Melia bounced on the bed she had been helpfully placed on top of by Jessica, while the others made themselves comfortable and went through their own routines to de-stress.

  Running into a different sect of the Church, if it was even part of the same church, was interesting. She supposed it was bound to happen eventually, although she was surprised it had happened sooner rather than later. In the game, various members of the clergy tended to congregate around various holy things, like churches, shrines, temples…or dungeons, especially if they happened to deal with the undead. Sometimes…they even went rogue. As was the case with the Executor inside the Magister’s Terrace. Once upon a time, he was the mouthpiece of the gods, or so they said, until he went apostate. No, not quite that either. He didn’t lose his faith, per se…not so much as he set himself up to be his own god.

  And, as Melia was coming to find in this new world, the Executor was a real person, whom she and her friends fought and barely defeated, if the tale of “Brandywine’s Bane” had spread to other cultures. Melia wondered if his temple now housed a dungeon, since he himself was long since dead, now set in stone as a reminder to mortals what should happen when they angered the gods.

  The gods.

  What did Melia know about them?

  Surprisingly, both much and very little.

  She knew everything she read from in-game lore, snippets and details and little side remarks from overarching quests. She could spout out trivia and facts about the supposed creators of this world, but she didn’t believe in them.

  No, that wasn’t quite right.

  She had a feeling they existed. She could tell something controlled holy magic, since none of her healing spells worked, and she could make the connection to Alastair’s belief and his own limited healing. But for them, she had no faith. And that wasn’t something she was sure she could change, if she wanted to or not.

  But that didn’t matter to Melia, not when she was currently more concerned with who they were than what they were.

  And if they were possibly a threat to her new team.

  Because nothing was going to threaten her hoard.

  Melia shook her head, nearly throwing her bouncing out of rhythm.

  Ebonvale’s gods.

  ?

  Ebonvale had a very clearly defined pantheon, but those who cared to look closer or study the world’s lore separated the gods into two factions.

  Those above, and those below.

  Not in the sense of “heaven and hell”, literally in a higher place or a lower place.

  It could almost be said that there were two pantheons.

  Those of the aspects, and those who were mere stewards with great power.

  Alastair’s patron deity, Celestara, was of the second. Goddess of Light, she had the power to raise “heroes” back from the dead. She gave a fraction of her power to her believers to fuel their holy spells, healing the injured and tending to the sick. But she was not “light” itself.

  Chaos. Goddess of dungeons, monsters, and, well, generally all things that could, in certain circumstances, give you a very bad day.

  She most certainly belonged to the first category. Melia didn’t know if she had a real Human form, only that she was referred to as female. The twin sister, and oftentimes considered the polar opposite, of Order.

  The appearance of [Templars] of Order outside was purely a coincidence, but Melia couldn’t help but worry about them. Because, as much as she would always hope a “holy man” was good and right and just…reality wasn’t so simple.

  Order was not “good”, just as Chaos was not “evil”.

  If Chaos were purely evil, monsters would swarm the entire world, dungeons would overflow, and they wouldn’t stop until every last speck of Humanity was destroyed. Certainly, she would never resurrect fallen adventurers who died inside her dungeons.

  Their natures, like their names, were perhaps a little more literal.

  Chaos embodied change, variance, deviation, and the unknown; while Order valued stability, rigid structure, and rules. It was said Order himself was responsible for establishing the System.

  But Chaos and Order were not diametrically opposed in all ways, despite seeming so at first glance. Or rather, they were not bitter enemies, the antithesis of each other.

  Order and Chaos were two sides to the same coin, and the important thing to take from that was that they were opposite, yes, but also similar. Very similar, being the same coin, to continue the illustration, instead of being opposite sides of two different coins. In many ways, they were more alike than they were not.

  For another analogy, take ducks. A flock of ducks, maybe a dozen.

  Order would take those ducks and put them in a row. Nice, neat, presentable, and categorized. Each one in their place.

  Here was the first point of divergence that many people did not consider when it came to the nature of Chaos. They would assume, incorrectly, that Chaos would do something to those ducks that were already in a row, Order’s ducks, to instill randomness, confusion, and unpredictability.

  Not so.

  Chaos would not bother with Order’s ducks because those ducks were already accounted for, and they were boring.

  Chaos would take 12 ducks of her own and throw them in the air, scatter them to the winds, to see which would fly and which would fall, which would survive and those that would die, leaving them all to their own devices.

  Therein lies the second misconception about Order and Chaos. Many assume that, being opposites, the two were mortal enemies. This could not be further from the truth. They were that of twin siblings. Squabbling, petty, rowdy, and sometimes prone to bits of disagreement and fighting, but never mortal enemies (divine or not).

  So no, while many would assume Order would try to rescue Chaos’ ducks in disarray, attempt to tame them and bring a semblance of structure, he would not.

  Order would see those ducks and say to Chaos: let us try this again, and observe if the same ducks would follow the same patterns, or if a new batch produces new results. Thereby deriving order from chaos.

  While many of Order’s aspects were commonly associated with “good”, Order himself did not hold any strict code of morality. His followers might attribute goodness to him, or they might not; that wasn’t his problem or concern. Melia understood what many zealots did not, that there was a great deal of order to be found in evil deeds. Murderers, especially serial killers, often held some of the most stringent codes, beliefs, and routines. To their own minds, they were incredibly ordered and precise.

  That’s why she was worried when it came to those [Templars]. As far as deities went, Celestara was powerful, one of the main gods and goddesses of the lower pantheon. But Order, belonging to the higher pantheon, was leagues above her in strength.

  In the game, Celestara manifested her presence several times to very select people, usually in cutscenes appearing before world leaders or npcs important to the story. She appeared as a woman robed in white, gentle and compassionate. And, compared to a human, no matter how high-level, she probably seemed invincible. Untouchable. But she herself was bound by the system, limited by it and confined by its constraints.

  She was to Order, as people were to her.

  And that wasn’t saying anything at all about Balance, the creator, the originator.

  To quote a scripture Melia had read in passing in some dusty library in the game:

  “From Balance came Order and Chaos both, in equal measure, for what was in one hand, must be made equal in the other.”

  Balance was never given a Human form, nor were they assigned any sort of identifier. At most, they were likened to a massive cloud of energy, as vast and limitless as the galaxies in the heavens above. Such a being surely held power unimaginable.

  Melia paused.

  Enough power to bring her back from the dead? To pull her soul from its resting place to this new world?

  …she wondered if it was possible to eat a nebulous cloud of power.

  ?

  Thankfully, her teammates were blissfully unaware of Melia’s potentially blasphemous thoughts. She found it interesting that the people of this world, if her friends were anything to go by, still reacted the same way when reaching their destination after a long day of travel. Despite having things like inventories where they could store a full minivan worth of goods, they lumbered into their inn rooms like a tired businessman would a cheap hotel, flopping lifelessly onto the bed while his soul seemingly tried to escape as a small white bubble leaking out of his mouth. Y’cennia and Jessica had both even gone so far as dumping a bunch of junk out of their inventories onto the floor, table, and chairs inside.

  Melia wasn’t quite at the point where she wanted to take a nap, because if she did, she’d just sleep straight through the night until they woke her up in the morning, and she still wanted to explore the town. Before heading straight to the door, she glanced at each of her teammates.

  Out of all of them, Jessica seemed to be the least incapacitated.

  “Hey, I’m going to take a walk around. Want to come with me?”

  At first, Jessica flinched at the thought of spending time alone with the dragon in disguise, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as when Melia first transformed. Her small, soft, and cuddly gnomish form did a remarkable job at calming her nerves.

  Or disabling her defenses, making her let her guard down, but Melia wasn’t going to do anything devious to them. Without a word, so as to not disturb everyone else, Jessica left a note saying she and Melia were going out, and to contact them by chatgem if the need arose. Once more outside on the streets of a fantasy city, Melia was yet again awed by the sights.

  Lakeridge wasn’t as rustic as Hammerfall and not as clean as Horizon. It was smaller than both by far, but unlike Sickledrop, which was also a smaller settlement, Lakeridge’s buildings were much taller. On average, each building seemed to have at least 3 stories, where most were 4, some were 5, and only a handful were 2. The only building that looked like it was a single story was the Magistrate’s Mansion, and that was an optical illusion. It was simply very wide, and the squatness of the building masked the upper 3 floors. Only five buildings in Lakeridge were taller than it: the bell tower on the local church, the landing deck on the flight platform, and three sentinel towers, two of which looked out over the lake.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The aesthetic was fascinating to Melia, also. Most buildings had a shop or storefront on the street level while the owners or renters lived above. Melia never visited any of those old and crowded cities of ancient Europe that featured the early workings of high-rise living, but she didn’t think they looked anything like this. Lakeridge looked like a fantasy mashup of “wild west” meets “apartment block”. It would most likely never occur naturally in any real setting, but Melia couldn’t say she hated it.

  The bottom floor and first story of every building were made of stone, and while some (between a third and half) were made entirely of solid rock, most buildings had upper floors built of wood. Every street was paved with smooth blocks of stone, so Lakeridge lacked the distinctive dusty, muddy look quintessential for old-timey shootouts, but a wooden boardwalk ran in front of every building on the main street. Each building had a facade, and in front of most businesses was a sturdy-looking post for people to hitch their horses. More than one establishment looked like it might have been a saloon, with swinging shutter doors that Melia could see under if she crouched just a little. Since it was already afternoon, she could hear some drunken rabble-rousers getting started early for the evening, and the bite of alcohol stung her nose. Despite being constantly hungry, Melia didn’t want to deal with drunks in a bar, so she and Jessica continued on their way.

  It was soon clear that not everybody was quite as carefree as those people celebrating indoors, and when the duo made their way to the Midsummer fire pit placed in the plaza before the Mansion, it was shockingly vacant. Normally, only a week into festivities, the area around the bonfire would be packed with revelers and vendors, but there were only a handful of stragglers warming their hands on the fire as if haunted by the memory of the cold, or else tossing in some incense to burn for good fortune. Several guards stood by the gate leading up to the Magistrate's Mansion, which looked far more crowded than the streets outside, and the Keeper of the Flame kept glancing at the sky, looking miserable and probably wishing he was anywhere else but here.

  Melia tracked a line of people streaming out of the Mansion’s front doors and dragged Jessica over to the closest guard. The man looked bored, tired, and overall done with the crowd behind him, but he offered a polite nod of his head as the pair approached.

  “Excuse me,” Melia squeaked, stretching up on her tippy toes to get a tiny bit closer, “Can I ask a question?”

  The guard looked down, putting on a genuine, if tired, smile.

  “Of course, Little One. How may I assist you today?”

  “Are there normally so many people crowding to get inside? This is still the Magistrate’s Mansion, isn’t it? It’s been a long time since I’ve been in town.”

  The guard looked at her strangely, as if the question was very silly.

  “Have you just arrived in Lakeridge, travelers? Did you take the Aetherlines in?”

  The “Aetherlines,” referring to the giant blue crystal meant for warping in. Melia and Jessica turned to glance at the beautiful structure, which hadn’t seen a trace of displacement energy since before they wandered into the plaza. It was a polite fiction on the guard’s part, instead of straight-up calling them idiots. He was basically asking if they were blind or were living under a rock. Maybe both…at the same time.

  “Indeed, we just arrived this afternoon,” Melia continued pleasantly. “Was quite a predicament getting here the last two days. Didn’t expect a freak snowstorm in the middle of summer!”

  “You and everybody else,” the guard sighed dramatically. He pointed behind him, tilting his spear toward the line without turning around. “Though I’d say if you made it through all that in one piece, you’re made of hardier stock than the average merchant.” He gave Jessica a speculative glance. “Adventurers?” he asked. His eyes lingered on Melia’s attire before quickly traveling toward a…slightly fancier section of buildings with a higher ratio of beautifully dressed women. Melia decided she wasn’t going to ask.

  “Yeah,” Jessica replied simply. “Thought we might make the area our new base for a while.”

  “Well, I won’t lie to you, new adventurers are always a welcome sight. If you haven’t visited the guild yet, it’s on the other side of the plaza from the Mansion. While you’re here, if you’re interested in getting the lay of the land, you might want to stop inside the hearing room for a moment. Not pleasant,” he sighed as somebody in the line complained loudly about the wait, “But informative. I don’t think there’s a better way for you to get a feel of what needs doing than listening to this lot gripe.”

  “Are they all lining up to…complain?” Jessica asked, sounding appalled.

  The guard neither confirmed nor denied, but judging from the roll of his eyes and the nasty look somebody close by shot at them, that was a firm “yes”.

  “The door on the left leads to the audience chamber for the hearing room,” he explained as if reciting this speech by heart. “Get in line if you want to bring any concerns before the Magistrate, and even if nothing can be done today, your requests will be noted. If you’re here on other business, for any legal proceedings, or if you want to sit in on a hearing in session, use the right-hand doors.”

  Melia thanked the man and led Jessica toward the front entrance. One rather irritated man called out to them, “Hey, no cutting in line!”, but Jessica simply flipped him off and opened the right-side doors for Melia to walk through.

  The inside of the Magistrate’s Mansion was once again a different aesthetic than everything else in town, reminding Melia slightly of the Capitol building in Sacramento, California. She’d taken a trip to it once in second grade, right before she could no longer attend physical school, so the memory stuck with her. Gleaming, polished floors reflected multiple golden chandeliers hanging from a vaulted ceiling, lit not by candles or flames, but glowing crystals. Fascinated, Melia focused her vision on the chaotic magic floating through the air, tracing it as it ran like an electrical conduit from each chandelier, across the ceiling, down the wall, and ending at what she assumed was a light switch. Jessica hummed next to her.

  “Sometimes I wonder what you see with those eyes of yours,” she muttered, and Melia shrugged.

  “Sometimes, I don’t even know myself. I was just marveling at those light fixtures. Aren’t they amazing?”

  “I’ve always wondered about things like those,” Jessica mused, staring straight up. “Do you suppose somebody needs to get on a ladder to recharge the gems?”

  “No,” Melia giggled, pointing to the wall. “There’s a line of magical energy that runs from that plate all the way up to the chandeliers. I can see the runes for charging, as well as turning on or off.”

  “You can see magic?” Jessica asked, surprised. Melia tilted her head. She made no secret of that, and she was pretty sure she’d pointed out runes in the past.

  “Yes?” she questioned. “I’m a dragon?”

  Jessica closed her eyes, as if the memory pained her.

  “Right. All-powerful dragon.”

  And then she paused, remembering.

  “You said something like this before, didn’t you? Back at the vault. I forgot.”

  Melia smiled and nodded. “You’ve had a lot on your mind.”

  “Not as much as them,” Jessica not so subtly changed the subject, pointing to the hearing room where loud voices complaining inside leaked out into the foyer. “Shall we take a look?”

  “Can’t hurt, can it?” Melia asked, hoping she wasn’t jinxing them.

  ?

  Melia did not, in fact, trigger an encounter or set a flag. They walked inside the chamber, a large hall the size of a high school gymnasium. At one end was a raised platform holding a desk, with several officials seated behind it. In front of it stood a podium for a speaker, and behind the podium were over a dozen rows of benches. It looked like they could seat several hundred people, which was probably only a fraction of the entire town. Currently, the hearing seats were only about a third full, with most visitors waiting impatiently in line for their turn to harass the very beleaguered-looking dwarven woman sitting in the fancy chair behind the desk.

  Taking their seats, Melia and Jessica quickly discovered that this “hearing” was a waste of time.

  Many of the people who lined up to complain had very similar problems and concerns. Half the time the wording was only changed very slightly, saying practically the same things that somebody a few places in front of them said, over and over and over on repeat. No wonder the woman, whom Melia assumed was the Magistrate, looked so haggard. She had bags under her eyes, her suit, while high quality, was rumpled, and she looked only seconds away from standing up, walking out the doors, and joining all the drunks in a saloon.

  “What are you going to do about the snowstorm?!” a large, barrel-chested man bellowed. “All that water is bad for business!”

  Judging from the stains on the man’s apron, he probably worked with machines. Melia could understand not wanting to get water all over equipment, but the Magistrate had no sympathy.

  “It’s summer,” she said plainly, the slight sheen of sweat on her brow evidence of her claim. “Winter came, the snow melted, and it’s gone. The whole thing was over in a day. Something completely out of our control. Or do you expect me to order around the clouds? Make demands of the gods? I’ve got no more say over freak blizzards than you do.”

  She paused, as if daring the man to say that yes, he did have control over the weather, he was only choosing not to exercise it. When he did not, she waved a hand dismissively, while addressing the court recorder sitting to her side, scribbling rapidly in a book.

  “Make note: Harmond Miller wants special care paid to sudden snowstorms appearing in the summer. We will observe any further occurrences and make plans as deemed necessary. Mr. Miller, your concerns have been recorded. Next!”

  With one hand she waved the man toward the exit, while the other rubbed her temple as she sighed. Her voice was so low, only Melia and the scribe heard it.

  “You live on a lake. You should be used to the water.”

  Mr. Miller didn’t look remotely satisfied, but after a glance at the two guards, one at either end of the table, he left without another word.

  Melia found it interesting. The Sienna Mountains was a higher-level zone than Gold Coast, so part of her expected everybody in Lakeridge to be higher level themselves. This was not the case. She could see the guards were level 513 [Defenders], which must have been a subset of the [Guard] class, but they were the highest people in the room. The Magistrate herself, Darcy Stoutfist, a young woman by dwarven standards, had flaming red hair set in an immaculate braid, though she lacked the typical accent that dwarves who spent their entire lives in the Strongholds retained. She must have spent much of her life around humans, and she was only level 119.

  Glancing around the room, most people in line and in the audience were “low level”, between 1 and 2 hundred, but Melia supposed that was actually normal for ordinary people in these supposedly peaceful times. The sole exceptions were two of the [Templars], sitting in the front row, paying rapt attention. Melia got the feeling they weren’t from around here, but being agents of Order, they probably ruffled their kinks listening to stale proceedings like this. She wasn’t going to judge…out loud.

  Not like they could do anything to her if she did, being level 491 and 502 respectively, but Melia was content to live and let live.

  More people came up, and more people spouted the same complaints over and over like a badly worn record. Three things seemed to be on the docket for discussion: the blizzard, the lake, and the dragon.

  Melia ignored the blizzard after the second time it came up, the townsfolk didn’t know any more about it than she did. She was hoping there might be a reasonable explanation, like [Frost Giants] going into a yearly reproductive cycle or something, but their spawning ways were just as much a mystery to the Magistrate as they were to Melia.

  The lake she was very curious about, because the concerns the people had were much more valid…if overly used by the time the third request for search parties for missing boats came in. Search and rescue during an unforeseen disaster was incredibly important…but once the proper measures were in place, people didn’t need to harp on and on about it. It wasn’t like their cries for help would bring in the missing boats faster.

  …though maybe they could? Melia didn’t have an exhaustive list of every skill imaginable, but judging from the Magistrate’s tested patience, she didn’t think so.

  The dragon…was a bit unfortunate. People saw the dragon pass over the northwest chunk of their zone on its way to Abbyton, but they never saw it come back. And then some of them complained about the much bigger, darker shape flying back this morning. Some claimed it was the dragon, grown huge from eating everybody on the other side of the mountain, returning to its roost. Others claimed it was simply a really dark cloud.

  It took everything Melia had, and Jessica’s hand on her shoulder clamping her down, to keep from jumping up and declaring the dragon harmless. They wouldn’t believe her, and she’d possibly cause panic. Certainly, it would do more harm than good.

  Melia and Jessica sat and listened for a solid 30 minutes, but before they got bored and decided to leave, something made the decision for them. Outside, the bell from the church tower rang, signalling 5 o’clock. The people still waiting in line groaned, while the clerk scribbling madly in the records book slumped over, thankfully not dead. The Magistrate stretched and stood up, showing she was tall for a dwarf, and made her way toward the exit, ignoring everybody calling for her attention.

  Melia glanced at Jessica, and both nodded. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try.

  ?

  “Magistrate, if I could have a moment of your time?”

  The woman glanced at Jessica as if she were the mud beneath her shoes. Did they not hear the bell? 5 o'clock. Business was over, no exceptions. She’d have a real riot on her hands if half the townsfolk saw her listening to somebody else’s problems after she kicked them all out of her office. She gave a subtle nod to the guards behind her but said nothing.

  “We’re adventurers,” Jessica hastily added, watching the two large men take a step forward. “We just reached town today, traveling from Hammerfall. I’m a [Hunter], and my companion here is a-”

  “[Dancer],” Melia supplied. It was a work in progress, but a class she was already known to possess.

  “-There you have it. We’ve got news of that dark shape.”

  The Magistrate held up her hand, and the guards obeyed.

  “And?” she asked.

  “It was a dragon.”

  To her credit, the Magistrate did not cower or pale in terror. She did look extremely tired, as if this was one more pile of poop on an ever-growing turd tower.

  “It was heading toward the dwarves,” she mused. “Gods help them.” She considered the human and gnome in front of her, though she obviously wasn’t impressed. “In your opinion, which I will freely admit is worth less than an ice [Mage] in the winter, do you think it’s heading back?”

  “No-” Jessica began, but was instantly cut off.

  “Do you think it poses an immediate threat to my town?”

  “No.” This time, she knew to keep her mouth shut.

  “Good.”

  The Magistrate nodded once and began moving forward again. Before Jessica could complain, she turned her head over her shoulder and gave them a final glance.

  “Then meet me in the morning with your party before the 8 o'clock bell. My door opens at 7. One minute past 8 and I won’t see you, I’ve got meetings all day. Enjoy your stay in Lakeridge. Gentlemen,” she nodded to her guards and quickly walked away.