Legend of Ransera

The Half-forgotten Inn – or The Forgot-Inn as Dhruv had dubbed it, much to the delight of the proprietor – slumped so casually in a worn corner of the Kalsazi Commons that it may as well have surfaced from the sands of time along with the mysterious hytori for no other purpose but to greet the weary time traveler. Within a week it was almost as though the inn could no more survive without the sad-eyed elf than it could without its yawn of mahogany bar, ancient and hand carved, purposefully polished and too well scarred. They were both of long lost worlds.

Everyone became friends with Dhruv. It didn't matter what faction they were part of, who they were employed by, or if they were here for a day or for the rest of the indefinite tomorrows. The elf was an exceptionally good listener. He rarely passed judgment and he would walk you safe home even after he kicked you out for starting shit in Nora’s bar. He had one of the rooms upstairs with a window that kissed the city’s star-gazing curve. Nora would let the other rooms out from time to time, for a night or a month; but she had started asking Dhruv to “handle it” when he proved an earnestness in looking out for her best interests. He could be strangely picky about who could stay, and at what price; but any appeals to Nora over Dhruv’s decisions were deferred back to the elf. Everyone figured she just liked his face. Afterall, he was charming in an odd but consistent way. And everyone was welcomed into his friendship and to a pint when he manned the bar. But the astute might eventually realize that nobody really seemed to know Dhruv. Not even Nora. Where did he come from? Who was his family? Why was he here, with fists full of an unbelievable nothing, with no apparent affiliation or loyalty? How did he know Nora? What was his last name?

None of your business, was Nora’s answer for everyone except Aurin. The streaks of silver in otherwise dark hair made Nora appear older than Dhruv, but her mind was nothing if not sharp and Dhruv didn’t seem to notice or care that she reported on him to his original benefactor. Maybe he hadn’t caught on. Maybe he had nothing to hide. Maybe the sand that scraped beneath his bootheels to get caught in the cracks of the floorboards or be swept out into the street was the figment of an over-active imagination.

He stuffed his handkerchief into the pocket of worn black slacks. They slumped over scarred boots and he wore a matching shirt. Muscled, broad shouldered, and lean, he had some ink on his arms that looked like an artist had started a strange song on his skin and never finished, hardly hinting at the sheer symphony of sigilry hidden by his clothing. Golden brown hair was getting a little long, tousling into eyes that the unimaginative called hazel. Naturally bronzed skin held a hint of pallor today, but nothing that would give someone cause to notice unless they were trying. He slumped ignobly at the top of the stairway and a mug steamed between his hands, smelling of bourbon and honey.

He eyeballed the door, debating. Or waiting. Yeah, waiting. That was the other thing about Forgot-Inn and the elf who now helped Nora run it. It was welcoming and comfortable and familar, and underneath all of that was a stillness of sign posts at crossroads, or sentinels at castle walls. A waiting. A watching. But for what? Or for who? Maybe just forever.

His eyes cut straight to Aurin, drawn like a moth, and their corners crinkled with a smile that maybe should not have been so warm. Maybe it only seemed to be in contrast to the cold that had crept into his bones the day before, conjured at the howls of a frost elemental. He quaffed enough of the drink to keep it from spilling before jogging the rest of the way down the stairs. Spying him, Nora swallowed a sigh and reached for the steaming carafe so she could pour Dhruv a refill when he slid to a halt before her.

“Did you get all of it then?” The canny innkeeper arched an elegant eyebrow. The corners of her mouth twitched, bemused, as she watched Dhruv gather up his fresh mug and Aurin’s glass. Dhruv rolled one shoulder in a shrug.

“And more.” He winked and turned about on his heel even as Nora’s grin flared, making his way through the tavern in a loose hipped swagger to Aurin’s table whereupon the pint glass was set down and he availed himself of the seat across from the man, seemingly heedless of the fact that it placed his back to the room. After all, Aurin was there to watch it. Wasn’t he?

“Cheers,” he muttered and elbowed down to nurse his drink, studying the man through wisps of steam. “Are you hungry?” He asked at length.

“Are you expecting someone?” It was a question quietly posed while Dhruv watched Aurin’s eyes, how they were alert and wary in their regard of the taproom. It was starting to fill as the night crept out from the feet of the mountains, and near the stone hearth someone was tuning their fiddle in a slow moan of strings.

From behind the bar, Nora’s part time server Janey bounced down one side and up the other, slinging drinks and chattering merrily to those who elbowed down to the bar. Dhruv slumped back, arm slinging over the back rise of his chair so he could tilt his chin to take it all in, let his regard find the same pathways as Aurin’s before refocusing on his friend.

“Oh-aye.” The elf’s grin returned. “I’ll be full fluff before too long, all the biscuits madam needs testing. Call on me tomorrow and there’s gingersnaps in it for you and like as not the whole of your neighborhood, you like.”

A shrug meandered through the strong line of his shoulders and he took another long swallow from the steaming mug. Nose wrinkled, he rubbed a sleeve over his mouth and considered. “There’s ham pie if you think you can stomach my cooking,” he offered. “Madame has been teaching me and I have to tell you that I’ve improved. Be glad you weren’t about for my first attempt. I think Janey is still regretting it.”

Unvoiced laughter loitered in the corners of his mouth, dripping into that archaic accent like molasses. He left his mug on the table between them while bounding to his feet. “Be right back –” He sidestepped his way around the beginning of a card game and bellied back up to the bar at its end. Watching the elf, he seemed at ease in this place. It was as if he had been here forever, a fixture who received a few nods and a whack on the back by the regulars as he collected up fresh plates from Nora’s hands. In short order he was sliding one of the plates in front of Aurin and resuming his seat with a plate of his own. The savory pie smelled delicious, and was perhaps surprisingly good considering who had thrown it together.

“How goes everything with you, eh?” He wanted to know while digging a fork into his dinner. It was used as a pointer or a wand to gesture vaguely. “Business has been good for madame. But I’m telling you there’s no room here for the new rug merchant’s apprentices. They are, eh, gros écœurant.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “So I showed them out and won’t be letting them back in.”

The line of the elf’s mouth slanted sideways at Aurin’s remark that the Forgot-Inn’s regular bartender cum waitress was just a girl who can’t say no. He forked a bite of the steaming ham pie into his mouth and slumped a little further forward, considering. For a moment it seemed he was contemplating the outcome of his cooking experiment – after all, dredging his memories resulted in the strangest flotsam buoying to the surface. In this case, the flotsam came in the shape of a cold, clear day set somewhere in his past. He had no idea of the actual sequence, only that he could feel the sharp blade of winter clearing his lungs when the smell of frying ham had greeted him at the kitchen door this morning. It was said that scent was a powerful conjurer, motivating many a recollection to make its way up. It was with these crumbs that he raided Nora’s larder and gathered the ingredients – some a lucky guess, at best – and set about the day’s work of rebuilding himself. Or rebuilding of self.

Aurin was watched as he took his first bites for his reaction, although Dhruv was beginning to suspect that his trust in the man would have come as a surprise to people who had known Aurin longer. That did not make the elf uncomfortable or impact his good opinion, and maybe that in itself was telling. He was broken, but not dull witted. And his experiences, whatever all they were at this specific point in time and space, did not incline him toward judgement in this regard.

“Women who can’t say no are typically built by men who can’t take no as an answer,” he remarked mildly. He gave a glance over the rise of his shoulder to the bar where the woman in question had paused in her work to listen to the fiddler, a dreaming gleam to heavy lidded eyes. There was no edge to the elf’s words but it would be easy to assume he had developed a crush on the bartender, which would neatly explain his clear integration with the day to day dealings of the inn.

Of course, that was not true either.

“Well. We will see how many pies of any kind I’ll be able to make in another turn of the moon or two.” He swallowed a hearty bite before laying down his fork, for once not scraping his plate clean. He must have already eaten, and had seconds. At the rate he was going, he would be full fat by the time they ran out of ingredients for pies or any other foodstuffs. “Do you know what, if any, sort of plans there are for sustaining the local food supply through the, ah, true winter?”

As time – that thief – widened the pass between Dhruv and his abrupt arrival in the Kalzasi sewers, his considerations too broadened. Although he remained far from his full strength, physically as well as magically, he was no longer so very discombobulated. He still suffered from bouts of illness and the great yawn of his memory could still occasionally come back to at a thundrous roar that left him shaking and irrevocably changed. He hoped it would return quickly and in full. He also hoped it would go slow, absorbed drip by drip in a painless rennaisance. Sometimes he was determined to lead what life allotted him here in ignorance of both his origins and his fate. Sometimes.

There was a ghost with gold eyes who flew through fog. There was a wayfinder with a sword like a ticking time bomb and a hydrangea sky that stretched above so blue it could break a soul. Yesterday, for a handful of hours, Dhruv remembered that he was both ghost and helmsman.Today, he recalled the guardian and the clan leader. Who was he to think he could impact the outcome of a food shortage on the people of Kalzasi? What right had he to such a presumption? At the end of the day, Dhruv did not so much as imagine he could change things for the good, only that he should try. He had never been much for permission anyway, preferring the route of forgiveness when the cause was clear. Always a man of action because he was constantly running out of time.

“Had a run in yesterday with a pair of ice elementals who’d been soured by the dread mists,” he offered at length, quite as if he did not realize how deep he had buried the lead. Maybe he didn’t. “If that sort of madness is what we have to look forward to in the coming seasons, the people of this city are going to be hard pressed to handle it until Glade.”

“Potatoes.” Dhruv’s voice slid under the swollen ascent of the fiddler’s strings, automatically calibrated to be heard but not travel beyond the breadth of their table. How many hours had he spent in bars and backrooms such as this in his youth? “You need about twenty to twenty-five square feet per person for potatoes.”

The elf trailed off. It wasn’t an answer and he well knew it. It was just a fact, bobbing up from the giants depths of his chaotic memory, to present itself. He found it discouraging, a reminder of how busted his brain was The steam had long since cooled from the lip of his mug but he drank deep of it all the same.

He shook his head at himself, elbow down to the table so a long fingered hand could curl about his chin. His smile quirked, eyes meeting at the intensity in Aurin’s question. “Good thing I know you, eh? Else starve. Potatoes.” He snorted at himself or perhaps at the comment regarding his cock.

The strong prey upon the weak far more than they protect them. Shadows spilled like curtains against the backdrop of his memory and he imagined for a moment he could feel the beating of hooves in the pit of his stomach, reverberating through the meat and bones of him. Seeking a route out.

His smile flickered, then faded. The fiddler’s song seesawed cheerfully through the inn’s main room in strange counterpoint. “I need a ring that was fashioned for me an age ago,” when the accent with which he spoke was only old and not yet dead. “So perhaps for my memory to flesh itself out, restore what’s faded both naturally and by illness. I don’t –” He cut himself off and the frustration fletching his words along with it. He took a sip of his drink and began again, more easily. He contained multitudes.

“Aye, I am able to defend myself well enough. Though ice elementals such as those would have seen me gone for reinforcements. I’m not so foolish as to take them on alone.” A beat. “Like this.” As there was an age where he absolutely would have, and been not altogether too worried. He was much diminished. “I accompanied the Dawnmartyr.Talon and the red dragon were more than capable of handling them without me. Aurin –”

Strong shoulders tilted forward, eyebrows drawn. “Do you think some element of history could carry over? That something from the times I’ve lived could follow me forward, here, to this time? If only I could know. I’d not want my body to be the bridge for something like the dread mists.”

He did not really expect Aurin to have an answer for that, and perhaps it was obvious. He didn’t expect anyone too, really, not anyone living. His last hope ought to have died when he lost that interminable clock, or maybe with the death of the last aeternus mage. But time was funny that way, wasn’t it? And time magic stranger still. He might even see his old lover one day, in a far flung future she’d no hope of ever returning from. Dhruv didn’t like to imagine things like that, however, because it kept him balanced on little but longshots when he needed to be grounded in the inevitable – the only way out was through.