Legend of Ransera

Having spent nearly three full months in Solunarium, the urchin of Antiris cum divine bastard of Re’ha had something akin to homesickness. It wasn’t exactly that, for he’d never felt quite at home in the North. His home had dutifully travelled Southeast with him in the form of a certain fair-skinned minstrel who was working to make a name for himself in the cabarets of the Umbrium. Arry envied that freedom, having essentially abandoned the career he’d been building for himself since he quit the thieving dens of Antiris to recreate himself in Kalzasi. Playing the part of the exiled noble of Sol’Valen he didn’t dare to dream he might be an exiled royal of Solunarium. In truth, he hadn’t really been aware of Solunarium until he chanced to be cast unwittingly as one of his own direct ancestors. Through his own machinations, he later subsumed the role of Deus Aværys himself and became fascinated by the culture. Perhaps that sense of kinship with the distant, isolationist culture had been coincidental, but it felt like more.

Still, there was only so much he could immerse himself in this alien culture before he wanted for some semblance of familiarity. In the Forum he found that. Shopkeeps of many races with many accents- not like the relative homogeneous he found in his Aurecine neighbourhood where most everyone who met his eye on the street looked a bit like him. The others, who looked more like Finn, tended to keep their eyes downcast. There had been something lovely about that at first, but once the novelty wore off it was terribly isolating.

He’d grown up on noisy, pungent inner city streets. Much more like these of the Forum than those of the quiet, austere, spacious markets of the higher hills.

He found an Antiran luthier and a Kalzasern clothier, who had taken advantage of the recent entrepreneurial gold rush of foreign traders embarking on the mercantile frontier of this kingdom. It was a relief to speak Common to others fluent in the tongue, but by and by he found himself at the stall of a toy seller whose wares looked remarkably like those of the man who raised him. Self-propelling gadgets- miniature airships and wyrms that employed magic to animate. The merchant, clearly a Vastian, addressed him in the local tongue upon noting his interest.

“These…” he gestured to the toys and continued. “Beautiful pieces.” His pronunciation was technically perfect, but there was something off about the lilt of the language that gave him away as a foreigner to a particularly keen ear.

“Where your technique learnèd was?” Alas it wouldn’t take so deft a listener to note the faults in his grammar. The toyseller smirked and rubbed his hands together.

Arry looked to the approaching woman. Ironically, it was her sudden insertion into the discourse, and not the shady shopkeep, who reminded him to check his belt to make sure his coin purse hadn't been nicked. How far he'd come that the former cutpurse should have ascended such a distance from the slums that he forgot to mind his coin. He'd become the sort of mark he used to look out for- Finely dressed, out of place... He resolved to be more mindful, as he nodded a friendly greeting to the woman, having established that his purse was still in place.

The toy trader cleared his throat and forced a smile, now addressing them both.

"My mentor used to make pieces like these for the royals themselves." He explained, "He had a proper shoppe... four walls and a roof- at one of the posh markets in the Aurecine. The Sovereign's oldest, Founders rest His Serene Highness' soul, came in one day when I was polishing up the airship collection. Bought a Blazing Basilisk for his son, just like this one..." The shopkeep leaned over his display to pick up a model lizard, that seemed to slither in his grasp. He tapped the head twice and said: "Lux", and the painted scales began to glow like roiling lava- bright and beautiful.

"That's right." He grinned, "I put one of these in the hands of the Princeps Pontifex himself when he was knee high to a grillus. Would you like to inspect it, Dominus?" He offered the toy to Arry, who accepted the illuminated model basilisk and turned it in his hands to inspect it from different angles.

"How was the mentor named?" Arry asked with an arched brow.

"Erasmus Venius Ceres." The golden elf seemed taken aback at this nomenclature. There was harrowed recognition. "After that, he worked for our blessed royals several times, and then he retired rather suddenly... I suppose he got into some trouble or t'other, but I was his best student. I carry on his traditions here in the Forum."

Arry handed the toy back with a trembling hand. The shopkeep only now seemed to notice his distress.

"Shall I wrap this up for you, Dominus? I am certain your children will love it for years to come..."

Arry shook his head, and the seller looked crestfallen.

"Thank you, no..." The elf hadn't caught every word of that, but he caught the crux. "Are you every day in this spot?" He was resolved to come back with someone who might help translate so he didn't miss anything important. The artisan's eyes lit up,

"Oh yes, Dominus. My son or I am in this spot every day."

"Thank you." Arry inclined his head to the shopkeep, then the woman who'd stepped up to them, and started down the aisle.

"Yes?" Arry paused, turning around and only after a beat did he realise she'd addressed him in Common. As she continued, he stepped out of the flow of traffic into a little pocket between two of the stalls nearby the toymaker's. He replied in his native tongue.

"Oh, you speak Common, I..." He sniggered and shook his head, "I shall have to let my pædagogus know how quickly I was caught out in the Forum today." He turned his golden eyes toward the stall from which they stepped away.

"He tells me my pronunciation is quite good, but I'm still struggling with the grammar. All the bloody conjugations are killing me, and I still need to refine my vocabulary." It was so hard to rush language learning, but at least he was immersed in it on the day to day. The official language was the only one regularly seen on signage. Common was just not... well, common there. Nor was the realm particularly friendly to foreigners. They hadn't been particularly welcome there over the past few millennia, but recent and controversial shifts in their foreign policy would likely bring about changes. Albeit not quickly enough to benefit Arry.

"I... think I understood most of what he said, but he was speaking a bit quickly so I suspect a missed a bit of the nuance." He looked back over to the cart. He considered giving her some context for their exchange, but decided that it might be wiser to revise the truth of it. He knew from years as a liar that the easiest lies to both remember and make convincing were those nearest the truth. Fanciful stories were easy to pierce and harder to uphold, because one inherently lacked the details and making them up created complicated webs that it was difficult to retain.

"When I was a boy, I had a few toys quite like those." Which was true, "I suspect his mentor may have constructed them, and... Well, as my broken Vastian might suggest, I grew up a long way from here and it made me nostalgic to see something evocative of my childhood." He smiled wanly and shook his head, "It isn't important, really..." He paused, looking the woman over and considering.

"You know, I was feeling a bit homesick today. I think my brain could use a break from Vastian for a bit, if you'd care to stop for a cup of tea and a chat? I would deem it a welcome diversion."

“Is it?” Arry’s smirk might have taken on a bit of smugness at her compliments to his diction. “Well, I’ve always had an ear for languages, and I used to be-…” He stopped himself from letting his enthusiasm at being flattered cause him to be reckless, “Well, I had cause to take an interest in linguistics.” He demurred.

“Ah…” He listened to her clarification of thr conversation with the merchant and considered the suggestion. “I don’t think we need to go to the trouble of vetting his story with a stake out or aught of the like. It was… naught but a spot of idle curiosity.” It was more than that, in truth, but he was just being impatient. He knew that, in time, the answers would come to light. As his mother had bade him: ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the wood hatch out.’

“You’re terribly kind to offer your services as translator. I do have more resources at my disposal than may seem apparent at present. My father…” That felt stranger on his tongue than Vastian, “Is a Vigil of the Sentinels, though as my accent might suggest I am a Len rather than a Val.” He unconsciously rolled his eyes at the designation of bastardy baked into his nomenclature. Although it had been emphasised to him many times that base birth didn’t carry the same connotations in the South, his knee jerk reaction to the label remained a fierce vexation.

“Alas, I am a stranger in a strange land with few Solunarian experiences and fewer friends. I’m certain you’ve a better lay of the land than I, but wherever you decide- I’ll treat. You’ve been ever so helpful.” He gestured for her to lead the way,

“So, you came up in the open desert? I’ve not met any like you- am I to understand that’s rather atypical?” It seemed a hostile enough place.

"So it would seem." Arry conceded. The Sentinels, like much of Solunarium, were a novel concept to the foreign elf. Much of the information that was available abroad was absurdly out-of-date. It was fortunate that, in many ways, the insular culture hadn't changed much over the centuries. It had evolved, of course, but where other cultures adapted to their times with science, the Solunarians seemed to default toward magic. There was a fearlessness to that, which he found invigorating.

He chuckled slightly, embarrassed at her didactically optimistic response to his unintentional eye-roll.

"You ought to give lectures! I could have used someone like you at Port Tertium." The welcoming committee he'd actually received upon arriving had been rather aloof and austere, until Finn had plied his inimitable charms upon him.

"Oh? Well, that should do nicely. And, worry not, I do have an adventurous palate if things wax exotic." He noted with a sly wink as he stepped through the door at her gesture.

"I'm really not terribly picky, in faith... Sweet or savoury will serve me, but-..." His memory flashed backward toward Antiris on that watershed day when his life forever changed. Stuffing honey cake ravenously into his adolescent mouth on Aurin's Aven, and thinking he'd broached the divine. A faint, crooked smile curled his lip, given the current context of his life. "Well, yes, I do like sweet." He acknowledged, as his mind returned to the present moment.

"You will order for us." Arry stated, as if it was a foregone conclusion, and settled into a seat against the wall that gave him a good vantage of their environs. Part of it was out of curiosity and a desire to people watch, and partly out of habit- having once been a thief and, more recently, a spy.

"Tertium was beautiful, I thought. I'd never seen anything like it... The Colossi were..." He was speechless. The grandiosity of the statues that guarded the harbour was awe-inspiring. "And..." He bit his lip, excited but a bit uncertain about mentioning this, "Well, I'm told it's thought a favourable omen, but as I emerged from the hold of the ship? The shadow of the Crownwyrm graced me... I'd never seen a dragon, and..." His face was flush at the very memory of it.

"It's so fascinating to me the way people hold onto traditions here." The golden elf pondered, "The 'old ways' of the nomads must be, gods... Over five thousand years old?" The tribes of the Vastii had wandered the desert since being driven out of their Northerly villages by the Orks in remote antiquity. It was before Aværys and Varvara... before the Cult of Re'ha ever crossed the Crystal Sea to flee their Hytori oppressors. Perhaps it was the newness of this knowledge that made it feel so potent. This wasn't scripture or ancient history to him, it was his favourite penny dreadful.

"Do your roving tribes still have skirmishes with the Orks? My f-..." He twitched. That was a slip not completely avoided, "My fair mother in Antiris used to tell me scary stories about the Orks stealing human children and gobbling them up with their tusks." He wrinkled his nose, "She said their stench alone could paralyse a person outright." In truth it had been his father... or the man who'd claimed to be... who'd told him such tales, but that didn't suit the current narrative of Kyros Len'Sorokys Arvælyn as it did that of Arvine Venasyr.