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Jero Khan sat cross-legged on the floor, squinting as he inspected the crystal, the dim light of an oil lamp flickering in the shifting dust. After a while of attempted concentration, Jero scoffed and tossed the palm-sized artifact back into his pack, getting up to stretch his legs and weary brain.
The groans of injured warriors and the slow, methodical shifting of burlap on stone rumbled through the mostly-empty storeroom- one that a Sar merchant had let them shore up in after seeing their injuries to the Sons of Ra’luth the day earlier. Angean and most of the other knights had left to send off the slain members of their crew in the dusting pool- a sand-filled mausoleum the Zabifolk use to inter their dead. The only people who were left now were two injured crew members, Valakir, and the mousy, bald man Jero had learned was Han. The latter was sitting on a sack of dried desert flowers and holding the hand of a teenager, who was feverishly dreaming from the medicine and bolt wound in his shoulder. Jero walked over, sitting beside the bald knight.
“Trouble with the Commandment?” Han asked, his small eyes staying locked observantly on his charge’s pale hand.
Jero nodded grimly. “Unfortunately.” He said, massaging his aching neck. “It seems the Cleric truly is the only one who can read it. The crystal is bound- Trova salt and who knows what else mixed in there. Sometimes it hurts just to carry.”
“Sounds rough, buddy.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t understand- not that I’d want you to. Artifice is hell to learn, and worse to practice.” Jero shrugged. “Good of you to stick behind, Han. I’m sure he appreciates having somebody around.” The golden-haired artificer nodded to the wounded crusader beside them.
Han blinked rapidly, and turned his head away from Jero as he sniffed an emotion back up into his head. “No, you got it wrong, pretty boy. I’m just a coward. I’d never seen-” He sniffed again, choking on a memory. “I’d never seen fighting like that. Back on the ship. Magic. Monsters. And so, so many arrows. I still hear them ringing.”
Jero reached out, clasping his hands over Han’s white-knuckled fist on his knee. The artificer, though easily ten years younger than Han, waited patiently as the bald torman broke and sobbed. It was a long time before he was composed enough to speak again. “We’re bad people, Khan, I know.” Han’s voice was hoarse and quiet. “I’ve killed before. A kid, ‘bout his age. Hadn’t even entered a caste yet.” He nodded at the injured knight beside him. “This is some kind of punishment, I know. But… but I don’t want to kill again, Khan. I couldn’t fire that bow back. What if that’s why Killik here got shot? Or why we’re burying half a dozen of our company in this place?”
“You won’t get anywhere with those questions.” Jero said. “And if you can’t fight, we won’t ask you to. But you can still help, Han.” He tapped the satchel where his Commandment was stowed. “Once we unravel this and find our divine objective, it will save lives. It won’t forgive what you did or didn’t do, but it’s a bit of hope for the future. We just have to wait for when I can unseal the thing.”
Han took the words of the artificer slowly. He let out a held breath. “Alright.”
Valakir gingerly stepped over the unconscious tormen, to Han and Jero. Kneeling, the medic’s exhaustion showed on his sunburnt face. “Han,” he spoke as he routinely checked on Killik’s injuries, “if you’re going to help, I could use an assistant.” The older torman gestured to his wooden case of medical supplies. “Go out and stock up on two medicines- red scythe extract and orobel shoots. First for disinfection, and the second for sand flea inoculation.”
To the medic, Han’s agreement to apprentice under him wasn’t even in question. The bald torman’s lips curled into something of a smile. “Thanks, Val.” Han almost spoke to himself.
Valakir’s ruddy brown hair moved like a static block as he turned to glare at Jero. “And, don’t think I’m not seeing you procrastinating on your job, sacriman.” His broad arm gestured out of the barred doors to the warehouse. “You are our only adventurer. Go and experience the city, if you are to actually serve us.”
Jero sighed, knowing full-well the torman was right. He stood, affixing his quill to his chest. “Alright, alright.” His eyes flicked to Han. “Coming with?”
While Jero knew little about the city, he did know that Eastport Row- the archipelago of ports, blocky cisterns, and shipyards that their warehouse was situated in- was hardly the place for a market. Instead, he and Han turned north, following the winding boardwalk of the port to an old, flagstone street interspersed with patches of red and gray cobblestones. Like most of the city, the warehouses were blocks of bleached white and yellow sandstone, with rusty iron frames and doors. Burlap canvases stretched between the roofs of the warehouses, casting intermittent shade on the street, and bright purple flowers grew from the short cactus hedges dotting the sidewalks. A midday rush of flat-faced desert horses and wagon-carrying pack lizards clogged the center of the road, forcing walkers like Jero and Han to take to the sidewalks.
They drew attention as they walked down the street. Jero’s quill- his adventuring Signifier- always did so as part of its magic, but it was the Neists’ clothes and mannerisms that gathered the most gawkers. Most of the folk around wore scant clothes- skirts of thin cloth and leather sandals- or were completely covered in yellow-ish wrappings from head to toe. Jero’s shirt was a thick, white brocade, and silk accents lining the coat he held over one shoulder, while Han wore an etched, leather skirt over gray pants and a sleeveless shirt. They struggled through the desert’s midday heat.
The street slowly turned from warehouses to shopfronts and apartments. Murals and ruined walls of the city that Dra’angel was built on discolored the bright washes of white and yellow, and stalls selling food and trinkets began to pop up in the shade of the street. A massive tower rose from the west, with purple and blue banners draped from its luxurious, glass windows. Markets stuffed themselves in between cook shops and in the squares between residences.
Jero’s walking slowed as he drank in the sights. His adventurer’s magic stored the experiences somewhere deep in his mind that wasn’t quite his memory- a place where nostalgic scents and campfire songs go to slumber. He felt the sandpaper grit of his knee scraping against the stone as a kid fell down in front of the small, Idraka schoolhouse. He tasted the bittersweet tea on the lips of a Zandai man in an open cafe. He felt the practiced, timeless flow of artistic passion through the mind of a woman playing a large zither on the street. Jero drank in their experiences. He hated it.
An adventurer could never experience the world with a carefree heart, like Han did beside him. Instead, Jero heard the sound of laughter and his body stored it in some place to be exploited later. He had always felt it had a touch of voyeurism to it.
Still, he had a job to do, and continued to passively absorb the identities of people in Dra’angel while Han asked after Valakir’s extracts in the markets. His Neist accent earned him quite the price bump- though he and the rest of the group had diligently learned Dunespeech during their journey across the ocean, his slow conversation still marked him as an outsider. Soon, he had the yellow, straw-like strands of orobol root stashed in a jute bundle, but the red scythe extract was nowhere to be found. It was nearly an hour of searching before a merchant even knew where to point them.
“You’ll want the Divers.” The herbalist flashed her red, pointed teeth- marking her as a local fangling- as she shuffled herbs into small pouches behind her scrap-iron stall. “They live in a walled-off enclave, south of Tanner’s Bend, practicing artifice and alchemy and whatnot.”
“Divers?” Jero snapped out of his adventurer’s haze at their mention. “There’s a colony here?”
The woman nodded, her coiffed, white hair bobbing like seafoam. “Yes, yes. Refugees, as I hear it.” She explained. “They come from down south, like you two, from those dreamstruck islands down there- the Coral Pact. They’re good for business, despite their looks.”
“What do you mean, refugees?” Han asked, leaning against the stall to let a group of soldiers pass through the side-alley they’d found themselves in. “The Coral Pact usually takes in refugees, instead of turning them out.”
“Oh, I don’t keep up much with foreign affairs.” The woman brushed their concerns aside. “The lass that comes by to deliver for them- a very nice islander girl- she said something about a pirate-witch attacking the island, not a decade ago. About when the Divers settled.” She pointed down the narrow, shaded streets, toward the bay that nestled itself between the walled-off districts of the city. “Keep heading west, and you’ll find a number of ferries across the Angel’s Bay. They can take you to Tanner’s Bend.”
The ferry was a small operation- a push boat headed up by two fangling women, carrying a half-dozen people at a time. They slowly moved across the wine-colored water that lapped against the raised docks of the Angel’s Bay, crawling between larger trade vessels and great islander canoes.
Jero and Han sat with a few other travelers- a shriveled husk of a paddyfolk elder and two islander women on their honeymoon. None talked to the Neists- especially not when they could feel Jero’s golden quill pulsing with a Signifier’s magic. The women at least veiled their whispered suspicion in Zanrush- though Jero knew the tongue, it was more considerate than the open hostility he’d met in other Zandai islands.
Instead, the artificer looked over the districts of the walled city that passed them by. Towers- ancient and new- rose from behind the white buildings at the docks. Old towers ran great banners of faded, imperial purple, while the newer constructions were painted in blue and gold, with wide balconies and glowing witchlights glinting in their glass windows. Beneath the towers, squat, utilitarian slabs of metal and sandstone created the warehouses and factories that acted as the city’s foundation- quite literally, in some places, as the streets and bazaars of the old city ran up and over old warehouses.
Then, as they crested the north of the bay, the city abruptly shifted away from the cramped chaos of the eastern districts. Statues, fountains, and even a single rather sad gum tree decorated the white flagstones around a cylindrical, red castle. Scarlet, viscous liquid poured from three minarets surrounding its keep, flowing into honeycomb channels across its courtyard, where workers stepped across and tended to it on stilts. Jero had heard of them- the city’s Red House, center of the fanglings’ political assemblies and the source of the scarlet, tooth-eroding water that gives them their name. Next to it, a complex of pointed domes surrounded by story-tall ziggurats signified the complex of the Idraka temples, where the bodies of the shattered gods of the desert were held. Jero felt a distinct block to his adventurer’s gaze- the temples were warded from adventurers who would Experience them. It was like staring at a void. He looked away.
The ferrymen let them off on the western dock, where the air was choked by fumes from the many mills and the fishermen dragging in their catches. A few coins passed hands, and the two Neists were on their way without so much as a word.
Jero felt a chill run across his spine, with a prickling pain spidering through his lower back. He placed a hand on Han’s shoulder to stop- perhaps it was the experience of one of the older fishermen?
“I feel that, too.” Han spoke quietly. “It’s like a phantom pain. I’d felt it before- when I crossed one of those Okku cultists back home.” His hand was on his hip, but found nothing. Their swords had been confiscated while in the city. “What’s going on?”
The feeling intensified- and it wasn’t just Han and Jero who felt it then. Almost everyone stopped in their tracks- some gasping in the sudden pain. Then, people panicked. The Dunespeech they shouted was too fast, too frantic. The factories opened up their doors, masked men helping bystanders get inside. The sun’s light felt too dim, like a non-existent cloud had covered it. Something like snow or dust clouds fell from the sky, vanishing on the ground. A gong sounded from the minarets of the Red House.
With the third wave of debilitating pain, an announcement rang over the great horns of the Red House- “the Dragon’s shadow falls on our city! Find shelter immediately!”
Jero and Han had little time to think between the waves of stunning pain and debilitation, but they remember the group of burly workers grabbing them, pulling them into the safety of their factory.