Our first quest had been a success. I grant you; five silver pieces doesn’t sound like much, but it was a lot more than I had been earning from my solo quests. Chloe and Tilda even let me have two of the pieces as I would need a lot more arrows for the future.

  I was incredibly excited on my way home. I had a party, an actual party. Granted it was only three of us. But we were to meet up again at the guild tomorrow and find another quest. I told my mother all about them when I got home. I could barely focus on the stew that she had made; I was so excited. She sat at the other end of the table smiling as I talked. The next morning, I was up at the crack of dawn to set off for the guild and start a new quest with my new party.

  For the next year, the three of us continued taking relatively low-level quests to build up our skills. And over that time, we got quite close. Although not close enough for me to be honest with them. I was very careful to stay back and not get injured in case my skin were to be seen. I never used my daggers at all during that year. Not that I needed to. Chloe and Tilda had close range nailed for the missions we went on.

  It turns out that my assumption when we first met had been correct. The two of them had been firm friends for a long time. Since they were little in fact. They had both grown up next door to each other in the western district. Which is not a poor area but also not where nobles would ever live. Which would explain why Chloe could afford good armour and a great sword. Tilda’s dad had been a monk and had trained her as she grew up, which was why she had opted for the monk class.

  I respected and understood that. I wanted so much to be a paladin growing up because of my dad. My mother was right though; front line fighting is too risky for me. Most people would kill a goblin on the spot, so being revealed really is not an option for me.

  Chloe and Tilda had decided at ten that they would start a party together when they turned 15 and had spent the five years in between training together. I wish I had had a friend like that growing up. All I had was my Bergy. I didn’t even know what creature he was supposed to be for the first 3 years. Turns out it was meant to be a dragon. If it did look like a dragon when I was given it, then it certainly doesn’t look like one now. It has one button eye because the other one fell off. Neither of the wings are there anymore. Pretty sure I bit the snout off once which is why his face is all stunted now.

  My mother stitched him up every time so that his insides didn’t fall out. But she never put him back to how he was. She said it was a lesson for me. She said “wounds heal, but scars remain… we are all effected by our past, Dwyn, and we should embrace it, for we can never erase it.”

  It took a while for me to understand what she meant. I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed when I was little. But I always remember those words now… because she was right. I hate my origins, but I can’t escape them. They are a part of me and I must never forget that.

  We had accepted a job escorting a wagon to the next town over. The capital city of this region, a place named Vardan. I had never seen any other towns before, so was wary of taking the quest. But Chloe said “It’s five times more money than the quests we usually take and protecting a wagon from wolves is easy work!”

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  To be fair to Chloe, she was right. We had killed wolves before and you can sell their pelts afterwards if you have time to retrieve them. So off we went. Wagons don’t normally have three adventurers protecting them, but this one had a jewellery merchant travelling in it with some high value jewellery, so they wanted the extra protection.

  I perched on top of the wagon with my bow to keep an eye out, whilst Tilda sat on the back and Chloe sat up front with the driver. It was always best to put the strongest looking fighter on show at the front to discourage highwaymen, and, well, Chloe certainly looked intimidating.

  The road to Vardan was much longer than the road from my farm to Kataravonia. It passed through some fairly unfortunate crevasses as well, which made it a road that you could easily be caught off guard on. I have to say… the rolling hills were very impressive. And the river that flowed under the bridge about halfway through the journey was beyond beautiful. Beautiful scenery was not something I had much experience of, what with spending the vast majority of my life either in a cave or on a farm. The way the sun gently peaked over the mountain tops. It was truly magnificent.

  Unfortunately, I was not there to observe the scenery. During the journey we had a couple of wolf attacks. They were simple enough. The second attack ended instantly when I shot one of the wolves in the neck and the others ran off. I was even able to retrieve my arrow. But then, the bandits came.

  Human enemies are much more complicated than animals. We were used to animals; they are easy to predict. We had only dealt with human opponents once before when we were working security for a festival. And that was mostly just Chloe throwing drunk people out of a beer tent.

  These bandits were not a bunch of drunks who fancy a punch up however. I saw them coming early enough, so Chloe and Tilda were ready. Their three melee fighters didn’t stand a chance. Between Chloe’s overwhelming power and Tilda’s speed, they retreated pretty much instantly. The problem was their ranged attacks. Their two archers nearly hit me multiple times, I had to use some luggage as a shield, but they weren’t the problem. If it was just them, I could have taken them out with my first couple of arrows. The problem was that they had brought a mage with them.

  The mage had cast a wind spell that enhanced the range of their archer’s arrows but crippled mine. My arrows weren’t even getting close to them. Chloe was deflecting arrows with her great sword but Tilda had to take shelter behind the wagon to avoid getting hurt.

  Chloe couldn’t advance whilst deflecting the arrows due to the wind and she was too stubborn to take shelter. That was when the mage threw a fireball at her. She tried to deflect it as she had done with the arrows. This dampened the blow, but it still knocked her back and onto the ground. Another fireball like that and she’d be done for.

  I jumped down to help Tilda pull Chloe behind the wagon when we heard a woman’s voice saying “lightning bolt” in an irritated tone. A fraction of a second later, a blue light shot past our heads at an incredible speed and struck the mage right in the chest. He collapsed to the floor. I saw my chance and instantly launched a series of arrows straight at the archers who had paused for a moment due to the shock of the lightning attack.

  With the mage and archers incapacitated the warriors who had retreated earlier swooped in to retrieve their fallen comrades and disappeared. With the bandits gone, I looked back to where the bolt of lightning had come from. A very tall woman stood before me. In her right hand she was holding a hammer with a large ruby encrusted in it. Both her hair and the ruby were glowing. She lowered the hammer to her side and the glowing stopped. She said, still in that irritated tone, “Even bandits understand that every good party needs a mage.”