Chapter 179: Quest after quest
Chapter 179: Quest after quest
Rohan exhaled and nodded.
"Right. Sorry."
Liora tapped her crutch once against the floor.
"Guest-right first. Then answers. That is how Veyrhold works."
"And if I don’t get guest-right?"
"Then you stay in the ash-house until Maerin decides whether to throw you out, lock you up, or make you useful."
"Those are all bad in different ways."
"Make yourself useful, then."
A new panel appeared beside her shoulder.
[Quest Received: Earn Guest-Right]
[Objective: Stand before the crash ledger and receive formal witness from Liora and Bryan.]
[Reward: Temporary Veyrhold Standing]
[Penalty: Restricted Movement]
Rohan stared at it.
Liora followed his gaze, then sighed.
"Again?"
"Yes."
"What does it want?"
"To make me useful."
"That sounds like Veyrhold."
The guest-right ceremony happened two hours later.
Ceremony was perhaps too grand a word for it, but it had weight.
Rohan was brought from the ash-house to a stone hall built around what remained of the old ship’s central spine. That was the only way he could describe it. A huge curved beam of pale alloy ran the length of the ceiling, partly embedded into the structure, its surface scratched, patched, and blackened by age. It did not belong with the rough stone walls or ash-cloth banners. It belonged to clean corridors, engine rooms, and a world where people did not have to scrape monster residue off spears by hand.
Beneath it sat the crash ledger.
It was not a single book.
It was a wall.
Metal plates, hide scrolls, old data slates that no longer glowed, etched bone markers, and newer paper records all arranged in careful rows behind glass. Names filled them. Some written in scripts the translation effect rendered after a moment. Some stamped in machine-perfect blocks. Some scratched by hand, uneven and desperate.
Captain Maerin stood before the ledger with three elders, Liora, Bryan, and a small crowd of witnesses.
Bryan looked terrible.
He sat in a wheeled chair made of blackwood and metal bands, his broken arm bound to his chest and his side wrapped thickly. His face had the colour of old ash, and sweat shone at his temples, but his eyes were clear enough when he looked at Rohan.
"You dragged me," he said.
Rohan glanced at Maerin, unsure if this was part of the formal process.
"Yes."
"Through ash?"
"Yes."
"Badly?"
"Very."
Bryan nodded gravely.
"Then I witness."
Liora snorted.
One of the elders gave her a sharp look.
She pretended not to notice.
The formal part was short.
Liora spoke first, recounting the skarn attack in clipped detail. No embellishment. No heroic nonsense. She said Rohan came when he heard cries, killed the skarn in the pocket, freed her, bound Bryan’s wounds, deceived the nest pack long enough to escape, then held the path until
Maerin’s patrol arrived.
Hearing it described aloud made Rohan feel oddly detached from himself.
It sounded impressive.
At the time, it had mostly felt like panic wearing boots.
Bryan spoke next, though he remembered less. He confirmed Rohan had dragged him and had stood between them and the skarn.
Then Maerin spoke.
"Rohan Roy is not shipblood," she said.
The hall went quiet.
Rohan felt every eye settle on him.
"He is not of the crash ledger. He is not bound by family debt, crew-line, work-name, or hold oath.
He came from the west under unknown means. He bears unknown system signs and has shown ash-working without teaching."
A low murmur moved through the crowd.
Maerin let it pass.
"He also saved Liora of Line Esh, Bryan of Line Varr, and recovered the body of Sera of Line Esh from the skarn pocket. He accepted cleansing. He has not raised his weapon within the walls. By witness and by watch authority, I grant guest-right under ash-house supervision for one month."
One of the elders stepped forward with a shallow dish.
On it sat a piece of flat grey bread.
Rohan remembered Maerin’s warning.
It might be fungus cake.
The elder held it out.
"Guest-bread," she said. "Eat and be seen."
Rohan took it.
The texture was dense enough that he briefly wondered if this was also used as emergency building material. He bit into it anyway.
It tasted earthy, sour, smoky, and faintly bitter.
Not good.
Not awful.
More importantly, everyone watched him swallow.
He did.
The panel appeared.
[Quest Complete: Earn Guest-Right]
[Reward Acquired: Temporary Veyrhold Standing]
[Standing: Distrusted Outsider -> Watched Guest]
Rohan stared at the final line.
’Watched Guest.’
Better than ’Thrown Outside’, at least.
The first month passed in tasks.
Not heroic tasks.
That was the part the stories usually skipped.
No one handed Rohan a dramatic mission immediately. No one invited him into their deepest secrets because he had saved a few people. Veyrhold was not that kind of place, and honestly,
Rohan respected it more for that.
Instead, he swept ash from drainage grooves.
He carried filter stones from the ash-house to the wall cisterns.
He helped repair marker stakes along the inner approach routes, under watch and never beyond bow range of the walls at first.
He learned how to wrap his face properly so the ash did not gather at the throat.
He learned which bells meant wall sighting, which meant fire, which meant storm-silver flare, and which meant everyone should get indoors and not ask questions until after the shaking stopped.
He learned that children in Veyrhold were not allowed beyond the third ring of streets until they could identify six kinds of dangerous ash by smell.
He learned that skarn were not the worst thing in the Ashen Marches.
Only the most common.
Every task came with eyes.
Some curious. Some grateful. Some suspicious. Some openly hostile.
The word shipblood followed him constantly.
Not always spoken aloud, but present in the way people paused when he entered workshops or lowered their voices near the crash ledger hall. The descendants of the shipwreckers had built their entire identity around surviving where no one should have survived. Their bloodlines were records.
Their family names were proof that their ancestors had endured the crash, the first winter, the first ash plague, the first skarn breach, the first merchant bargain.
Rohan had none of that.
He had no line plate. No ancestor in the ledger. No family debt or work-name. No place in the stories people told about themselves to make the Ash bearable.
To many, that made him less than trustworthy.
To a few, it made him almost interesting.
To the most suspicious, it made him dangerous in a way they did not yet understand.
Rohan did not blame them.
If a stranger had appeared in Erenhot claiming to be from another universe, carrying a weapon made by a goddess, and manipulating local terrain through some unknown ability, Rohan would have watched him too.
Probably from behind someone else with a bigger shield.
The Great System encouraged the tasks.
It was shameless about it.
[Minor Quest Received: Clear the West Drain]
[Objective: Remove ash buildup before second bell.]
[Reward: Veyrhold Standing +1]
[Penalty: Maerin’s Disapproval]
Rohan had stared at that one for a full ten seconds.
"Maerin’s Disapproval is a system-recognised penalty now?"
The boy beside him, a thin twelve-year-old named Pell, had looked at him as if he were stupid.
"Captain Maerin’s disapproval is always a penalty."
"Fair point."
He cleared the drain.
[Minor Quest Complete: Clear the West Drain]
[Reward Acquired: Veyrhold Standing +1]
No one cheered. No golden light descended. The drain simply worked again, and an old woman who lived nearby gave him a cup of hot mineral broth without making eye contact.
That was how acceptance seemed to function in Veyrhold.
No speeches.
Just slightly more soup.
Another day, the Great System gave him a quest to help reinforce the eastern marker line. The work took six hours, three near arguments, and one close encounter with a patch of ash that swallowed a dropped hammer in complete silence. The reward was not strength, but practical knowledge.
When the quest completed, Rohan understood how to read the paired stones better than before.
Not magically.
No information poured into his mind.
Rather, the process had forced him to look, listen, repeat, fail, correct, and notice. By the end, he could spot subtle differences in the markers that he would have missed before. The Great System had not gifted him understanding. It had pushed him into a task that created it.
That pattern repeated.
Clean filters, learn how ash clumped when contaminated by skarn residue.
Carry storm shutters, learn how Veyrhold buildings sealed before ash tides.
Assist at the ash-house, learn the difference between harmless grey drift and fever ash.
Walk the inner wall with Jorren, learn which silver lenses were defensive and which were only signal reflectors.
Jorren was the shield-bearer.
He was enormous, quiet, and amused by almost everything without ever smiling properly. The "Jorren sound" turned out to be a low breath through the nose, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. Rohan heard it most often when someone embarrassed themselves and least often when danger appeared.