Given that the settlement had only been constructed two days ago- three, actually, since Sera had been unconscious for most of the second day- the promised party was a rather modest affair that consisted mostly of gathering all the adventurers in one place and breaking out the alcohol. Some of the more woodsy adventurers had made the trek back to the forest near the original camp to bag mystery animals that could be roasted, giving the celebration the feel of a feast without dipping into long term supplies too much.
What was strange was how boisterous the atmosphere was considering it doubled as a funeral, or perhaps a wake. While she’d heard many people say they would prefer their loved ones celebrate their life instead of mourning their death, Sera had never actually seen anyone go through with it once the deceased was gone. After all, a funeral was for the living; it provided closure for the people that attended. The person actually being mourned was not, after all, around to object.
Not this time, though. If Sera hadn’t been told ahead of time this was meant to be a way of honoring the dead, she would have thought the Aegis Company had won a bloodless victory for their own side. Frontline fighters, scouts, mages, and clerics all mingled together, gathering around roasting spits and kegs of spirits made from the leaves of an elven tree. It was incredibly noisy from the dozens of adventurers carousing and telling their own side of the story of yesterday’s battles.
And at the center of it all were several funerary pyres upon which rested the people that hadn’t made it. They were as of yet unlit, and apparently would remain so until the end of the party.
Eleven adventurers had fallen fighting the nachzehrer, most of them from the battle in the field. A couple of Vivi’s patients hadn’t made it, primarily because she’d been forced to personally activate the barrier instead of providing life support until more clerics could relieve her. Although Sera had been worried their party members would hold it against Vivi, that didn’t seem to be the case; if anything, they respected her bravery and scorned the engineers that had been too afraid to go themselves. That in itself might be a problem, of course, but that was a problem for Dr. Kahnton and Cadenza to sort out.
At the far fringes of the gathering, just barely within the area lit up by the light spells cast by some of the mages present, Sera sipped on her drink and nibbled on a chunk of mystery meat. Despite sounding more like a tea than an alcoholic beverage, she found the drink to be tangy, and while it went down very smoothly, Sera suspected it was rather strong judging by how liberated some people had already become. She took it slowly, using the drink to wash down her food.
The term ‘mystery meat’ usually had a bit of a derogatory undertone to it, but in this case, it was simply that no one had a name yet for whatever the animal had been. Isidro might have known, but several of the kills were butchered by the time he got back, so he hadn’t had a chance to identify them if he could. According to the stereotype Sera had expected the meat to taste like chicken. It was closer to beef, though, with a slight hint of salmon of all things.
“Is this normal for adventurer funerals?” Sera asked of Tiriana and Vivi, who, knowing few of the people present, had opted to stick together.
“Somewhat. It’s more of a recommendation than a tenant, but the god of Adventure advocates for remembering the dead the way they lived, and for adventurers, that means excitement and revelry. Normally there’d be mock battles too, but everyone is a little too banged up for that,” Vivi explained with Tiriana doing the translating. Sera had asked her question in crude elven, but she wasn’t fluent enough to understand the response yet.
“…I haven’t been one for long, but isn’t there a lot more travel and boredom than excitement?” Sera asked, remembering spending an entire week riding all the way out to the fortress and army base just for less than an hour of poking around the latter. That sentence had been a bit longer than she was comfortable with, but she seemed to have gotten the point across.
“Sure, but that’s not what defines being an adventurer. We do it for the thrills- the discoveries, the victories, and celebrating a job well-done,” Tiriana answered personally. “A soldier spends most of their time travelling or sitting around too, but you wouldn’t say anything but a professional fighter.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Sera accepted, taking a sip of her drink. The others did the same. She was forced to switch back to English to get her next thought across. “Maybe I just don’t have enough experience to understand it yet. I didn’t know any of the people who died, but I still can’t bring myself to party while standing around their corpses.”
“Most people can’t at first. You have to learn how to work yourself up to it, more or less,” Tiriana replied between sips. “In my experience, once you do that, it takes some of the sting out of the loss. Makes it easier to remember the person fondly.”
“Have you…lost a lot?” Sera asked carefully. It took her a moment figure out the right way to say it in elven.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“A few…friends, I guess, back when I worked for a company. I wasn’t there long and didn’t know them extremely well, but it still hurt,” Tiriana answered somberly. “That company wasn’t run very well and their deaths could have been avoided with better leadership, which is part of why I left.”
“I don’t even know what you just said but I’m sure it was depressing,” Vivi commented. Sera only understood about half of it, but Tiriana repeated it for her benefit with a smirk. “This is supposed to be a party, can we talk about something more positive?”
“We could gossip about whether there’s even a face under that one’s helmet,” Rinnie suggested from between Tiriana and Sera, who was so startled by the dryad’s sudden appearance that she jumped at least a foot into the air and flung both her drink and her food into the closest fire. “Huh. Perfect score for that one- how far was that, twenty feet? Could have landed almost anywhere else but you somehow got it right in there.”
“Where did you come from!?” Sera demanded of the tiny scout, who snickered in her face.
“I’ve been standing there since ‘is this normal’ and you just didn’t notice,” Rinnie mocked.
“I did,” Tiriana said as she calmly raised a hand.
“So did I,” Vivi piled on.
“Really gotta work on that situational awareness and peripheral vision if you’re gonna be an adventurer,” Rinnie advised, nodding sagely.
“You could have just said something!” Sera insisted, unable to hide how flustered she was.
“Now, now,” Tiriana consoled while patting Sera’s back. “It’s almost a rite of passage to get caught off guard by the party scout. Vivi and I had to learn somewhere.”
“Urgh…” grumbled Sera, unable to think up a response to that. Instead she looked towards Layla, who was standing alone with a large mug of spirits almost on the other side of the gathering. She was drinking through a straw, inserted through one of the holes in her helmet. “I’m curious, but it’s rude to speculate.”
“Suit yourself,” Rinnie said with a shrug. “Not much else to do right now though. All these pansies are still too busy nursing their wounds to do anything fun.”
“I really want to scold you for that one but it’s hard to argue after seeing you get stabbed three dozen times and walk away on your own two feet…” Vivi commented dryly.
“Sure kept those leapers busy though, didn’t it?” Rinnie laughed heartily. “Didn’t have the brains to know when to quit!”
“I’m certain they just thought you’d leap at them the moment they turned their backs,” Tiriana gripped her forehead while speaking. The question of Rinnie’s seeming immortality had been giving the elf a headache since she heard about it, Sera knew. Herself, Sera was pretty certain the dryad was just highly resistant to stabbing because of her plant-like properties. While Rinnie was an ally and Sera saw no reason to devise ways to murder her, she could think of three ways off the top of her head that would likely do it.
Morbid thoughts aside, it was funnier to watch Tiriana grapple with the question than tell her any of that. Even if she did, it wasn’t like there was a way to test it, and Rinnie surely wouldn’t confirm or deny anything. Tiriana was intelligent enough that those possibilities had likely occurred to her anyway; it was probably the lack of confirmation that was torturing her.
Either way, the conversation died when Cadenza snapped her fingers from near the funerary pyres- clearly enhancing the action with some form of magic judging by the way it was audible even over the din of the partygoers. Her Aegis Company adventurers quieted themselves almost instantly, with the few independents catching on a moment later. People began assembling themselves in front of the Party Captain without her having to order it.
“Good evening everyone! Have you given the dead their due?” she spoke to the crowd, somehow making herself heard as if she were right next to everyone in the crowd. Her words were followed by cheers and affirmations from the adventurers. “Excellent! I know the offerings were limited due to our limited supplies, but I see it hasn’t dimmed your fervor.
“You all know why we’re here. We fought, we won, and some died as they lived: struggling with all their might against the dangers we know live outside of civilization’s light. Though they are gone, they will not be forgotten. We will tell the tales of their heroism, their might, and their wit. We will immortalize their memory through story and commit their records to the keeping of Pehtayuson and his clergy forever more.”
Sera glanced at Vivi at the mention of her god’s true name to find her merely nodding along. Normally that name only ever received mention when the cleric bestowed blessings, but it seemed like a funeral for adventurers was a proper time to bring it up. Supposedly that would draw his attention here- to claim the dead, perhaps, or merely to join his followers in commemorating them.
“The battle we fought here meant nothing today. We repelled the nachzehrer in the defense of land that is not ours, for our own purposes and not in the defense of the weak. But it is not today that we fight for, it is tomorrow. In the future this may be remembered as the beginning of something great, and it is up to us to make it so!
“We stand upon the greatest mobile fortress ever imagined by mortal minds, a construct so vast it can hold a city on its back. Today it stands in ruins, but its foundation remains, and that foundation is what we will build from. This land has been consecrated by the blood of our comrades, who we will now send off with the fires they were so willing to step into.”
As Cadenza set the pyres ablaze, Sera considered her words. Just the other day she’d told her people that their lives were their priority; that defeating the nachzehrer wasn’t important. Was it the loss of those lives that had changed her perspective? Or was she simply working the crowd, making those deaths mean something in their minds regardless of how she herself felt?
She hoped it was the latter, because if it were the former, Cadenza was intending to take adventurers numbering in the hundreds to war against the entire nachzehrer army, and that wasn’t a fight they could win. For her own sake, and that of Tiriana and Vivi, Sera would be watching the adventurer leader closely in the coming days to determine where her motives truly laid.