Emily, in the Valley of the Vanishing River

I planned to leave my home behind me forever when I left for this year's Uldlip trade fair. I intended to take my chances with moving to the land of the Sea Coyn. Without a scar on my hand to advertise I was runaway property, I no longer had to fear my acceptance among free Coyn. Until I left for Uldlip, I was busy making portable food supplies and exploring glass.

I needed about eight days to walk to the ferry over the Salt River at Uldlip. I would trade my crystals there and then move on. I would take my food, my bow, my fishing rod, and my iron tools. The rest I would have to abandon. Okay, I would take the graphite for the arc light. I had no idea if I would ever find another graphite deposit.

There was just one problem with my plan: I got stupid. For someone who used assay furnaces all the time in my previous life, I made a classic and fatal mistake. On my first attempt to insert a blowpipe into the melted silica and limestone sand, I neglected to warm it up first. The small amounts of water present in the amphibolite blowpipe flashed to steam and blew hot melted glass droplets into my face.

I was using my piece of slitted horn across my eyes to protect from the heat but the slit was still open by about half a centimeter. Some tiny bits of molten glass got into my eyes. The pain was bad but the terror was worse because I was blinded. I didn't know if I couldn't see because of blood in my eyes or because of the glass droplets penetrating my cornea.

As I staggered away from the furnace, my only thought was whether I could get from my workshop to my living space and find my knife. I wanted to be able to kill myself if I was blind. It was simply a decision of wanting to escape the misery of starving to death alone in my cave. I'm not sure I was entirely rational just then.

I could not find my knife anywhere in my first stumbling search of my home, tripping on things on the floor, hitting my head, bruising myself with every sightless mishap. In hindsight, it was a good thing I couldn't find my knife. In my panic, I never realized it was on the back of my belt, where I moved it out of the way before I started working.

Few things can match the terror of suddenly not being able to see and fearing it was forever. My existence in this perdition of a life had been painful, oppressive, and unhappy, but now it would be capped by a slow death as I ran out of food, unable to replace it because I was blinded. The pain in my head grew until I eventually curled into a half-catatonic ball on the floor and passed out.

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Aylem, Crystal Shrine of Tiki

Since the hot spring debacle, I took to watching the Coyn girl in the Great Crystal, planning my next move with her. I was left with some free time every few days when I wasn't busy with the children or the treasury clerks. Asgotl and I would leave the palace and travel to the Crystal Shrine of Tiki where the Great Crystal was kept.

The ever-faithful Asgotl watched all my trances. We were joined by Foyuna, who was the high priestess of the shrine. She was the youngest high priestess of the Convocation at 31 but she was a talented clairvoyant and the king’s cousin on the paternal side.

We were amazed to see the Coyn lived inside a cave. Given the stalactites and stalagmites inside, I was sure it was a limestone cave. The Coyn girl used different areas of the cave for different purposes. There was a sleeping place piled with animal furs for warmth. There was a place for cooking and storing food with a rustic table and chairs.

There was also a bathroom with running water and a tank-driven flushing toilet which left me in awe. It also birthed within me the desire for my own modern plumbing. I never imagined before that I could upgrade the padded stool over a chamber pot which people called a necessary here.

The best part was her workshop, filled with hand-built furnaces of different shapes, pestles of stone and bronze, and a table with ceramic jars, labeled in ink with Latin letters and names like stibnite, sal ammoniac, sylvite, quick lime, and sodium lye. Those meant nothing to Foyuna but they meant the world to me. This speechless Coyn girl knew English and she was recreating modern chemistry.

She even had a thing which might have been a generator, which had both a hand crank and what might have been a small water wheel. Any doubts I had over her identity as someone reincarnated like myself were long gone by now.

The days she spent digging rocks and crystals were rather dull. The days she went fishing were always entertaining because she was a good fly fisher and her smoke house for fish was amazing. The days she spent in the workshop were spellbinding because she was trying to make glass.

The entertainment turned to horror when one molten glass batch exploded in her face. I dropped my vision trance and took a deep breath to clear my brain of the trance fog.

"I have sent an attendant for your riding clothes," Foyuna said, practical as always. "I will have Asgotl saddled while you change."

We were in the air soon after but lost time to avoid an active eruption of magma fountaining out of the volcanic fissures in the middle of the plain. Despite the detour, it was both the fastest trip I had ever made across the valley and also the longest.

I had Asgotl land at the cave entrance closest to the workroom. I was too big to use the entrance that led to the kitchen and bedroom. As it was, I still had to take off my coat and my overtunic to get in. Not that I ever talked about it, but I both loved and hated being as big as I was. When I was younger, it was purely hate until I came to terms with the advantages my stature gave me. Right now, I was cursing my size as I had to squeeze past tight spots to reach the more open areas inside.

I found my little Coyn girl in a semi-conscious state, curled up in a fetal position not far from her bedding. The accident was a half-bell in the past so the immediate damage was already done. The glass landed in her eyes, into the skin on her head above and below the horn piece, and around her ears. Frankly, it was a rather ugly mess of many tiny bleeding burns. What was more concerning was her lack of consciousness. She should not have passed out. The burn was in a bad place but it wasn't that large. Was she injured elsewhere or was she just weak from not eating enough?

Regardless, I needed better light to pull the glass out of her face and eyes, so I bundled her in a bearskin from her bedding, carried her out to Asgotl, and flew straight for the Healing Shrine of Mugash.

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Imstay King, on march with the army

A messenger bird found me watching the van of my army on its way through the second to last pass before the eastern plains. It was an update on the search for the Coyn woman we were calling the maker of fire.

"Imstay King," General Bobbo had seen the bird land on my saddle and spurred his flying horse to land next to my griffin, "is this something that may concern my soldiers?"

I was busy reading the message written on a starched piece of linen. "It looks like one of my scouts found what might be a Coyn dwelling and workshop, in a cave in the Valley of the Vanishing River. No one was currently living there but there were indications of a sudden and recent departure from the premises. Food and drink were left uneaten in the cave as if someone had left in a hurry."

"What are the chances it belongs to the maker of fire and not some other pioneering Coyn, Mighty One?"

"I think it may be the Coyn we are looking for," I replied. "We know about all the other pioneers on the other side of the lava plains and none of the others are currently Coyn."

The head of the scouts wrote that he wanted further instructions.

On a scrap of the finest linen, I wrote back: "Keep looking for other habitations and set up surveillance at the one you found."

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