Dodoreimei watched as Aleph and her elder appraised the field cooking tools made available to them. It was not very much different from the kit that he and the Righteous Gallants of Lower Middle Sky Trackers had used and honed skill in for generations.

There were nuances and differences though. Things provided that were best fitted only to Grand Novices like himself and even a few he recognized as instruments of Least Apprentices which he might yet never attain sufficient rank to be taught.

Minor secrets just barely on his personal horizon of enlightenment.

Under duress and great need he could delve into them. But it would be at the cost of a later trial of the Station of Apprenticeship.

Other guilds, orders and marches of the Middle Sky he knew had harsher trials bestowed for such transgressions. The Middlemost Sky Trackers of Turmoiled Knights especially were public and brutal to those that had reached beyond their own enlightenment to the ways of Chivalry, Honor and Wayfinding.

With so many Proper masters of so many paths attending there would be no call for him to rise above his station.

On that recognition Dodoreimei banished the contemplations on mysteries beyond him.

His concern and assignment, his duty as his station demanded and his rank delegated was the Guests.

Aleph and Omega.

And Squidgie their Disciple?

Their names even with honorifics as known were far too short for their standing. It was impossible to not memorize them almost in passing. To be named something so short, literally simple numbers for three of them!

He briefly considered if perhaps it was an ordering of age. But quickly admonished himself the errantry.

Reciting the focus and the way of The Righteous Gallants and the unvoiced tenants.

The Eldest Hospitilator had decreed that there would be no honor lost to any for this transgression and impropriety.

That it would be acknowledged that the guests while strange and unknown were also yet safe to call completely.

Dodoreimei observed and considered the nature of his charges, his guests and if necessary the treasures which he would spend his life to protect.

His mind stilled and he reflected while internally reciting the service tenants of his path.

He was Grand Novice, a rank of great acclaim to be sure, but while he was far above the common laborers who could be taught by even himself in their dozens days after their proper coats grew in so was he miniscule and irrelevant against the enlightenment of even the least of Apprentice.

The Honorable and Grandest Deep knowers of the Eldest Council had decried each guest had a life worth above Intermediate Master.

An Intermediate Master!

Against such esteem and value the future of the entirety of the Righteous Gallants in all their thousands of Novices and the council of five leading Disciples was a fair price to pay if it was Necessary to secure the guests’ survival.

So given such an honorable task Dodoreimei was observant. Watching and contemplating every nuance of the charged treasure he was entrusted with.

As if he was trying to divine the passage of a particularly fearsome prize for one of the hunters. It was his service and path now to know these beings as it was his service to find the ways.

And while he was only a Novice he thought he could see a gleaming of the value placed on the guests.

She, who was named Omega, looked at Squidgie with an expression he had to suppress as reading too deeply. It was not the glance of familiarity he wanted to see. Dedicating all of one’s vision to assure a sense of safety and trust.

It was a sign of suspicion. But if he recalled the primer imparted to him a familiar one. Gentle, no sign of betrayal or danger there. Or so his training at that touch of the Eldest Hospitilator assured.

Squidgie for her part practically vibrated with an excitement that was at least thankfully universal. Like a child.

They were oriented in a sensible manner for promising commoners or Least novices. Their feet facing opposite, giving each of them the least occlusion look past one another. It was wasted by the mistake of not actually looking. But that was hardly an issue so far from the Lower Middle Sky.

But it spoke to a familiarity between their path and his own.

If they were newly enlightened commoners among the Righteous Gallants he might even see to their training himself.

“So it’s a pressure cooker?”

The tones were foreign animal call noises, but there was just a hint of the music of proper air-speech to it. And again the Eldest Hospitilator had trained him to know.

There was a questioning query to verify.

Uncertainty of truth.

This interaction flipped the former impression into a confused spin. To a Commoner Ignorance such as this would be considered the place of the lower ranked, the beseeching of student for teacher. Child to adult. Commoner to Novice.

His own time as a Commoner was full of punctuations of sharp terrifying ignorance. Seeking out the wisdom and traditions when he could remember them and their application to a situation.

Fleeing to his Elders and Betters when he could not.

But he had been honed and when he was deemed ready he was enlightened into the ranks of the Novices among The Righteous Gallants.

The ways of Commoners were for the ignorant. The unready and the undisciplined.

For those unenlightened their labors would be as the Novices and above dictated and trained them. Their lives would be short, secure and unburdened by responsibility except to their better will.

To a Commoner (assuming one were bafflingly allowed to entertain thinking like a Novice did, and not immediately executed for the heresy) that Omega had shown ignorance would be considered dishonor and losing of esteem. A failure and embarrassment.

But to the Novice the ability to admit ignorance, to ask for enlightenment and recognize the edges of one’s own understanding were one of the first secrets.

After all one had to know one's ignorance in order to request reports, send out scouting missions and properly appraise the lay of the middle sky among the Trackers.

Dodoreimei knew it was the same among the other paths. It was said by those his better and passed on in his rites that it was so.

Omega turned her attention to the topic of discussion, it was a cooker, one well suited to use on patrol, capable of treating and cooking many dishes that they prepared of the wild game and harvests of the Lower Middle Sky and beyond.

The way of its making was not part of his path. A working of the bone-wood of trees and the purified metals of many manners of beasts were spoken of. He knew in his hands the heat and shaping of each of their parts in a field dressing manner needed for maintenance.

Alone and isolated one of the Righteous Gallants as he could find, process, work and apply all that was needed to attend to a litany of seventy-three breaks, abrasions or faults that might occur in the field cooker. And he knew what lesser crafts could partially substitute for its loss.

The names of the cooker were many, one for each order and ranking towards the secrets of its working.

He did not know the truest and deepest name for it. Which would hold the inspiration and workings of its deepest make.

And yet Omega had named it, named it with a familiarity and consideration that spoke to at least an Apprenticeship by his reckoning. And she had done so with a name of general purpose and abstraction.

In the open air speech of hers which Dodoreimei now shared with her.

He turned his attention briefly to the cooker and felt the need for his litanies rise up. There was a shame there and he admonished and recited till his focus was clear.

He was high and grand as a Novice, but he was not yet to be Apprentice. He might never live to pull that yoke.

And then his attention was brought to another of his charges. In many ways Aleph was far more problematic than Omega. There was a sternness and a rigidity that put her place firmly in one of a Disciple for the blue hued of the guests.

Likewise was the dealings with Squidgie clear. One of at most an apprentice, probably closer to a Novice herself.

But Aleph?

Aleph was young, it was obvious both from the training of the Hospitilator and simply watching. From how she spoke to the others.

She was young and that made her all the more disquieting.

Where Omega might admit ignorance and in it show a sign of a deep wisdom and secret knowledge that Dodoreimei could appreciate and recognize as he did in his superiors.

Aleph vacillates wildly and willfully. From blatant ignorance and subservience to the others or even himself into sudden cutting dangerously potent clawing.

Digging.

Dragging at the nature of things. It scratched his own baser urges in that way the Least Masters sometimes inspired.

When there was need for Reimeidoe and Domeirei had attended and trained the Experts of The Righteous Gallants in the farsight. To be later bestowed and filtered down to the highest Novices such as Dodoreimei.

Aleph looked at the world and said things as they did. Even at a distance the least masters had spurred him to such a vile scratching at his own tenants he had required a corrective session with his superiors.

Even the memory brought on a reflexive recitation to ground, clear and correct his wandering musings.

Faladolalafei had been the Apprentice overseeing his correction, and where the strikes to correct his posture and breathing had been strong. From the worst, he still had scars.

The greater lash though had been the terror of his Temptation.

The figure was un-named. Of a path, order or clan he did not know.

It was possible it was a commoner who had been trained to speak what was said and then to be executed after. He did not know for he had never seen them since.

The Temptation had spoken in the open air with the very questions he had itched to pry into. They had mused on meandering conclusions from that, had ferreted and dug and hollowed at his foundations. At the tenants that had stood firm even from his first words and the solidity of his rites as a Commoner.

Hauntingly prying at even the resilience of his Novice rites. Questioning everything.

He had buckled to his shame to some of that.

But Faladolalafei had seen in him reason to spare, tend and correct him. If nothing else, the future luck implied by such a great misfortune. He thanked in his current recitation that he had buckled and failed then.

So that the momentum of luck could carry him past that ruin.

And here and now it had given him a constitution of character to remember his rites and focus them against the challenge of the conundrum that was Aleph.

She was named first.

One.

He did not muse on why.

But he observed and considered the aberration of her, as she prodded and poked and voiced ignorance and uncertainty about the nature of the field dressing kit that was made available.

It was a familiar sort of kit to him. The kind kept in every creche even commoners well versed in its care and even make for how they would know how to tend their children if injured without at least traditional rites in this.

There were extensions, necessary tools for sealing and care of wounds that were beyond the remit to waste on lives as meagre as commoners.

Arts and crafts of healing on display that Dodoreimei knew by the tenets of his place as a novice were far too esteemed to be spared for his life.

He did not know their full care and working, only the application and correct use of them in a mere thirteen injuries that had only recently been trained into his hands and eyes.

Especially ones that could apply to ape-beasts of the kind that Aleph was.

But though the pultices could be used sparsely by him he was bereft of the secret to restore them. His hands were to be used for a task with these instruments as a last resort. After his work he would be unable to prepare to use those tinctures and tools for a second use.

One of the apprentices brought by another master were the expected executors of any medicine required by the guests.

But just in case even a Novice could suffice.

“So what’s this bit do?”

Thankfully the question broached was one he could give to the bizarre and ignorant pseudo-master before him.

“If your flesh is punctured such that either or both of your lungs begin to fill with fluid I am to spear it into the artery of your neck here...”

He gestured but did not touch her, she had shown skittishness to such contact. It was something he was having to grow to act on.

“In such a case it will sustain your life and blood as we understand it.”

It was a paltry answer, bereft of any secrets. But the conundrum smiled and nodded, eyes glittering with thoughts and intentions that made Dodoreimei shiver with the volume of his inner reciting of the tenants.

“Oh Cool!”

He tried not to think too hard on the attempt at screeching open the secret of the thing that assaulted him afterwards.