A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 2113: My Kingdom - Part 9

Oliver tried to sense it, using the Fragments of Claudia and Ingolsol, but he found no signs of the sort of darkness of corruption that he was finding.

"You won’t be able to use them," the Chief said, seeming to know what he was doing. "Only a sensitive human heart would pluck it out. Well, I suppose you felt it enough that you could tell the state of the land that you went to visit earlier, and you can feel it here... But a Gnome can’t tell you what to do. We’re like the river, we have our own direction, we don’t tell things outside of our domain how to act."

"Then I should just follow your current, and do as you do," Oliver said.

The Chief stroked his beard. "What you’re looking for, it’s deep underground. I’d never go there. I cannot even pretend to seek out and find it. I’ve my duties to attend to... the natural will of the forest to obey. But mayhaps, if you follow me tonight, you might be able to find it yourself."

Oliver grinned, and nodded. The Chief nodded back. "To be clear, I’m only going about my normal duties – this isn’t anything different from normal, okay?"

"Right," Oliver agreed, and the Chief went dashing off along the river bank.

Oliver sprinted after him, briefly surprised at just how fast the little man could go. He leaped nimbly from rock to rock, seemingly immune to how slippy the surface of some of them were. Oliver had to fight hard to make sure that he didn’t go flying.

They found a goblin soon enough, and before Oliver could do anything to help, the Chief rid them of it with one great sweep of his hammer. The goblin didn’t seem to die, it disappeared, as if permanently erased from the realm that they inhabited.

Further along the river bank, they came upon another goblin, and the Chief rid them of that just as easily. Oliver had his sword drawn, but he still wasn’t fast enough to lend a hand.

Wordlessly, the Chief left the river bank, and disappeared into the forest. Just as he said he would, he was really acting as if Oliver wasn’t there. It was Oliver who had to negotiate with the low hanging branches that the much smaller Chief so easily ducked under, but he managed to keep up nonetheless.

Up ahead, Oliver sensed a stronger presence, and was about to shout out a warning, when the Hobgoblin suddenly burst into view. Without changing his speed, the Chief ran straight at it, and gave it two hits with his hammer, one on the knee, and then another one atop the head. Just like the goblins before it, the Hobgoblin slowly disappeared into thin air.

A quick reappraisal of the Chief – he was much stronger than Oliver had expected him to be. He didn’t seem like he needed Oliver’s help at all.

As they ran through the forest, they came upon another handful of goblins, and the Chief dashed through them all. Oliver began to get the sense that it was important to let the Chief do his work alone. His task was elsewhere. He fell into a quiet watchfulness as he kept up his running. He saw the Chief dismiss another two Hobgoblins, and round a pile of stones, before he went racing off back towards the river.

Here, Oliver drew to an involuntary stop. He hadn’t planned to. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He was half-confused when he saw that he had stopped running. The Chief kept steaming on off ahead, and quickly disappeared from view. A handful of moments longer, and Oliver thought he would likely not be able to find the little man again that night. It was only his eyes that could see him. The awareness offered to him by Ingolsol and Claudia could not track him.

He didn’t feel irritation at missing his opportunity. He was stood in place with a peculiarly dumbfounded look on his face, and his foot resting on the first large stone of the moss-covered stone pile.

It looked like it had been some sort of structure at some point. Perhaps a wall of some sort, given how regular the stones were. That would be rather odd for the Tigris Forest. Oliver had seen no other influence of man inside it – though he didn’t have the presence of mind to recognise the oddness.

He felt peculiarly light and dazed. It wasn’t an altogether foreign feeling, and it should have been far more disconcerted with how little control he thought he had. He bent down, for whatever odd reason, and plucked one of the large stone bricks from the floor, resting it on top of another.

It struck him as sad that this little pile was left there, in that otherwise pristine forest. It was out of place, even if the moss had tried to reclaim it, and make it seem somewhat more in keeping with the rest of it.

He picked up stone after stone, and layered them like they were bricks, making a low wall at first, and then building it ever so slightly higher. Without any particular reason why, he extended that low wall into another one, until it was a square, and then he left just a little bit of room for the doorway. He started to move faster, as a vision of an old place took hold. Some sort of gatehouse, with a thatched roof. He tried to rebuild it the best he could, though there weren’t enough stones to complete the task.

He was left with three low walls, a doorway, and a rather large hole in the ground where the stones had once lay. Rubble lined it, too broken up to be used as bricks, and not quite enough of it to conceal the first two rungs of what Oliver imagined to be a staircase.

Now it was the rubble he found as his target. Faster even than before, his heart pounding, he began to shift it. A strange feeling of rightness as the place opened up. This was where he was meant to be. Not just from what the Chief had said – but there was a feeling that, from a time far beyond that day, it made sense that his feet would soon enough carry him here. Maybe from the moment he stepped into the Tigris Forest. Maybe far beyond that.