Chapter 11

Jack, Stacey and Nate sat together on a fallen stone column as they watched various guild personnel work. It had been almost a week since they’d discovered the ruins during their exploratory expedition into the Dire Woods; as soon as they’d stepped out of the tomb Sam had contacted the outpost about their find. Normally, radio and satellite signals wouldn't be able to get all the way back to base, but as they’d been walking through the Woods, the team had been periodically dropping transmitter beacons along their trail which would carry the signal further.

During Sam’s conversation with the base, she’d been told to maintain position and wait for a full team of surveyors and other hunters to come out to properly investigate and survey the ruins. And now, a week later team Meredith were lounging around in the middle of the ruins as they watched guild personnel swarm over it all, collecting samples and cataloguing everything. They even made off with the corpse from the tomb, for science.

During their week waiting for the guild to send more people out, the team had mostly patrolled the ruins, making sure no monster wandered through or that the place wasn’t already the territory of something nasty. But for some reason, no monster or animal seemed to want to come near the place.

Jack also made sure to use the downtime to further his own studies, the ruins were a treasure trove for runes, he saw many different runes and examples of how they might be used. Normally all he had to work with were scavenged examples of something a desperate goblin or orc could cobble together, but here, everything seemed more sophisticated and planned out somehow.

He smiled smugly to himself, he’d already got a decent design for something he’d been working on for a while now, he just needed to get back to the outpost to try it out.

“What are you smirking at?” Stacey asked him suspiciously.

“Me? Nothing, just happy to be getting out of here today.” He shrugged innocently.

“Mm hm, maybe we’ll run into something on the way back to base,” she suggested with a smile to Nate who perked up.

“God I hope so, Sam made us avoid practically everything on the way out here! The closest I came to death was from a damn mushroom! We need to ditch that surveyor!” Nate exclaimed vehemently.

“Did I hear my name?” Sam said as she approached from behind with Meredith, Noah and Katie.

“Just saying, we want to get rid of you,” Nate told her blandly.

“Nate! We didn’t say that Sam,” Stacey said with a hard elbow to Nate’s ribs.

“Hahaha! That's fine I get it, he’s looking for trouble and I keep making him avoid it. Well, you’ll be rid of me soon enough. Once we get back to the outpost, you guys can go back to doing what you do best without me interfering. Ready to go?” she asked brightly.

*******************************************

Four days later the team traipsed through the main gate of the outpost, finally back. It had taken them slightly less time than before because they weren’t exploring, just going from point A to point B, also Sam allowed Nate to lead the way. Nate elected to take the most direct route which coincidentally took them through several known monster nests. They were dragging the results of those impromptu monster encounters behind on improvised sleds.

As soon as they stepped into the outpost, they said their farewells to Sam and headed back to their living quarters via quarantine with Noah saying he would take care of the sale of their loot.

As usual, everyone slumped into their common room and collapsed onto the circular couch.

“Hola amigos!”

“Hola flower!” Nate tiredly but cheerfully replied.

“Don’t worry! It stopped breathing after a while!” the flower cheerfully informed them.

Jack and Katie shuddered. Stacey tilted her head up from where she was laying.

“Is it - is it okay when it says things like that?” she asked, faintly disturbed, not yet used to the Echo Lily’s one liners.

“No,” Katie, Jack and Meredith replied at the same time.

A day later, the crew were all off doing their own things. Jack was in his room, his head buried in his books and notes on runes. Stacey and Meredith were in the kitchen collaborating on using the water element to manipulate blood for medical uses.

Nate was in the common room, sitting on the circular couch, he had a large metal bowl full of smouldering charcoal resting on his lap. Every few seconds he would breathe in deeply and a cloud of smoke and sparks would stream into his lungs from the burning coal. Occasionally as he was doing so, he reached over to the table in the middle of the sofa and he would sprinkle some chopped up pieces of dried meat into the Echo Lily’s flower pot. The flower shifted and let out strange, high pitched sighs of relief.

Katie was watching the new tv plasma screen intently, she groaned in frustration and chewed her fingernails as she watched the coverage of some sort of archery competition.

Noah meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, apparently he enjoyed pottery in his downtime and was actually pretty good at it if Jack was one to judge. However when he’d last tried to do it in the kitchen, Nate had managed to convince the Echo Lily to give a haunting rendition of ‘Unchained Melody’ by The Righteous Brothers. It had actually been quite moving, while Noah was gathering his things and leaving in a huff, both Meredith and Katie had teared up and even Jack had stopped to listen.

Now that he finally had some time alone with all his notes and not just his pager, Jack could at last review everything he had and add what he’d found at the ruins to his collection. After what he’d learnt at the ruins, he was able to come up with a particular effect he’d been working on for a while. He wrote out a long and complicated sequence of different runes on a piece of paper with a normal ball point pen, the pattern he used was a sort of circular flowing script that had different sets of runes all leading into one another in different branches, his own design. It took him close to an hour and when he was finished he took several pictures of the finished product on his own phone for his own records. He then put a finger to the start of the sequence and pulsed a tiny amount of energy into it.

From the surface of the paper came a semi-opaque square sheet of blue light, it hovered over the paper. Whilst he kept one hand on the paper to keep feeding it miniscule amounts of power, Jack raised his other hand in trepidation and touched the blue construct.

Solid. It was perfectly solid, he didn’t know why it was blue but other than the colour it was exactly what he was going for. The shape, the size, the thickness, the distance from the paper, the angle and completely solid. He increased the power slightly and diverted the flow to another branch in the runes, the square altered into a circle with a slight ripple and distortion.

He grinned at his success, he reached out to touch the construct again but before he could, the construct began to flicker before disintegrating into blue sparks. The runes and the piece of paper slowly burned up into ashes.

Hmm, regardless of the success with the runic script, materials for actually writing them were going to be a problem. Almost everything he’d used so far had burnt up into nothing, although it was probably a bit much to expect normal printer paper and ball point pen ink to be capable of harnessing cosmic energies without a little wear and tear. The only time that didn’t happen at least straight away was when he used his own blood in place of ink.

In anycase, he’d done it! Jack grinned. After all that time studying, he’d come up with something he could work on and eventually put into practice. Shields! Barriers, traps and more. He could think of plenty of things he could do with the ability to create what he was pretty sure was ‘solid light’, only a theoretical material until now. And none of it was elemental too, though he would have to go down to a lab at some point with his findings and see what the white coats had to say about it all.

He’d studied all the other examples of rune usage found from various sentient monster sites including the ruins in the Dire Woods, and in so doing he’d found them to be fairly limited and simplistic. He’d tried recreating some of the tools recovered from the monster hunts and found that even after painstakingly reverse engineering them, the actual runic sequences seemed to require something extra from the user. Not just energy, but a cognitive element, severe and deep focus, like he was having to perform mental gymnastics just to keep the effect going. That didn’t seem very safe right in the middle of a combat situation, each runic effect also seemed to use up a fair amount of energy.

So Jack began to think about how each different species of sentient monster seemed to do things and how he would do them differently. It was then that he came up with the idea similar to coding, specifically computer coding. He could create runic script in a similar fashion to computer code, with complicated ‘what if’ algorithms to solve problems and take away from the mental strain whilst using multiple sets of runes taken from different sentient monster species. It wasn’t like he would be writing runes on the fly in the middle of combat, he had all the time in the world in between jobs to experiment and write whatever he wanted.

In Jack’s own humble opinion as he viewed images of his work on his camera phone, it appeared to be much more sophisticated than anything any hunter or surveyor team had come across out in the field.

With some preliminary success under his belt, Jack began experimenting with different variations of the rune matrix he’d just written out as well as making a list of different materials he could use in creating runes that wouldn’t disintegrate after a single use. After the third hour of painstakingly writing out the thing and rubbing his sore wrist, he began to think about getting a photocopier too.

*****************************

A few days later, the hunters and surveyors who had followed team Meredith to the ruins returned. Three days after that the guild surprisingly decided to reveal what had been uncovered.

The guild was normally closed lipped about this sort of thing, after all they’d kept Jack’s own secret for a few months until he’d been outed due to a combination of factors. But now for some reason they had decided to pull a big reveal. When the team had discussed it before going down to the canteen, Stacey had said it was probably because the guild was under pressure to produce results. Not just money and materials, but research data too, a whole bunch of organisations had invested in the guild’s efforts to explore the Dire Woods and that included a variety of universities and research and development companies. So the guild decided to share a little about what they'd found.

Team Meredith were on their way there now, apparently attendance was mandatory if you weren’t already out on a job. They’d also been instructed to wear their armour and to be as clean as possible, the guild had seen fit to invite the nation’s journalists to the big reveal as well as a good number of foreign media, representatives of various investors, government officials and various guild higher ups. It was supposed to be a fairly big event, the guild had even managed to sell tickets to normal citizens who were willing to sign a pain waiver for a single evening in the outpost, apparently they were really gouged on the ticket price but they were sold out within a couple of days anyway.

Also, the instructions to wear armour for the hunters had been a point of contention amongst the guild higher ups. Most of the guild execs wanted formal attire for everyone, tuxedos for the men and slinky dresses for the women. However, some people objected to this, partly due to many hunters disliking formal attire for some reason. But also because a fair few hunters were a mess of scars and botched cultivation attempts, a lot of them wore armour to specifically cover up disfigured, burned or petrified skin. So armour it was.

Team Meredith stepped out of their apartment into the evening air. They joined a steady stream of people heading towards the canteen building.

Jack heard a few snap clicks and saw several camera men taking pictures of them. He tried not to react and simply continued walking.

The entire outpost seemed to be shining, lights were everywhere, bathing the outpost in a warm cheery glow. Fresh coats of paint had been applied here and there and everything seemed just a little less bare and austere than it had been before. The guild support personnel had made an extra effort to make the place presentable before they showed it off to their illustrious guests and the rest of the world.

A few minutes of walking found the team joining the main avenue where the canteen was located and where large crowds of people were gathered. As they approached, the murmur of the crowd grew into an excited babble of competing voices, camera flashes dotted the crowd and they even had a red carpet which various dignitaries were walking down into the canteen building. The rest of the crowd stood around held back by velvet rope barriers.

The exterior and interior of the canteen had been hastily renovated and refurbished to appear grander than before. It no longer resembled a large warehouse front but instead the entrance was twice as large and had decorative wooden columns and glass panelling surrounding it along with something similar covering the rest of the exterior. It was also much bigger than before.

The team stopped at the back of the crowd, seeing no way through. They waited for a while and eventually saw the last of the supposed VIPs glide along the red carpet into the canteen, after that the crowd of hunters, guild personnel, journalists and tourists were allowed to funnel in.

Following the press of the crowd, Jack and his team were squeezed through the entrance and into the canteen, although calling it a canteen at this point didn’t really do it any justice.

It looked like a big game hunter's wet dream, massive hunting trophies hung everywhere, skulls, pelts, horns, bones and various mounted heads and entire monsters were artfully placed around the room. Jack noticed a few results of both his and Steven the taxidermist's efforts scattered here and there. He still remembered Steven’s reaction when Jack had first told him he was heading into the Dire Woods, the guy had almost fainted in euphoric shock before frantically writing down a wishlist which he shoved into Jack’s hands with uncontrollable, excited giggling.

The lighting was dim, with only the bar area being fully lit up, a bit like a nightclub. Crowds of people were everywhere, fully armoured hunters were mixed with people in formal attire and evening wear. Men were generally wearing suits, ties or tuxedos whereas many of the women were dressed to impress in gowns and slinky dresses along with small pelts of thick monster fur over their shoulders which had become rather fashionable lately. Soft music played over the low murmur of the crowds.

The upper mezzanine floors of which there were now two on either side of the hall connected by wooden bridges, were off limits to anyone who wasn’t a VIP. So if you weren’t a guild executive or an investor who’d sunk at least a cool million into the outpost, then you had to stay on the ground floor with the shifting masses. Jack didn’t mind, he could see the newly enlarged bar was very much open for business and he worked together with Nate to subtly guide the rest of the team over there.

As they walked through the buzzing crowd, they greeted fellow hunters and various guild personnel they were friendly with. Meredith was quickly snatched away into the crowd by an enthusiastic team of journalists and Jack likewise found himself accosted by numerous reporters and their cameras.

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One pleasant interaction however, he had with an attractive young blonde woman in a black dress and her friends who were clearly tourists.

“Oh wow! You’re Jack Errant! The lightning cultivator!” she gushed as she approached him with giggling friends behind her.

“Erm yeah, that’s me.” He smiled awkwardly at them.

“I’m your biggest fan! I follow all your hunts on the guild website and I bought your hunters card the day it was released!” she babbled excitedly.

“Oh, well it’s always nice to be appreciated. What was your name?” he asked politely with a smile. His eyes couldn’t help but drift to her generous cleavage when she said ‘biggest fan’.

“I’m Sarah. Would you - would you sign my card?” she asked nervously as she dug around in her hand bag.

“Yeah okay, course I will,” he replied, smiling. He’d met self proclaimed ‘fans’ before, the experiences were a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes it was super awkward, sometimes it was creepy and made him feel quite unsafe frankly, but other times it was nice. This was one of those times.

He got out a pen that the guild PR department had told him to always carry on his person and took the hunters card from the young woman. It had an image of him in full gear with his weapons along with a couple of headshots. Just underneath was a brief description of him along with a list of weapons he was known to use as well as all of his currently known skills, to one side was a list of all completed hunts and dungeon delves he’d performed when the card was made. Apparently the card making company updates the cards every year with fresh information and new photos, but once the hunter dies they stop producing them.

Jack signed his name in a flowing delicate scrawl across his image and then in a flash of inspiration, he added something a little extra. He scrawled the runic sigil for lightning just underneath his signature, just as an extra treat, might even make it worth more in the future. He handed it back to her with a smile.

“Here ya go.”

“Wow thanks! The others are gonna be so jealous!” she said gleefully.

“Jack! Over here my boy!” a voice rose above the hubbub of the crowd and the music playing throughout the hall. He turned to see who it was and saw Adrian Welts himself, the director of the North Yorkshire hunters guild branch calling out to him, he was dressed in a tuxedo like many non-hunters there. Jack waved in acknowledgment before turning to excuse himself from the young woman. She smiled slyly before giving him a little wave and returning to her friends.

He walked over to Welts.

“Hello sir, nice to see you again,” he said politely.

“And you Jack and you,” Welts replied cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. “So glad you could make it, I understand we have you and your team to thank for this night.” Welts grinned at him.

“Ah well, somebody else would probably have stumbled on that place eventually if we hadn’t,” Jack said humbly.

“Nonsense! You don’t give yourself enough credit lad! This is exactly the sort of thing we sent you here for; exploration and discovery. That and making money, but primarily the exploration and discovery thing. Anyway I’m glad to see you’re doing well, I also have a bit of a surprise for you.” Welts smiled conspiratorially.

“Oh yeah?”

“Indeed, I’ve invited a few people here as my guests, all the way from London.” Welts looked around in the crowd for a moment before spotting someone. “Ricky! Ricky over here! C’mon!” Welts happily shouted over the heads of the crowd to someone. They heard their name being called out and came over, moving their way through the crowds of chatting people.

“Sir?” A young man with brown hair and pale skin approached them, he was fairly tall and wearing black carapace armour and kevlar with a short sword sheathed at his side. Jack recognised him, he was one of the new lightning elements that had been interviewed on television a few weeks ago. He then noticed Jack with a look of surprise.

“Jack, this is Ricky. He’s a lightning cultivator just like you and a recent addition to the guild. Say hello boys,” Welts clapped them both on the back before getting distracted by someone else and going to greet them with his usual cheer, leaving Jack alone with one of the new guys.

“Hi there, it’s nice to meet you,” he said politely, offering his hand.

“Oh er, it’s nice to meet you too! I erm, I’m kind of a fan of yours eh heh,” Ricky chuckled nervously.

“Oh yeah? We’re both guild hunters, you know. You might even outrank me one day.”

“I know but…..you’re like, the first you know? The first ever real lightning cultivator, it’s kind of a big deal for me anyway.” Rickey grinned, sheepishly rubbing the back of his.

“Hmm, from what I saw on the tv a few weeks ago, I thought you and the other lightning cultivators kinda disliked me or something,” Jack responded with a raised eyebrow.

Rickey grimaced and looked embarrassed. “You mean that press release last month? Urgh yeah, sorry about that, sincerely. That was Jason, he is……not your fan.”

“Yes I got that impression, he did seem a little…..well he seemed like a complete arsehole but maybe I’m just biassed against people who talk shit about me on national television. What's his problem anyway?” Jack asked.

Rickey rolled his eyes. “He’s just a little annoyed that you kept the secret of lightning cultivation for so long and didn’t try to reach out to other lightning elements.”

“Hmph, does anyone even understand why I never said anything? Do you?”

“Yeah, I get it. I mean I didn't really get it when I first heard about you but now after having learnt how to actually cultivate our element, I understand why you never said anything. It's dangerous, way more than just sitting next to a campfire and drawing in fire essence or something like that. With the lightning element you actually have to use another living being to cultivate from, its…..” Rickey trailed off, looking for the right words.

“Creepy?” Jack suggested.

“Ha! Yeah I suppose it sort of is, it -,” Rickey was interrupted by a raised voice called down from above.

“Hey Rickster! Who ya got down there?” Rickey rolled his eyes and both he and Jack looked up to the balcony railings of the mezzanine a few metres above them, a young man about Jack’s age stood at the railings looking down at them with a grin.

“Speak of the devil,” Rickey muttered to Jack. “Hey Jason it's -,” but he was interrupted again.

“Holy shit! Is that who I think it is? Haha! It is! It's the main man himself! Hungry Jack!” The man gave a delighted laugh and suddenly hopped over the railings of the balcony and dropped the several metres to the floor where he landed in a crouch with a great thump, shocking several people nearby.

“Well, well, well, Jack Errant. I was hoping to run into you.” The young man stood up and approached them. He was fairly tall, wearing similar armour and weapons to Rickey. He had tanned skin and long black hair framing a smug smile.

“Do I know you?” Jack asked innocently, pretending not to recognise him.

“What? You er…we, I was on tv and…and…” he babbled, put on the backfoot, clearly having been certain Jack would know him.

Rickey stepped forward with a small smirk. “Um, Jack this is Jason, a fellow lightning cultivator, Jason Jack,” he introduced them.

“Hey,” Jack greeted him casually.

“Ah right yes, you’re the first then. The first ever lightning cultivator.” Jason looked him up and down.

“I guess so, nobody else ever came forward.” Jack shrugged.

“No, they didn't, did they? But then, neither did you,” Jason looked at him judgmentally.

“Jason,” Rickey hissed.

“You got a problem with me?” Jack decided to just cut straight to the point, he’d never really been one for circling around a topic.

“Hmph! Oh no problem here, just wondering why exactly you never came out with the method to cultivate lightning last year, why instead it took you months of nothing until somebody else had to do it for you!” He raised his voice towards the end of his little rant and other people in the crowd began to notice them, several reporters and their cameras stood at the periphery of the gathered onlookers.

Jack took a brief wary glance at the people surrounding them before refocusing on Jason. “Aww, are you gonna cwy?” Jack mocked quietly in amusement before sticking his bottom lip out slightly in a mocking pout.

Jason narrowed his eyes in anger and snarled momentarily before gathering himself. Before he could speak again however, Jack interrupted him.

“I’m pretty sure I made my position clear on the matter, director Welts told me about you a few weeks ago and said he’d passed it along to you in London. I’m sorry you’re so salty over it, but I don’t actually give a damn. And it's not like I was actively stopping you from discovering the method yourself, you know?” Jack explained as calmly as he could.

Jason spluttered indignantly before calming down again with a deep breath. “You’re right, I apologise if it seemed like I was….blaming you, or something like that. Anyway, it's just an….honour to meet you,” he said with gritted teeth. “I hope we can work together and collaborate in the future.” Jason offered his hand to shake, multiple camera flashes went off.

Jack looked down at the hand dubiously. He reached out and took it, Jason’s grimace turned into a small grin and Jack began to feel an increasing pressure from Jason’s grip. He felt his hand getting squeezed more and more, then he began to feel the tell tale buzzing cold fire of lightning surging into his hand and up his arm.

Jack also felt a surge of amusement, Jason was actually trying the old cliche domination ploy; squeeze the other guy’s hand too hard during a handshake to make him look weak. He was even adding in a bit of lightning into the mix. Jack smirked slightly, he’d felt more pain from overdoing it during actual cultivation sessions.

Well two could play at that game. Jack returned the grip and then some, he then began to add his own lightning into play. Jason’s face turned slightly strained before he increased the strength of his grip and current of lightning, Jack did likewise and began to effortlessly overpowered the less experienced cultivator.

Jason’s face became more and more strained as he was slowly overpowered, both physically and with the lightning element. His legs started to buckle and a pained expression slipped onto his face but just before he fell to his knees, someone came up behind Jack and slapped him on the back.

“Hey Jack!” It was Stacey. “Who’s your new friend?” she asked as she slipped something that smelled like whiskey into his hand. An unfortunate side effect of cultivators getting more powerful is the lack of effect alcohol had on their bodies. Nate called it ‘diminishing returns’. Thus, stronger stuff with a higher alcohol percentage was usually required in order to get a buzz.

Jack let go of Jason’s hand in surprise. “Huh? Oh it's erm..James - Jason right? Yeah, this is Jason, one of the new batch of lightning cultivators.” Jack idly waved towards Jason, who rubbed his hand and glared at Jack balefully. However when he saw Stacey, his eyes lit up and looked to be about to say something with a smirk before Stacey spoke over him.

“Nice to meet you,” she said brusquely before subtly grabbing Jack’s arm and gently pulling him away. “Lets go to the bar Jack,” she said loudly enough for the small gathering of onlookers and journalists to hear. Jason watched them go with traces of irritation evident on his face, stray tiny trails of electricity ran up and down his torso.

Just before Jack allowed himself to be guided away, in a flash of whimsy, he snatched a small spoon from the tray of a passing waiter and turned to Jason with it.

“Boop.” Jack deftly placed the spoon onto a surprised Jason’s nose. The spoon stuck fast thanks to a hefty dose of electromagnetism and stayed there despite Jason’s attempts to remove it. Jason’s efforts to remove the spoon from his face grew increasingly frantic to the amusement of a growing crowd. Jack and Stacey turned to leave.

As they pushed through the people packed into the ground floor canteen, Stacey spoke in a quiet, amused tone. “Always making friends Jack?”

“It happens everywhere I go, I’m just a people person ya know,” he replied jokingly. But then he sighed. “Was I being an arsehole to him? Sometimes I can’t tell.” He shrugged.

“That was the new guy that spoke about you on tv last month right?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Then no, you’re good,” she replied simply.

“Ah, good.” They continued through the crowd to the bar. Jack spotted Rickey and Jason walking up the stairs to the VIP mezzanine area, Jack exchanged friendly nods with Rickey before greeting team Meredith at the bar. Meredith was surrounded by a small crowd of admirers, signing autographs whilst Nate and Katie were busy persuading Noah to do flaming shots with them.

The team chatted and mingled for half an hour before the lighting around the hall dimmed noticeably and extra lights on a small raised stage at the end of the canteen turned on brightly.

Director Adrian Welts walked onto the stage with his usual customary smile. He was holding a champagne flute and a spoon. He walked up to a microphone stand and even though most of the crowd was quieting down, he gently tapped his champagne flute several times.

“Welcome everyone, welcome! I’m so glad you could all come out here this evening and I hope you’ve all enjoyed yourselves thus far. But now….it's time for the big reveal. I’m sure you're all very interested to hear about what the UK hunters guild has been doing out here in such an inhospitable place and what we’ve discovered.” Welts motioned to someone next to the stage and they tapped at something on a touchpad.

The wall behind Welts lit up as something projected images onto it, the quiet hall of people were shown various images of the interior of the Dire Woods; its flora and fauna, the various monsters and animals that called the place home. Jack was particularly impressed with the image taken of the Kladican within a small glade. The demonic super moose almost seemed peaceful, it actually looked to be grazing on some grass within the glade, surrounded by fronds of luminescent fungi hanging from nearby low tree branches. The pictured scene looked quite beautiful, whoever took it must have balls made of brass though.

The projected images continued to cycle through various scenes of the Dire Woods and certain hunts with Welts commenting on or explaining them. The wall then began to show the images of the ruins that team Meredith had discovered.

“Now, before recently we had yet to discover anything that could be denoted as a civilisation within the Woods, oh we’ve found small scattered tribes of goblins and orcs scrabbling for survival here and there, but never anything more advanced than a hole in the ground.” He paused and allowed the crowd to chuckle. “But now, finally, after all this time, we’ve actually discovered something that has begun to answer some questions for us, about why and how the great changes we’ve all been experiencing have happened,” he continued to explain. The crowd murmured to one another in curiosity.

The scenes on the wall changed again and the crowd quietened down again.

The projector showed various images that Jack remembered had been depicted on the walls of the ruins, pictographs and petroglyphs of various humanoid individuals and runic symbols featured across the wall. He hadn’t really been able to make heads nor tails of their meaning before now but apparently someone in the guild thought they knew what they meant.

“About two weeks ago, a hunter and surveyor team embarked on a perilous mission to explore and expand the known frontiers of the Dire Woods. This team, composed of hunters Meredith Shriverston, Noah Blaces, Jack Errant, Katie Aziz, Nathan Roshton, Stacey Fairchild and surveyor Samantha Arkson, discovered the settlement ruins of an unknown sentient and by all appearances, sophisticated, race of beings.” The crowd renewed its interested mutterings.

“From what we’ve been able to piece together and ascertain, these pictographs and petroglyphs are a record, a chronicle of sorts, of the same events happening to these beings that have also been happening to us,” Welts explained. Jack found himself focussing more and more, intrigued at what Welts was about to say.

“The images seem to depict a similar sequence of events as to what has been occurring to us, the sudden appearances of strange violent beasts, the strange weather and magical anomalies, the sudden ability to use magic. However, they then go on to describe their own findings and conclusions as to the cause of all this change.” The projector image changed to show a large wall section from the ruins. It depicted dozens, maybe even hundreds of spheres or varying colours and sizes, thick multi coloured strands intersected and connected each sphere to one another. Next to each sphere was a rune along with a small figure. Jack had seen this before when he was at the ruins but hadn’t paid it much heed, what with there being a treasure trove of runes to distract him. It seemed the guild thought this large pictograph had some special significance, and now that he had another look at it, maybe they were right. Various camera flashes dotted the crowd.

“Now, we realise this is mainly conjecture on our part, as the beings responsible for all this aren’t around to ask nor did they speak English, but we believe that the spheres depicted here are in fact other worlds, inhabited worlds at that, ones capable of bearing life!” Welts grinned as he spoke with excitement, the crowd mirrored his excitement.

“And you can see, the multi coloured thick strands that connect each sphere or world, they look a great deal like the energy given off from dead monsters, we believe that to be the same substance. Not only that, but amongst the spheres, there are several which have runes next to them which we in fact recognise, not from our recent studies but from our own ancient histories, one thousand and more years in the past. Runes from the known dialect of Elder Futhark have been seen next to nine spheres, the spheres are labelled as Svartalfheim, Helheim, Niflheim, Muspelheim, Asgard, Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfheim and……..Midgard.” Welts paused, as if waiting for the crowd to react. And they did, or at least some of them did. A mixture of shocked intakes of breath and surprised expletives were interspersed amongst confused mutterings and blank faces. It seemed not everyone was familiar with or understood the significance of what Welts was saying. Jack did though. Those names were from ancient norse mythology, they were the names of other worlds where other races of beings were said to dwell, all connected by the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Huh.

Welts continued to explain the significance of this discovery to the crowd, however he wasn’t going over anything Jack didn’t already know or hadn’t heard before.

After a few minutes, Jack caught the eye of Sarah at the other end of the bar, the pretty tourist who’d asked him to autograph her card of him earlier. As Welts continued explaining and taking questions, Jack raised his eyebrows at her and grinned before tilting his head towards the exit. She smiled and laughed quietly before making her way over to him.