Simon was gone before Ennis emerged from the tower, but he preferred it that way. He’d done a good deed, but there was no knowing how it would all py out from this point forward. The best of iions could still have horrible effects, and Simon didn’t need all of those on his sbsp;

  His only regret in all this was not finding out if the Vist would have paid him or not. Simon would have bet not, but now he would never find out. Not that he he money, of course; it was just the principle of the thing.

  He had a good horse, a full purse, and overflowing saddlebags. Other than a good backpad a book to write things down in, he was iy good shape. Still, the roads only got worse as he made his way to the coast, so it was good he was traveling light.

  Simon saw evidence of beastmen at one point. They were fresh enough that he shifted camping sites, but he never did enter them. Civilization all but disappeared until he reached the coast.

  Ohere, he was never out of sight of a fishing vilge. They dotted the coast and were never built far from the one. Bigger cities than that took a little lohough it took him almost a week to reach the coast, the first town of any size, in, took ahree days to reabsp;

  Simon took that in stride and adjusted its position on his map. When he arrived, he took on the role of a trader waiting for his ship to e in. That worked well sihere were always ships ing and going from its broad harbor. in wasn’t even half as nice as Ionar, but it was big enough to have a lighthouse, two markets, and even some gardens and an amphitheater.

  He was in no rush here and took his time eating seafood aing to know some of the regurs at a few of the most popur taverns over the week. It was men like that who had what he really needed: information.

  All of it was useful, and he didn’t try to stop anyone from talking about news from abroad or even the political climate between the governors of the different cities. He eve hours listening to someorash talk Elthenna and what a poor job she was doing in ruling the nation. What he was really ied in, though, were the myths and legends of the region.

  Some of those people seemed ined to talk about it. They would tell him about mortal demigods who had walked the world in ages past. Apparently, some people sidered Elthenna’s grandfather, who had founded her dynasty, to be a demigod, making her divine in a way. That thought made him smile.

  Finding out about the curse was harder, though. There were strange superstitions around it. It was a strange cultural taboo, but in time, familiarity and enough free drinks peed it, and Simon found a couple willing to tell him the whole story of Andus the Uable, the first king of Ionia as it was today.

  Though the thespian and the fisherman who told Simoory disagreed on some parts, they agreed on enough that he retty sure he got the gist of it.

  “Iime before time, this nd was almost uninhabitable,” the thespian started, pying as muto the drama as he could. “The three elements ground against each other with all the iability of a millstone, and the few settlements that existed between them were nothing but grist for the mill!”

  It was a little over the top, but it did remind Simon that so many people bought into a strahree-element formution of nature, like the pgue doctor he’d saved so long ago. In their world, only air, metal, and water existed. Fire was just elevated air, which expihe sun and why no light from it could reach all the way to the depths of the sea.

  Simon didn’t buy into it, aher did his magic. If anything, it implied that the world very much had four elements at a minimum. Really, oerpretation was that all of his words were a, and there were dozens of them, but that was too much for him to specute on.

  The point that both storytellers agreed on was that the region had been a very dangerous ptil a hero came through and ed the whole pce up. He slew the sirens that dragged sailors to their deaths, giving Ionia access to all the fish in the sea, and then he did likewise with the harpies, making the world safe for shepherds and their herds. He bound the hideous fire spirit Brogan to the heart of a volo, giving the riches of the earth to his people, drove off the basilisk, giving them back the southern pins.

  Sihen, except for the basilisk, who had returned a few geiohe rest of the monsters had stayed banished. Sailors still sometimes whispered about sirens in the sea, and shepherds occasionally vanished, but there was nothing clusive iher case. More mundane monsters like hydras and wyverns occasionally made a nuisance of themselves, but they were dealt with by heroes or the army.

  In the end, it was less than Simon had hoped for. He’d wanted some grand curse that he might learn from. Perhaps he’d even learn some strange new magic, but he was left feeling more like he was reading the adventures of Hercules after all of this than unc a real mystery, which was disappointing. If he couldn’t find a way to disprove all of this before the past version of him was shanghaied, then he was going to have a much harder time expining to Elthena that her stance was more silly superstition than it was wise sacrifibsp;

  “The basilisk came back because of the previous queen, right?” Simon asked. “Any idea where it came from?”

  “It was vomited up from the depths of hell because the prophecy was broken,” the actreed with gusto. “It turned a city to stone and then devoured those stones as well.”

  “But like… How was Ozioptan doing before that?” Simon asked. “Was it prosperous?”

  The man just shrugged. “The prophecies don’t say. Does it matter? The Oracle warned us what would happen, and then that damn fool of a queen—”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Simon asked. “There’s an Oracle, isn’t there. Where is she?”

  “Where is ssshe?” the man ughed, slurring slightly. “You fners are ssho funny. You think you just climb Mt. Elian and talk with a divine creature like her? You would be smote for your insolence if you even tried to do such a thing.”

  Simon ughed along with the other man, but even as their versation drifted off to other stories, he’d already decided that was exactly what he was going to do. He’d already been thinking about going into the highest parts of the mountains to see if harpies still existed, but if there rophet up there, too? While he might as well kill ties with oone.

  The day, it wasn’t hard to get a local to name a few of the mountains for him. Simon dutifully recorded all of them on his map, but when he asked where Mt. Elian was. They just looked at him balefully until he got the hint and moved on.

  Simon was uned by that. He just went further south aed the same act for a few days at a time. Though no one ever pointed out the mountain iion to him, eventually, he reached Thebian, which was the rge city on his way. There, none of the locals seemed willing to he tallest mountain in view, even though he eventually got the names of every other ohe uionable one was half shrouded in clouds, too, making it even more mysterious. That was when he decided he’d found his target.

  Simon sold his horse and other things he wasn’t likely to need, and thearted walking. The road sted lohahought it would have, and he almretted getting rid of the horse. Eventually, the mountains got wild enough that he would have been forced to abandon it.

  At the end of that road, less than half the mountain, he found a mohat had been built into the cliffside. It oputed only by old men. They offered him hospitality for the night and told him many iing stories, including one about how basilisks roam wild beh the earth, where they gnaw at the roots of the world and cause earthquakes. Simon doubted that was true, but he still found it iing.

  He, in turn, told them the story of the bckheart and the haunted graveyard, though he embellished it io make it seem more fial. Wheime finally came for them to ask him where he was traveling to and why he was so deep in the mountains, he lied, showing some of the sketches of fishermen and ndscapes that he’d done since he’d bought a journal in in. “I’m an artist and an explorer. That’s all, and Ionia is not well known where I e from, so I pn to write a book on the subject.”

  The sense of relief in a few of the men he was talking to was obvious, and Simon was very sure that if he’d admitted that he pnned on visiting the oracle, they would poison him or murder him in his sleep.

  That didn’t happen. Instead, after they tried to vince him that the Raiden mountains were a dangerous pd that he should not trifle with them lest his body never be found, they wished him well. In the m, he tinued on his way, well-rested with a full belly.

  It wasn’t that Simon didn’t believe the monks, of course. There was a reason they built their little monastery as if it were a fortress. There were clearly monsters in these hills. He was just hoping to fight them. Fortunately, in that regard, he didn’t have to wait too long. The higher he rose on the mountain slopes, the more signs of beastmen he saw. He still hadn’t seen a single harpy, though a couple of times when he saw vultures or dors, he thought that perhaps he had. On his third night past the monastery, the goat-men attacked him for the first time.

  He was lucky in that the wind shifted just before they attacked, and he smelled their foul musk only half a minute before they charged out of the night, screaming and braying. They had spears, but Simon very quickly realized they weren’t trying to kill him with them or even fight him in hand-to-hand bat if they didn’t have to. Instead, they were trying to herd him off of one of the nearby cliffs so that he would dash his own skull on the rocks before.

  That’s a very iing hunting tactic, Simon told himself when he figured it out, but he had no i in obliging them. Instead, he sleith his sword and then used a word of force when another six tried to charge him in mass, bsting them all sideways. The beastmen had an impossible sense of bance, but even they weren’t prepared to be smmed past Simon, and right over the edge by ehat weren’t there.

  He ehat fight, which was good because it was repeated every couple of nights after that. He never found anything resembling a vilge where the beasts were ing from, but he did occasionally find bloody altars decorated with the corpses of men and, more occasionally, goblins. Once, as he rose above the tree line, he even found an altar with the remains of what had to be a harpy on it. That made him smile, and he spent his few remaining hours of daylight trying to sketch it so that he would have a better idea of what it looked like.

  When he was dohey looked like a real horror show in his mind, but he didn’t think they’d be so tough. Even a-foot tall wingspan and vicious hooked cws didn’t mean much when you had hollow bones and couldn’t have weighed more than thirty or forty pounds.

  “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” he said as he set off on the ridgeline, looking for a defensible pp. “Endangered, yes. Extinct, probably not.”

  As the su, Simon still couldn’t see the peak of the mountain he was climbing. That was frustrating, but irely ued. It didn’t matter. He had to be more than halfway, and soon enough, he would answer a pletely different question.