I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 130: The Kingdom Where the Sun Never Shines

The old dwarf looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

"Let me make sure I follow you." Hrazfel’s giant form still crackled, but the heat had gone out of his voice, replaced by flat disbelief. "You want to march on an entire organization — a fortress, an army of those things — with what, exactly? One dwarf. One half-grown dragon.

And a Visitor." He shook his enormous head. "I think the smarter play is to kill you where you stand and collect the bounty. They pay handsomely for a dead Visitor, you know. That’s a guaranteed return. This is a guaranteed grave."

"And that," Ebony said, unbothered, "would be a waste."

She let the fire on her hand settle to a low green glow, conversational rather than threatening.

"Think it through, old man. If we help each other, we don’t just get your boys back. We take the mountain. And maybe — who knows — we take the whole hexagon it sits in."

She held his gaze. "I’ve fought these idiots before. I went toe to toe with one of their monks at the base of a tower they were trying to claim near Kanary’s homeland. That’s how they work — they take a tower, and if no one stops them, the entire hexagon falls under the Eclipse."

"Which means they’ve almost certainly done the exact same thing to the hexagon your mountain sits in." She spread her hands. "So if we beat them there — if we tear out whatever they’ve planted — that hexagon is open. All of it. Every vein of ore, every road, every coin of it, sitting there with no one left to hold it."

Hrazfel’s giant eyes narrowed.

"You ever think about that?" Ebony pressed, leaning into the thing she knew about his kind. "Being a king? A whole wild hexagon, all to yourself. A hall full of gold. As many big-chested women as a man could want."

She watched it land. "Dwarves don’t usually bother, do they. Too comfortable. Too settled in your old halls to go carving out new kingdoms in wild country. You almost never hear of a new dwarf-king out in the savage hexagons. Too much effort." Her smile sharpened.

"But the effort’s already half done. Somebody else conquered it. All you’d have to do is take it from a corpse."

The dwarf said nothing. But the lightning in his eyes had changed its rhythm.

"And if you still want my head when it’s over," Ebony added, "fine. We settle it then. You win, you carry me wherever you like and collect your bounty.

But until the crusade’s done — until your boys are out and that mountain’s ours — we don’t waste each other. We use each other."

Hrazfel was quiet for a long moment, arguing with himself behind his teeth.

Then the storm-form bled away. The giant shrank back down into a battered old dwarf, and he reached into a fold of his ruined clothes and drew out a stone — a white gem, smooth and cut, that Ebony recognized with a small jolt.

It was the same white crystal as Kanary’s promise dagger. He held it out, his other hand open toward her.

"Then we do it properly," he said. "Blood pact. This stone’s from my homeland — we cut them for exactly this.

Both of us swear: we don’t kill each other, and we stand by each other, until the crusade’s finished. After that — " he bared his teeth " — we’re free to do as we like. But break it before then, and you die screaming. The stone sees to that."

Ebony took his hand. Together they closed their grips around the gem between their palms.

"I accept," she said, with that cynical smile. "With one clause."

Hrazfel’s eyes flicked up.

"You can’t harm my companions either. Not Kanary, not the elf, not the others. The protection covers all of them, same as it covers me."

The dwarf’s face soured instantly, and Ebony understood the look — the look of a man who had been quietly planning to honor the letter of the pact while doing something clever with the gaps, and had just watched the most useful gap get sealed shut.

He grumbled something into his beard.

"Fine." He bit the word off. "Your companions too. Agreed."

A magic circle bloomed beneath their joined hands, white light flaring up around the stone, washing the clearing pale for an instant — and then it faded, sinking away into nothing.

They let go. The gem had turned, in that instant, from clean white to deep, glossy black.

Ebony turned it over, impressed despite herself.

"(I didn’t know this method. A blood pact sealed in a held stone — that’s not how Kanary’s worked.)" fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Her mind ran down the familiar track. "(So promise-stones come from dwarf lands. That’s strange. In the game, those crystals came off the backs of crystal dragons — they used the magic to keep from killing each other in their territories. And crystal dragon country is nowhere near the dwarf holds. So how do dwarves have the same stone?)"

She held the question for a moment, then let it go with a quiet breath. There were too many of those lately, and none of them mattered tonight.

She crossed to Kanary and checked her again. Stable. Still unconscious, the new scars pale against her skin, but breathing easy.

"(No time to lose,)" Ebony thought. "(We leave at first light. Even if she’s still asleep. She comes with us either way.)"

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.

.

By the next day they were in the air.

The red dragon carried them — adolescent, roughly the size of a small carriage, strong enough to bear a dwarf and a Visitor and her cargo without complaint.

Stor was asleep on Ebony’s shoulder, his tail wound twice around her neck like a scarf, twitching now and then with hatchling dreams.

Kanary, still out cold, was lashed to the dragon’s back, and the same ropes ran across Ebony’s chest, binding the unconscious girl against her so she couldn’t slide off in flight.

The forest unrolled far below them, green and endless.

"Can we cross the territory barriers like this?" Ebony asked over the wind. "Flying straight over them?"

"In the wild hexagons, aye." Hrazfel sat behind her, arms crossed, scowling at the horizon.

"Savage country’s open sky. The trouble’s the size of the things. These hexagons run vast, girl." He spat over the side. "And those monk bastards travel on Rhinosaurs — great horned brutes, cousins to the old land-dragons, two horns on the skull and legs that eat ground.

They run fast enough to cross a whole territory in a few hours, so long as nothing big gets in their way. Which means they’re already home, most like. Their seat’s three territories out. Day and a night of flying, even for us."

"And the closer ones?"

"That’s the problem." Hrazfel jerked his chin at the land ahead. "The hexagon we hit in a couple of hours — no flying over it. Forbidden. It’s Undead country."

"I’ve dealt with Undead." Ebony shrugged. "Annoying, but I ran into a nest of them in a wild territory outside Lithany once. Nothing I couldn’t handle."

"No." The dwarf shook his head. "You’re not hearing me. That nest you found was wild — loose dead, no order to them. This is a kingdom. Undead, top to bottom, the whole hexagon — and it has a king. A throne. Laws. Borders that are kept."

(A kingdom of the dead. With a king.) Ebony found herself genuinely interested, the strategist in her waking up. "(That’s a different thing entirely. That’s organized. That’s — )"

The dragon dropped.

No warning — it simply plunged, banking hard for the ground, and Ebony grabbed the ropes as the world tilted.

The red beast landed heavily in a stand of trees and crouched, low and trembling, and began to keen — a low, frightened, animal moaning, pleading in the only voice it had not to be made to cross the shimmer in the air just ahead of them.

A barrier. The faint distortion of a territory line, hanging between two ordinary-looking trees.

Ebony didn’t understand the dragon’s terror, but she unstrapped herself and followed Hrazfel’s lead as he dismounted and walked toward it on foot.

She set one boot across the line.

And the world changed.

The color drained out of everything in a single step.

The green trees, the ordinary daylight, the living forest — all of it peeled away the instant she crossed, as though she’d stepped through a painted curtain to find what was behind it. The trees on this side were withered, black-barked, bare.

The sky overhead was not blue and not gray but red — a deep, even, sourceless crimson stretching from horizon to horizon, with no sun anywhere in it.

"Welcome, girl," Hrazfel said, and for the first time all day there was real relish in his voice, "to the realm of the Undead. The kingdom of Clifforgart — the land where the sun will never shine."

Ebony stood and felt the air.

There was pressure in it — a dense, heavy weight of magic that pressed against her skin from every direction, thick enough to taste. And something in it was familiar. She knew this magic

She was almost certain she’d felt it before, somewhere, sometime — the recognition tugged at the back of her mind like a name she couldn’t quite reach.

She ignored it. There were too many of those today, too.

"The king here hates dragons," Hrazfel went on as they started walking, the red dragon left cowering at the barrier behind them.

"Loathes them. So we keep our heads down and we stay to the edge — hug the border, near the barrier, and move quiet. Cross the middle of his land and we’ll have his whole court on us."

"Then why cross it at all?" Ebony fell into step beside him. "Why not go around? Take a different territory."

"Because there is no around." Hrazfel laughed, short and bitter.

"The territories on every side of this one are Undead too. He’s spread his dead into all of them — on purpose. So that anyone who wants to pass through has to stop. Has to rest somewhere. Has to pay for a bed in one of his miserable little roadside —"

"(...wait.)"

"—hostels," the dwarf finished.

Ebony’s blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the red sky. freewebnσvel.cøm

"Hostels," she repeated, very quietly. "(No. No, it can’t be the same — )"

A presence detached itself from the shadows ahead of them.

A man stepped out onto the path. Tall, robed in black, a wide-brimmed hat set low on his head. His hair was black.

His skin was pale as a dead man’s, drawn over features that were, beneath the pallor, strangely fine. And his eyes were white — white as clouds sealed inside the sockets, drifting and swirling slowly within them.

His boots were black leather, each set with a small silver raven.

Ebony knew him at once.

She had met this man before. A long time ago, on the worst night of a different journey, behind a door that should never have opened.

"Midnight Hostel..."