I yelled, "WHAT?!"
"It just so happens that I too, have urgent matters to tend to in Alphospine. If you're not happy with that, I'm sure you'll be happy with our dungeons."
"No, we can bring you along.", Xavier said.
"Right! I assume you two cannot handle shadow transportation, I suppose we can use the carriage."
"What about the horses?", I said.
She glared at me, "They're fine, I had one of my men gather them and take them to stables. Come along now. Oh wait."
She snapped her fingers and the ropes that tied me and Xavier disappeared. Now she may be annoying, but she's annoyingly cool. I got up and helped Xavier up. Poor guy, he was turning purple.
She pulled us out of the room. Outside of the room, there was a long, dark hallway, with lots of doors, and the windows on the doors had bars..
I paused, "Wait, this is the dungeon?!"
Xuri smiled sarcastically, "Ah, the little peeping bird does have a brain after all. Yes, this is our prison, or dungeon. We had you two put in a more humane, cell."
I shuddered, if that cell was humane, I couldn't imagine what the others looked like. Some questions are better left unanswered though. We continued walking down the hallway for what seemed like hours, until we reached a flight of stairs, thankfully it went up.
After all of that, we made it into the carriage. Xuri had one of her best guards come with us, to keep us 'safe'.
A couple hours of silence later, Xavier finally spoke, "Soo. Nice weather today huh?"
Xuri glared at him, "Yes, if by nice weather you mean cloudy skies, frequent storms, and the scent of dead bodies everywhere you go, then yes, the weather is nice today."
I may not like Xuri, but she's kind of funny sometimes. Something didn't feel right, the view outside was not looking right. Then I realized, we weren't on the path to Alphospine, we were heading farther into town?
"Hey, Xuri? I mean, Your Highness? I'm afraid this isn't the path we were taking, it looks like you're going the wrong way by mistake."
She chuckled, "This is no mistake, I'm simply taking my guests to view my empire. Tell me, is there any harm in that?"
Well that's a stupid question, of course there's harm in that. I needed to get to Alphospine ASAP for gods' sake! But obviously, telling her that to her face would be a death wish. My best bet was to go along with whatever she had planned for us, and pray to the gods that I would still make it to Alphospine in nine day's time.
We arrived at the city a couple of minutes later, in one piece surprisingly. Xuri was not lying about the stench of dead bodies, it smelled like a morgue, everyone looked like their entire family was slaughtered in front of their own eyes, which they probably were, to be honest, I don't know what I was expecting from Shadowrend.
We exited the carriage and went on walking for what seemed like miles, while Xuri dragged us around like a tour guide. We eventually reached the market, basically the shopping district. We later arrived at a tavern, and oh my lord did everyone there reek of alcohol. There were drunkards everywhere I turned. Thankfully, right across from the tavern was a nice looking tea shop.
There was this tea shop I liked visiting in Apheros, it was called Green Tea Inn. Its owner is Lady Kanna. She's a very sweet old woman, she used to work alongside my father as his advisor, and then she retired and opened her own tea shop. She treated me like her granddaughter, and I treated her as my grandmother.
