Faye’s chair toppled over and slammed to the floor. She looked between the two men. Seán was taking off his inner layer and looked confused. Gavan, on the other hand, looked a little sheepish.

“Gavan…” Faye started.

He held up his hands before she could say anything else.

“It was an honest omission,” he said. “I promise.”

“She didn’t know?” Seán put in. “How did she not know?” Then, he strode over to the bar to grab something to drink.

Faye picked up the chair and slumped down into it. She could hardly believe it. Hundreds of years was straight out of a fairy tale.

“You said that people only live to a hundred?” Gavan asked, he spoke quietly, but loud enough for Seán not to think he was being excluded. The innkeeper joined them at a nearby table and sat with a strange expression on his face.

“No, they rarely live to a hundred, Gavan,” Faye said, shaking her head, “most live until their seventies, eighties… less when there are diseases involved. Or accidents.”

Seán took a gulp of his beer and smacked his lips as he set it down, then wiping his lip on the back of his hand, asked, “Where are you from, again?”

Faye just waved a hand. “Not from here.”

“I’m getting that impression.”

Faye stood up, less suddenly than before, and put a hand to her forehead. She was feeling a little dizzy.

“I’m going to go lie down.”

The two men were still talking downstairs. Faye could hear them through the floor, though not the specifics.

Hundreds of years. God, that’s… wonderful and awful all at the same time.

She daydreamed about going home, someday. Before now, it was an errant thought that she had seen as a pipe dream, something so unlikely it would probably never happen. But with centuries to figure it out…

She turned over, staring at the wall beside the bed. Patterns and shapes jumped out at her the longer she looked at the wall, but her mind was elsewhere.

She’d be alive if we had been here.

Faye could not think of anything else. There was much about this world that was cruel, dangerous, or broken. But the fact that her mother would still be here, alive and breathing, if she had lived in this place rather than the one Faye had called home was almost too much for Faye. She found the tears flowed easily.

Faye woke, sometime later, confused. Something had woken her.

She sniffed. The smell of something mouth-watering floated through the air. It must have torn her from her dreams. Even now, they faded as the scent grew stronger.

She was drained, as if she had been running a mile a minute rather than sleeping. Her head pounded, too and her eyes were scratchy. She rubbed them and wondered if she had been crying whilst asleep.

Pulling herself up and out of the bed, she took a moment to wash her face with water in the basin. It was not quite as refreshing as the first time, but it was enough to make her feel half-alive again.

Gavan and Seán were sitting opposite one another at a table, bowls of steaming food to one side, and the pieces of some kind of game arrayed between them. She stepped carefully so as not to disturb them, but as she got to the ground floor, Seán stood from the table.

“No moving the pieces. Sit down, Faye, I’ll get some food for you.”

“Oh, no sorry, I was trying not to disturb you.”

“No trouble. Sit.”

He pointed to a table before he disappeared into the kitchen. Faye took the commanded seat. She looked over the pieces of the game with interest. She caught Gavan’s gaze and she gave him a small smile.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Uhm, ask me again, later.”

He nodded, then took a spoonful of the food from his bowl and stuck it in his mouth, his eyes wandering back to the game pieces.

“What are you playing?”

“Careint,” he replied. “It’s a game where you must capture your opponent’s pieces.”

“Fantasy chess, then.”

Gavan’s response was postponed as Faye tucked into the food that Seán brought out for her. It was delicious and filled the void in her belly. It revived her, pulled her back into wakefulness with finality. She was able to watch the two play careint and even pick up some of the basic moves.

The pieces were almost all varied, unlike chess which had multiple of most pieces, and there was clearly some kind of complicated rules system for what each piece could and could not do, as the interplay between the pieces was different based on, it seemed, random factors that Faye could not make hide nor hair of.

Eventually, Seán declared, with satisfaction, “Bhar.”

Gavan paused, his hand already halfway to his piece, and his face fell. “Oh, no.”

Seán crowed. “I have you now.”

Gavan made a move, hesitantly. Seán replied immediately. Gavan made another, with some reluctance. Seán quickly made another. Then, three turns went by without much excitement, until with relish, Gavan rapidly moved two pieces.

“Bhar, innkeeper. Two turns.”

Seán did not look pleased. “Two turns, please. I say you have nothing, and I have you in four.”

Gavan shrugged and leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms and waited. Seán muttered to himself a few times, and Gavan’s grin grew wider and wider. Faye got herself a drink whilst she waited for Seán to apparently accept the inevitable.

A few minutes later, he made a move. Gavan responded, and repeated that word. “Bhar.”

Then, after a couple of seconds, Seán made another move. His last.

Gavan moved a sequence of pieces, the order of which was more complicated than anything either player had done so far, and Seán’s face fell. He looked disgusted. “How?!”

“Fruagapachí!” Gavan exclaimed as he made the final, solid placement of his final playing piece.

Faye clapped. “Well done! I have no idea what just happened, but it looked exciting.”

“Want a game?” Gavan asked.

“Would you like a full-contact spar?”

“I guess that’s code for ‘no’, then?”

“I’ll let you figure that out,” she replied, sipping her drink. “Should be easy for you.”

Seán shook his head as he moved the pieces around. “I cannot believe you pulled that off. I don’t think I’ve seen someone perform that move before.”

Gavan nodded. “You would have if you had attended the college I was sent to. Took me at least twenty losses against it to even realise how it sets up.”

Seán muttered. Then, seemingly giving up on losing, he turned to Faye and gave her a look.

“Seems like you’re back with us. Are you okay?”

She grimaced. She did not like the way they were both looking at her, as if she were fragile. “I’m fine, thanks. Food was good.”

“Aye, well, I realise there are things there we don’t want to poke and prod… but Gavan was telling me what happened back west. I’m sorry ye went through that.”

“Oh, my problems stem from way before that, but, thanks.”

He nodded and pushed himself back in the chair. “There’s also the fact that you’re telling me there won’t be much traffic in this direction for a while, not until you can sort out some relief, eh?”

Gavan nodded. “It seems that way.”

Seán sighed. “I guess I was out here for more than coin, but it seems the Traveller’s Rest won’t live up to its name for a few months.”

“I like that name,” Faye said, with a smile. “But, once the initial help has returned to the town, there should be more traffic than usual for a while.”

Gavan nodded. “Aye, Lóthaven is not rich enough to keep every visitor supplied with stones of recall.”

“Something I can be happy with, then,” Seán said, “but it does not please me to hear that there are wild folk out this way. The idiots from the cities are bad enough, without wild ones coming and ruining things, too.”

“Why did you set up out here?” Faye asked. “It seems like an odd place for an inn, really.”

“It’s a crossroads,” Seán said, “or close enough, anyway. I would say that the folk from the villages southaways are my best customers. They know I can get better drink than the swill they make, and so they come up and purchase my stores. Often enough I don’t go destitute.”

“Thank you for the warm food and roof over our heads,” Gavan said, “but, we should think about moving on. Is there anything you wish for us to transport, or deliver, to the city for you?”

Seán had a letter or two he would want delivered, but he needed to write them first. Gavan said it was fine for them to wait. The innkeeper went into another room to pen his missives. Faye found herself tapping her fingers against the table as she waited.

Gavan looked over and waited for her to say something, she could tell from the air of expectation about him. She was unsure about bringing up what was on her mind, again. But, after he politely, but pointedly, coughed she sighed and sat back.

“Okay, sorry,” she began, “I’ve been thinking…”

“Can see that,” he replied, with a grin. “What’s on your mind?”

“That teleport artefact…”

Gavan nodded. “Hmm.”

“Well, it seems odd that something so powerful or rare, and, well, priceless, would be out there in the middle of nowhere like that. What if it was put there? Planted. We don’t know who orchestrated that attack on the town and whether anyone knows what we’re doing…” she shrugged. “And I just learned that people here live for centuries. That’s a long time for someone to come after us if we piss them off.”

“You’re right,” Gavan responded, “but I think you’re forgetting something important.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re young. People are going to have to avoid pissing you off, too. You just have to make them realise that before they do anything stupid.”

Faye thought about it, but the concept of scaring people around her before they thought she was insignificant enough to trample was not a sustainable way to live. No wonder this world produced paranoid, knowledge-hoarding people.

There had to be people that were not like that. She wondered what it would be like to meet them.

“Faye,” Gavan said, with a quiet voice, “I know it seems difficult, sometimes. But there are plenty of people out there that are worth the fight. Worth protecting. If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for them. Learn to stand up for something greater than yourself.”

Faye followed the thoughts his words evoked around and around. But, what it came down to was the fact that she was not sure what she stood for, what she wanted to do with her life. What did anyone do with centuries?

In a laboratory, at an undisclosed location protected by at least five layers of security and secrecy, a woman poured over the stone-like slab that was inlaid into a special platform abutting one wall. The teleportation platform was an intricate but robust artefact that had been designed with tamper-proof wards and qualities, at great expense.

“Impossible!” she exclaimed, for what seemed to her to be the hundredth time.

It had been days since that strange young woman had appeared in the laboratory. She had claimed that a Steading was being poisoned with her experiments. The woman examining the teleportation array scowled.

It certainly did not seem like she was lying. Why would she enter the lab whilst I was here for the first time if she was going to spin that tale, of all the tales?

Part of the reason she had set up her laboratory in this way was to prevent the very problem the adventurer had claimed. Research into new fields of magic were already dangerous enough without the research being used for nefarious ends.

Pushing aside the worries of what use her experiments had been put to use for, she tucked her hair behind her ears and ducked close to the array’s surface once more. She would get to the bottom of the malfunctioning teleportation artefact before she continued, at least.