Orea is gone. Even the roads leading there, the people who lived there, they are all gone. Just… gone.

Lost to the icy winds.

- Report on the state of Orea after the appearance of the Wall of Winter.

Buying a cloak was supposed to be a quick and easy endeavour, especially given the fact that I now had somewhere in the realm of thirty times my life savings to spend as I wished. Instead, the moment I picked out a suitably dark coloured green cloak, Jevi accosted me.

“No! I refuse!” She ripped the cloak out of my hands and hurt my fingers in the process. “You can’t walk around dressed like that and then put that dull thing on top!”

The hand that hurt less massaged my forehead. “Jevi. I’m buying the cloak to blend in.” And my garb wasn’t that good anyway. My shirt was long sleeved and buttoned, coloured a deep blue that was almost green. The pants were a dark maroon, and the bloodstains from the rats weren’t very visible between the dark colour and the mud.

They were clearly more expensive than what most of the people I’d passed here were wearing, but my old clothes had been far more striking than this set.

“Yeah, and you can do that. With, uh…” She unceremoniously threw the cloak I wanted to buy under another rack of clothes and picked out a bright orange cloak with yellow and red trim. “This one!” She pressed the cloak against my front.

“Ah yes, that suits you.” The shop’s tailor commented from where he was leaning on the counter.

“I didn’t ask.” I shot back, then swiped the cloak from Jevi. She let me take it, so I immediately threw it where the last one went. “And that will make me stand out like a bonfire in the night. I. Refuse.”

The look Jevi gave me reminded me of the one time I accidentally ripped a fairy’s wings off. That incident turned out fine since there was a cleric nearby to regenerate them, and the relevant memory was when the fairy was trying to get me to say sorry even though she had been the one to provoke me. But that’s neither here nor there. The thing was, Jevi was much less cute and charming. My hand started curling around the handle of my dagger. Why did I ever let this person stay close to me?

“If I may, Jevi, Amber.” The tailor intervened before I could get stabby. “There is a wide variety of cloaks we have at our disposal. So many, in fact, that not all of them are on display. If it suits you, I can call my assistant, and together we can pick out a cloak for each of you that strikes a balance between fashion and discretion.”

I squinted suspiciously at the tailor. There was something about him…

“And what guarantee do we have that you won’t shortchange us?” Jevi demanded.

“My craftsman’s honour.” The tailor bowed lightly with a hand over his heart. “And that of my assistant. We take our work very seriously. Nothing tugs at my heartstrings more than seeing my designs put to proper and fashionable use. My assistant, even more so.”

“I’ll take that green one.” I said, pointing at where it ended up.

“Unfortunately, it seems to have been lost amidst the clutter.” The tailor responded genially without even looking. “I’m afraid you’ll have to pick another.”

“I like you.” Jevi declared, though she didn’t smile. “Will you make sure my friend looks good?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to look good.” I stated, and got subsequently ignored.

Jevi nodded in approval at the tailor. “Then get your assistant. You’ll be helping Amber.”

“One moment.” The tailor vanished into the back of the shop.

“Jevi.” I said the moment we were alone. “The more you act like this, the closer I get to stabbing you.”

“Like how you stabbed Ratmaker?” Jevi shot back, unimpressed. “I’ll take my chances.”

My eyes narrowed, and I would’ve jabbed back if two men hadn’t joined us. The tailor was a middle aged man that was sharply dressed in a way that made him fade into the background. His assistant on the other hand, looked as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of some intensive work, which he probably had been. The assistant was younger than the tailor, and had frazzled hair, as well as a number of bandages on his fingers, presumably from clumsiness and or inexpertise.

The tailor cleared his throat. “Assistant, we will be helping these young ladies pick out fashionably discrete cloaks. You will be helping the young caster. See if you can’t get the sorceress to clean up before trying anything on.”

The assistant nodded, and was facing Jevi, but he was eyeing me with… fear? “Of course, master. Is…”

The tailor chuckled. “No. She’s not here.”

Jevi gave me a curious look, but I certainly didn’t have any explanations.

The assistant nodded repeatedly, and approached Jevi, finally sparing the attention to look her up and down. His eyebrows creased as his posture relaxed, and he tapped a bandaged finger to his chin in thought. “I see. This is a tough one. Can’t underdo it...” He glanced around. “Nothing here…”

The tailor’s assistant turned and returned to the back of the store, still muttering.

“Best follow him.” The tailor told Jevi with a hint of awe in his voice. “I’ve never seen him get into a fugue so quickly. He will have questions.” He cautioned as Jevi walked awkwardly after the assistant.

Then he turned back to me with a devilish grin.

“So-” He began.

“How did you know my name?” I demanded. It had taken a little while for the fact that he called me by name to come back around as suspicious. Then there was the way he told his assistant what we wanted.

“You introduced yourself.”

I searched his yes for signs of deceit, but found nothing but honesty and amusement. This man was a good liar. Though I suppose that came with any jobs that involved selling things. “Is that so?”

“You were in something of a state, but no matter. I did love this cloak because it was representative of your name.” Somehow, the gross orange cloak had appeared in his hands and he was smoothing it out. “Amber.” He said fondly.

“I still refuse that cloak.” I stated.

“Of course.” In a flash, the cloak was hung up and the tailor was sorting through the racks further down. “Do you have any requests? Beyond discrete, of course. And I will not allow one such as yourself to go without fashion.”

“Then what do my requests matter?” I demanded. “You basically said you won’t listen to me just there.”

“Young lady, did you mother not teach you the wonder of fashion?” The tailor picked out a cloak that was even more grossly orange than the last, glanced at my disgusted expression, and put it back.

“She was a seamstress. I never had to worry about that.”

“I imagine she was a very good one.”

I thought about it and couldn’t argue. Come to think of it, whenever she completed an item someone showed up to buy it within the hour. I just never thought about it until now. “She was.”

“And is what you are wearing a product of her work?” The tailor asked.

“No.”

He gave me a bemused look. “I thought not. The style…” He frowned. “So blue and dark. Don’t you want to break out of it at all? You are named Amber, after all. Not Sapphire, Lapis, Diamond, or any of the countless variations.”

That actually gave me an idea. “What’s a cloak you’d give an Emer?” My gaze wandered back to the rack where things got lost.

“Not that, if that’s what you’re asking.” The tailor shook his head slightly, then paused. “Well, it depends on the coin available, and if they explicitly ask for subpar work. Which you cannot, in this exchange.” He cut in before I could ask for a shitty cloak. “But for an Emer…” He pulled out a hideously bright green cloak. It hurt my eyes to even look at it. “Too much?”

“What do you think?”

The tailor hummed. Then he nodded and put the cloak back, “Too much. This way.” He led me around to the other side of the racks where a new array of cloaks greeted us. Had they been there before? I looked around at where I remembered other kinds of clothes, but for the life of me, all I saw was cloaks. “Tell me about this Emer. What does she like? What does she hate? What drives her to get up in the morning?”

I shrugged. “Emer doesn’t exist.”

“Now, this tailor might be a little presumptuous in saying this, but please, allow yourself to humour me.” He paused to gesture at me. “You are Amber, are you not? Dressed as you are, going about as you have been. But you want to put a layer between yourself and the world. As to why, it’s not for me to say, only to provide.” He found a deep green cloak with a gold design across the split in front and held it up against me. “Hm. No resonance. You’d hate it.” The cloak went back, which was a shame because I liked the colour, if only a bit more than the last one.

Which wasn’t saying much because he was right and I did hate it.

The tailor continued. “But if you want a buffer in the form of one of my cloaks, I’ll ask you this. Why stop there?”

“Does everyone talk in circles in Breach?” I asked bluntly, unimpressed.

The tailor chuckled. “Forgive me, it’s a marketing tactic.” He didn’t look very contrite. “You have asked me to pick out a cloak for ‘Emer’. Does Emer have a purpose? What does she do? She doesn’t exist, as you have stated, at least physically. Why not make her exist in some limited fashion? If only to serve you and your purposes?”

I sighed, getting tired with how everyone was stringing me along. “What are you saying?”

“Consider that you are currently Amber. But when you put on a cloak…” He whipped out a sea green cloak and had it pulled around my shoulders in a flash. “You become Emer.”

“You could’ve just said, ‘As an alias’.” I deadpanned.

“Oh, I’m just a tailor. I’m not terribly educated, you see.” He pulled the cloak off me and put it back, which was a shame because sea colours were familiar, and that had therefore been the first cloak I’d been willing to compromise on. “But please, tell me about Emer as an alias.”

I considered how to respond, then just addressed his questions in the order he asked them. “Uh. She didn't really have a purpose beyond knowing some things she refuses to stand for. Emer likes practicing swordcraft, and enjoys training for duels even if that pales in comparison to how much she enjoys fighting them. She hates people who only look at her for what she can provide at home and despises the idea of being trapped in one place. As for what drives her to get up in the morning… I need to think on that.”

The tailor gave me a genuine smile and dropped the emerald cloak he was inspecting. “That is more than enough. Come, the cloak I have in mind is in storage, and may need to be refitted.”

After hesitating for a moment, I followed the tailor into the back of the store and was immediately assailed by a sense of claustrophobia. Not only were there more racks of clothes, ranging from socks to headdresses and everything in between packed twice as tightly as the front of the store, there were shelves of unused fabrics, drawers containing who knew what, and even a stack of tomes for some reason. The tailor moved through it with ease, but I had to pick out every step. Jevi and the assistant were nowhere to be seen.

“This way.” The tailor called out when I lost him in the maze of clothes. It was no wonder the assistant had bandaged fingers if we worked in this mess.

When I finally caught up to him, the tailor was extracting an emerald green piece of fabric from a hanger. I wasn’t so caught up in the trappings of fabric as to gasp when I saw a nice looking cloak, but I got the distinct feeling that someone who was so inclined would’ve emptied their lungs in my shoes, and then been in danger of fainting.

The cloak was a sharp green mostly, but was broken up by long, triangular sections coloured a deeper green that reminded me of the grassfields around Veliki. The sections were separated by a thin stretch of silvery fabric, but the colour didn’t catch the light. Instead it almost made the colours blend together and let my eyes wander up and down the cloak uninhibited where others would have drawn the eye. That same colour was used to trim the edges of the cloak, but that didn’t stop me from noticing the characters flowing up and down the back of the garment along the edges of every section.

“As you have likely noticed, this cloak’s design is one of elven inspiration.” The tailor began his explanation after a few seconds. “We had some elven characters come through a few years ago, and I was tasked with repairing a few items of clothing for a young looking elven woman.” He chuckled, and I knew why. All elves looked young.

I didn’t laugh though. That was the very definition of low hanging fruit.

The tailor continued, a little disappointed that I hadn’t laughed. “I didn’t have the pleasure of working on her cloak, which put this one to shame, but I did draw inspiration from it. That and the manner in which she cut down thirteen bounty hunters in the thoroughfare right outside the shop. For a prideful swordswoman named Emer, Emervit, or Ku T'Emer, I cannot think of a better cloak.”

“What do these say?” I asked, running a hand down the line of repeating characters.

“Nothing special. One of her shirts had these words tracing the collar, which was an interesting challenge to work on, but it urged me to ask for a translation. She smiled shyly and told me it meant ‘Blade of the Forest’.”

I smirked, but not at the translation. “That doesn’t sound like ‘nothing special’ to me.”

“Perhaps if you meet an elf in the future you can ask for a translation yourself. But to do that, you’ll have to buy the cloak.”

I looked at the elven characters once more, noting that the cloak had a hood as well, which I’d missed in the initial inspection. The words didn’t go over the hood, but there was another line of elven characters circling where it connected to the cloak, starting and ending at the clasps. No matter how I looked at them, the words said ‘I am unimportant’ over and over again like an unmotivational mantra. It seemed the elf that had inspired this cloak was something of a liar.

But I could appreciate that kind of misdirection.

“It’s perfect.”

\V/

“Amber!” Jevi gasped. “I thought you accepted that you were Rubes, not Emer!”

“What?” I looked over and saw Jevi in an emerald and black cloak that hung closely to her body with a design that hinted at curves beneath. It was discretely fashionable if you squinted at the discrete part. The tailor’s assistant was just behind her, and it looked like he was hiding from something. “No, you never said anything of the sort.”

“It was implied!”

I raised my eyebrows in false surprise, then dropped a gold onto the counter in front of the tailor. “Well, I just implied that this is the cloak I’m buying. It’s adequately fashionable, is it not? I have this guy’s word that it is. So uh… Deal with it.”

Jevi’s face scrunched in anger, then she turned, grabbed the assistant, and dragged him back to the recesses of the shop. “Find me something like this in red!” Echoed through the building shortly after.

I turned back to the tailor. “So how much is this actually going to cost me?”

The tailor chuckled, and I looked down to find the gold was already gone. “Given that this is a backwater town by definition, I couldn’t dare charge the prices you’d see in Saltless Sanctuary or Juvel. The most I could charge for a mastercraft such as your new cloak would be seven silvers. However, as you and your friend made use of our consulting services, I must charge an additional three.”

“So a gold.” I said dryly. “How perfect.”

“I wouldn’t dream of overcharging you.” He said with a glint in the eye that told otherwise. We lapsed into quiet after that, not having anything more to say.

“I must ask,” The tailor said after another yell of Jevi’s made it through the wall. “How is Shoe?”

I arched an eyebrow his way.

He coughed purposefully. “If you don’t know who I’m talking about, no matter. There’s a good chance you don’t. Apologies. I’m not certain why I asked.”

“No, it’s fine.” I said, then kicked a foot up onto the counter. I had two options for shoes when I left Veliki, and right now I was glad that I chose the less comfortable, more familiar set made by the mentioned nizkaling. “See for yourself.”

The tailor cast an eye over my boot, then repositioned to inspect the sole. His expression was unreadable. “I see, thank you.”

I put the foot down. “That explains why you knew me. I didn’t realise that guy was sending messages to the outside world.”

“Well, not quite.” The tailor said, clearly tiptoeing around something. “He hasn’t been in direct contact since he departed twenty years ago.”

“A shame. What’s your relation?”

A shimmer ran across the tailor revealing deep red skin, along with a set of horns that I couldn’t quite see how he’d navigated the back room with. Experience, it must be.

“Ah. Nizkaling.” I frowned. “Does that mean your name-”

“It’s not Cloak, if that’s what you’re asking.” The tailor cut me off, suddenly embarrassed. His appearance was back to what it used to be, but it was like I was talking to an entirely different person. “No one understands how we do names.” He muttered.

“One of my, friends, is a nizkaling.” I announced, pausing because I wasn’t sure if we were actually friends. “His name is Casien though. Seems normal enough to me. And I only know Shoe because he kidnapped me once to make these boots.”

The tailor gave an embarrassed smile and covered his face. “Ooh, Shoe. He really hasn’t changed.” Then he looked back to me. “The names we take are our calling. Sometimes our aspiration. Shoe was always… taken by his name. It’s not something I can really explain to someone that doesn’t feel a similar pull. Your friend Casien will have his own pull, but wouldn’t have found it if he’s having you call him that.”

“He is fourteen.” I admitted. “So he’s going to change his name at some point?”

“No, he’ll take another. It’s up to him if you call him by it or not.”

“So what’s your name?” I demanded suddenly, realising we got sidetracked.

“Dress.” The tailor said with a straight face and no hesitation.

I blinked. “So you…”

“Yes, I am compelled by dresses.” Dress said calmly, somewhat returning to the charming shopkeep he had been for the past half hour. “And I tend to insist that women entering my establishment peruse that section, if not try one on whenever it’s feasible. I almost did something regrettable when I saw your friend walk in that messy. Thankfully, I have more self control than some of my kin.”

“I’ll say.” My voice wavered, suddenly aware of the vast number of dresses in the shop. I had… strong opinions on that style of dressing.

“Though, you may be comforted by the knowledge that I have felt no such compulsion when it came to you.” Dress continued, making me uncomfortable. “This time.”

I blanched. Far away in Veliki, pushed to the bottom of a bag shoved to the back of a wardrobe in a blue mansion was a layered but daring bright blue dress. It came complete with a corset and all manner of garments that were meant to only be worn with the dress. I was quite certain it had a pocket connecting to an extradimensional space, but I hadn’t put my hand in it because I suspected that the only thing inside was makeup.

It had all been in the bags I received in exchange for my time, and it had been the first piece of clothing to be rejected when I was packing to run away. Maiathah must have brought me here when I traded my time for clothes. It did explain why he knew me, and hinted at the truth behind his assistant’s reaction to me, but…

Oh gods. I’d put on a dress here. Maybe several.

“Right.” I said, voice cracking.

Whatever Dress was about to go on and say was interrupted by Jevi pulling the assistant back into the room by his horn. Apparently the assistant was also a nizkaling, formerly in disguise, and Jevi had figured it out after acquiring her new black and red cloak. This one required even more squinting to see the discrete part of it. She also had the assistant at wand point, and was talking loudly for me to hear.

“Emer! I have discovered this assistant was an agent in disguise! He was probably waiting for us to leave so he could report our location to his masters!”

I sighed. “No Rubes, that’s Assistant.”

Assistant stiffened. Huh, guess I got his name on the first try.

Jevi stiffened, then the wand came around to point at me. “Are you in league with them!? I knew you were too good a package to be true!”

“No, you’re wrong.” I pointed at Dress. “This guy is Dress, and that’s Assistant. They are nizkaling. Kreg’uune ostrasizes them. Don’t be an ignorant bitch about it, they’re only trying to make a living.”

“Please.” Dress said, a little unnerved. Nerves that only doubled as Jevi turned her wand on him. “What your friend says is true.”

Jevi clearly didn’t want to put the wand down, and I knew I liked Dress more than I liked her. I definitely disagreed with Dress saying we were friends if this was how Jevi treated nizkalings. With that in mind, I started walking over to Jevi and quietly pulled my dagger out from under my cloak.

The wand came back to point at me when I took my first step. It was wavering by the time I’d crossed half the distance.

“Okay! Okay!” Jevi pushed Assistant away and lowered her wand, instead tapping it against her thigh. “You’re fucking scary when you stop talking.”

“Good.” My dagger found its scabbard without me looking. The wonders of Rezan. “Now pay the man so we can leave. I want to be on the road now if possible.”

“Alright, alright.” Jevi said as she moved over to the counter, brushing me as she passed by. “So how much do I owe you?”

Dress’s eye glinted. “Two gold and five silvers.”

“What! Why!?”

“For picking a cloak and changing your mind, wasting my assistant’s time, threatening his life and mine.”

“Changing your mind is what every customer does. Amber probably went through five cloaks, am I right? And you only charged her one gold.”

“You are correct.” Dress conceded. “Two gold and four silvers.”

“But you don’t know the kind of things I’ve been going through! Isn’t your job as a tradesperson to read your customer and not cause them undue stress? Surely you’re asking too much. You saw how dirty I was, one gold and two silver!”

I groaned loudly and no one heard me. They were too busy haggling.

\V/