Everything is dark. Why is everything dark? I start moving around. I bang my head into some kind of wall. I am trapped. I start squirming. I can feel I am trapped inside some kind of sphere.Where am I? I start panicking and banging my body around inside the sphere. I hit my head really hard into the wall. Crack. Light floods in. I break out of the sphere. I can see now. It’s an eggshell. Where am I now? I’m floating in a white room. I can now see myself from a third person perspective: I am a lizard. A really pink, baby lizard. I move my right lizard arm. I can see and feel myself moving my right lizard arm. Now a right chopped off hand appears out of nowhere and grabs my entire body in its hand. What the fuck! I can feel and see the hand holding me. But it’s not crushing me, just holding me in place. A knife comes out of nowhere and chops off my little pink tail. What the fuck! I am so sad! The hand releases me and exits the room. Now a new sensation: My tail is growing again. I can feel it grow and see it grow. First it starts off forming a little pink blob at the place of the wound. Then that blob keeps growing and growing, and I can feel it grow. I’ve never had this kind of feeling before, an entirely new sensation. Now my tail is back. I am so happy!

I awoke, with my hot body drenched in sweat, as usual. Out of habit I got up, butt-naked with morning wood and oblivious to my surroundings, and went over to the bathroom to pee. 

Peeing with a hard on is pretty hard. The secret to doing it is bending your upper body forward, which gives more space for the urinary tract in your penis while erect.

When I turned around and exited the bathroom, I found three new developments in my environment: 

Firstly, Albana was blushing and looking away from my erection. 

Secondly, Oilyhair and Squareface had their swords out, pointing them at my right hand. 

Thirdly, I had a right hand.

“Hey, what’s up? No pun intended.” I thought I’d try to break the tension in the room, but all three of them were still deadly serious and looked at me in shock.

“W-What the fuck? Why is your hand back?” said Squareface. 

The sword he was pointing at me was shaking. Why was he so afraid?

“I had this weird dream where I looked like Tailless when he was a baby. Was pretty weird.”

“Only Grandmasters have the ability to regenerate body parts! This must be some kind of trick of his!” Oilyhair said. 

Albana, still shocked, was starting to take a few steps back.

Squareface’s right foot took a micro step forward, telegraphing his next move. My brain stimulated what was going to happen next:

Squareface lunges forward and strikes, I take a step back and barely miss it, Oilyhair lunges forward as well and strikes at me while Squareface is getting ready for his next swing, I take another step back and barely avoid it, now Squareface hits me. A similar scenario to last time.

Before that could happen, I instinctively used Wind Magic to dash back into the bathroom, and I hit the bathroom wall really hard and all the air in my lungs went out. And while Squareface and Oilyhair were following me, I closed off the bathroom entrance with Earth Magic.

“What the fuck he can do chantless magic!” I heard from the other room. I’m assuming they meant Imagination Magic.

What now? What do I do now? I could use an Earth Bullet like with the boar? No, it might miss or pass through Oilyhair or Squareface and hit that cute, innocent elf. She clearly was not bad, and I had taken quite a liking to her. What was the alternative?

In my moment of hesitation, Oilyhair smashed through the Earth Wall and swung his sword at me. I reflexively used Wind Magic again to dash to the side. The dash was uncalibrated and I again smashed into the wall.

Squareface followed in his brother’s step and they were now both in the small bathroom with me, point blank range. 

I uttered this weird happy sound when I realized this ideal position I was in: Without thinking about it, I automatically used my both hands as flamethrowers and roasted Vlado and Miroslav to death.

I used the Fire Magic for 3 seconds until I was conscious again and stopped. 

What lay before me was an ugly scene: Two boys completely black. Though their armour and swords were unharmed, I guess they were high quality.

Revenge is sour. 

To this day, I still regret killing them. 

I’ve spent a lot of time rationalizing their deaths. Telling myself stuff like it was in self defence, they were trying to kill me, they cut off my hand, and so on. 

I also later on learned about the horrible things they had done to other people, and told myself things like: If I hadn’t stopped them, they would have hurt more people. 

But in the end, none of that rationalizing has helped me. My body has a built in unchangeable belief that all death and hurting other people is bad. 

I have hurt and killed a lot of bad people in my 100 years of living, but it seems this belief has never disappeared, as if it is the foundation upon which I am. 

I heard from other people that the more they killed, the less problems they had with killing. But this seemed to never work for me. 84 years have passed, but this experience still leaves a kind of feeling of black goo stuck inside my intestines. 

I see life as movement: You are moving inside your body, and you are moving outside your body. Constantly moving. To me there is something perverse and unsettling about one second moving like always, and then the other second never moving again. I have more to say about this, but I will stop talking about this moment in my life because it just makes me feel bad.

When I exited the bathroom I found Albana the elf girl standing still, holding her staff, and looking at the burnt corpses. I put on my pants to cover my dick.

“I’m sorry about your friends,” I said.

“They weren’t my friends…”

There was a moment of silence. 

“Well,” I said, “what are you gonna do now?”

“I don’t know.”

I thought for a moment. Then I said, “If you are willing to teach me about this world, and help me grow stronger, you can come with me.” 

At this she made strong eye contact. Then looked away. She spent about a minute thinking in silence. It was pretty awkward.

“O-Okay. I will help you if you help me. But first off, you have to change your clothing. Right now you are wearing leather clothes which they only use in the mountains, so you will draw a lot of suspicion and be an open target… First off, wash yourself. Then put on their armour and swords so you look like an adventurer,” she said, gesturing to Vlado and Miroslav.

I did as she said. 

I took off my pants and washed myself with Water Magic and dried myself with Wind Magic. Then I went over to the two burnt bodies. Their faces were entirely black and looked disgusting, so I covered them with Earth Magic. 

The clothing on their lower bodies, that is, the boots and pants and socks and sword sheaths, were pretty much undamaged since I had aimed my flamethrowers up at their faces. 

But the clothing on their upper bodies were burnt to a crisp. But their breast plates and shoulder plates had survived, and the two swords as well. I took all of the usable stuff off of them. Then I exited the bathroom and sealed it with Earth Magic so I didn’t have to look at them again.

I put on one pair of pants, socks and boots. I used the same leather shirt I already had, but I put one of the breast plates and shoulder plates over it. And I stored the other pairs in the backpacks we had.

I got an idea with the swords: They were very high quality, higher quality than my lance and machete, so I thought it’d be a waste to not use them. 

I attached the two sheaths to my back in an x pattern, so I could draw them from overhead. But since the longswords were slower to move around, I also kept the shorter machete to my left hip in case I needed something fast. 

Then I attached the three daggers to my back as always. I decided to throw away the lance since it was made of wood, and I now had higher quality weapons. Though this is not saying I stopped using the lance fighting style I had created, I just replaced the lance with the longsword.

“What now?” I said.

“First off, we need to get away from this town. Eventually, the company will find out about what happened. Also, they will send people after me. So we can’t go to Gjilan.”

“Then where do we go?”

“We will go to Prishtina. We will take a carriage from here to Gjilan, and another carriage from Gjilan to Prishtina. And about your Riding Lizards…”

“Yeah?” I said.

“We can’t bring them with us. They will draw too much attention.”

Fuck. I was not ready to leave Tailless and Speedy.

“Jo bre! I can’t leave them,” I said.

“Listen, those Riding Lizards will tie you to the mountains and make us a target for slave-catchers. Also, they will tie you to Vlado and Miroslav’s murder. When the company finds out about their deaths, and the beast tribe finds out, then that will be target on our back. Right now I will be targeted, but you don’t have to be as well. Do you understand this?”

“Y-Yes…” I said.

“Another another important part, your accent.“

“What about it?“ I said, confused.

“In Llap and Drenica, the spoken dialect is Tosk, not Gheg. When you came over to us at the fireplace, that was another clear sign that you were a refugee since Gheg is only used in Dukagjina. Make sure to never use the Gheg dialect.”

“Oh, I had no idea,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.” 

I had only been exposed to Gheg my entire life, so I would have to study Albana’s way of speaking from now on and imitate it. Luckily the only differences between Gheg and Tosk are few so it would be easy to make the transition.

We packed all of our stuff and left the inn hurriedly without checking out. 

We took Tailless and Speedy from the stables and rode to the southern exit of the town with them. I could see the mountains of Dukagjina far off in the distance.

“Listen,” I said to Speedy and Tailless while petting them and taking off their saddles and leashes, “You guys need to head over to the mountains, home. That way,” I said pointing to the mountains.

I slapped them on their buts and said, “Ik! Ik! Away!” and they ran off in the direction of the mountains. It made me feel sad seeing them leave. I hoped I’d see them again in the future.  

***

    We were now in a crowded carriage headed to Gjilan

The carriage cost 2 euros per person, and for our luggage it cost an extra 1,5 euros.

“This leaves us at 40 euros. It is cheaper traveling from Gjilan to Prishtina, so that will only cost us 3 euros in all, leaving us with 37 euros.

We will be sleeping in the carriages and not stopping at an inn. Though we will still need food, which will cost us 0,5 euros per meal. When we reach Prishtina we immediately need to start dungeon diving to afford our inn. One decent room with 2 beds will cost us 20 euros a night. If we dungeon dive every day, we should make 30 euros per day.”

“By the way,” I said, “can you explain dungeon diving to me?”   

“Oh yeah, I forgot you’ve never been to a dungeon before.”

“I’ve never been to a city either. Last night was my first time.”

“Oh, okay. Let me explain: Pretty much every major city has dungeons. Inside these dungeons are monsters and rare materials which can be sold inside the city. Some monster parts are valuable as well and can be sold. All the monsters and materials regrow after a set time. I don’t know why this is, or why dungeons even exist in the first place, but I think it is the gods who made them. Anyway. A dungeon is divided into three parts: The upper, middle, and lower floors. The lower you go, the rarer and more dangerous the monsters, but also the higher the profits made. Prishtina does not have the biggest dungeon in Dardania, but it has the most.”

“Okay I understand. By the way, what’s your last name? And why do you have a Shqip first name when you’re an elf?” I said.

“Half elf,” she said. “Also, Albana isn’t my real name, and I don’t have a last name. I mean I do, but I don’t know what it is, they captured me from my village in the  Great Forest when I was 4. Currently I am registered in Gjilan as Albana Trepica Company, which is the name of the company that owns me.”

“What’s a company?“

“A company is a group of mercenaries that makes money through adventuring. That is, gathering materials, doing quests, and dungeon diving. Also, my company will be sending bounty hunters after me, so we have to stay low. And another important part. You said your last name was Krasniqi?”

“Yeah, Arben Krasniqi.”

“Well Krasniqi is clearly a mountain name, so you should try to not use it as much as possible.”

That hurt to hear. I had always been proud of my name. But she made a good point.

It was night when we arrived at the city of Gjilan. We disembarked outside the city gates.

“I have 200 euros in a bank box inside the city, and the news of Vlado and Miroslav probably hasn’t reached the company yet, but we can’t risk going inside the city,” said Albana. 

We got 5 pieces of gjevrek at a stall outside the city walls, and went on another big carriage headed for Prishtina.

Inside the carriage there were a lot of people. Albana yawned, which looked cute. I took our luggage and put it in the corner of the carriage.

“Sit there,” I said to Albana, pointing to the corner of the carriage. I then sat right next to her and she blushed.

“W-What are you doing?”

“Go to sleep. I’ll watch over us.”

“Oh… okay,” she said and closed her eyes. 

When she fell asleep, I took a blanket from our baggage and put it over her. 

One hour into the journey, the carriage shook a little from the bumpy road, and Albana rested her head on my shoulder while asleep. 

I took this time to study her face: She had these pointy ears, and short blonde hair, with two locks around her ears. And a cute little nose. I thought she looked beautiful. Her hands were also small and feminine, and the nails unusually pink and well shaped. I remembered Elvana’s nails looked very ugly from all the berry-picking she did. But Albana’s elf hands were very clean and well kept, without any scars or calluses. 

Back in my village, from the stories I heard about the elves it was a theme throughout them that elves were all beautiful. I guess this was true.