Rather than lead us back into the common room, Maggie led us to a small circle of stone benches in the keep's shadow. Far enough away from the entrance that no one leaving could hear our conversation.

  “Last night, I designed a bunch of campaigns I think could be good for y’all.” Maggie said. “But I have a quick question before I decide which ones to present.”

  “Doesn’t designing a campaign take a while? How’d you make so many in one night?” Nora asked.

  “It’s one of the Guild’s services. They have a bunch of magic tools designed to aggregate various quests and leads into categories like difficulty, time required, and travel distance. I went through those and designed a few.” Maggie replied.

  The stories of adventurers I’d read never mentioned tools like that, but it made sense the Guild would have them, and that the stories would exclude them. Logistics were almost never that interesting. Yet, an organization like the Guild could afford tools to make adventuring easier.

  “Take your time answering if you don’t know.” Maggie prefaced. “I want to know what you’re all looking to get out of being adventurers.”

  I didn’t need to hesitate. I had both my duty to Ylena and my people, as well as my own personal reasons for becoming an adventurer.

  “I am charged with winning glory for the Grace Mother and her faith, and I want to provide my daughter with the resources I didn’t have growing up.”

  “Thank you Bran. Feel free to ignore this question, but,” Maggie hedged. “I know the Cult of Weeping Grace tends to focus their efforts on the war within the Emerald Ocean. And I know the Order you belong to is the spear tip for most of those efforts. How come you’re not in the forest?”

  Unbidden, memories of soft-spoken words, rusted knives, blood-soaked timbers, and dancing fires reached from the abyss of my mind to drag me back to that secluded place in the forest. Memories that spanned seasons filled the silence between calming breaths.

  It took me a moment to banish the thoughts and Maggie took my silence and slow breathing as anger.

  “Like I said, Bran, you don’t have to answer if you’re not allowed or don’t want to.”

  “It is fine. Recent events have made it so my training is best put to use outside of the forest, winning renown and resources for those who remain. There will come a time, however, when I am expected to return to the forest and rejoin the war effort.”

  “So, you’re free to remain outside the forest adventuring for the foreseeable future, then?” Maggie asked.

  “I am. Though I have promised to return as often as I can to see my daughter.”

  “Okay, I can work with that. You visiting home every so often is easy to accommodate.” Maggie said. “Ellen, you look like you have an answer.”

  Ellen, who’d been looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, chewed on her lip for a moment before she answered.

  “I guess my reasons are two-fold. I want to provide my family with the resources the house isn’t going to give them. Less importantly, I want to follow in my dad’s footsteps. Continue the legacy, y’know?”

  “You both want to provide for your families. Noble reasons if there ever were some.” Maggie said, ignoring both of our other reasons. “Mika, Nora?”

  They both looked hesitant to speak, but after a minute, Nora worked herself up to the task.

  “My reasons aren’t as noble as Ellen or Bran’s, but I really love magic. I need to see how far I can go with it. Plus, the money’s nice.”

  “Both are totally valid reasons Nora, there is no reason to be ashamed of either. Hells, half the reason I joined the Guild instead of the government was for the money. Mika, what about you?”

  “I’ve always loved sculpting, and after I awakened, I discovered a passion for magic. Now that I’ve got my sculptures, I want to continue to developing them, and adventuring is the best way to get the resources and connections I need.”

  “Again, perfect reasons for joining. An old party mate of mine back when I was an apprentice wanted a similar thing for a new type of sword he was trying to develop.

  “Thanks for sharing, guys. I know that can be kind of awkward, but I’ve found getting our reasons for being here in the open can be really helpful in the long run. I’ve got a couple of campaigns I think could really work for you all.”

  Maggie reached into a small coin purse at her hip that rattled like a bag of marbles and drew out a trio of perfectly spherical blue crystals. Each held between the finger of one hand, and held them out to us.

  “These are quests stones. Just send a little mana into them, and the details of the campaign will pop up in front of you.”

  I had to wait a couple minutes for a stone to make its way to me because I was furthest from Maggie. When I sent a strand of mana into the vacuum rune of the face of the crystal, it felt like I had gently handed my magic to the device rather than have it ripped from me, like how the System operated.

  The information stored on the crystal presented itself as a wall of text scrawled across a sheet of blue glass. I swiped my hand through the glass, but it turned to mist at the contact and reformed once my hand was free from it.

  The campaign that popped up had us going to Dustreach, a massive city, provincial capital, and trading hub built atop a mesa to the east of Woodsedge. To get there, we’d travel on one of the emperor’s highways, stopping along the way for beast hunting contracts. Once we got to Dustreach, we’d take a bounty before heading into the Under Tunnels and doing mercenary work down there.

  The Under Tunnels were something I’d only read of before. A series of cavern and tunnels within the mesa itself and home to the aranae and goblins. I wasn’t sure on the details, but the species had been at war for millennia now and both sides had standing contracts with the Guild to hire adventurers as mercenaries. According to the plan within the quest stone, Maggie wanted us to do at least a week of work down there.

  It looked well thought out. Each phased designed to acclimate us to one another. A period of challenging but relatively safe beast hunts, followed by investigative work, and finished with a week working within a larger force.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  After I’d finished reading, I handed my stone off to Nora and got another in return. I wasn’t all that surprised to see a campaign that had us going into the Emerald Ocean, and more specifically, the Weeping Forest. Given my connections and familiarity with the area. Even ignoring that, the Weeping Forest is a popular adventuring location. However, most parties stuck to the outer rings of the forest, while one or two groups actually entered Cult territory every year.

  Unlike the campaign to Dustreach, this one had us only focused on beast hunting contracts, and finished with us wiping out the bane beetle hive I’d seen on the way out of the forest. Though there was a note that fighting with the ‘enlightened population’ may be unavoidable.

  “Hey Maggie.” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d advise against going after the bane beetle hive.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We use them as detritus cleaners back home. The fact we allowed them to spread to an area where the Guild would know of them is odd, granted, but not unheard of.”

  “Aren’t those things super harmful to the environment? Why would you do that?” Nora asked, looking up from the stone I’d handed her.

  “They’re only harmful after they run out of detritus. That’s when they go after trees and animals. Before then, they’re actually useful in managing the forest litter and breaking down dead matter.

  “I actually saw some on my way into Woodsedge. Based on their size, I’d say it’ll only be a couple of weeks before the Mistress of the Howling Winds has some trainees dispatched to wipe out the hive. I think we should scrap this quest.”

  The vacuum the sudden absence of the beetles caused in the area they occupied was also a useful tool for shepherding some beasts to more advanced evolutions which the Orders could hunt as well.

  “If it’s going to be wiped, why shouldn’t we be the ones to do it?” Ellen asked.

  “Hives likes this one are common, and it’s a big tradition for the little ones in the Order of New Growth to clear them. They spend the entire year training for it, afterwards the villages all have a short festival in their honor. I would not rob this year’s class of the tradition.”

  “How young are these kids?” Nora asked.

  “Ten or eleven. It depends on when they’re delivered.” I replied.

  “Delivered?”

  “The Order of New Growth takes in all orphans of the Cult.”

  All of this was public knowledge, and something Delia occasionally advertised to the other faiths within the forest. Maggie took the answer thoughtfully, but Nora stared at me, slightly horrified.

  “Your cult has an order of orphaned child soldiers?” She asked.

  “They do not engage in any of the true fighting deeper into the Emerald Ocean until they’ve awakened, but technically, that’s correct.”

  Maggie spoke before Nora could ask the follow up question she clearly wanted to.

  “That aside, what about the rest of the quests in the forest Bran? Anything we should avoid?”

  I quickly checked the rest. There were a dozen monster hunts. Most of which were fine and didn’t clash with the Cult’s needs, but there were two that stood out. The hunt for a herd of rooted boars was fine, but we have to be careful. Rooted boars were popular livestock animals for some of the more powerful entities in the forest.

  The most problematic quest was to find one of the river spirits that lived in the Wayfarer, Magnara by the description, and ideally kill her. Though the option to trade with her if her death was impossible was included as well.

  “Most of these are fine, but with the rooted boars we’d have to be careful to make sure they aren’t a part of someone’s herd. The river spirit quest is also a problem. I actually know the spirit in question. Her name’s Magnara.” I said.

  “You know the spirit?” Maggie asked.

  “She and her haven are Friends of the Cult. They keep the more dangerous river beasts from swimming up the Wayfarer to our villages. Aside from that. Magnara is the granddaughter of the Wayfarer’s nymph matriarch. Even if we kill her, which I doubt we could, her grandmother would slaughter us like ants before we made it ten feet from the corpse.”

  “Noted.” Maggie said seriously. “I’ll have to talk to some admins and get that quest removed. Or at least moved up in difficulty.”

  “I should mention that as Friends of the Cult. Magnara’s haven is under our protection. Anyone who killed her or any of the river nymphs under her domain would have the entire military of the cult on them within half a day.”

  “I’ll see that the quest is removed. The Guild will have to find whoever posted that at such a low rank. Hopefully, it was ignorance rather than malice.”

  “Bran, have you seen the Great Spine campaign yet?” Mika asked.

  I shook my head, and we exchanged quest stones. The last campaign Maggie had for us was in the Great Spine mountain range, specifically the Hoarflame Mountain. As with the other campaigns, it started with a couple of beast hunts to wet our teeth against during the trip to the mountains. Afterwards, we’d spend a couple of weeks in the foothills, where she had two opportunities for us. The first was a young pride of griffins. Which, according to the quest, was an offshoot of a more established pride near the peaks.

  The new pride just laid their first clutch of eggs and Maggie wanted us to either kill the pride and take the eggs, or sneak into the nest and grab them. The fixation on the eggs seemed a little strange.

  The second point of interest she’d laid out for us was a well-known court of earth elementals established in a cave near the foot of the mountain. Maggie wanted us to contact the court early, otherwise they’d make travelling through the foothills a nightmare. Maggie also had down that the court had a reputation for exchanging lessons in earth magic for doing the tasks they saw as beneath them. She wanted us to try as hard as possible to secure one of those lessons.

  “Hey Maggie.” I said.

  Rather than answer, she just arched an eyebrow at me.

  “Forgive my ignorance, but is there something special about the griffin eggs? Why are they such a priority?”

  “How much do you know about griffin young?” She asked in return.

  “Not much.”

  I’d only ever read a brief entry about them in a bestiary my mom owned. Even then, it focused more on the spirit beasts they descended from.

  “Griffins imprint on the first creatures they see, makes them fairly common mounts amongst the better mercenaries and adventurers. Combined with the fact that each clutch averages around thirty eggs, usually there’s a rush of people looking to grab mounts while they can.”

  “If that’s the case, shouldn’t we head there now?” Nora, who’d been listening in, asked. “If we don’t go now, won’t the eggs be gone by the time we get there?”

  “There’s no real rush. You guys are so new to the Guild and adventuring that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The eggs are a nice bonus, but not something we need to drop everything to get. There’s also the fact that the Guild doesn’t know about the nest yet. My mom was the one who found it. The pride’s claimed a hidden cave in a valley and she’s already taken her cut of the eggs. By the time we get there, if someone else hasn’t discovered it, there should be sixteen waiting for us.”

  “Why wouldn’t your mom just leave four in that case? Why leave sixteen?” I asked.

  “Population control. Both the mercenary and adventurer Guilds have policies mandating there be twelve eggs per clutch kept wild.”

  “Okay. But, if griffins are so popular, why haven’t I seen one?” I asked.

  “They used to be way more common a couple hundred years ago, but that guild policy exists for a reason. Griffins almost got wiped out in the wild because hoards of adventurers used to rush the eggs and kill the adults.

  “That’s not what makes them genuinely rare, though. They’re expensive to care for and can’t reproduce unless they’re back on the Hoarflame. There are only a couple of breeding programs that have been successful. And only because the nobles that keep them literally chopped off a piece of the Hoarflame and took it to the capital to simulate the right environment.

  “No one knows the exact reason they need the mountain to reproduce, but our best guess is that the mountain’s Dao has something special in it they require.” Maggie said.

  “If they’re that expensive, how would we even be able to raise them?” Ellen asked, looking up from the Dustreach stone.

  “Adventurer is a popular job for a reason. Pays well if you’re good at it. I intend to make you four great at it. Besides, if times get tough, we’ll just feed the tykes whatever you hunt. The griffins won’t care so long as its meat.”

  That made sense to me. When hunting beasts was a large part of your job, feeding a carnivore probably got a lot easier.

  The rest of the campaign was a series of small beast hunts. Animals that weren’t a problem right now, but could grow into one if allowed to advance and breed unchecked. Maggie had down some yearly quests as well. Missions that got put up every year once the mating seasons were over and the populations had to be culled.

  Maggie gave us another ten minutes to go over each of the campaigns and ask questions before she asked us what we thought.

  “Now that you’ve read over all the campaigns, I’ll give y’all a couple of minutes to talk about which one you want to do first. Keep in mind we’ll probably end up doing some variation of each over the coming years.”

  With that, Maggie got up from where she’d been sitting and walked over to Ruth, who’d entered the yard from the keep a couple of minutes ago. The two of them entered a quiet conversation as Ruth surveyed the training yard and all the people who’d come to work out as the morning progressed.

  “Personally, I want to go to Dustreach first.” I said. “The early quests seem like they’ll be good for us to learn how to work together, and I like the idea of working as mercenaries for the people in the Under Tunnels.”

  “I agree with Bran.” Nora said. “Dustreach will be good for us. Who knows the kinds of things we’ll be able to find that aren’t available here? Plus, Irene can probably help us if we need any.”

  “Who’s Irene?” I asked.

  “My cousin. She’s pretty close with Duchess Katherine. She’ll probably be able to get us out of any political trouble we find ourselves in.”

  I could tell Ellen was leaving something out from the smile Nora gave her, but the secret didn’t seem dangerous, so I didn’t press her for it.

  “I don’t know about Dustreach. I think Hoarflame could be good for us.” Mika said, as he rolled the quest stone in his fingers. “We could grab some griffins as mounts. Not to mention the ways I could improve my statues if I got to learn under the elementals.”

  Mika looked up from the blue crystal towards Ellen, seeking support.

  “Sorry Mika, I’m with Nora and Bran on this.”

  Mika looked like he might protest further, but Nora spoke before he could.

  “Mika, think about the goblin and aranae. We’ve never seen anyone besides humans before. Think about the magic we could learn from species who’ve spent their entire lives underground.”

  Mika chewed on his cheek while his eyes searched both Nora and Ellen’s. Eventually he let out a long sigh and let the quest sphere he still held fall limp in his grip.

  “Fine. Dustreach it is. But I want all of your words that we’ll campaign in the Great Spine within the year.”

  Nora and Ellen agreed easily, and I thought Mika had just meant them, so I said nothing, but his eyes found their way to mine.

  “Barring outside emergency, I vow we will campaign within the Great Spines in the next year.”

  The formality of the vow took Mika by surprise for a second, but he gave me a small smile as he nodded his head.