A New Light (The Astral Wanderer Book 1) by D'Artagnan Rey (best romance ebooks txt) 📗

“Isn’t your father a traveler?” Asla asked. “Did he not teach you anything?”

“That would imply he listens to an instruction other than when it benefits him,” Zier snarked and earned an eye-roll from his apprentice.

The young swordsman looked around the group again. “Hey, I noticed Mr. Lebatt isn’t here.”

The grand mistress nodded. “He had to depart earlier on a different mission.”

“Oh, I see.” He was more than a little disappointed. “I was hoping to thank him before he left for getting me here and the training.”

“You’ll see him again, lad,” Wulfsun promised and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Everyone here comes and goes but this is our home. He’ll be back. You can tell him then.”

He smiled. “Right.”

“Are you ready to depart?” Nauru asked. The three young adventurers looked at one another before they nodded to her. “Very good. Let me open the portal for you.” The group moved to the anchor point and she held her hand out. Immediately, the rock began to glow before a large portal erupted in front of them.

“That’s not how Mr. Lebatt opened it before,” he remarked.

She chuckled. “It’s one of the perks of being the grand mistress,” she stated and darted him a questioning look. “And I heard that it isn’t how you opened it either.”

Devol grinned and rubbed the back of his head a little sheepishly. “Well, you do have a point.”

“Let’s get going,” Jazai ordered and waved over his shoulder as he stepped through. Asla turned and bowed before she followed him.

“Bye, everyone!” Devol yelled as he hurried to catch up. “We’ll be back soon.”

As soon as he stepped through, the gate closed. The older Templars took a moment after they left to stand idle. It had been quite some time since they had seen a group of adventurers as young as these leave on a Templar mission and for them, it was inspiring.

“Man, feel that sea breeze!” Jazai shouted as he stretched his arms wide with enthusiasm. “I’ve been cooped up in that castle for so long, I almost forgot what the outer wilds feel like.”

“Fish?” Asla asked and sniffed the air. “There’s fish in that village.”

“Yeah, it’s a fishing village,” Devol told her. “This is where Mr. Lebatt and I came from. We should get some when the mission is over. They have many great restaurants.”

“So which way should we go, Devol?” the scholar asked as he circled the rock formation to look at the fields beyond. “Past the forests, right?”

“Through the forest to the northwest,” he clarified and pointed over the fields. “We should reach the mountains in a few hours and be past those by nightfall. If all goes well, we should get to Rouxwoods by tomorrow afternoon.”

“All right, sounds good.” Jazai smirked and began to glow blue before he vanished, a now-familiar sign that he was using his blink cantrip. “See if you can keep up!” he shouted from about a hundred yards away.

“Wouldn’t it be less Mana-intensive to simply use Vis?” Devol asked as the other boy blinked farther away.

“He’s showing off,” Asla muttered as she adjusted the straps on her back. “Besides, do you think he could keep up with us only using Vis?”

“I would have slowed so he could.” That drew a giggle from her before she crouched.

“Come on. Let’s get going.” With that, she pounced and landed at the bottom of the hill before she repeated the action to catch up to Jazai.

Devol charged his Mana and hurried to join his teammates. Vaust, who was seated behind one of the rocks and hiding his Mana, smiled in amusement. It appeared that their mission had officially begun.

Chapter Twenty-One

“According to the card, we’ll make contact by the evening of the twenty-first, and the call sign is…Caw-caw?” Devol read aloud.

“Like a bird call?” Asla seemed unimpressed. “That doesn’t exactly seem inconspicuous.”

“Do you think they may be a bird wildkin?” he asked.

She shrugged as she leapt off a large tree branch. “Possibly, but most guilds aren’t multi-racial. If this was a wildkin guild, I would think they’d have mentioned it.”

“All the card says is that the carrier’s name is Zeke and the guild is the Hunters of Britana.” He slid the card into his pants pocket. “That’s the main hunters’ guild of the kingdom. I’m surprised they reached out to the Templars for something like this.”

“I am too, honestly,” Asla admitted. “I wonder what we are collecting and why the guild wouldn’t want to keep it for themselves or sell it.”

“Some rare item that belongs to the Templars?” he suggested.

The wildkin shook her head. “I’m sure there are many of those around as the order is quite old, but if that were the case, I don’t think anyone is that gracious, at least to us.”

Devol recalled Wulfsun mentioning the Templars’ fall from grace. There was still much he did not know about it, but it appeared it had traveled much farther than he had imagined if people weren’t even willing to do the right thing and return their treasures.

“Hey Jazai!” he shouted, caught the diviner’s attention, and almost made him fall out of the sky.

The boy blinked and reappeared as he landed neatly and his teammates caught up to him. They maintained a quick pace but continued to run along the ground. “What do you need?” he asked.

“We’re trying to work out what we’re retrieving,” the swordsman explained. “We know it’s some kind of box. But what do you think is inside?”

“Beats me,” he confessed. “I don’t think they would send us out here for a simple supply run. It might merely be an artifact or something that needs study. Although if that were the case, Zier would probably have been more excited about the mission.”

“Hunter guilds don’t typically have a scholar division. At best, it’s usually a small research team,” Asla stated. “If they did find something of interest that they couldn’t identify… No, even in that case, I think they would hand it to their kingdom’s academics before