Chapter 141 - Leaving Valleroy

Chapter 141: 141 - Leaving Valleroy

By the next morning, everything was finally ready.

They descended through the enormous Edevane tree together, the lift platform carrying them down the hollow interior while Elyndor disappeared above. Vael came as far as the lower entrance, where the long-distance mana vehicle waited beneath the branches.

Adrien had expected something close to the cargo transports he had already seen. This was considerably larger.

The vehicle had a long reinforced body mounted over six broad wheels, with two enclosed mana engines built beneath the rear section, and thin engraved formations ran around the metal frame to support the suspension and cut down the strain of travelling for days.

A driver waited beside the front door, an older elf in practical dark clothing. Once he had confirmed the destination with Vael, he began loading the luggage into a compartment along the side.

Inside, the vehicle felt closer to a small moving room than a carriage. Cushioned seats faced each other around a narrow table, while the rear held compact sleeping compartments behind sliding doors. Mana crystals set into the walls governed the temperature, and another formation swallowed most of the vibration.

"This is better than I expected," Adrien said.

"It needs to be," Lucien replied. "We’re going to be inside it for a while."

Amelia came in behind them, and Adrien’s attention moved to her almost at once. She had gone with the third outfit from the previous day: black trousers, a fitted grey-blue coat and a simple travelling cloak over her shoulders. It suited her far better than he had expected when he first saw it folded across her arm.

He looked a second too long, and Amelia noticed. "What?"

Adrien met her eyes. "It looks good on you. Better than the other two."

Her expression eased, though she glanced down at the coat as if checking it again. "I thought this one would be easier for the road."

"It was the right choice."

Lucien stopped near the rear compartment and looked at both of them. "If this is how the entire journey is going to be, I might stay in Elyndor."

Neither Adrien nor Amelia answered, and Lucien went back to checking where his things had been stored.

Vael stayed outside while the driver finished preparing the vehicle. Adrien stepped down again for a final moment, and Vael gave him only the practical details: keep to the main route, let the driver handle the checkpoints, and contact Orven Talris once they reached the Sylvamir capital.

There was no long farewell. Vael looked toward Amelia and Lucien, then toward Adrien. "Get there safely."

"We will."

Adrien climbed back inside. The door sealed behind him, and a moment later mana ran through the engines beneath the floor.

The vehicle pulled away almost without a jolt, and Elyndor slowly fell behind them. Adrien watched the Edevane tree shrink through the rear window until the canopy closed over the road and took the whole city out of sight.

For the first hour the road stayed familiar in structure, even though Adrien had never travelled this far along it. Massive trees gave way to wider plains and lower forests, while mana-powered vehicles moved in both directions carrying passengers, cargo and merchants between cities.

The road itself ran broader than anything around Greymoor, split into separate lanes and paved with stone treated by mana to survive heavy transport.

Adrien watched through the window for a long time. Cities appeared in the distance and vanished again before he could work out their size, some built around rivers, others climbing over low hills, several with enormous mana towers rising above their walls.

Valleroy had always looked large on a map, though travelling across it made the scale feel like a different thing entirely.

By midday Amelia had finally stopped checking her luggage. She sat opposite Adrien with a small travel guide open in her hands, while Lucien had taken the seat nearest the front and spent most of the time watching the road or resting.

"How long until the border?" Adrien asked.

The driver answered without turning. "If the roads stay clear, we’ll reach the last Crown checkpoint tomorrow morning. From there, another few hours to the Sylvamir crossing."

Adrien looked back through the window. "So we’re still spending an entire day just crossing Valleroy."

"More than that, technically," Amelia said.

Adrien nodded slowly.

Most of his life in this world had revolved around Greymoor, Valebrand, Arquenay and a handful of nearby cities, and even Elyndor had felt distant the first time he travelled there.

All of that occupied a fraction of a single kingdom, and Valleroy itself covered only part of one continent. Beyond its borders sat other human kingdoms, Sylvamir, territories held by other races and lands Adrien knew almost nothing about.

The borrowed memories in his head covered a noble’s education, and even that stopped not far past the map on Vael’s table.

The hours passed steadily. They stopped once at a roadside mana station, where the driver swapped several partly drained crystals and checked the engines.

Adrien stretched his legs while the station workers rolled spent crystals away on a low cart, Amelia bought food for the road, and Lucien vanished for a few minutes before turning up again with nothing to show for it.

By evening they were moving once more. The landscape had changed noticeably, the forests thicker, the air carrying more ambient mana, and distant mountains drawing a dark line across the horizon.

The driver tipped his head toward them. "Beyond those ridges is the border region."

Adrien leaned closer to the window. Tomorrow, for the first time since he arrived in this world, he would leave the Kingdom of Valleroy, and the thought brought up something he had not felt in a while.

Expectation.

He wanted to see how Sylvamir differed from everything he knew: its cities, its magic, its technology, the people living there, and whatever waited beyond the narrow slice of the world he had seen so far.

Looking at those distant mountains, Adrien understood something simple. He had barely seen anything yet.