The next morning brought with it a soreness that none of them were prepared for. Simon was faring the best out of everyone, but riding Taz and riding on Honos felt like two completely different things. As the gryphon rider stood and stretched, he made sure to bow to the Queen when she returned with Honos.

  "Your Majesty, Lady Honos. It is a pleasure to greet you this morning."

  "Thank you, Lord Simon. Give the others a few minutes more to rest." Alliyah walked over and poked Amara with her foot. "Will you cook? I fear if we let Brutus or Stas cook, some of the children may die."

  Amara snorted and closed the book she was reading. "At your will, Your Majesty." The infernal orc made a grand gesture of bowing to her before setting off to get some sort of food cooking for the younger generation.

  Some days, Alliyah wanted to throttle the ever sarcastic General.

  "May I ask you a question, Your Majesty?"

  Alliyah turned her head to Simon and nodded.

  "Why do so few people know of Honos? She is not listed as..." The little goblin had been about to say mount, but that somehow felt disrespectful. "A companion."

  "Honos is a dragon, Lord Simon. She is not beholden to me or to Kadessa. Nor is she pact-bound to any deity. She suffers my mortal dalliances as my companion and a mount in combat entirely because I saved her life when she was young, and she feels that she owes me a debt. I would never insult her by putting such a lowly label on her." The Queen paused and looked over at Taz, who was staring at both her and Honos intently. "No offense, Taz."

  The gryphon squawked happily at it.

  Simon chuckled. "I think Taz is smarter than me. Gryphons are proud and noble creatures, and a lot of knights have trouble bonding with their gryphons because they see them as animals and nothing more. I guess that pride and nobility are far more pronounced in dragons. I hope I didn't offend either of you with my questions." Simon bowed deeply to them both.

  "Not at all, Lord Simon. It is a question I have been asked a few times in my life. Most people know of the three mounts I have raised and ascended. I never include Honos in that because she will most likely outlive Kadessa itself. My children and I will all be ascended for thousands of years before she leaves the mortal realm behind. Even if sometimes I must treat her as a subject in my military."

  Taz slowly crept closer to the dragon and kept bowing his head. Honos must have finally sent some signal because the gryphon stopped bowing and crawling over. He finally stood and walked closer to her sniffing at her.

  "The lesser mortals are all so curious."

  "Can you blame us? You move faster than Taz, and you're easily five times his size or more. You could rival any mage in the kingdom in firepower. It's a small wonder that the lesser mortals don't all bend the knee to dragons."

  "They used to." Trillia's voice caused the small conversation to turn their heads to look at her. The little red orc was pulling a pointed comb through tangled white hair. "I read it in a book. A lot of the old nations were ruled by dragons. There was a really nasty war that cost a lot of lives, and Lord Darktone stepped in to put a stop to it. I guess that made a lot of dragons and deities angry, but...well they couldn't do anything about it."

  "The War of Eternity." Honos supplied. Trillia smiled and gave a thumbs-up before she went back to ripping out tangles. "I have read the same book. There are still some places on the other landmasses where dragons rule. But they are few and far between, and the deities pay close attention to them. Sometimes, I wonder why the deities put such emphasis on protecting the lesser mortals."

  Alliyah sat on a rock next to the cooking pot and snickered. "Until you realize that you are lesser in their eyes?"

  Honos nodded solemnly to the statement. "I may be proud and mighty. But I have witnessed the glory of Lord Darktone firsthand. On my best of days and his worst, I do not think I could even draw blood. Not all of us are gifted with that spark you have, Your Majesty."

  Now, it was Alliyah's turn to nod solemnly. "Nor would I ever curse others to have it. Come, let's wake the others, they have rested enough. Thank you for cooking, Amara. It smells delicious."

  The general poured a ladle of the hearty stew into a bowl and handed it first to the Queen before handing another large bowl to Honos. Between the smell of food and Brutus gently kicking everyone, the group rapidly woke up.

  -=====-

  There were no fights today. Trillia wasn't surprised. As they flew closer to their destination, she could still see the heavy clouds of mana from where Honos and the Queen had fought something. The two must have been out all night fighting.

  They set down just before nightfall on the second day. It hurt to move. As exciting as it was to fly on Honos, even when there wasn't battle the dragon flew so fast that all of Trillia's muscles were sore trying to stay on.

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  "Why does it hurt so much? I'm just sitting on a dragon. I'm not even doing any of the work." Trillia whined as she plopped down near the fire.

  "What's your agility?" Brutus sat down, leaning his back against a log that Cordaos had dragged over.

  "It's right around a thousand."

  "That low? I feel like you move faster than that."

  "I have an ability that lets me use Dexterity instead of Agility for things."

  "Fleet Foot?" Trillia nodded at Brutus' continued questioning.

  "Decent ability, for how early you can get it. The reason you hurt is because your body is being moved faster than your Agility or Dexterity should allow. There are lots of stats that aren't really shown that you have to learn as you go along. But a mixture of Agility, Intuition, and Wisdom, are used when looking at other people. Some combination or average of those three stats is how you perceive others. If it's high enough, you can watch their movements, if it's not, everything is going to be a blur."

  Trillia and the other kids were now leaning in and listening to the old duelist intently.

  "Take Amara as an example. If she is moving at her fastest, she's going to disappear in front of your eyes. None of you are remotely close enough to her stats to see her move. This doesn't mean she's teleporting, but as far as any of you are concerned, she might as well be."

  "But we are attached to Honos. So our stats are trying to compensate for what we're seeing and doing, and it's putting extra strain on us?" Layla offered a solution before they were told in full.

  "Exactly right. The Queen would be a better source of confirmation or Stas. But there is an upward limit of what you're capable of doing on a mortal realm, but once you go into the void between realms, that changes."

  Stas recoiled one of his spider-like limbs as Amara smacked it away with a wooden spoon. The hurt goblin gave her a glare before turning to Brutus. "The old drunk has it right. Many of the deities call the void between realms space. Which...if you think about it, is a hilarious name, right? Like what should we call this huge open space? Oh, I know! Space!" His routine cackling was actually joined by Alliyah's giggling for once.

  "The space between realms is...impossible to comprehend for mortals, I think. I could write out the numbers, but they just can't be understood without experiencing it. On the realm, there are some pretty severe limitations in place. I don't know the numbers, but...somewhere faster than sound you stop speeding up. Regardless of your raw stats. Having more agility at that point only helps your perception of speed so that other fast combatants can't outmaneuver or out-think you."

  "Out think? Agility affects your ability to think?" They all seemed shocked at that. Fred was happy to have voiced the concern.

  "Of course." Cordaos added after finally dragging over enough logs for everyone to sit before raising a large stone chair for himself. "Presence helps you deal with mental attacks, helps you shrug off auras. Vitality is not only your health but also how well you stand up to poisons and some curses. It also affects...some other things you'll learn about later in life. Every stat does far more than you initially think. But if you had every single thing that every stat does on your status page, it would be a book all on its own."

  Amara chimed back in. "If ever you face a creature with the ability to attack your mind, or lock your minds together in combat. You will want not only a high Presence and Wisdom but also a high Agility and Intuition. Mental battles are often a battle of instinct. The speed at which your instincts work is a combination of Intuition and Agility. There are diminishing effects like anything else, of course. The difference between ten Agility and a hundred is probably close to the same difference between a thousand Agility and two thousand."

  "That feels wasteful, doesn't it?" Trillia asked as she looked pointedly at the Queen.

  The Queen shook her head in response. "Do you know how deities travel? Stas has mentioned how large and grand space is. Yet deities will often hop between realms within seconds."

  Trillia excitedly raised a hand. "Veins! At least that's the closest mortal word for it! Some friends tried to teach me about them when I was studying with the Professor."

  Alliyah wore a wide smile and nodded. "Yes. Each of the axles spends millions of years slowly snaking out thin strands of their power to all corners of their part of the universe. These strands are connected with one another and are locked to the central pillar of energy that the axles make up. When a deity needs to move, it sends its consciousness into a vein and appears at its destination. If mortals try to do this, their minds are usually torn apart unless a deity or the system is protecting them. However..."

  Alliyah snapped her hand up, and a stick was yanked from the fire into it. She began to draw in the air, and the glowing embers from the half-burned stick left words in the air. "What if two deities are racing to one goal? What if a mortal is protected and trying to get there as well? When you leave the confines of the mortal realm, every single stat matters. In the void between realms, the difference between fifty agility and sixty can be massive. Because in the void between realms, you don't measure things in distance anymore. It is all measured in time. Years... millennia. Even a small increase becomes a very big deal."

  The camp went quiet, save for the crackling of the fire and the soft scraping of the wooden spoon.

  "What about things like Strength?" Layla finally broke the silence as Amara passed her a bowl of food.

  "Similarly handled. Diminishing returns in the mortal realms. But in the space between and the immortal realms, everything matters a lot more. Truly, if you never plan to become an immortal, you could stop leveling all of your stats at around the ten thousand mark, and you'd be fine. Only the extreme ends like dragons, leviathans, and mortals such as the Generals and I would ever pose a threat to you. While the returns are diminishing, they still matter in large numbers." The Queen offered the little orc an answer, as she scooped a spoonful of food into her mouth.

  "How are we supposed to learn this? I mean...normally." Malor spoke for the first time to the group since they had left.

  "Trial and error. That's the point of mortal realms, weed out the weak and let the strong ascend. You all get to cheat a little because it is an emergency, and the other Generals and I are here to teach you what we've learned. You still have to put it into practice yourselves."

  Malor nodded before leaning back to eat his own soup. The kids went silent after that, each deep in their own thoughts.

  The Generals were happily swapping stories and tales of their own adventures, or misadventures in many cases. Trillia watched them all laugh and smile with one another. But she also noticed a deep unease in their eyes. She watched their eyes dart around the forest, she felt the random pulses of mana to check for enemies. The little orc let her eyes slowly drift to her friends and wondered if they would all become as paranoid and worried about the attack.