The Quantum Wanderer

We go back home, and I leave the bullgoose meat with Roberta, in the cold room. After that, we go up to my room, and I put some magic on the Comm Gem. It is a strange thing, because all the girls’ necklaces shake together. After a little bit, I hear Siratra.

“Yes, master?”

“Hi Siratra, we are thinking of making a trip to meet up with the dwarves. Do you want to come?”

“Master, is this an order?”

“Oh, come on, you know that I am not going to use that, right?”

“Oh, right. Master, if I may… May I stay here? We are studying the numbers.”

“Ok.” I put the Comm Gem away.

“Alright, girls. I am going to do some portal leaping, and find the place. Once I get to the place, I will open a portal to get you there, ok?”

“Yes, my lord.” Shandon answered for the team.

I go to the balcony to position myself, and with the map in my hands, I portal to the place that I think the entrance to the dwarves is going to be, but kind of high, so I stay out of sight. I cast fly, and after locating the place, I do one more jump, and this time I go in stealth mode. I land in an empty area, outside anyone’s view, behind a mountain. It is around half a mile from destination, a not long walk. I open a portal and bring the girls in.

We walk around, and go to the small village that is built around the cave entrance. They have a stone wall around it, and a line with come carts waiting to go inside the city. There are two dwarf guards outside, and about four on top of the wall, close to the gate. As we get close, I can see that there are some empty carts, but the majority of them have a lot of innura or dendrif in it. It is hard to contain my laugh.

We wait our turn, and present our mithril tags at the gate. We are the only group of people outside a cart. He looks at us up and down, several times.

“What are you here for, adventurer? Which merchant are you escorting?”

“We are not escorting any merchant right now. We are just visiting, interested in some nice dwarven metal work.”

“In that case, you may as well turn around, nothing to see here.”

I get close to the guard, so that other people will not listen to us.

“So, are you going to deny us entry just because we are not bringing mithril or adamantite ore like the others?”

He looks at me, flabbergasted. He recomposes himself, gives a couple of steps back.

“Well, since you insist, go ahead. It is your time you are spending.”

Of what I though was a village. It is actually a lot of small shops, and a wide street that goes straight into a big portal on the side of the mountain. The doors to the cave are wide open, with just one guard on each side. The wooden doors don’t really look all that strong, though.

To the right of the big gate, there is a strange device. It is an arm extending from the rock, with cable as wide as my wrist. On the stone there was something written, but it wasn’t in [common]. I looked at the girls, and chose Aquamarine, just because.

“Aquamarine, do you know what is written there?”

“Yes, my lord. It says ‘Prove your strength, prove your blade, cut the cable and… ’. It feels like a part is missing, though.”

I see that one of the guard stationed there are smiling.

“Good morning.”

“Morning, sky people.”

“So, if I cut this, am I allowed to enter the city?”

He giggles.

“Yes. You will be considered dwarf. Just like your sheath said. It has never happened in over 3 thousand years, though.”

I go back to the contraception. When I enhance my mana senses, I check that the arm, the cable and even the floor in that patch are made of mana enhanced adamantite. Adamantite by itself would already be a tough thing to cut, but mana enhanced adamantite is nearly impossible.

There are some very, very tiny marks, here and there.

“Girls, you want to get some distance, this might make a noise. Keep your mouths open. Cecilia, get behind Shandon, and really keep your mouth open.”

“Why?”

“Please do it.”

They positioned themselves. I take my sword out, and I can see that the guards have a strange look when they realize that it is different from normal metal, looking akin to a mirror instead of common metal.

I proceed with the preparations. First thing, I am going to suck up on this thing’s mana, and I redirect that mana to a body enhancement. I apply gravity on my feet, so that I can get grounded for what I am going to have to do.

I keep receiving a lot of mana from that cable, but I manage to create a small area, right where I need it, with a much smaller amount of mana. I let some mana flow to my sword, to reinforce the neutron crystal. I make it interlaced with mana. I can feel my mana dropping, in spite of the amount that I am absorbing from the cable.

I enhanced the whole body, so time kind of stands still. I focus on the cut, reaching all the system skills I have on sword fighting, and with my both hands, hold myself, and put all my strength and do a cut, from upper right to down left. I do it in a way that the blade slides a little over the cable, to try to maximize the cut.

The blade breaks the sound barrier, my boots are ruined, and I leave a mark on the adamantite ground. The strength of the impact creates a way louder boom than the sonic one, and the land around shakes.

The portal to the cave let some dust fall, the guards that are keeping it fly almost 10 feet, and fall on the ground. The girls are exactly behind me but they got their distance. They take a couple of steps back, and Cecilia falls on her but.

As everyone is recovering their breath, the dwarves on the ground stand up, and the other guards come closer, running, weapons in their hands.

“WHAT THE FUCK!!! WHAT IS GOING ON!?”

The arm that was being held by the cable slowly moves up, and by the time the dwarves get close to me, another spot on the rock, underneath the written text we had seen, opens up slowly.

The dwarves that arrive start looking at the scene, flabbergasted.

Inside the compartment in the rock, I can see four necklaces, in the shape of small anvils. I can feel some magic coming from them, so I give some steps forward and pick one of them up. They are made of adamantite. I put one of them on, and I can feel the magic around me.

There are, apparently, two spells mixed in. The first one is applied directly to my lungs. If I am feeling it correctly, it has to do with breathing. The second one, is a very strong fire immunity, to the point that I am almost feeling cold right now.

Everyone gather around, dwarves, girls, merchants that started to recover.

“Aquamarine, what does it say in that thing?”

“Be a dwarf!”

So the whole sentence would be ‘Prove your strength, prove your blade, cut the cable and / be a dwarf!’ Interesting. Before any dwarf tells me I cannot do it, I pick up all four necklaces, and put one on Cecilia, Shandon and Opal. Aquamarine and Ruby are not going to get one, but I am only placing the necklaces on Shandon and Opal to be able to keep them.

I take my sword out to take a look at it. Instead of being a mirror, it became matte. Completely matte.

The merchants start muttering around us ‘he did it…’, ‘…impossible…’, ‘by the gods…’.

The chief guard looks around, grabs one of the guards, whispers something in his ear, and he takes off running. He then turns to me.

“Well, this was… Unexpected. I am going to have to ask you to come with us.”

It wasn’t really a question, but I wasn’t really concerned. Besides, even though he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t try to put us in chains yet, so…

We go inside the cave, and there are glowing stones embedded on the walls. We walk a little, then we make a turn, and, hidden by the curve, there is a kind of a cable car station. We enter one of them.

The cable car goes steep, through a very long way, making turns around pulleys, until we reach another station. This station is a big parallelepipedal cave in the rock, with a gate, large enough for two carts to pass by, and very tall, around 20 feet.

There are some windows in the stone above and to the right and left of the gate, from where we can be seen.

The gate starts to open, and now is my turn to be flabbergasted. After the gate, there is a road that goes to the left. Right in front, there is a precipice, and down bellow that, a city as big as Ironhold stretches out. To my right, there is a couple of sets of moving platforms. One coming in from a dark hole in the ceiling, and going through the floor, and another one with the platforms going up.

All the houses are made of rock, shaped in different ways. A lot of the houses, on one section of the city, seem a little more on the common side, having a simple design. There is a castle on the end, that is actually attached to the wall of the cave.

The towers in that castle are all nicely decorated, every ceiling a piece of art. Around it, there are some nice looking, smaller, houses. They are lower, but I can see that everything in there is elaborate. Every gate, every ceiling.

To the left of the city, there is another huge pair of movings platforms. One set is going up, all the way from a hole on the floor to a hole on the ceiling. On the other side, the platforms are coming down.

On the top of the cave, there are innumerous stalactites, all of them shining light down bellow.

I examine the air, and I can see that it is not breathable for a human being. It has a very high dose of carbon monoxide, some sulfur gases, like hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and some volcanic particles in the air.

The amulet that I got outside the cave is really doing its job, I can’t even sense the rotten egg smell. I see that Aquamarine and Ruby do a face, but I know that, other than that, it is not going to affect them.

“Finished sightseeing yet? Let’s go!” The guards’ chief interrupted my quick tourism. He moves towards the road, and I appreciate that, because it allows me to take in the sight of the city in more detail.

As we go down that side road, I see some carts moving around. They are going to the elevators that were close to us when we entered the floor. There is also some movement of carts with ore going to the elevators further away, in the middle of the cave. With my senses, I can see that that area is hotter than the rest of the city, that is already on the 130 degrees (around 55 Celsius).

Once we are down the ramp, a group of armored dwarves are there to receive us. They are riding a group of giant moles, that are using some form of armor. They all have big halberds on their backs. The guard chief gesture us, and we start following these riders.

They go in a very slow procession, apparently towards the castle that I had seen. There are a lot of people outside, on the streets. I hear some bells ringing, from moment to moment, and this adds a musicality to the whole thing.

The most common characteristic is that all of them have beards, as far as I can tell. Some kids, hidden behind another dwarf, still have a clean face. What I noticed, though, is that the beards are not all the same. While some have the normal, curly beard, some of them have straight beard hairs. So straight that is flows when they turn their heads. The clothing is very varied as well, but it is mostly simple and light.

When I look at the buildings up close, I realize that they are actually a single piece of rock. Around most houses there is a red/brownish grass around it. Then there is a kind of sidewalk made by square slabs of stone put together, and then the road, made of smaller pieces of stone.

The procession keeps going on, until we arrive at the palace. There, the riders dismount, and we continue walking.

When we enter the palace, I notice that only the front half was outside the rock in the back of the cave. The rest of it was actually enclosed in hard rock. About as hard as the menhirs used in the knight test.

The work inside the palace is exquisite. The tables, the cupboards, most things were actually carved from the walls. As we go down a corridor, there are images of dwarves engraved on the wall, just like the series of paintings of past emperors I had seen in Suresh’s palace. Each of them a work of art.

We get to a very large and tall door, that has another two guards around it. They open the door, and we are motioned in.

There is this carpet, and golden motifs on the room. To either side of a red carpet there are several dwarves, and at the end of the carpet, a throne with their king on it. His crown is a silver looking one. He has this intrigued look towards us.

Above the throne there are a couple of exquisite halberds, crossed.

“Here they are, your majesty.” The lead of the procession says, and kneels down. Cecilia and I follow suit, but the dragonesses keep standing up. I look at them inquisitively, and Opal is the one to answer.

“My lord, we only kneel to you!”

“BWAHAHAHA!!!” The king lets this boom laughing out.

“THAT IS ABSURD! WE SHOULD HAVE THEIR HEADS!”

“Calm down, Stonebeard. No use hitting cold metal. Are you going to dig before you find the vein?” The king says. He turns to me. “Are you the one that proved yourself?”

“If you mean cutting the cable, then yes.”

“I tell you, your highness, we should make them give back our treasure.” Another one said.

“Oh? Is it now our treasure, Vestri? Did you even know what was there? Why didn’t you do it, then? Why wait for the foreigners? No one here was ever impeded of trying the trial.”

I can see that the dwarf is uncomfortable with the question. The king looks back at me, then at the group of nobles. He sighs. He gets down from the throne, and comes our way.

“Come, let’s go to a better place.”

“Your majesty! We don’t know them! Your safety.”

“YOU BUNCH OF MORONS! IF THEY WANTED US DEAD, WE WOULD BE ON THE FLOOR ALREADY!”

…

“Who, among you, has a soldier with a shield with just a fraction of strength as the trial?”

He keeps going towards the door, and turns back.

“Are you coming?”

“Sure.”

We follow the king while we walk the corridors, until we reach a room. The functionality is much of a study, with some bottles with drinks, a couple of sofas, a coffee table. It reminds me a lot of the room we use when we visit Suresh. Apparently every king has the same taste.

He sits on one sofa, and Opal and Ruby sit by my side, while Cecilia and Aquamarine sit on two chairs.

“Can I offer you anything to drink?”

“I am actually good for now.”

“Well, then, I hope you don’t mind.”

He picks a little bell that was on the table, and rings it. A butler comes in, and the king gestures towards the table by the wall, with the drinks. The butler prepares a drink, and delivers it on a tray to the king. The king picks it up, takes a sip, and then sits back.

“So, first question. What are you doing here?”

“Well, at first I was intending on buying some new weapons for me and my wives. I then saw the opportunity to get to know this city, and things happened.”

“Things happened? That’s a way to put it.” He takes a minute looking at the dragonesses. He stares at Ruby, that doesn’t have the dwarven item. “What race are you? I thought we were the only humanoids capable of surviving here.”

Ruby looks at me, and I nod indicating that she can answer. It’s not like they are not going to figure out anyway.

“We are dragon.”

He nods calmly, and then the information sets in. He looks with his eyes wide open towards the girls. He looks at Opal, that nods. Then, he looks at Shandon, that also nods. Next it is Aquamarine’s turn, that also nods. And then he stares at Cecilia, that shakes her head. Then he looks at me, and manages to open his eyes even more.

“YOU! REALLY? IT CAN’T BE!”

He looks around again, and starts mumbling.

“Black, red, white, white…”

He grabs his glass, and drinks everything in a single gulp. Then he stands up, goes to the bar and pours a whole glass, that he drinks in a few gulps. Then he pours some more, and brings the glass almost completely full to the sofa.

“How should I address you, your… Godliness?”

I giggle. “Marcelo is fine, your majesty.”

“You can call me Dávrin. Should I kneel or something?” He giggles.

“Neeeh. It’s ok. I don’t really care for protocol. I don’t even know what is the protocol for other species.”

“For other species?”

Opal is the one to answer.

“We ignore it because it is our lord’s wishes, but the proper form to greet my lord is showing submission, but so far only dragons have done it correctly.” She turns to me, lowers her head, stretches her arms out, with the palms pointing up.

“I am sorry to ask, but… What position do you hold?”

Shandon, showing some pride, is the one to cut in.

“My lord is council dragon.”

“What is that?”

Opal explains him the council thing, and how there are only one dragon and me in the council, and I hold most votes.

“And… Where are the crows?” He asks, while laughing.

“I left them at home, I wasn’t sure what I was going to find here. Good thing though, since they might have issues with the air here.”

“WHAT? I WAS JOKING! ARE YOU WRAX?”

“No, I am not Wrax, the crows was just a… coincidence. They kind of adopted me, more than anything really. I like crows, they are very honest about their feelings towards you. So I initially got Muninn to accompany me, and then he apparently invited Huginn to come along as well.”

The king sits back, and just looks at the distance. He keeps sipping the glass. After sometime, he stares at me again.

“And how could I help you?”

“Well, I would like to stay some days, and visit the city. This much close to the volcano, can I assume that there would be some hot springs anywhere around? I would also like to be directed towards some metal work artisan, like I told you, I intend on buying weapons for me and my girls.”

“Well, as for your stay, sure. I am going to see what I can arrange. The hot bath thing was a good guess, actually. But why would you want to another sword? Yours is way better than anything we can provide. I can also feel that your armor is not a simple leather armor, although I cannot tell what is wrong with it.”

“About the sword... It was a normal iron sword that I did a treatment on, adding a kind of a coat to it. And now the metal is gone, actually. Do you have a trash can around?”

He points out to a can that is by the desk. I go there, and bring it back with me. I place my sword on top of it, and I undo the neutron crystal around it. The very thin iron powder falls on the trash can.

“What the…?” He picks up the trash can, and smells the powder. Then looks back at me, intrigued. “This *is* iron! How?”

“Hey, you got your secrets, I got mine. Although you should discount the one about innura and dendrif being the ores for mithril and adamantite.” I giggled. “That ship had sailed way before I came here. A guild master showed me the ores, and I identified it.”

He takes another sip on the drink. I am amazed at the amount of booze he can consume, but I keep this to myself.

“Can I ask you to stop spreading this information?”

“Sure, I don’t particularly mind, unless something really urgent comes up. But other than that, I will keep my lips closed. Of course, a couple of people already know about that. Can I also ask you to not spread around information about me? I think I kind of said more than I intended.”

“Of course. And on my part, I don’t think there are any other secrets.” He gave a nervous giggle. “I am going to provide you a guide, and I am going to find accommodations. Not many people travel around here, so inns as a place to sleep are not really flourishing business around.”

He ringed the bell again, and the servant came in. He whispered a couple of things in the servant’s ear, and the servant went away.

“You can wait here and have a drink if you want, I have some other matters to attend to. A guide will come in in a little while.”

He left, and the girls and I are left alone. I look at the girls.

“Well, that went well, actually.”

Cecilia starts laughing. Opal looks at her amused.

“I wonder if we are still alive or if they already killed us, and this is just a dream.”

“No, we are all very well alive and well.”

“What now?”

“We wait for the guide, and we check the city out. And we find some nice swords. We do have the cash for that, anyway.”

We keep chatting a little bit, I keep risking some guesses on how things work. That they buy the ores from outside just because it is cheaper than actually using their people to mine them. So other humanoids would sell them the material, and buy the final product for a premium.

After sometime, our guide arrives in the room, and we follow him out of the palace.