Chapter 121: The Long Way
With only his mirror, half a sword, a particularly ragged bedroll, some salt-encrusted armor, a small piece of flint, eight silver coins in a canvas pouch, his trusty fishing spear and a pair of boots that weren’t going to last much longer, left to his name, Simon finally left that familiar beach and started walking east along the coast. These lands were not completely wild, and he was sure he would find villages along the way.
It only took four days to find his first fishing village, and two more to find his second. It even took less than a week to find his first bandits, though he seemed to have little enough worth stealing, and they left him alone as he walked past, looking more than a little like a crazy old hermit.
It was a pity, too. A couple of those toughs had nice swords, and Simon would have had no compunction stealing one of them from their corpses. He continued his journey in near silence, breaking it only to hail travelers going the other direction and ask them for news from up ahead.
Well, that and hunting. Thanks to the deprivations of the weather, Simon no longer had a bow, but he was also completely sick of fish. So, when he saw a plump hare feasting on grasses not so far from him. Simon used the lesser word of force to turn a pebble into a sling bullet and gave it the force his arm never could. It was the easiest choice in the world.
After all, he’d much rather give up a week of his life for something to eat that wasn’t from the sea at this point. That would have been true even if he wasn’t going to get it back when he died.
That night, he feasted on charred, greasy meat for the first time in months, and he lay there in the scraps of his bedroll feeling blessed. “How can I be this happy with this little?” he asked himself.
He didn’t try to answer his own question. He just appreciated it.
It wasn’t until he reached the first town of any size in Fia, almost a hundred miles away from where he'd started at Ionar. It was there he learned that he had over a hundred fifty miles to go to reach Abrese, but he wasn’t in a hurry. Why wasn’t he? Because the portal he needed was almost certainly gone by now, and even if he managed to track down the Sea Seraph to whatever port she was currently in, he doubted that the portal would still work after all this time.
No, I’m probably trapped herefor a long time, he decided, for better or worse.