Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) by Grayson Sinclair (black authors fiction txt) 📕

I’ll see if I can’t spoil her a bit when we get there. She definitely needs her own clothes.

Speaking of spoiling. I put the gold away and pulled out a brush for Lacuna and proceeded to spend the next hour or so brushing her coat while praising what a good girl she'd been.

Lacuna was a smart horse, and I believed she could understand at least the meaning behind my words, if not the words themselves. Her eyes were bright and happy as I brushed her down. Once her coat and mane had been brushed thoroughly. We climbed into the saddle and continued onward through the forest.

A few hours in the saddle and we started passing signs of rural civilization. The rough dirt road we’d been traveling on became smoother as we reached an area with a lot of foot traffic. A few other travelers, merchants, and adventurers kept cropping up—some on horseback like us and others in large wagons with armed escorts.

Wealthy merchants always hired guards to protect their cargo on trips like these. Bandits and highwaymen were commonplace on these backroads, and I had Eris cover her face with her hood. While I doubted anyone would recognize what she was, Eris still was exotic enough to stand out easily. I didn’t want anyone looking too closely at her, so she kept her hood up whenever other people were nearby.

As the day passed by, there were even more signs of activity. Albeit not the kind I was hoping.

We passed several splintered wrecks of wagons that had been looted. Not an uncommon sight, but what was unusual were the bodies. Most of them were human, simple merchants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there were also a couple of demi-humans in the mix. Rabbitmen? What are they doing so far from the Pale Everlands?

They were unmistakably rabbitmen. Their long, gray ears gave them away. Both were male, with lean, functional muscle and bloodied cotton tunics. Multiple stab wounds and lacerations covered them from several different weapons along with four or five large holes that had punctured their chests. Some type of curved blade did that, but what kind of weapon made those holes?

Eris tugged on my shirt. Her eyes wide with concern. “We need to stop and help them; they might be alive.”

I ignored her, and sped Lacuna to a full gallop, racing as fast as I could away from there. Eris looked shocked at me—and more than that, hurt—that I would so callously abandon people in need. I had to explain things quickly to get her to calm down.

“It was more than likely a trap.”

She cocked her head to the side. “What do you mean?”

“That's a common trap used by bandits: rob a caravan, butcher the merchants, and lie in wait for a good Samaritan to pass by and try to help. Then rob and murder them. Rinse and repeat.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, absorbing what I’d told her. “Did you ever do anything like that?” she asked, barely more than a whisper.

Ah, guess I shouldn’t be surprised she saw that part of my life. I let out a breath through my nose and nodded. “Yeah, quite a few times, but it wasn’t my clan’s go-to,” I said.

“Why?”

“It’s not good business. The bandit empress didn’t like us drawing so much attention to ourselves; butchering merchants was a good way to bring the wrath of the Merchants Guild down on top of us. So we usually stuck to less bloodthirsty methods, but we didn’t let the opportunity slip by if it presented itself.”

She wasn’t happy with my answer, but I wasn’t going to feel bad about my past. I’d done some truly awful things to innocents, but that was behind me. I’d put my bandit ways to bed a long time ago.

“I wasn’t in a good place after Lonny…after I died, and I took my anger out on a lot of people who didn’t deserve it. It doesn’t make what I did right, but I can’t go back and change what happened.”

She nodded and gave my fingers a light squeeze. “I know. Even though I witnessed it for myself, I find it hard to reconcile that side of you. You’re a killer, but almost always, you have a good reason for it. But those deaths were for nothing but selfish reasons, and that’s not who you are.”

She lapsed into silence after that, letting the past weigh heavy in my heart. Damn it all to hell. Life isn’t so black and white, Eris. People have just as much capacity for evil as for good, and I’m no exception. It’s what I tried to tell you before. I’m not a good person. Not anymore.

Whatever I wanted to say faded into nothingness as the silence stretched on. It seemed she’d said her piece and was content to leave it at that, but there was no absolution; she understood and accepted it, but she couldn’t condone it.

As we rode, I kept a lookout for more traps or potential ambush sites, but thankfully we didn’t encounter any as we made our way through the many forested trails. Night came quickly, and before I knew it, it was time to make camp.

We stopped at a graveled trail that led to a small encampment. There was no one else around, but it was a frequent enough stop for travelers that someone had taken the time to set up a semi-permanent campsite.

There weren’t any tents, but there were plenty of places to set them up and a rough granite circle built for a fire pit. With holes drilled in for cast iron poles to hang a caldron or grate.

Once I pulled out the camp supplies, Eris set about getting the cookware situated while I