All this occurred eons before

Secv Serith, His haunted wood, has stood strong since that time

And amidst that long, oft lost lore

Do His red eyes still watch, and He still maintains his prime

Old age does not take Him

He laughs in the face of pain

Wounds refuse to claim Him

He persists as All’s true bane

So Beware, Beware, Dronn, the Everlasting Tyrant

He is eternal, forget your pointless defiance

- Beware the Everlasting Tyrant, Final Stanzas, author unknown

My teeth were still chattering when Jvina knocked on the door leading to her room. She had wrapped me in a towel and strained most of the water from my hair, but I was still cold. I just didn’t have the constitution needed to bounce back from things like that, so she had carried me as a husband does his wife after marriage. It said something about my state that I wasn’t bothered by that.

… Much. I still didn’t like it.

Jevi took a few moments to open the door. I watched her eyes narrow at Jvina, then widen when she saw me, dart back to where I’d fallen asleep, and then back to me with a tinge of panic. “Amber! You were- I just ste- saw you. How?”

“Aside, wench.” Jvina commanded, pushing past Jevi with all the determination of a mother bear. She went from strong and brusk to soft and caring as she let me down in the middle hammock. Her hand brushed some of my still wet hair behind my ear. “Rest now.”

“That’s creepy.” I told her. “You’re being extremely creepy.”

“Am I?” She asked, surprised. “I’m sorry.”

Jevi looked at her skeptically. I sympathised. The only thing Jvina looked sorry about was taking her hand back. “What happened? Why is Emer drenched and how?”

“She slept on the floor.” Jvina said as if it explained everything. And, to be fair, it kind of did. She looked at me with stern eyes. “Do not do that again on this ship.”

“Already told you I won’t.” I told her. “Don’t you have something you need to do?”

A strange, misty expression crossed Jvina’s face. “You’re correct. I will complete my task then return.” She said airily, then turned and walked out.

“Huh.” I wasn’t expecting to get rid of her that easily. “Close the door. Lock it and hope that’s enough.”

Jevi gave me a curious look before pushing the door closed and operating the lock. She gave me the look again once the click sounded. “So?”

“Ship’s not real.” I said.

“What makes you say that? What happened?” Jevi frowned at the floor. “You were right there until I opened the door. I stepped on you, you know.”

“One thing at a time.” I said, fidgeting in an attempt better wrap the blanket around me. “I thought I fell through the ship when I fell asleep. I wasn’t out for long, was I?” Jevi shook her head. “How long?”

“Half an hour? An hour?” Jevi shook her head. “You may as well ask yourself when you started dreaming.”

“It was like I blinked and then I was underwater…” I trailed off. Did I want to share what I had overheard? It raised questions, certainly. Chosen Ones tended to instinctively know who or what chose them and for what, and I definitely wanted to know what Jevi’s situation was in that regard. Those answers would have to wait, I realised, glancing at the walls. They weren’t thin, but they weren’t thick. This was a conversation best left for when nobody was around, when we weren’t on a dream ship made real.

“So that’s why you’re cold and wet.” Jevi realised. She was about to go on to say something else when the door slammed open and a green haired man wearing a trifold hat stomped in. The fact that the door was locked didn’t matter. I could see the tooth that actually locked the door extended and jutting out of the now swinging wood, having accomplished nothing.

“Who was it?” Sanjak demanded. He rounded on Jevi. “Was it you, crownhilt?”

Jevi scoffed. “I’m taking note of that. I will have my revenge. Just you wait.”

“It was her actually, cap'n.” Jvina pointed at me from the doorway.

In a flash, Sanjak was next to me and his hand struck across my face. “You’re a fool and a nitwit!” He told me. “Tell me landlubber, what do you remember?”

I felt the magic spread over me, and I was honestly surprised by his use of it here. He hadn’t cast any spells within sight of me the entire trip, though that made sense on account of me avoiding him. Enchantments of command like this were deceptively complex, but masters could do them without the aid of a casting focus, meaning that Sanjak, who had done just that, was a master of the craft. Jevi had needed to flick her wand behind her back when she did the same thing by comparison. The other thing that surprised me about his magic was how it bounced away from my ears, failing to properly take hold.

It still made me answer though. “I rolled out of the hammock, didn’t get back in, and fell asleep. Then I was underwater. I could breathe fine, and was upside down. Then, after a while, Jvina was rescuing me. Uh…”

Somehow, I’d left out the whole thing with Serfle and the gods. Was I learning to resist charms? I directed my attention to my ears and sensed the remnants of the symmetrical glyphs that had been imposed on me. They’d definitely done something, though it was difficult to tell how effective they were.

But they were effective at all, so I immediately started trying to shape the magic back to how I remembered it. It didn’t take so much effort that I was unable to focus on the conversation, which had mostly moved past me by then. Sanjak and Jvina were whispering to each other, and as my glyphs regained their shape I found their words becoming clearer.

Not enough to make anything out beyond the tail end of ‘one of the lucky ones’, however.

That made me very curious as to what being an ‘unlucky one’ would entail.

“Emer, you’ve been very irresponsible on my ship.” Sanjak announced once he was done with his huddle. “Therefore, you and your companions will be dishonourably disembarking at the next dock.”

That was fine. That was Burden Bridge, and we were getting off there anyway.

“I’d fine ye, but ye just a passenger on me ship.” He continued, slipping into an accent. “Therefore, ye going to be doing me a favour before ye disembark.”

“Can you stop doing the ‘ye’ thing?” I asked quietly.

“Yee.” Sanjak said. I brushed up on my skill in eye rolling. “I’ll wait ‘till ye no longer shivering my timbers.” That got everyone frowning. “Now if ye’ll excuse me, me have work to be do...eng…”

Sanjak opened Jvina’s closet and walked in. It shouldn’t have worked because of the relative heights, but Sanjak’s green haired head passed under the lower frame without ducking at all. Then the door slammed shut.

“Is he going to come out of that closet?” Jevi asked aimlessly.

“No.” Jvina said. “He only goes into the closet.”

“I’m going to sleep.” I announced. “Damn freezing river woke me up.” I was mostly over my shivers, but my jaw refused to cooperate, making my teeth chatter against my will.

Jevi and Jvina quietly sorted themselves out. The latter went back to whatever nighttime duty she had, while Jevi locked the door and climbed into her hammock, which happened to be the one Jvina put me in. She wrapped her arms around me and for once I didn’t complain. She was warm.

\V/

Sanjak’s captain’s cabin disrespected every captain’s cabin I’d grown up reading about. There was no gold overflowing from plundered chests. There was no lavish velvet coating random surfaces. There was no four poster bed that filled up half the cabin. For all the pirate paraphernalia Sanjak worked into his appearance, his living space was spartan and the decorations all had a purpose.

I was disappointed. Reading swashbuckling adventures during my time at the School of Paper had been one of my more favoured pastimes. Walking in here made me feel as though they were all lies.

He didn’t even have a bed, just a hammock. It was strung up in the centre of the room and was thankfully unique, if mismatched to his apparent theme. There were strings of pink and blue beads, braids, and hoops hanging down from the dyed red netting that made up the easily moved furniture. Dream catchers, I noted. One had a glowing orb vibrating violently in its centre.

I cleared my throat. “So I’m here. What do you want?”

Sanjak, who was writing something at a desk, snapped the tip of his quill upon hearing my voice. Ink spilled over whatever he was writing, he cried out in anguish and tore up the letter, threw it and the inkwell out the nearest window, which swung open just in time to avoid a mess, then he turned and faced me, completely calm.

“What favour can you provide?” His was the voice of serenity.

I arched my eyebrow at the lack of ‘ye’ in his accent. “If it has anything to do with heavy lifting, I can’t do it.”

“Curse and confound me!” He threw another inkwell out the window, which then swung shut. Sanjak jabbed a finger in the direction of the window. “Don’t you get smug with me!”

The window opened a fraction, allowing a faint breeze into the room.

Sanjak nodded and curled his finger back down. “Better.”

“I honestly don’t know what I can do for you.” I stated, unperturbed. Best to just act as if nothing strange was happening. It kind of worked with Bubbles. “This boat isn’t even real, after all. Anything I do to it won’t keep, we just established I can’t do much on it, and I have nothing to craft with.”

“If you realised that simple truth, then perhaps you aren’t useless.” Sanjak said without missing a beat. “What do you know of magic?”

“You’ve tattooed a lot of the related script into your skin for some godsforsaken reason.” And I still don’t want to be anywhere near that.

“Accessibility.” He nodded it as if it was the most simple thing in the world. “How fluent would you say you be in the arcane tongue?”

“Passably.” When compared to the people I used to spend time around, that was. I would’ve claimed more, but there was a vast gap in my education covering anything fundamental.

“Finish this passage.” He decided, slapping a piece of parchment onto the desk that now had a quill and inkwell waiting on top. That was what, the third well of ink and the second quill? No. He must have been throwing things out long before I stepped aboard this ‘ship’.

I was expecting a spell, but the glyphs weren’t structured correctly for such a thing. Or Sanjak was an extremely unconventional spellcaster. Rather, it seemed as though he was describing a ship’s voyage, specifically the Busty Butler’s, and included details like the number of passengers and crew, the average ship speed, and the sum of coins he was making.

“Value for the pay of the crew?” I asked in what could be considered the arcane tongue. Really, I was just replacing common words with their arcane equivalent while keeping the grammar the same. A common game to help young wizards remember their craft without setting off any unwanted spells. I was pretty much just vocalising what he’d already written down.

“Fifteen silver per day of work, fully including the start and end days of the trip.” Sanjak responded in kind.

I did a quick calculation and put down what I guessed the right number was. It was either nine hundred silver or one thousand and eighty, and I sat down to scribe the latter on his parchment. “What do you name Source and Burden Bridge?” I asked. Proper nouns were weird when you started naming things using magic. I’d personally spell them out phonetically using common glyph pronunciations, there were more than enough for that. The problem with that was the passage used Sanjak’s dialect, which would be different.

“First-Preceding Intersection-Crossroad and-also Ore Anomaly-Suspect. Not respectively.” Sanjak supplied, doing that annoying thing some casters did when they were afraid of being specific.

Not respectively. He’d given them to me backwards. I had to adjust what I was writing from ‘From Burden Bridge to Source’, to ‘To Burden Bridge from Source’ mid sentence, which made the grammar stilted. Either way, that was everything.

“Unless you want me to describe the weather for each day, I’ve finished your task.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Sanjak said, looking a little nervous. “Let us return to the common tongue. Any more of that, and I worry about the solidity of my ship.” His concern was warranted. The floor underneath us was depressing under our weight, and kept attempting to flicker back to its original position. “Some recent passengers strained it to breaking point just last night.”

“Fair reasoning.” I admitted, not thinking about the tongue I used to say it until the words were already out. We immediately sank down to our knees in the floor, and the wood made a horrible groaning sound, though I felt nothing from the wood allegedly surrounding my legs.

“You’ve made a grave mistake.” Sanjak told me with the tone to match.

Then the world snapped and I found myself falling into the Busty Butler for the second time in as many days. The deck that should’ve been beneath this one was not where it should’ve been.

...

I thought I knew despair.

I mean, I was right. But this is still terrifying.

It was hard to tell if the fact that I had no idea where the despair was coming from made it better or worse.

...

“...ould’ve thought I’d run into you here... me...”

“I could say the same to you… me…”

Sanjak’s dark reflection cracked his neck audibly, his startling white tattoos thrumming as power began to flow through them and bulk up his dark coloured muscles. Sanjak himself simply turned halfway to the side and raised one hand palm up. He gestured his massive and hulking dark reflection to approach.

“Why aren’t you paying attention to me?”

I glanced at my own reflection, which was entirely mundane next to Sanjak’s. She was trying to drag me somewhere, likely a bottomless hole that paradoxically led to the Abyss. Or the Heavans. Again, I wasn’t sure what was worse.

What amused me was that she was trying to drag me, but since this wasn’t exactly reality, I didn’t need to worry about things like physical strength. It was the first time I’d been the stronger one without use of a sword.

“Because you’re worthless.” I told her, then turned my attention back to Sanjak as weapons started raining down on him. He caught each one that came near and used them masterfully to fend off the brute that his negatively coloured self became. Until he used a giant maul to hit the brute in my direction. He sailed in a perfect arc until he hit my…

...

“My cabbages!” Sanjak declared. “Not yours, mine!”

“Oh yeah!” I yelled back at him.

“Yeah!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

“I’m taking my watermelons then!” I declared, sweeping up all twenty of them with a single movement.

“Noo!” Sanjak fell to his knees and covered his face. “You don’t understand. The scourge will succeed unless I stop him! The Pestilence! I needed the cabbages, and the…”

...

“...nd the staff. See? They’re tied together- complete each other. Alone, they’re powerful artefacts, but together they become greater than if you managed to just use each of them effectively.”

I nodded, looking at the wall of scrolls Sanjak had put together. He had illusions making lines linking one fact to another as necessary, and despite its intimidating first impression, was actually quite easy to figure out.

“How long did this take you?” I asked as I inspected one scroll with a picture on it. There was a title and text, but I couldn’t make them out.

“Not that long, did it on the side.” Sanjak grasped his hands behind him and fidgeted. I was reminded of how ‘she’ acted when she wanted Avien to notice something.

But the picture had my attention at that moment. It stared at me while still being difficult to make out. The details seemed almost fluid, but were solid as stone. There was… intelligence there. It almost felt like it was going to say some…

...

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Not now, Serfle.”

“... Very Well. Perhaps a nudge to ensure your continuation.”

...

“Get to the staff, Amber!”

I became aware of Sanjak yelling at me. He was pointing across the way to a pale blue podium suspended in a deep black void. It took a moment to register that I’d need to cross that void to reach the staff. But before that, why did I need to get to the staff?

“You need to git, Amber! That’s our only hope!”

I turned back to Sanjak and became aware of the monstrosity he was fighting. It had a shape, but that shape changed. Mostly it was dark like the void surrounding it, and was only visible through the movements it made, and those movements told my eyes I was looking at a being with many long reaching tentacles. Sanjak had a sword he was using to dismember the tentacles that came close, but they grew back as fast as they were cut off and his footing was becoming increasingly perilous on the mountain of tentacles building underneath him.

“Is that a nightmare?” I hadn’t meant to say that, but if this was a dream, and that was a horror of the mind, then it made sense my internal monologue would be hard to halt.

“No, you filthy blueblood. It’s a seed of despair!” Sanjak delivered a strong blow that sent the gargantuan thing far off into the distance, to the point that it became a speck. It started coming back just as fast, but Sanjak used that time to turn and yell at me. “One meant for the gods, too! It’s stronger than the ones I’m normally fending off from this cursed vessel!”

A seed of despair. I knew of those. Those were beings that exist only in the metaphysical, where it does not exist during the host’s waking hours. Always manifests the potential of its opposite, a seed of hope within the dream of its host, but makes that hope difficult to accomplish. Can be driven out by reestablishing equilibrium of hope and despair. Fun stuff. I’d thought about putting one in Avien’s dreams for a time.

And this was a seed of despair for a god?

Kinli’s? Or Scajoce’s?

It did explain where that sourceless dread had been coming from though.

“Thanks for the lesson!” Sanjak shouted, making me aware that I’d said all of that out loud. “Now get to the staff!”

The flashes returned to me, of Sanjak’s repeated insistence that he needed two things together. I only remembered some of them, which made sense given that we were dreaming, but it told me what I needed to know. The staff was in a void, but that didn’t matter when I could cross that space by turning around.

It was a dream, so it worked.

Staff in hand, I turned again and landed next to Sanjak. “Here.”

He was the one that worked with dreams. He would know what to do with it. True to form, Sanjak took the staff and began bellowing words that failed to reach my ears. The sword and staff started glowing, and became blinding when he touched them together in a cross above his head. The seed of despair recoiled and writhed, desperate to destroy this new source of hope.

But hope had already been established. It died violently and slowly. I got bored after ten seconds of it writhing. Likely it would continue perishing until the next dawn.

Something tugged on my arm before the thing could properly die. I looked over to see Her again, her face distraught as though she had been crying.

“Am I really worthless?”

I shoved her hand away, relishing in the fact that I was able to do that for the first time.

“Yes, but it’s worse than that.” I pointed at her belly. “This is the only part of you that matters, and only to one person. You only exist when Avien is around, and your value to him is measured by how well that works. The rest of the time? That’s me. I don’t go away when Avien is around, but you do when he isn’t.”

“Woah, girl.” Sanjak grabbed my arm out of nowhere and made me point my finger up. “That’s awful harsh to your own self.”

I glared at the green haired man, ready to spit vitriol that had suddenly come to fore. Unfortunately, I was taken by a sudden rising sensation. Only it was to the left.

\V/

Horns and drums. The beating of running boots, the slaps of the boarders’ own. Clashing steel.

Steel clashing with the cutlass in my hand. Across the sword of my attacker, currently locked against my staff and sword in a cross, the creature of the deep snarled. It twisted as I did, but failed to break my guard as I failed to break their’s.

No… That wasn’t right. These creatures had faintly blue skin, kind of like Taranath and Maiathah’s, only they weren’t elven at all. The tail I caught in the corner of my eye told me what I needed to know. These were merfolk.

The one I was engaged with had an eyepatch. Merfolk pirates.

With a harsh grunt, I shoved my attacker away, struck at him with my staff, whipped his eyes with the wet strands of the mop, opened his stomach with my cutlass. A quick put down, but I’d wasted time trading snarls. I hastened to slice another merfolk’s back open.

“No, Amber!”

I looked back in time to see the Cap’n throw a larger merfolk over the railing by the wheel. He landed on the scum a second later. It was a flawless move. I was in awe.

“Don’t succumb to battle lust.” He told me, looking deep in my eyes. His face resembled a roguish human. He kind of looked like my- “You, I hired for your mind.”

I nodded, then cried out. Another merfolk was attempting what I’d just stopped doing, and was trying to do it to the Cap’n. I shoved Cap’n aside and put the mop between him and the merfolk to catch his blade, then opened my second stomach for the day as half the mop rattled on the deck.

“Thanks. I will have ORDER!” Cap’n yelled, his voice echoed out across the open sea. It reminded me that we really should’ve sailed in a fleet. He had one foot on the back of the big merfolk and was lifting his bleeding face. “Your captain and I have fought! I prevailed. Hold true to your customs and LEAVE!”

…

“We won’t make it back.” Jevi said.

“We’ll make it back.” I said.

“I can’t keep going. We’ll sink.”

I didn’t look, only kept moving. Even so I could tell she was slowing. She and I had been working at the same speed ever since we changed course, and I had slowed significantly. That was an understatement, actually. I was nearing exhaustion.

The keel was in two pieces. It wasn’t a large hole, but it also wasn’t the only one. Damn merfolk stole the nails of all things. So it was enough. We were condemned to a watery grave, and the damn fishes were probably following us until we became a shipwreck. The ship was slowly going down. We had to make it back to shore. No call had come from above, not that anyone was fit for the nest, meaning land was still out of sight.

Later, Jevi stopped working entirely.

Later, I stopped working as well. Swaying with the rocking of the ship, I eventually overbalanced and fell forwards, the seawater rising to meet me. A firm had caught me.

“This isn’t your grave.” Cap’n… no, Sanjak told me. He had twisted at some point along the way. “Not so lucky after all, eh?” His other hand came over my face and swung my head back against the cold surface of the-

\V/

I spent the rest of the trip in a foul mood. Jevi was bleeding from seven different spots on her face alone before she finally left me alone and went to go find Weldon to heal them away. Jvina also was strangely distant. That was fine by me. I just overlooked the river most of the time and let the melancholy associated with that kind of thing slowly mellow me out.

Parts of the dream stuck with me, though not the parts I would have liked. Upon awakening, I had been pleased to know that I had the memory of killing two people. When I visualised the moments, however, I found them impossible to grasp. My curse was not so easily outwitted. The rest of it was easy enough to retain.

Any debt with Sanjak had been absolved, obviously. He didn’t have the decency to come and apologise, but I preferred him to maintain distance, and wasn’t about to bring up the matter.

Lacking anything else to do, my time was dedicated to trying to figure out Serfle’s listening glyphs. I didn’t make any profound breakthroughs, it wasn’t that kind of magic, but I did realise that the glyphs as they’d been shown to me were three dimensional.

Meaning all glyphs were likely meant to be three dimensional, even the stuff Sanjak was tattooing onto his arms without a care in the world. I did not envy any artificers or enchanters in the world upon realising that epiphany.

Jevi invited me to her hammock the next night, but I wasn’t that tired. I put that to spending more time than I normally did in a dream. She seemed unreasonably happy when I just walked away without answering that invitation. I went to my own hammock when tiredness finally became overwhelming.

The next day saw the Busty Butler arriving at Burden Bridge. Jevi had dragged me to the front of the ship- the prow- to try and catch sight of the chapter of Silver’s Reach that had apparently been moved here. I wasn’t seeing anything like that, instead being taken in by the sights that were, according to Jevi, completely normal, or actually less busy than usual.

Burden Bridge was a town with the sprawl of a city and the permanent population of a village, but had approximately three to five times that many people travelling through it on any given day. To say nothing of the temporary lodgers. It was built where two rivers intersected, feeding into the river that the Busty Butler had just spent several days sailing up.

As critical a location Source had been, it was almost nothing compared to this. This was the place all earthbound traffic needed to pass through when going between the east and western regions of Kreg’uune.To provide passage, two giant bridges spanned two of the three lanes of water, and each had several dozen groups of travellers passing over them.

I could see carriages on one such bridge, drawn by horses. Going both ways.

But that didn’t really baffle me. More impressive things were my normal, after all. No, what baffled me was the sheer number of people moving within my field of view right now.

“Is this the first time you’ve been somewhere with people?” Jevi asked.

Literally, the answer was no, I’d been places with people before. That wasn’t what she asked though. “Yes.” I said, distracted.

Was it possible to count all these people? How many people lived in Kreg’uune, anyway? I thought that most places were inhospitable due to monsters cropping up everywhere they couldn’t be culled. Which was most places, since Chosen Ones were often required for that and most of them had fucked off to Veliki.

Come to think of it, it was strange I hadn’t encountered any monsters worthy of the term since leaving Veliki.

… I was going to regret thinking that. And I’d even had that encounter with a seed of despair. For a god! It just didn’t seem relevant since Sanjak had been the one to deal with that and it was over so quickly.

“I asked Jvina since she mellowed out a whole bunch, and she said we’re going to be docking past the second bridge.” Jevi said, leaning over the railing and pointing. “You don’t really get a good impression of just how many people there are until you see the sprawl from there.”

“Huh.” I said faintly. I wasn’t sure why I was acting like this. Going somewhere with people I didn’t know wasn’t anything new. It was just that I felt like I was going to be ruining something sacred if I stepped off the Busty Butler and into Burden Bridge.

“We’ll have to step into Cavaan if it isn’t under siege by the time we get there, then.” Jevi decided. “This place has nothing on that cesspit of scum and slimy businessmen. That’ll pop your city virginity, farm girl.”

“My mother was a seamstress.” I said absently, then shook myself from my strange state of mind. “No, what we need to do is have a private conversation about you.”

“What about me?” Jevi asked, losing her joyous edge.

“Stuff I heard in my dream.” I answered evasively.

Jevi’s joy came back in full force. “So what is it? I didn’t realise you were dreaming about me.”

I frowned. “Curb your ego, you weren’t actually there. This is two nights ago, not one.”

“You mean when you,” She made a splashing sound with her mouth and gestured splashing water.

“Yes. It’s regarding what you were meant to do in the north, and is not for anyone else’s ears.”

“Oh…” Jevi deflated into seriousness. “I thought I got away from that.”

I shook my head empathetically. I still hadn’t told Jevi, but whenever she was around all people could whisper about was the brewing rebellion of Cavaan. She was derelecting her duty, whatever it was, and the Heavens weren’t happy with that. The only question was if she was getting on the mascevan path or not, and if she wasn’t, how long until I started advocating she return to her mysterious duty?

I needed to know what it was for certain before I could say anything. No matter how confident I was with my assumptions.

“We’ll discuss it.” I said. “But later.”

\V/