Random Encounter Story

"I see." He nodded and refrained from asking difficult - or at least what he considered awkward - questions about family. To his annoyance, the question he had been wanting to ask escaped him, and Sebastian ended up concentrating on the game for a while instead.

"I don't sound like clergy, do I?" he finally asked with an amused smile.

"I guess not. I don't think I've talked to a priest here for that long."

"Good," he said and snatched the single seed from a pit with no apparent intentions to say why was a good thing.

Sylvie looked puzzled for a moment, but then turned to the game again.

The only questions she could come up with at the moment were ones she did not want to ask for various reasons.

A few turns later the game was over, and she won, albeit by a narrow margin.

"I'll need to practice if I want to beat you, it seems," the half-elf said, pointing out the obvious in a slightly playful tone as he glanced up at the sun. There was very little tension at all in his body language, nothing to suggest that he might have taken offense or begun to worry about something.

"Shall we have another game, or is it maybe time for something else?" Sebastian asked as he glanced toward the fire, making note of the firewood.

"Well, you learn more quickly than I did," Sylvie threw back, matching his tone.

She poured a couple of beads from one hand to the other and back again. Noticing his look, she said, "firewood's no problem; there's dry driftwood clustered a bit that way," and pointed downstream. "And days are still long. I wouldn't mind another game."

"Thank you. But that's because I have a lot of blank mind to fill," he replied with a smile and glanced downstream as he set beads pack into the pits. "Though to be honest, I usually learn basics well enough. It's the advanced things that elude me - I never stop to practice."

Seeing as he had lost last time, he started by picking from the first pit this time and made a thoughtful sound. "What's the religion on Eodea like, or Yrn alone?" he asked and looked up, eyes wide with curiosity. Religion was, for some reason, a topic that appealed to him right until the conversation turned to who was right and who was wrong. "If you don't mind me asking, of course."

He smiled.

"Not at all." She started with the same move, and considered for a moment.

"One thread that's common in a lot of places is a concept of two forces that make up everything... matter and spirit; body and mind. Some people spend their lives arguing about the meaning of it, and what bearing each has on people" - her tone made clear her opinion of that was not very high - "but most just figure there should be a certain balance in life."

She watched Sebastian's reaction as she went on. "Some people pleaded or bartered with spirits for help. There were also patrons. People invoked them before certain deeds, or they founded orders or organisations in their name. Say, Gawenya Mabé was the first to create - or at least complete - and spread sea charts of the waters between the islands, and in her honour a cartographer's school was founded.

"But those patrons were born as people. In Yrn and most places I've been, there were no gods as people describe them here."

Sebastian nodded, barely paying attention to the game as he watched Sylvie and listened. His eyebrows rose briefly at the mention of patrons, but he offered no other special reaction to that. Neither did the mention of having no god of any sort appear to confuse him, let alone surprise him.

He crossed his legs again and reached for his satchel between moves. "Is there a certain etiquette to follow when it comes to dealing with the spirits? Most spirits I've met are only interested in the world directly around them or have some specific goal or purpose."

Sylvie felt a slight relief this wasn't going worse. She had for quite a while avoided talking about religion to people because it had led to bad reactions in the past. But then, she maybe shouldn't have been surprised, considering Sebastian had travelled a lot.

"Yes, they are local. It depends a lot on the spirit in question." She looked through Sebastian, trying to remember. "It's very uncommon in Yrn, so I'm not that familiar with it.

"Some spirits are more like minor forces, with little in the way of a mind, and can be steered by people with a certain talent. Some spirits have a specific goal, and the aware ones may help someone who promises to help them reach it. Others, well, they will have their own reasons for dealing with people, just like people of flesh and blood."

She shrugged and smiled wryly. "Maybe some of them have been around a long while and would just get bored otherwise."

Sebastian responded by first blinking twice, faintly amused, and then by smiling. "I wouldn't rule that out at all," he said. "And I understand. I haven't really ever dealt with spirits on a regular basis. I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to deal with the spirits of my home."

He snatched seeds again and stared at them for a while, watching the light reflect off the beads while mulling over what he had just heard. "I'm not sure if I can think of anything else to ask about that particular subject," he then said. "Anything else that comes to your mind about spirits?"

After a slight pause she shook her head. "As I said, not that common in Yrn. Maybe people thought if there are really powerful malicious spirits in the old walls, it would be a bad idea trying to call any."

"Perhaps. It makes sense," Sebastian said, then paused when he realised a part of him had wanted to say 'certainly'. It was a curious thought. "That's that, then," he said, smiling a little when he realised he would have gone into the old walls despite of all that - or maybe even because of it.

Right now the stupidity of the urge hit him with full force. Was this lucidity? He hoped not. "You still don't mind questions? I know I don't, but..." he blinked at her absent-mindedly, slowly focusing his gaze.

The question amused her. "I think I'm capable of telling you if a question bothers me after you pose it. But thanks for asking."

She looked down at the board and made a move.

"Hm, if you don't mind... Is there any reason why you don't want to settle down?"

She realised it was a somewhat different class of question, but asked anyway.

Sylvie's amused response was received with a faint grin that turned into a faintly amused smile. Her move on the board did nothing to dim the smile, nor did the question.

It did cause a silence that lasted a bit too long to seem healthy. "It never compares to my memories of home," he finally said, squinting at the board. "But I don't want or need to go back there, either. Settling down in a world I wasn't born in is..."

I've tried. "I've tried," he repeated out loud. "I never stay, not even once I learn to appreciate local culture, the food, the scenery. So I don't think about it much anymore because it seems so impossible to me." It wasn't the entire truth, and he couldn't hide that he wasn't telling everything. The question may not have dimmed his smile, but answering had - though not to the point where it was completely gone. "Of course, it might be nice. But unlikely."

Don't want or need... For a moment Sylvie considered asking why, but then it occurred to her that if "home" was centuries in the past, returning may well be impossible.

She didn't want to make things worse either by prying further or jumping to the first trivial thing coming to mind, so she kept quiet.

And then he smiled. "Of course you could say this is a lot more exciting, and there's no tax collector or aspiring young landowner trying to ask me why I haven't paid them or what I'm doing in their barony, county, duchy or whatever." He made a move. Most of the time, anyway.

Then he looked up. "Why are you on the road?" He couldn't believe he was actually talking about something like this.

That gave her a slight pause, but only because she wasn't sure what he referred to.

"Right now because I had a chance to raise some money doing something I'm at least moderately good at as well as interested in. Why I, left Eodea originally..."

She rubbed her throat, uncomfortable with the memory for a moment, but shrugged the feeling off. "It was an accident, really. I told you that it's customary to travel for a while after completing schooling - as far as that's possible inside a school only, of course. I eventually came across a mage in a really backwater area working on a fascinating project. He wanted to manipulate a deserted fae gate so it would connect two points in Eodea, instead of liking it to a minor world. I didn't have much to with the process, but I was curious enough to stay around until it, well, went wrong." With an ironic smile and raised eyebrows she made a gesture that could have indicated an explosion.

There were significant points missing in that story, but it would be easy to mistake the little cues as signs she just didn't really want to talk about a failed experiment, or bringing herself into trouble.

He nodded and made no attempt to pry more about how it went wrong, but smiled at the ironic gesture appreciatively. "How long ago was that?" he finally asked carefully - in a quieter voice - but without masking his interest in the topic. He went so far as to stop his incessant fiddling with the beads (seeds) he had alreacy collected and just watched and listened, head slightly tilted.

She closed her eyes considering that, a look of calm concentration on her face. A couple of months here, a couple of months at the Cross'd Roads, and considerably longer where she'd originally been thrown to...

"It's confusing because the calendars don't match up." She opened her eyes and shrugged, frowning slightly. "About four years, I guess."

She finished her move before looking at Sebastian again, at which time she had found her smile again. All things considered, things were not so bad.

He nodded and thought back to his feelings about their chance encounter the moment he had seen her. All in all, no, things were not so bad. He had been expecting... well, everything worse. So far, Sebastian admitted to himself, this had been enjoyable and somehow enlightening.

He nabbed seeds from a pit and smiled a little at them. "What about before 'right now'? It doesn't sound like you've been staying put very much," Sebastian said and blinked at her wide-eyedly, ears perked.

"Well, back home, as it were, I was officially on the road. After being thrown elsewhere I couldn't see a way how to get back, because that manipulated door did not stay open, so besides being in the habit of moving around, there was also hoping to find someone who knew about these things. That's the world where I picked up Ayu-Asra, too, by the way."

She didn't go into the problems of finding your feet when you were in a strange place, looked different from the people there, and didn't even speak their language; he had to have been through that far more often.

"I thought I had found a way, but that led me to the Cross'd Roads instead. A nice place all in all, but I think in the long run it would have driven me insane. There seemed no way to get from there directly home, and, well, I walked out to see where I'd end up."

She tilted her head, said, "You know, maybe I'd been there too long already," and chuckled.

He grinned. Not just because it was amusing, but because survivors were another group with whom he was comfortable around. "Maybe so, maybe so. The Cross'd Roads... uh, well, establishments like that are places where you will go crazy," he chuckled, although in the back of his head rattled a memory of another similar place and a friendly face telling him off.

"Maybe," he said after a while, rubbing his head. "How do you feel about being on the road? I can't say I remember what it was like to want to go home, so I'm curious about... umh. Well, what I just said?"

She sighed. "It was more fun when I was floundering on the end of a long line." But had it been, really?

Resting an elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, she considered for a while, before continuing thoughtfully, "When I travelled Kondar - that is the continent I went to - I was in a small way a representative of my guild and homeland. Later, where those were unknown... I lost the protection the guild granted, and there was the sheer strangeness to get used to. But there is a certain freedom in being cut off completely. And there are always new things to learn and see.

"And yet..." She shifted her weight and leaned forward, gesturing, talking more quickly.

"The night sky's an example. A moonless night, here, with countless bright stars? It doesn't happen in Eodea. It's beautiful. But I also miss the sky I grew up under.

I visit places no-one from my world has seen before. But that means little if my friends, teachers and family never find out, but think me dead."

She leaned back and turned her face away from Sebastian, sighing again, sounding more exasperated than sad. This wasn't a place she had wanted to visit, but it did good telling someone. "That is, no-one I've ever heard of visited the places I've been to and came back to tell the tale."

Looking Sebastian in the eyes with a grim smile she added, "As I said at the start. I'd like it better if I knew for sure there was a way back." Another shrug, and she ended more softly, "But if I can't find one, well, I'll manage."

There was a certain anger underlying part of her explanations, but it was not directed at Sebastian.

The half-elf looked sympathetic, yet at the same time he didn't know how it felt even though he knew what it felt like to want something like that. He would have felt envy if he had not felt a hint of sadness. The survivor spirit he heard in those words was what touched him. "Thank you," he finally said quietly, feeling a little overwhelmed.

Then he made a move on the board. "I won't pretend to know how that feels, as I more or less said, but... well, I hope it'll turn out all right for you. Whether you have to manage or find your way back," he said, just as softly, and smiled and looked back up at Sylvie. "Not much of a consolation, I know," he added a little self-depreciatingly and shrugged, still smiling.

"I'll just take it as encouragement, then." She looked up from dropping beads. "Thank you."

After stretching her arms a bit she asked, "How do you get from one world into another, anyway?" She was relaxed, and just asked the question since it occurred; expecting it to hold the answer to her problem would have been silly.

Ayu-Asra finally woke up (or possibly stopped pretending to be sleeping) and stretched.

He looked up, wearing a sheepish expression. After a moment's consideration, he said, a little uncertainly: "I'm not too sure. It's never a conscious thing. There's been accidents, there's been... crossed roads and then, well, this one time I was on a world that was... a little zealous about their laws. Must not wear blue on the first day of the week, that sort of thing...

"They had a kind of gate through which they threw their unwanteds, like outsiders that broke some law without knowing it." He smiled at the memory a little, getting carried away by it for a moment. "The world behind that gate was... unnaturally bright and vibrant. Trees thrice the size of these, rodents twice the normal size... hot, humid. Even the colours were brighter. The people there liked to wear plain colours."

Pause.

"Sorry, uh, as I was saying... it's rarely a conscious choice, although there are people who have some idea of where worlds connect."

Sylvie looked around. "Well, they'd been about the size of the trees in that spirit-protected wood."

Ayu-Asra snuck up to her and rested his heads on her leg, and she scratched him absentmindedly.

"I do wonder what the people there feel about getting stuck with the zealots' unwanteds, though."

"They were the unwanteds," he said after a moment of looking at the dragon getting scratches. "They had their own world going on in there. It was a little rough and unforgiving, but so was the land. Giant predators, mainly. Lizards. The people made their armour and weapon out of their bones and leather.

"I don't think it was that strange that they were the best hosts I have ever met. The food wasn't all that bad, either."

"When the land's unforgiving, people need to stick together." It was half a question, but she continued with barely a pause.

"Sorry. I've known someone who lost family because a neighbouring country banished some thugs rather than dealing with them. It's not like those ridiculous laws you mentioned. Just a bit of a sore point."