Foreword:
This story is based on my experience playing Arcane Odyssey. Obviously not entirely 100% accurate to the in-game story and lore, but perhaps a fun story, regardless.
This is Chapter 3 of the Astral Odyssey series.
1 - Dawn
2 - Ronin
4 - Gratitude
Content Warnings: None
Bronze Sea - Frostmill Island - Glacier Inn
”Frostmill Island is dealing with their own set of problems, evidently. It’s been a very busy few days, and I’ve not been able to write every day as I’d originally planned. Fortunately, I haven’t lost my memory again. Unfortunately, I’ve remembered nothing new of my past, still.”
”A theory that I might have came from a book that I got from Frostmill Island’s resident alchemist, a wizardly man by the name of Enizor. According to that book, one of the mind’s responses to severe emotional trauma is to induce a deliberate form of amnesia to block out the pain from those events.”
”It was just a theory, but it made a lot of sense. I don’t know how well Morden is processing things, but he seemed to be handling himself well enough. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure -I’m- processing things well, myself. Owing to the fact that Tucker is dead and was evidently my friend, and I have -no memory of him whatsoever- tells me that he was heavily involved in whatever atrocities went down from wherever we escaped from.”
”The mayor of Frostmill Island wanted to speak with me as I woke up from my first evening on the island, having opted to stay at the inn. As I mentioned earlier, Frostmill is having some problems of their own. Frostmill Island isn’t a traditional island made of earth, grass, stone and sand, it’s a glacier that’s been drifting through a place called the War Seas for -centuries.-”
”And now it’s melting. Evidently, there’s been talk that the island has been cursed, and that soon the island may very well become uninhabitable. Against my better judgment, I volunteered to do some investigating into the matter.”
”I was directed to one of the citizens of the island, who said that there was a possibility that one of the bandits on the top of the island may know something about why the island is melting at an accelerated rate. In addition, they’d been troubling the residents of Frostmill Island for a while.”
”I took care not to brutalize them too badly until I got a bit of information- they’d spotted a woman with red hair a few nights back, heading to the far side of the island. While that wasn’t too much to go from, I opted to go and investigate.”
”There was a ruined village atop the island, on the other side of a plateau of ice. As part of learning what I was capable of, I learned that I could jump quite high, with a bit of effort. Crossing the plateau was no trouble to me. The ruined village was certainly concerning, but from what I could tell, it had been abandoned for a while. Snow filled the vacant buildings, the frigid nature of the island slowly entombing the ruins.”
”And I saw a light, in the distance. Something was on fire. I headed over to investigate, and that’s when I found her.”
”Her name, as I later discovered, was Iris. Her magical ability, as I discovered immediately, was something that I didn’t know the name of. As I approached, she launched a bolt of what I thought was fire at me, but it was somehow -too hot- to be any ordinary fire.”
”I didn’t want to kill her, or even hurt her, and I recalled how tired I got if I overexerted myself, so I just evaded her attacks until she was too winded to keep fighting.”
”She said that I was obviously from Ravenna, and I asked her what she meant by that. She was at a loss for words, muttering something about obviously hunting her and trying to capture her.”
”I merely reiterated that I knew nothing about her, or this Ravenna that she kept talking about. She seemed agitated and I was afraid she’d start throwing fire around again, but she eventually looked me in the eye and somehow made the determination that I really was just as clueless as I evidently looked.”
”She asked me why I was here, and I said that I was simply here to figure out why Frostmill was melting. She said that Frostmill was part of Ravenna’s dominion, and she was rebelling against them for taking her father away from her, with no apparent rhyme or reason behind why they had taken him.”
”She said she was trying to send Ravenna a message, and after some thought, I told her that if she really wanted to fight against Ravenna, she had a lot of training ahead of her. She asked me what I meant.”
”I explained that if Ravenna is as terrible and powerful as she says, then they evidently have quite a lot of power in the region. Considering that I wasn’t all that powerful, as far as I could tell, and yet I’d managed to wear her endurance down to the point where she surrendered, she clearly wasn’t cut out to fight whatever battle she had with Ravenna.”
”With that, she gave her actions some thought, and said that she was going to do some investigating and training of her own. But she wasn’t going to go out of her way to cause any more problems, much to my relief.”
”She departed a bit later, after I’d returned and explained the situation to the mayor. The mayor was very, very relieved, and sent a letter to Ravenna explaining the situation. I didn’t know where Iris was heading next, so I couldn’t tell him, but she did agree to leave peacefully and I didn’t even have to fight her, so it was unlikely that she would cause more trouble.”
”I spent the next day or two doing some exploring with my new sailboat, traveling to various islands, running errands for the locals, and even clearing out some smuggler’s in Frostmill’s ice mines.”
”Finally, I came back to Frostmill a few hours ago, had some spare time before nightfall, got some food, and realized that I hadn’t written in my journal for a bit. So here I am now, writing this all down.”
”First Morden, and then Iris… I wonder what’s going on around here? I’ve got no idea where I’m going to go from here- perhaps sail for a different island? There’s a small island called Palo Town not far away, and I’d certainly not mind getting out of the cold. I bought myself a new scarf and some gloves to keep warm, and the gloves are so comfortable that I might make them a new part of my outfit from now on.”
”For now, it’s bedtime.”
-Matt Starsoul
