~Hope

The wide city ahead just barely sits above the horizon, growing larger for the hours that pass, like a loaf of bread slowly rising in the oven. While we escaped from the dark clutches of the forest a few days ago, it remains by our side, though thinned out and littered with animal trails. The trees cover the landscape along the far left of us, stretching out into the distance nearing the city but not reaching it’s walls.

No bears or wolves have accosted us, and only the occasional deer dared cross our path in the weeks we spent travelling. The only other people that wandered the same road kept a friendly distance from us, focused on their own world ending quests, and the villages and towns we passed by quickly. It’s been quite the pleasant trip, all things considered, but civilisation waits for us.

The sight of it alone is enough to stir up the anxieties and paranoia within me.

People are… well they can be nice, but I’ve experienced too much of their cruelty and hatred to ever anticipate a civilised experience to be something positive. I’m just trying to keep that sourness to myself, Fate is all too excited to see people again.

She bounces on the seat beside me, a big bright smile on her lips as she stares ahead towards the city.

“Baths, food, conversation, and trade! Give me civilisation!” She cries, standing up and getting a better look at the city ahead of us. “This time, we can take a break and enjoy everything this city has to offer!”

“Sit back down.” I say, pulling her back to the seat. “You don’t want to fall off and hurt yourself.”

She lets herself be pulled back onto the bench beside me, but the sparkle in her eyes and the smile on her lips hasn’t tuned down even a little bit.

“People, Hope. There are so many people.”

“It’s just a little longer.” I say, unable to keep from being infected by her positivity. I know that I’m going to hate this city, but at least Fate is going to enjoy herself here and it’s not going to be too awful by her side.

“I can’t wait, it’s so close.” Fate says, and as if to spite her, the wagon jolts beneath us, nearly throwing her from her seat. I react fast enough to catch her, but I can’t do anything for the wagon beneath us.

“What was that?” Fate asks, looking back at the wagon.

~Fate

“Just perfect. The axle really just snapped like that? That’s a thing that can happen? Come on!” I shout up at the skies. “Did you really have to take it from me now?”

“I don’t think the gods are particularly interested in our wagon.” Hope says, walking by the side of the wagon and watching its awkward roll from a safe distance. It’s still moving, but the front of it is bouncing up and down violently.

“Well, it’s not that bad.” I say, shrugging as we take a few steps further forwards in line. The people in line around us chuckle a little at my sudden turn of heart. It’s not like I was really that bothered about this, but I mean you have to overreact a little when exciting developments like this happen.

“Then why have you been shouting for the last six hours?” Hope asks, looking towards the afternoon sun and shaking her head in exasperation. Would she be upset if I said that it was just to see how she reacted?

Shadow snorts, throwing his head up.

“Yes, yes. You did well, Shadow.” I say, feeding him another apple from the stash. We have enough to last a year if we ration.

I think we’ll be out of them in a week.

“Should we be worried about the guards?” Hope asks. “Is there a tax? Are they going to try anything with us?”

“Don’t really know.” I say, standing up on my toes to try and look a little further ahead. “They don’t seem to be taking anything. Things are getting a bit strange this year, so who knows exactly what they’ll want. Let’s just be friendly, and ask.”

Hope nods, but it’s a little stiff, and she reassures herself that her sword is still by her side. She is terribly quick with it, but then she doesn’t seem accustomed to killing at all. I wish she’d open up to me about what she’s been through, but she’s been tight lipped this whole trip.

Love might just take a little while longer to bloom than I was hoping for.

“Next!” The guard calls us closer, and I notice that they’re not wearing anything that I’d really describe as guards colours. Instead, they wear purple shirts and capes, all painted over with a large, silly eye. Their smiles and general good cheer really pulls my guard down.

“Hello, Fate and Hope, travelling merchants.” I say in quick introduction.

“Sable, and Greg. We’re with ‘The Vigilant’, protecting the people of the world.” Sable says, “It looks to me that you girls won’t be travelling very far with your wagon the way it is.”

Sable is a rather feminine young woman with long black hair, though the clothes don’t do much for her figure, the only nice piece of clothing she’s wearing is a light scarf around her neck. Greg, meanwhile, is a plain looking fellow with a hatchet of a nose and a jolly smile.

“Yeah, the axle snapped just a little way out of town.” I say, waving at the mess. “Shadow here pulled us through after I fixed… okay, I’ll be honest, I didn’t fix anything. I just made it much, much worse.”

Sable chuckles, and her partner steps up to take a peek under the wagon. When he looks back up again, he can only shake his head at me, in barely contained disgust.

“Yeah, that’s a mess.” He says. “It’s a good thing you didn’t have any proper tools or you might have split the wagon itself in half.

“Where should we visit to get it fixed?” I ask. “We have plenty of gold, or whatever anyone could want in a trade.”

“It’s a big city, but what about Larry?” Greg says, turning to his partner.

“He ran off to the mountains a few days ago, something about a calling.” Sable chuckles. “The Madhouse, would be better. Stanley does good work, and I don’t think he’d turn them down.”

“The Madhouse?” Hope asks, frowning at the pair of not-quite-guards.

“Yeah, the madhouse grill. Stable, inn, bar, and grill.” Sable says, shrugging. “A bunch of his neighbours up and left, so he took over the buildings and added some rooms to patch it all together into the Madhouse.”

Sable turns her eyes to Hope, her smile sparkling a little as she takes notice of my partners charms.

“I can walk you two over if you’d like.” She says, “It’s not far.”

“Leaving me here alone again?” Greg asks, shaking his head at his partner. “Fine, go have fun. I’ll take care of the gates.”

“Thank you!” Sable says, stepping up close to Hope. When she notices that Hope is intentionally keeping a slight distance, she takes a few steps ahead and starts walking backwards to face us.

“Welcome to the city of Dust. We have everything a city should have, from galleries, to horse races, and markets with all sorts of strange things, the night markets in particular are stunning with a whole bunch of lights set up along the streets and crazy good foods at every stall.

“With that broken axle you two will be staying around for a while, is there anything that interests you, anywhere you want to check out?”

Her gaze is almost perfectly stuck on Hope as she says as much. I get it, she is cute, and I’ve had to run off a few guys that have gone after her already.

“I… I’m looking for somewhere beautiful.” Hope says, surprising me by speaking her mind. She’s not usually a complete fool or anything, but she’d usually wait for me to answer in her stead in this situation.

“Oh, there’s plenty of beautiful sights around here, but good luck finding them on your own. I can show you around the city when you’re free, a service without compare, I assure you.” She continues walking backwards even while turning streets. She really is a strange one.

Gritting my teeth, I look towards Hope, thinking that maybe she’ll turn her down.

Hope looks back at me, tilting her head a little and blinking.

“I guess.” She says hesitantly.

Yeah, Hope doesn’t quite get it. I guess she hasn’t really experienced much flirting before, not many potential suitors out in the deserts.

I breath out a sigh of relief, she can be a bit blind at times, but I trust that things are going to turn out just fine. Hope shouldn’t stray too far from me, and this offer sounds acceptable enough so long as I get to come along too. It will take away a little of our personal time, but in exchange we can get a local to guide us, so it’s not an unbearable loss.

Sable doesn’t seem the sort to do anything forceful either, though you can never be entirely sure.

“First, the Madhouse!” Sable says, raising a hand in excitement and waving it forwards as she marches us away. The cape that she wears over her shoulders waves out behind her, and I get a look at her from behind. She does have a nice butt, I suppose, and her attitude is quite fun.

“Why is the city called Dust?” I ask, looking about the road, it doesn’t seem particularly dusty or anything.

“Ah, did you see all the farmland surrounding the city?” She asks, turning back towards me and smiling. At least she doesn’t seem to be ignoring me or anything, in fact her smile is just as bright as when she looked at hope. Perhaps I was overthinking things?

“Yeah, there’s plenty out there.” I say, shrugging in confusion.

“Well, at the end of the autumn harvest, there’s lots of scrap that gets burnt in the fields. It helps revitalise them for the next season, but the fire spreads lots of ash, and it makes the town dusty for months after.” She says, “I can’t handle it, I have sneezing fits until it’s gone, and everyone teases me for it.”

“Why do they tease you?” Hope asks, walking a little closer to me and giving me a reassuring smile when she notices my attention on her.

“My sneezes are tiny little things, I just can’t put the proper energy behind it. I build up for this really big sneeze, and then… tsu. Like that!” She waves her arms wide, and shakes her head while laughing at herself. “Ah, here we are. The Madhouse!”

The extra-large building is a morphed combination of a stable, an inn, and tavern, but it’s clear that each was once separate and the efforts to combine them were entirely devoid of aesthetic direction. It looks structurally safe, and there’s a strange charm to it for that well maintained, and clean ramshackle look.

The sign that hangs outside the front door has a simple image of a stein overflowing with foaming beer, alongside the words Meadhouse & Grill, but with the ‘e’ in meadhouse is scratched out with half-hearted intents.

“I’ll go talk to Stanley and get you a room.” Sable says rushing ahead of us and leaving us out on the street with Shadow and our broken cart. It’s been rolling its way along, just barely, but I’m worried about the wheels falling right off on us.

“She seems nice.” Hope says, looking up and letting out a long sigh. “I worry about people too much; everyone here seems really nice, so far. So, was there anything you wanted to do while we’re here?”

“Hmm?” I hum thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t mind walking along the night markets with you. It sounds romantic.”

“Romantic, huh?” She asks, blushing a little as she looks down the busy street. People come and go, and all sorts of conversations are going on, but through it all, I think I can barely make out a whisper that makes me smile.

~Hope

“I think I’d like that, too.” I say it quietly enough that she shouldn’t be able to hear me. It still feels like I’m doing something wrong whenever I smile, or whenever I think of Fate.

It’s like a guilty pleasure, enjoyable partly because I know that I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be finding a quiet, beautiful burial spot, as far from the desert as I can get. Then I should wait for the end to come.

That was my plan for the longest time, but now I have something else filling up all the rest of my days, while I finish this quest.

“He’s got room in the inn and the stable, and he’ll look at that axle in the morning.” Sable says, joining us again huffing proudly as she places her hands on her hips. “Just bring in it in through here.”

Sable opens up the gates and gets us inside, guiding the carriage into place, before we unhitch Shadow. Fate feeds him another apple, which he gladly takes, not letting a single chunk fall from his mouth. He’s a strange horse.

I look back towards Sable, trying to get a read on her.

The young woman, wearing that ridiculous purple cape and shirt, painted with that terribly creepy eye, smiles bright and offers no explanation of what her group is.

The Vigilant.

Are they a privatised group of guards?

A cult?

A volunteer group?

I’m not quite sure I’m ready to ask, people can be wonderfully nice up until the point you ask them the wrong question. At which point they decide to pull out the pitchforks and try to hang you by your ankles over a fire.

Everyone seems nice here, but people in general suck. I’m not going to let Fate get herself into trouble like that, so I’ll figure this out and make sure nothing bad happens.

“I’ll come by again tomorrow!” Sable says making her way through the door but turning back to smile and wave a few too many times. Is she just awkward, or is there something more to that?

“I took a look at that wagon of yours.” The large man called Stanley says from across the bar. “It’ll take a good weeks work to get it rolling again, what with how busy I am at the moment. If you’re interested in making a deal, I have a thought.”

“What is it?” Fate asks, completely innocently leaning on the table, not worried at all that he might just try and attack her or something.

“We’re having a spring’s end festival in a week to the day, and we’ve been busy as it is. Help out with the tables, and I’ll see to that wagon of yours for free. I’d also be interested in trading for some of that food you have back there, but that’s a separate deal.”

“A weeks work for the axle?” Fate says, seeming a little hesitant. “Will we be working the whole time, or…?”

Stanley laughs, shaking his head.

“Festivals for everyone. You’ll have time to enjoy it together, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It sounds like a deal.” Fate says, shaking the man’s greasy hand, before pulling out a few coins. “The room?”

“Room and board is free, too.” Stanley says, “I’ll introduce you to Lucette in a moment, she’s the best of my waitresses and she’ll be making sure you get the basics of the job down by the time of the festival.”

“Well, I think we’ll go get ourselves cleaned up and get some dinner then. Do you need help tonight?”

“Start tomorrow. Looks like you two need some rest.” He turns away from us to return to the grill that is half the namesake of this shop.

Fate grabs me by the arm and pulls me up into the room before anything can get in the way of her bath.