“Don’t like this at all,” The trader said out loud. His name was Beniel. A forgotten branch in his family tree drew from one of Faleria’s older conquests, giving his name the etymology meaning born of luck. His grandmother had failed to specify what kind. So he went through the years assuming it was the other.

He hauled another crate onto a half-occupied trolley. Glancing over to his side, he saw a passenger unload twice his weight in a fraction of the time. It was the stranger those runners had been dragging with them. Rumors during dinner had told him the mysterious man was a monster. That he could chop trees with a stiffened hand and wrestle bulls into submission.

A load of nonsense.

But he was quite the helping hand. Beniel whistled to get the man’s attention.

“Hey, you, come help me with this!” He called. The man came over with a casual attitude, somewhere between amateurish or just plain lackadaisical. Together they began unloading the crates from Beniel’s car.

“This was a bad idea,” Beniel said to himself as he worked. “Knew the discounted rates were too good. Do you smell that, big boy?”

“…? Oh you’re talking to me?”

“Who t’hell else? Smell that do you?”

“Still can’t smell much else but that forest fire down south.”

“We’re in Ralagast. The center of industry in this corner of Faleria. And you can’t smell fuck all but that damned volcano. I knew they didn’t lower the caravan rates for no reason.”

The so-called monster patted the crate. “What do you peddle?” He asked.

“A kind of heavy metal. For pipes. Sometimes them rich pricks use ‘em to make wine amphoras. Makes your fermented grape juice sweeter. Then gives you psychosis and impotence. But they’re the ones with the coin and the word, so who am I to play doctor, right?”

“You only live once,” the man agreed. Or was it humoring? Beniel couldn’t tell.

“Me? I take care of my body. One glass of wine made with indelible metal equipment every week’s end. Dark greens and red meats. My father’s side has a history of heart problems. My mother’s the spittin’ of health. I ain’t leaving my heart to a coin toss.”

The monster man hauled the last crate the trolley could carry into place. He appeared no more fatigued than that morning. Beniel on the other hand was beginning to pant. His temples were wet with exertion.

“I got the rest,” Beniel said. “Thanks, big boy.”

“Hm.”

Jorge left the talkative trader to his day. He left the unloading area to join the gathering of the Scoutrunners by the stables. Captain Yavi stopped talking as Jorge approached.

“Figure out what you want to do with me yet?” Jorge asked.

“I’ve arranged an inquisitorial appointment at the mayoral palace,” Yavi said. “They have the adequate skills and equipment to determine if there is Wolfrim influence in your mind. If you’re telling the truth and you really are just some tree trog who somehow missed the last thousand years of political chess on this continent, then you’re free to go do whatever it is you do.”

“But you’ve dragged this poor trog away from his swinging vines and favorite shitting holes just to ask a couple questions,” Jorge said, curling his mouth in a juvenile frown. “How am I supposed to live?”

“I’m sure there’s a jungle somewhere close by,” Yavi said, squinting. He turned back to his men. “Keep out of trouble. You, if you start another bar fight my report to your parents will be…”

Jorge left the stables. He looked up to behold the vastness of the city. It was a truly large place. Towers of brass, brick, and steel draped long shadows on top of them. Apparent age seeped out of the city’s every pore, in its repaired-over roads, architectural mismatch, even empty lots that used to house some tract of history. Jorge guessed this city was the routing junction for many a wave of reinforcement and triage during the war he had so much about. Ralagast had endured war’s capacity for prosperity and destruction. One clearly didn’t last, and latter seemed inevitable.

“Hey, Jorge.” That girl’s voice. June’s friend. Jorge had forgotten her name.

He glanced over his shoulder. “What do you want?”

“We need to head to HQ to get our rooms for the next couple of days.” Lisŗa strolled up beside him, twiddling her hair. “Don’t make me make you.”

He laughed. They began their walk into Ralagast. The noble city which never sleeps. Where nights were bright with parties and days rich with labor. It looked mighty quiet by Jorge’s gaze. The band of runners and one white-robed priestess were conspicuous on the loosely crowded streets. Subtle emptiness can be gleaned every the eye wandered. Were they afraid of something? The sun hadn’t finished rising yet; the streets should be busy.

He took breath, preparing to ask, but stopped. Lisŗa was fidgeting, her brow lowered. Jorge frowned. He was never good at reading faces, but the anxiety was palpable even to him. What was wrong with this place? The citizens either avoided them or glared. Concerned mothers ushered their children away. A few odd men loitering by an alleyway sized him with their eyes, as if genuinely considering if they ought to start something.

Curiosity finally caved in.

“What is going on here?” He asked. He felt a tinge of guilt for doing so; Lisŗa seemed to grow more restless.

“You really don’t know anything, do you?”

“I’ll drop it.”

“No, if you’re going to be staying, you might as well know. Look at them. Their eyes.”

Jorge shrugged. “Don’t see what you mean. They’re a normal looking green.”

“Falerians have purple eyes, Jorge.” Lisŗa rapped her knuckle on Jorge’s elbow. He looked down at her face and noticed the similarity. “These are all Aldrenites. The ones who didn’t play nice or failed to integrate into the new regime. They force them into these neighborhoods.”

“What about the ones who do play nice?” Jorge asked.

“They get the same opportunities as everyone else. Allegedly.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“The highest ring of noble families will never be anything less than pure Falerian. I know that.”

“Hm… I’m not telling you what to do, but I don’t think you should keep your head down.”

“The hell do you know? You’ve been monkeying in the woods for your whole existence, wherever you came from.”

“I’m suggesting—nothing more—that making one thing your whole identity is going to wreak havoc to your soul in the long run. I’d know.”

Lisŗa chuckled. “What was your ‘thing’ pray tell?”

“I…uhm—I used to be very overweight.”

Lisŗa fell into bellows of laughter. The other runners looked back in alarm. Even June made a face.

“That’s—” Lisŗa could barely speak. “That’s not the same thing! At all! Ha~! That couldn’t be your only ‘thing’!”

She caught herself, and withdrew. Hesitantly, she searched for Jorge’s gaze, but when she found it, it wasn’t an angry one. Jorge wore a bemused smile.

“For a moment there, you forgot there were other people here,” Jorge remarked.

“Listen,” Lisŗa said. “I apologize.”

“Didn’t need it. But I get it. I can change my weight. You can’t change your eye color, or whatever it is that’s different between you and the Falerians. What you can choose is whether or not to let it hold you back.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It both is and isn’t. Maybe I realized this too late. To live among other people is to deal with an ocean of opinion. Blaming the whole world for judging one way or the other is only good for a moment’s catharsis. If you think there’s nothing you could have done, you stop trying. You get addicted to that catharsis, and the hit is weaker every time.”

“But you still lost weight,” Lisŗa said. She gestured to his tone form. “I mean you probably gained some in other ways.”

“I did it for me.”

They made it to Ralagast’s runner station without molestation. Maybe it was because of Jorge’s presence, maybe not; it didn’t matter. Lisŗa had only heard of those neighborhoods, so shameful to the public consciousness they were unnamed. There were orators and essayists out there of course—their eyes glinting amethyst in the noon sun as they spoke poignantly—who claimed this a kindness. Once a place is named, it takes after its namesake. People who crawled their way out of the muck of those places could choose to have their past erased, and join the court alongside everyone else, equally devoid of a past. Ultimate fairness and a serene lack of prejudice. And therein lied the complication.

Lisŗa did feel better. She held her head high as she walked the rest of the way, uncaring of the judgmental gazes of her fellow Aldrenites. She did not fault Jorge for not understanding. She understood what he meant. What the simple-headed man did not recognize was: that was the point. They funneled these disgruntled Aldrenites here to these unnamed places, inspired them to grow strong, to leave their past behind and be unjudged before the court, ascending to the height of a lord if they were able, becoming at the end of a long, arduous, meritocratic journey: Falerian.

The people who lived in those neighborhoods were still fighting the war. They bore into Lisŗa those angry looks because in their eyes she had surrendered.

--

“Stop him!”

Edeard flew onto the rafters to avoid the flurry of knives that followed his wake. He was fast; the edges didn’t even knick his cape. But so were they. When he cleared the undercity and into the sewer pathways, five of them stuck to his tail. He needed to lose them before returning anywhere close to his neighborhood.

He disengaged his shimmer Spell—it was useless at his speed—and prepared a repulsion Spell. As they followed him up the vertical walls of the basin, he tossed a blast behind him. The force threw one of his pursuers off the wall. Edeard was gone before he saw the pursuer hit the ground. He certainly heard the crunch. Another knife flew past. Edeard wiped a finger on his ear, noting the red blot on his index.

“Fuck.”

He knew a boulevard in the area. A good forty meters in width. He veered behind the hills and valleys created by Ralagast’s uneven rooftops and chimneys. Bits of shingle and brick shattered behind him from footfalls and thrown knives.

Don’t they ever run out? He’d have used more potent Spells if he had two hands to cast. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary. The boulevard laid ahead. He channeled an Enchantment into his flesh and jumped. A rain of rooftop matter trailed behind the soles of his feet. He felt the stiff nightly breeze rush past his face, whisking away his sweat. Then he descended, gradually, as slow as adrenaline allowed, with his feet onto the edge of the roof on the other side.

He whipped around to see if his tail was still hot. A smile crept to his lips. His pursuers were rappelling to the ground; they couldn’t make the jump. Edeard wasted no more time, and left a maze-like trail behind him through an already confusingly complex city. He stalled on top of an annex to double check, then he triple checked.

He had lost them.

Only then did he return home. The sun would rise in but an hour when he could return to the comfort of his study. Edeard laid the brass contraption he had carried under his arm on his desk. There was no need to pretend; it was a gun, not a device. The first gun he had seen in this world, and it made the flintlock look like a super soaker. No matter, he had succeeded. The intense fatigue only made his victory sweeter. Edeard had never worked this hard before. His face was slick with sweat.

His smile instantly turned into a frown. The world was blurring. Trembling, he looked into the mirror on his desk. His ear had gone green. A blue spider web of veins pulsed on that side of his face.

“No…”

One wisp of a thought crossed his mind as he felt his whole body begin to deaden: he never did appreciate the designs on his rug, at least not so closely. As he neared complete blackout, the double doors to his study opened. He heard a shrill cry and someone rushing towards him, then all became silent.