>>5795066With that settled, the seven of you set out: You, Pearce, your father Rudulfo, Terzo the driver, his two carriage-horses, and of course Muffins—though the horses didn’t care much for him, and needed to be <Calm>ed down before they would stop trying to escape their harnesses. Luckily, you were sort of a specialist in such matters, and before long you were off!
Your journey took you east along the familiar roadways of the Paladins’ peace at first. To the northeast lay the Sylvan Realms, forested and primeval, pristine and beautiful, bounded by a wall of elder trees unplucked like a great green-and-brown barricade. You looked towards them with a pang of nostalgia, and caught your human traveling companions doing similarly: Pearce with muted and silent wonderment at the novelty, but Rudolfo van Houtzmann with much the same emotion on his face as you felt in your heart.
“It never really leaves you, does it?” he’d asked, quieter than he usually spoke.
Yous aid nothing, forcing yourself to look away from the woodlands and from your father, to the south-east instead. That wasn’t your destination, and you had no time to dawdle, or reminisce.
As the road curved south-east, it quickly began to crumble and fade into nonthingness. If trade-roads had once extended into the Goblin Wastes, well, they did no longer. Oh, merchants traveled back and forth across them of course—it was once means by which news and goods and occasional immigration moved from the lands of the human Easterlings and their strange, fey beastmen, and how the northwestern realms exported their own goods. Advances in shipping and logistics had made the overland route increasingly redundant, though, and these roads ahd become neglected.
“And anyway,” your father expounded, “a stretch of good, well-traveled road might as well be a big old dinner-plate for the hungry Goblin, ey wot?”
“They eat people?” Pearce had asked, eyebrows raised.
“Well, I didn’t mean to be taken quite so literally!” your father laughed, but then added: “Although…”
You shifted your hand from where it was massaging the neck-nape of Muffins’ goat head to the juvenile lion’s half-maned ruff, unconsciously grasping for strength. The goat, roused by the lack of petting, bleated in protested and butted against you hand, the two competing for your affections. The vigilant snake, unblinking, scented the air and watched the rough, rocky, half-dead landscape pass by beneath your rocking-and-rumbling carriage.
