under one of the few gaps in the canopy. Kwer was prancing around some yards into the foliage, hunting something that was not happy with its lot in life. Amid the desperate shrieks for mercy, we carelessly burnt meat over the fire together.

"If something in this forest caught the elves," Dewey asked, "Would we catch wind of it?"

"Frax would," Grea said. "Gets a lot of traffic. Probably can point us back to the trail after he gets us across the river."

"And why would he help us?" Auga asked.

"Won't. There's a bridge at his castle."

"Ohhh... will he let us cross it?"

"Why not?"

"Uh... just, the way things usually go?"

"Did you say a fucking castle?" Yusla butted in. "This guy has a castle?"

"Sorcerer in the woods has a castle, stop the fucking presses."

"How well do you know him, Grea?" I asked her.

"Eh. Mutual friends. Lots of people can claim to know him through just couple degrees of separation. You too probably."

"Well... yeah. Yours plus you."

"Right, but still. You ever got out of Sh'raitha you'd have heard of him before."

"Oh no, why didn't I ever think of that."

"I'll be damned if Sh'raitha wasn't just a filter against the world," Auga muttered, chewing this vague loin she had seared into ash. "Does anyone even know it was wiped out? I mean... my hometown is gone."

"Nobody cares," Dewey answered. "Wanna know how I know? Because we don't care. I don't know about you guys but I don't give a shit. I'm already on my way down south, right now with this quest. This is basically the most optimistic I've been about my future. Everything that exists in the direction we're headed is an improvement over where we lived before. I mean, I could go to Taggerlin, and join some hunting clan... or go all the way to Syfor Lek and join the Lady's army... so no, nobody cares, because nobody should."

"You ain't doing shit," Yusla grunted in response. "You calm your ambitious ass down. You're an imp."

"Sh'raitha is disregarded because its people were weak," said guess-the-fuck-who. "It was all a population of—"

"For shit's sake Lugoke, you were born and raised in that place!" I hollered into his face. "Why are you always some fateful exception? Why are you always the only one who hasn't drunk the water? Don't you think that's a bit convenient that you are so fortunately spared from the effects of the exact same circumstances as everyone else? Or could it possibly be that you're oversimplifying things for your own self-aggrandizement?"