Setting Out

After another few days of general preparations at our home, my parents actually decided it was time to leave a week early for further prep time. Today I found myself on foot while everybody else were riding various mounts rented from the Guild by individual wallets. The younger siblings in Gryn's group who were still much older than me in the mid-teens were riding simple horses while the older siblings road large flightless birds with tall bodies and thick tail plumage.

Like the reptile that Gryn was riding, the birds had three-fingered upper appendages. Unlike the eight-foot dinosaur who had a serpentine neck and tail, the upper appendages of the birds were plumed up the back of their arms with long and stiff feathers. I wanted to speculate on science and magical evolution while looking at these animals, but I was stuck dealing with the pilgrimage rule.

I had to 'travel by my own means' while they road everything under the sun. My parents actually rented some kind of 'earth dragon' that ate granite and carried a large carriage with actual beds on its back. They got to travel in comfort while taking up as much as one third of the highway leading out of town.

Luckily for me, though, I had familiars I could ride. Because the natural forms they had initially chosen had for some reason remained small, my wisps were not necessarily able to give rides unless to an actual small child. If, of course, a small child could stand to be in the presence of my demonic underlings.

One was a 'large' bird whose flickering, gaseous black flames replaced the feathers on a bird's body while the other was something like a monitor lizard with an iguana-like tail that had black ashy scales covering its semi-transparent body. What not only made them creepy but also made them a pair was the fact that neither of them had heads. Both of them just had large jawless mouths like a lamprey lined all throughout with needle-like teeth.

One glance into those abysses was enough to shiver the average spine with an assortment of phobias.

After those initial forms were set in stone, I compacted them into a layer around their core and forcibly kick-started the process all over again to make another layer. These second layers were controlled by my training the wisps to maintain the form of large knives and train with them. One month later, I started the third layers.

Knives, swords, shields, golems, and even a reversible ballista-spear combo were all the layers I had made them develop. After covering my general weapons, I was out of ideas on what to do and after several days of literally bouncing wads of paper ideas off of my wall I came up with their current 'final form'.

Because these were a support-class familiar, and very high end models at that, I decided their final forms would be a method of retreating from a battlefield. Either of them could turn into long boards with upturned rounded ends that naturally never touched the ground. These literal hover boards could carry the weight of their master's Strength at the expense of mana and travel at fairly decent speeds.

When combined into one hoverboard, I could travel at speeds that even my Agility stat's kinetic vision had trouble keeping up with. It even spent half the mana that an individual board used up. Which was why I decided to walk out of the gate and lag behind the others by a mile or so.

Then, after leaving behind the traffic of town a few hours later, I simply released my wisps from my body who either flew and sprang forth. They mutually met in the air while dissolving their physical bodies and reshaping into a surf board that leaned down on the ground in time with my walking to welcome my feet without missing a beat.

Cringing inwardly after walking onto the middle of the board, I do my best to think of height and not look down at where my wisps displayed a terrifying habit. Their mouths would appear on the board around my feet to swallow them as if securing them in place with thousands of clenching needles.

I nearly pissed myself the first time I combined them and they did this.

Unlike the usual forestry my brother hunted in the Eastern directions, we left from the North gate and stayed on the proper highway. Usually we would break off from the highway on the second morning, at the latest, on the few times I traveled with them. This time, our parents stayed on the highway for three days before we had reached the next village.

After spending a day checking our supplies, consumption, and behaviors, my parents advised everybody about making pit stops like this to go back over themselves and recheck all preparations. I knew they were genuinely worried about us by the emphasis they put into it, but there were some explanatory parts where even they seemed bored.

As if they had said those lines countless times to add up to many hours of their lives. They were probably accustomed to such practices from their early years in the Guild. They were probably still doing it if they were able to be Gryn's inspectors.

After leaving the village from a branching side road that was barely a few feet wider than my parents' carriage, we started heading westward through through forestry surrounded by 'low' hills. These hills were no less than twelve feet tall at their crests and stretched for hundreds of feet as they rose and fell. In fact, the road we traveled was a worn down valley that showed signs of light flooding recently.

We followed this valley path for another two days before my parents suddenly decided to just veer even further west as the forestry started thinning near the end of the region. The valleys grew deeper and broader in these areas where only on the sunny hills did trees manage to grow. The growing valleys in these usually dry places would be perfect places for giant goats to nest and breed.

Once they reached their destination and set up their base of operations is when I would be free to go off on my own. Or, rather, on my pilgrimage. Luckily, even if I was walking, my first location was only a day or so away and was to the start of a mountain stream so I was traveling to most of what I would need on a long journey.

Many times while we were traveling and I let my mind wander, while my wisps hovered me along at ten miles an hour, I wondered at the fact that I as an eight-year-old child who was mostly a member of the human race was being sent out on a religious journey of meditation and self-discovery. The gods, of course, already knew how old I really was but that probably was not shared to any of the boots on the ground.

The average eight-year-old would probably lose their shit at the prospect of having to backpack all the way around the northern edge of their home region.

I, thank God and any others involved, was not your average eight-year-old.

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