Devil's tale

Devil's tale chapter 21

Avarice still wasn't sleeping much. He hadn't told Jazz or Emily his reasons and he usually just pretended to snore or breathe like he was unconscious whenever one of them woke him up for a watch-shift. He wanted to keep spirits up and he knew that if he said why he couldn't sleep, Emily would probably overreact and their journey would come to a halt. The fact he expected her to act this way wasn't frustrating. If anything it was one of the things Avarice liked about her, but it didn't change the fact he wanted to press on as quickly as possible.

The journey through the kingless lands was long and boring. So boring, in fact that after a while, Jazz and Emily began requesting that Avarice entertain them whenever they stopped for a rest. Avarice happily obliged, either by telling a story or singing a song. After a few nights, he told a short story about an enslaved boy who began to fall in love with the daughter of his captor, a girl who did not know the boy was a slave. A cliche'd narrative if he'd ever seen one, in his opinion, but the night afterwards, Jazz asked.

"And what happened to them afterwards? After they entered the forest, I mean."

"I... I don't know, I kinda meant that as an endpoint for the story." Avarice replied, he stroked his chin and smiled.

"-But! I can continue if you both wish."

Jazz and Emily happily listened as Avarice gleefully strung together a tale over multiple nights, a tale of how the boy and girl grew and changed each other. A tale of heartbreak and love. He'd originally meant for the girl's father, the boy's captor, to be a one-dimensional villain, but he soon came up with a more sympathetic image of the man in his mind. He wove a complex yet simple motivation for the villain based on love and loss, and began to draw parallels between the three main characters. One night, he got to the part of the story where the girl found out the truth about the boy and her father. He got so lost in his telling of the story that he didn't even notice at first that Jazz was looking absolutely livid. He stopped talking for a split-second, ready to apologise for whatever he'd done wrong, when he saw tiny glints of light in the corners of the goblin's eyes. Avarice suddenly understood what was going on and what Jazz was actually angry about and trying to hide, he grinned and decided to take the drama and heartbreak up a notch, to see if he could get Jazz to openly cry. Unfortunately, the goblin's pokerface proved too strong and Avarice was forced to a point where any further escalation would damage the story. He smiled and continued to tell the tale normally.

Days of travel meandered by with nothing else special happening. Sometimes, Avarice, in his refusal to sleep, would write messages in his notebook. Drafts of what he might say to Roland if he ever summoned the courage to contact him. He always crumpled up the pages he filled out and tossed them to the dying embers of the fire, never being satisfied with his work. One night he'd written over fifteen discarded messages. He threw his latest work into the fire with frustration, he grunted and rested his head on his hand, staring at the fire.

The next morning, the party could finally see the edge of the desert on the horizon. "Everyone got their water-skins filled?" Emily asked. Avarice and Jazz both nodded. Avarice hoped that his magic would be able to pull water out of the air at least to some capacity while they were in the desert, since there was no way their supply of water would last them for the entire trek through the sands. The road the party intended to take would be a major trading route that cut right through the desert and lead directly to the city of water. Hopefully the accessibility of the route and the fact it passed by numerous large settlements and a couple of oasis would make the journey a little easier. If they ran out of money, Avarice could always perform in a tavern or two, or Jazz could disappear for a few hours and 'mysteriously' return with some pocket-change. As the edge of the desert grew closer, Avarice spotted something. Standing along the road leading into Anoria, were at least three dozen soldiers, backed up by about twenty clerics. Avarice swore under his breath as Emily and Jazz also noticed the obstacle in front of them.