As I stepped into the emperor’s throne room I was oddly focused upon the face of my father standing slightly to the left of the dais. Standing behind me was my ever loyal mathematically masterful battle-cow Betsy. I yelled out “We are all Twice-Lived” and pulled out my sword. The emperor and my father started to laugh but there was no sound that came from their laughter and they did not say any words.

I started running towards them, sword drawn, but the more I ran, the more these two men seemed to recede into the distance. I ran harder, and the closer I got, the further they seemed to get. Without any other choice I flooded myself with mana, and in a burst of speed that outpaced even the surreal nature of this encounter, I managed to catch up to the fleeing people.

My father and the emperor said nothing as my sword arced backwards and I swung firmly intending to sever my father’s head. But I stopped. A blinding white explosion filled my eyesight but I did not go blind. Other strangely silent explosions repeated all around me.

And I found myself in the room with in the Xa’dar sorting room once again.

“We’re sorry to disturb your final confrontation, but unfortunately, we’ve accidentally blown up this planet too. Please prepare to be sorted again.” Said the Dragon.

I looked around, Cow Ivy, Steer Ivy, Rabbit Thistle, and Canary Corn all stepped out of the shadows to throw me into a portal to reincarnation and said “Why did you kill us, Potato? Why did you kill us, now we have no chance to become Twice-Lived like you.”

The walls started to blur and close in on me, and I awoke… …and found myself in the room at the inn that I had rented the night before, covered in sweat and shivering in the darkness.

I had been on the road for two weeks, and every night I’d had a similar dream. I was tempted to drink myself to sleep in the village inns which I stopped, but so far I had resisted the temptation. There was still a long distance that I needed to travel before I reached the Argran kingdom’s border with the Magrithiam Empire.

Instead of immediately trying to go back to sleep I read from one of the books on blood magic. As I suspected blood magic was just life magic that was extremely specialized.

I would have to compare a more readily available blood magic book with one of the one’s that I had stolen, but at least from the evidence in front of me, this culture had come up with a pretty advanced concept of DNA. The first half of one of the books I had taken went into exhaustive detail about cellular reproduction, Mitochondrial vs. Nuclear DNA.

There were however massive differences. Thee chapters were devoted to Manacondria and Manaplasts. Theorizing about how they worked. Mentioning experiments being conducted at the headquarters of the order in the capital to change these cellular structures — trying to give more or take away magic abilities. But most importantly, how to use these organelles to further define someone’s aura and track that individual.

It was engrossing reading. I had taken some biology classes in college back on Earth and was able to keep up with a lot of what had been written. The amount of terms that had been stolen directly from Earth was astounding. There was no way that two disparate cultures would simultaneously come up with the term “Golgi Apparatus.”

After a while I grew tired of reading and put the book I was reading back into my pack. I doubted I would be able to sleep. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to puzzle through what I had learned and what had gotten me to this point.

From the book on blood magic, it was clear that I couldn’t just “vanish.” One of the first spells in book detailed a way to take three drops of blood from known people with established locations. Position those individual's drops of blood on a map. And then use known locations to establish a location of a fourth drop of blood in relation to the other three. A red dot would appear corresponding to the biggest and freshest source of that blood, triangulated by the other three sources.

My blood was on file in so many places. I used it for banking. The Order of the Status had gathered it and filed it in my naming. I’d provided some at my birth. My father undoubtedly had a few drops for his private use.

No, the only way I was going to disappear is if I figured out how to change my blood right down to the cellular level, or if I found a way in these books to block people from scrying me.

The sky was rainy and overcast when I checked out of the inn. A wind blew in and carried with it the smell of petrichor. My horse was reluctant to leave the warm dry comfort of the stables, and had to be coaxed out with an apple and some sugar. I pulled my waxed cotton overcoat tighter around me, and set off down the road again.

The road was very wet, and every half hour or so the skies would open up, and the rains would fall. Sometimes the wind picked up the rain and whipped it through the air like a projectile.

My horse whinnied as it daintily stepped over a puddle. After a couple of hours of travel, I decided that I would stop at the next inn. Today would be a short day, that would be better spent sitting indoors aroud a fire.

The problem was that unlike the highway system of earth, there wasn't a convenient hotel at every offramp. There weren't even offramps. In all likelihood, unless I were very lucky, I would probably have to spend the night outside.

There was a bend in the road up ahead where the path that I was on followed a stream for a bit. The water in the stream had risen and was brown from churned up dirt and fast moving. A short way down, someone had built a bridge, which meant some sort of civilization was near by. If this area was truly wild, the road that I was following would simply meander until there was a shallow enough place for merchant wagons to ford.

Sure enough about a mile after the river, there was a little farming village with about six houses. There was even a building that was marked off with the Lantra iconography for Inn and a stable for my horse.

By now the wind and the rain and the cold were miserable. Nobody was out on the streets, and even the farmers who might have been out fertilizing their crops were indoors.

I tied my horse, that even after all this time I still hadn't named, to a hitching post in front, grabbed my bags and went inside.

The common room was bright and cheery, and there was a fire lit and casting warmth and shadows around the room. About a half dozen men and women sat around at various tables chatting about things that I couldn't overhear but I assumed had to do with the weather.

"Hello." I said to the Innkeeper. "Terrible weather out there. Glad I found you, I wasn't looking forward to sleeping under the trees. Do you have a stable for my horse?"

"Of course. I will send the girl out to take care of your animal. I take it you would like a room? And a meal."

"And something to drink, and a place to sit and get warm out of the rain."

After I handed over a few copper pieces and he handed me an oversized iron key for a room upstairs. I went upstairs and changed out my wet clothing and into something dry. I left my books and saddle bags beside the bed and then went back downstairs to get warm.

"…ain’t shit for wet. Back in '03 was wet. I remember it rained for 20 days straight, water so deep you had to wade between the houses. Most of us went up to higher ground, but old man Cham Badger Corn he says he wasn't leaving. We came back after the water's stopped. Me rowing down the main street in a boat, and there was Cham sitting on his roof in the middle of town fishing…"

There was a table that was open near the fire and so I sat there. The innkeeper brought me over a mug of beer, some small loaves of bread that had been made in the last day or so, some butter and a plate of a curried goat stew which had been the only thing on the menu.

I sat down and ate while I looked over the room. On the far wall, there was a remarkably beautiful watercolor and ink drawing of the inn. Someone had had training, and I couldn't imagine anybody in such a small town like this wasting their time on learning such frivolity when there was farming to be done.

One of the farmers came over and sat at my table when I was finishing my food.

"Stranger. Where do you hail from?"

I mentioned Larkin, which I had left three weeks ago.

"Oh. Any news? A boy from here went there for his status ceremony. Heard rumors of a necromancer." Said the farmer.

My face twisted into a look of disgust for a moment, and I was tempted not to say anything. Instead, "Er, the local Lord Inquisitor claims to have solved that. Burnt three people he claims were helping the necromancer."

"Helping a Necromancer! No matter how old I get, people will never stop amazing me how vile they can be." The farmer shook his head. "Burning was too good for them."

Then he stopped and looked at me, "Aren't you a bit young to be on the roads alone. Got a son around your age. Would never expect to see him this far from home."

"My father has me apprenticing for an officer in the army in the war against the Argran kingdom. Just making my way there."

"Alone?" he said.

"It isn't like the roads are filled with bandits," I replied. I'd been looking forward to bandits. There was a part of me that enjoyed taking out my anger at the inequities of this world with a little cathartic violence. But the way the status system and freedom points were set up, meant that there were no common bandits in the empire.

The farmer, "there might not be bandits but there are bears and wolves if you are unlucky enough to get near a dungeon, there are monsters. Plus the closer you get to the war, the more chance you will get to run into baby killing enemy soldiers."

"I can handle myself." I said, my hand moving to my sword. Then to change the subject, I pointed to the drawing of the inn that I had noticed earlier on the wall. "That is a marvelous picture. I haven't seen anything like it outside of some of the manors of the nobles."

The farmer looked over at the picture. It had been drawn and painted on parchment and then framed and mounted behind glass. All of which was extremely expensive and beyond what a small village inn could reasonably afford.

"From how I hear it, some man come through here about 3 years ago now. He stood outside the inn for three days drawing before he left. A couple of weeks later a rider came into town all fancy and on a magnificent horse. The rider is carried a bundle and went into the inn, to give the bundle to the innkeeper. When he opened it up, inside of it was that there pretty picture."

"So the man was a noble?" I said.

"Don't know that. Didn't dress like some noble. Man on the horse didn't dress like some messenger either. It sure is a pretty picture. The innkeeper hung it that day, and refuses to sell it, even though some merchants and passing nobles have offered him gold for it."

I got up from where I was sitting and walked over to the drawing. The detail was fantastic. It was a three by four-foot pen and ink drawing with a watercolor wash over-top, but the ink technique was done in cross hashing rather than as a simple contour line drawing.

My mother would have loved this piece, and I was tempted to make an offer to the innkeeper of several gold, to send it to her. The innkeeper could turn me down, but it was a remarkable drawing.

I was mentally calculating how much I could offer to overcome his resistance when I stopped and took a closer look. Hidden -- oh, so very well hidden -- in the cross-hatching in the lower right-hand corner of the drawing were the words "Find safety in the Strawberry Fields." written in English.

Going back to my table, I asked. "Did the man or the messenger say anything else? Does anybody know where they came from or where they were going. Did they leave anything behind?"

The farmer shook his head. "Nope. He didn't even talk to anybody when he was in the town except at the inn, and even here he was standoffish. Ordered food and kept to himself."

I nodded.

That night when I went to bed, I wondered where these Strawberry Fields were and what kind of safety they offered.