His mother’s shriek tore the air as his father, King Elbrech of Parwys, of the House of Abal, hurled himself from the scaffold into the rain, the wind, and the crashing waves far below.
Waylaid
YC 1189
There is no need to preface inquiry with apology, Your Excellence.We of the City are accustomed to seeming strange to those of the wider world.To answer your question—indeed, want is the driver of conflict, goading us until desire overwhelms the bulwark of moral feeling in a rain of arrows and flashing blades.Yet not allwantsarematerial.When the needs for food, water, shelter, companionship and space are satisfied, and promised satisfaction in all but the most dire of imaginable futures, the dulling of hunger’s teeth only sharpens our more abstract desires.The admiration of our peers.Status.Pleasure and honour.And those who reject the comfort in which ordinary folk find satisfaction—those ‘puzzling oddities’, as you say, which I count myself among—want, most of all, for a purpose.
Letter from Archivist Tan Semn to Hierophant Adhamha III of Goll,YC1162
Some flee from ghosts.Others, by curiosity, or ambition, or an alchemy of the two, are drawn to them.
Fola was both.
She rested her chin on rough, beer-sticky wood and peered upwards through the bowl of her glass.The flickering light of hearth fire and hanging lamps glittered in golden honeywine.The world seemed suspended in amber.A pause, however brief, in the aftermath of wasted time while she waited for another rumour.
She was staring, particularly, at a broad-shouldered, four-armed man in the far corner of the room.There were people like him in the City.Relics of the First Folk’s meddling with mortalkind.The Mortal Church had waged a campaign of extermination against them not long ago.To Fola, the man seemed a wonder, not an abomination—though this was through the lens of five glasses of surprisingly potent wine.
Frog, her bird, squawked at her from his perch on the table.Fola snarled back at him, sat up, and downed the rest of her drink.One more, maybe, and she would have the courage to cross the bar and strike up a conversation.Maybe talk the four-armed man into her bed for the night.A brief salve to her old, aching need for companionship and camaraderie.
She waved over the barboy and, once her glass was full again, tipped him with a freshly alchemised flake of gold as big as the nail on her little finger.Frog ruffled his feathers, as though annoyed to see a piece of his hard work spent on such a stupid thing as a sixth glass of wine.Fola stuck her tongue out at him, felt silly, hoped the four-armed man hadn’t caught a glimpse of her squabbling with a bird, and reached for the glass.She’d managed only a sip when a stranger far less interesting than the four-armed man slouched into the chair across from her.
‘You the one asking after ghosts?’the stranger said, with a sideways glance at Frog, who narrowed his bulbous eyes, annoyed by yet another interloper.The man was gaunt, tanned, and fair-haired, with otherwise average features—two eyes, two legs, two arms, and so on.A northern complexion, from Alberon, Galca, or Parwys, as Fola reckoned.She’d discovered that the various peoples of the world were more intermixed and further flung than her reading had suggested, but the lilt to his accent marked him for sure as a foreigner to Tarebach.
‘I am,’ Fola answered, keeping a grip on caution despite a persistent buzzing in her ears and the sloshy, syrupy feeling behind her eyes.‘Paying for them in drinks, though, and rather hoping they’d point me somewhere nearer by than the far north.’
The man smiled, showing a surprisingly hale set of teeth.‘We all want the world to be one way, but seldom do our wants and reality align, eh?Know this—though I carry them far, the rumours I carry are true.’
Fola stared at him, then shrugged and waved for the barboy, who returned with a horn of frothy, bitter-smelling ale for her new friend.She tipped again with a slightly smaller flake of gold.She could always have Frog make more, but as she understood these things—which, admittedly, was not well—it would be unwise to reveal how easily she came by her money.
The northerner sipped his ale, sighed, wiped foam from his lips, and leaned towards her.‘Do you know the kingdom of Parwys?’
‘From maps.’
The man nodded.‘Few have occasion to visit there.A small kingdom, trapped between the northern seas to the west and Galca and Alberon to the east.One that has stood long, though, and untroubled by the wars of its neighbours.It holds a great power, it is said.A weapon of the First Folk bound to the line of its kings.’
‘I’m not interested in rumours of weapons,’ Fola lied.‘That ale is in exchange forghosts.’
‘Aye, and Parwys has its fair share,’ the man went on, the lilt in his voice tickled by the glee of telling a sordid tale.‘A few years back they came, at the edges of the Greenwood first, then spreading, until no corner of the kingdom was safe from their touch.Wraiths, screaming and howling in the night, so it is said.Some catch travellers on the roads and tear them limb from limb.Others claw at the windows of noble castles, screaming shrill enough to drive cooks and kings alike mad as hatters.’
The wine was not helping Fola tamp down her natural curiosity.She had heard such stories before, she reminded herself, and as often as not they were wildly exaggerated.‘Do folk see these wraiths, or are they only voices and tales to account for missing people?’
‘Dark shadows walk the skies of Parwys,’ the man said, his voice flattened of that little tickle of glee.‘I swear it by the Old Stones.I was a teamster.Made my living driving a wagon from the farms south of the capital to the markets, until one morning I saw a man walking on the air ’round the king’s half-built tower.Only it wasn’t a man.Its body ate the light of dawn, I swear it, and when it turned its black slate of a face towards me, I turned my team around and fled the kingdom.No family left to keep me bound to that cursed place, thank the Stones.Only my own hide to care for, and after that morning my blood whispered the ghosts would come next for me.’
A chill ran down Fola’s spine.Since leaving the City of the Wise—and before, though only in an experimental capacity—she had dealt often with the undead.Rarely, if ever, did they manifest potently enough to be seen, let alone by someone who was not the direct object of their haunting.It was these powerful ghosts she sought, those she might study to discern truths about the nature of the soul itself.Only then could she return in triumph, prove her detractors wrong, and begin the world-changing work of conjuring the souls of the First Folk.More, the man’s description was no flight of fancy, called up from children’s tales or old legends.
‘I believe you,’ she said, leaning forward.‘What more can you tell me?’
‘Little more.Only fragments of other rumours.King Elbrech may be mad.The Old Stones may not speak any longer.The druids have lost their compact with the land.’He sipped his ale and waved a dismissive hand before continuing.‘I was only a teamster, mind.All this overheard only in taverns much like this one.Save the wraith at the tower.’He tapped his cheekbone.‘I saw that myself.’
Fola twisted the thick stem of her wineglass, watching the golden liquid shimmer.She missed the wine of the City—golden, like this was, but free-flowing from crystal fountains, light on the palate and pure as spring water, tasting less of sugar and more of flowers.Four years was a long time to spend away.Four years chasing rumours from Kor to Ulun.Efforts that had yielded plenty of fascinating experiences and wondrous encounters with the First Folk’s myriad leavings, plus a handful of artifacts—discoveries that any other Citizen might have returned with in triumph, but which were far from the secrets of the soul she had set out to find.
It was time to go home.Ithad beentime to go home for years now, even before her descent into and narrow escape from the horrors she had found in Ulun.
Home to what, though?A life of isolation.Of enduring constant insults and rejection.She could count her true friends in the City on one hand—on one bloody finger, if she was being truly honest.In contrast, the wider world had offered four years of adventure, and opportunities to right the occasional wrong.Bring the justice and goodness that folk in the City took for granted to places that had never known its like.Not the life she dreamed of, but at least a life with value.
Plus, the world was filled to the brim with strange and wondrous things, and you didn’t need anyone’s help or permission to go poking around.After decades stymied by the bureaucracy—and, frankly, antagonism—of the research priorities board, she enjoyed following her curiosity to the hilt wherever it led her.
Again she twisted the stem of her glass, watched the shimmer of the too-thick golden wine.Frog chirruped, fluffed out his feathers, and blinked his ridiculous, bulbous eyes.A chastisement, but for what?Self-deprecation?Thoughts of home?Or lingering too long in the wider world in pursuit of a hopeless dream?She’d have thought they would be better at communicating, given he held a fragment of her soul.But then, communication—understanding others and being understood—had always been her greatest struggle.
