Akhil shook Vincent awake far too early the next morning. “We have allowed you enough time to wake up,” he said in response to Vincent's groaning, “your cot is needed.”

Indeed, his was the only cot left. Everybody else was already up and breaking down the shelter around him. The canvas was coming off, allowing wisps of morning fog to pour through. Swearing under his breath, Vincent dragged himself from his bed, his limbs weighed down by exhaustion, and began to pack his things.

Breakfast was the same confused loaf of nuts, berries, and grains that Slade had once shared with him. He supposed it was a common recipe among the militia and he found it to be more palatable this time around. Still, it gave him a strong yearning for some fat American breakfast and a steaming cup of Italian roast. He stood to the side while he ate, watching the rest of the expedition load the shelters into the wagons. While he was between one bite and the next, Sperloc came to stand beside him.

“You will be riding with me,” he rasped, “when you are done, grab your belongings.”

“You must be glad to get your name into the history books,” Vincent said.

Sperloc scoffed at the suggestion, “Why? Because I will be riding with you?” He wiped away some spittle that had leaked from the corner of his mouth.

Vincent shrugged. “A historian conveniently putting himself in a position to interact with a historic figure? Seems a bit convenient to me.”

“You have discovered my scheme, Saedharu. I will be documenting every action you take. I will be your shadow, notating every movement, every word. Every time you shit, I will be there, watching, describing in detail the quality and robustness of your logs. Artisans will create beautiful murals depicting your bowel movements for all to see and worship.” Then more seriously he added, “if you are the fulfillment of the Lore of Contradictions, so be it, I say. I do not invest in prestige. Waste of time...just like what you are doing with that feln bread.”

He was referring to Vincent's habit of breaking the food into smaller pieces instead of taking huge bites or devouring it whole.

“I have a human brain that’s designed to work a smaller mouth and a smaller throat,” Vincent said, “if I try to down it all in one or two bites, I'll start gagging.”

“So...you have tried it then?” Sperloc looked sideways at him with glinting rat eyes.

The tuhli was truly one of the ugliest Falians Vincent had encountered so far. However, there was something of a challenge in the creature's words. Vincent looked down at the rest of the loaf, then shoved the entire thing into his mouth and tried to swallow it. As he predicted, the sensation immediately clashed with the lifetime of human conditioning his brain had developed. His entire body clenched and shuddered at the way the gullet stretched to accommodate the passage of a portion large enough to choke a person. Several times his human mind told him to gag even though it had no need to.

“Oh man...that is just wrong.” Vincent said as he felt the bulge make its way down.

“You are done now?” Sperloc grunted.

“Yeah...yeah, I'm done.”

“Then grab your belongings and follow me.”

***

Vincent was out of his element. Journeying to Meldohv by landrider had been a more unpleasant experience than this for more reasons than one. Knives had filled his back, and they began to do so again. He was glad that Sperloc at least had an honest-to-God softer saddle on his mount, cushioning him from the landrider’s blows. And the pace at which the expedition traveled was far slower. However, cramps worked their way up his back like giant spikes. He comforted himself in the knowledge that eventually the vessel he inhabited would adapt and grow the proper muscles for the journey. So, he held his tongue and kept quiet.

However, a storm loomed in the horizon, dropping curtains of rain on the vista. Vincent had hoped they would miss it, but they turned out not to be that lucky. Both he and Sperloc threw on Falian garments called tielths, rigid ponchos that they wore for rain. Well, Sperloc threw it on, Vincent, having a human mind, had to fight with his. The tielth was a miserable garment to don and wear. He was told the material was something called cleptin hide, but to him, it seemed nothing more than a crude sack of stiff leather with sleeves and a hood. There were no openings for the wings, so he was expected to fold them and pull the garment over his head.

He managed to wrangle it on just as they slapped into a wall of cold rain. The downpour turned everybody into silhouettes and sprayed his face. The tielth hung loosely on his form and he could feel cold streams running down his back. However, as the rain continued to bomb them, the garment began to change. As it absorbed the water, it lost its rigidity and gained flexibility. It weighed down on him like a thin layer of blubber. Its interior was water resistant, but it was not entirely waterproof. There were faults in the garment where the waterproofing failed, and he could feel several spots of wetness blooming across his body.

For a while, he could endure the discomfort. In fact, he discovered that even though there were leaks, the tielth insulated him from the brunt of the storm's fury. It kept him warm. He used this time to study the shryken. As he held it in his hands, his ethereal form pulsed to life and he could feel the hierarchy of the conduit's biddings. He was developing a second kind of sight, one that overlaid the imagery his eyes showed him.

He was riding on the back of a wet beast, snout tipped so that the storm wouldn't blast his face. But he was also floating among lore, guided by a mysterious intuition toward understanding, exploring the nodes within the shryken’s magics. Unlike the ward, he no longer needed a drug to float among the biddings and forbiddings, weaving lines of command to see what would happen. It was a nice distraction from the storm.

Still, the wind blasted the rain into his hood, and he was left soaked. It was still pouring by the time night fell and the expedition set up camp. The rain had turned the dirt road into mud, which ended up sloshing everywhere. Vincent was shivering, he was famished, angry, and the mud, which seemed to find its way into impossible places, left his legs covered in grit. But after watching the soldiers go about their tasks without protest, he was determined to hold his tongue. However, when he saw a soldier activating storm wards around the camp, that was when the bitching commenced.

“Hey you,” Vincent whispered to Sperloc.

“Hmm?”

“Why the hell didn’t they put those up earlier?”

“Put what up?”

“Those things!” Vincent pointed at the stakes whose lore kept the rainwater away.

“Because we don’t have an infinite supply of agnai to power them,” Sperloc said.

“What is agnai?”

“Do you think wards and conduits power themselves?” Sperlock asked, “no. They need agnai. And we can only get agnai near a lyacite surge like Meldohv Syredel.”

“Lyacite surge?” Vincent repeated.

“I assume you have wells where you come from?” Sperloc asked, “a lyacite surge is akin to a well. Only instead of drawing water, one can draw agnai from it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Vincent that conduits and wards needed to be powered. To him, they were magic. Did this mean they had batteries? He wanted to delve into the shryken’s lore again and see if he could find any indicators of a power source.

“The surges, along with numerous theological differences, is why Jalhara warred with us,” Sperloc said, “whoever controls the surges controls the region.”

Vincent kept trying to brush the dirt and the grit off his legs. But the damn stuff stuck to everything. He continued to bitch about the weather as he cleaned himself off. Madrian, who had enough of his whining, scoffed.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Stop your griping,” he said as streams ran down his wings, “it’s just a drizzle. It could be far worse. Besides, the gleaners say the weather speaks of sunshine tomorrow.”

“The 'gleaners' huh?” Vincent said, “I met a weather gleaner once. He just hung some metal blades up on a string. Sorry, but your people don't know jack-shit about the weather.”

It was an unfounded proclamation, of course. They clearly had a method that allowed them to predict inclement weather. But Vincent was irritable and needed to vent.

“If you are going to utilize exotic curses such as 'jaak shit' in your blithering,” Sperloc rasped, “at least enlighten us as to what the history behind such vernaculars is.”

“It's...just a saying. It means they don't know anything.”

“I can ascertain its meaning, boy. But all idioms have a history. And your history, being that you 'hail' from another world, is precious knowledge. What, or who, is 'Jaak'?”

Vincent stared at the grotesque creature for a moment. He was tired, he was hungry, he was itching from biting insects, and he was in pain from the nonstop riding. The last thing he wanted to do was allow himself to be dragged into such a pointless conversation.

“What the hell do you want from me? A ballad? 'There once was a guy named Jack Shit...'” he said, enunciating every syllable for unnecessary emphasis, making it sound like he was about to lead into a long-winded fable. “And your weather gleaners don't know him.'”

He continued to lag behind the expedition in the days that followed. This was their show, not his. Each one of them knew when to get up, what task they were responsible for, when it had to get done, and they did it without missing a beat. They were all part of a well-oiled machine. Even Tuls, who as far as Vincent knew, had no military training, seemed to be dancing to the same beat as the rest. Perhaps relos were trained to work in conjunction with Meldohv's militia if needed. No, it was just Vincent who struggled to keep up with the rigid routine.

For several days in a row, he woke up later than the rest. At first, they tolerated his tardiness. Eventually, they had reached the end of their patience, and he awoke one morning to find himself being physically dragged from the cot by his horns and thrown to the ground outside the canopy.

“You will learn to move when we do.” Akhil growled. Vincent nearly soiled himself.

He had immense regrets about joining the expedition. Trying to acclimate to the shandan's routine was like jumping into a glacial lake. It was a shock to the system, and it left him flailing. When he told Thal'rin that he wanted to go with them, he did not imagine just how tangible the journey would become. These creatures were a trained militia and he was just a college student, used to having hot water, climate control, and a clean bed. Though he tried his best to hold his tongue and avoid coming off as a spoiled brat, he was miserable. Fortunately, his misery was tempered by Falius' majesty.

Though he had raced across its lands with Slade, he had not been given enough time to absorb the beauty of the land. The interplay between Falius' sun and the celestials created displays he would never see on Earth. When their star set, the sky seemed to catch on fire. If there were clouds, they were set ablaze and became liquid gold flowing over the canopy, their wispy forms tailed by penumbras that were cast like dark rays.

At night, Falius' features would bathe in the alternating crimson and purple light of its celestials, which he learned were called Niftel and Tarn. Day by day, the astral bodies took turns growing and receding in the vistas, their glows swelling over the alien landscapes. Sometimes one of them would eclipse the sun during the day, creating a brief period of darkness which his hosts referred to as a second night. Vincent tried not to think too hard about the implications proposed by Niftel, Tarn's, and Falius' astral dance, otherwise his chest would fill with a mind-numbing dread.

He was not an astrophysicist, but he guessed that Falius was a shared moon being passed back and forth between the two planets. Was such a thing even possible? The chances of such a system forming and remaining in a stable equilibrium seemed to be infinitesimal. If his guess was right, then these people had no idea how precarious their home world's situation in the cosmos was. What kind of havoc did the tidal forces wreak upon their lakes and oceans? What happens if a gravitational body passes through and disrupts the equilibrium? Trying to imagine and map Falius' unlikely orbit hurt his brain. Nevertheless, the displays caused by Falius' hosts were unbelievable, creating a plethora of painted nights.

The rust-tinged grass blanketed meadows, fields whose topography followed strange formations. They were populated with exotic life. Crustaceans the size of boulders traveled in tight-knit herds with sunlight glinting off their carapaces. Birds with multiple sets of wings landed on these creatures' backs and pecked at their shells, picking off flies. Tall insects with four long legs strode gracefully across the fields, reaching up into trees with their proboscises to search for fruit. Vincent saw panoramas and ecosystems both beautiful and alien with sounds and smells to match.

This place, with its graceful vistas and unrelenting beauty, was a place to be treasured and protected. Even in its moments of ugliness, it still enthralled the senses. And yet there was something solemn about its tapestries. Every feature seemed isolated and relatively untouched by civilization the further the expedition traveled from Meldohv. Even in the countryside back on Earth, he was used to seeing homes dot the roads. But the expedition could travel for an entire day without seeing even a single building.

Where were the towns and rural villages? Where were the farms? Perhaps Admoran was far larger than North America, allowing its populace to be scattered across greater distances. Or perhaps he was simply used to traveling by car, not in a caravan of beasts. Vehicles made the world seem smaller. Still, Admoran seemed far too wild, far too untouched.

“Our world is ravaged by calamities” Thal'rin had said, "generations are only allowed to grow so much...before their society is wiped out by some catastrophe.”

Occasionally, they encountered ruins of civilizations past whose foundations had been reclaimed by both nature and time. Sperloc would speak of fallen empires, of tyrants and fools who came to clash. And he told these stories with vulgar wit that left anybody listening either grinning or doubling over in laughter. Even Vincent, though he initially found the creature to be repulsive, took a quick liking to the tuhli. Underneath the scorched flesh and twisted visage was a mind that was both sharp, quick-witted, and had an eye for seeing through bullshit. Occasionally Sperloc would make some off-the-wall jibe that would even leave him in silent hysterics once the words sunk in.

Then there were the soldiers assigned to his protection. “Your eyes are glass, friend.” The “thousand-yard stare”, assuming that's what they referred to, was a human trait. It did not belong in the eyes of beings who came from mythology. They recognized that he had been through some shit, but beyond that, they were distant from him. He was fine with that. He was a stranger, unfamiliar with their ways. He needed to be both disconnected and impersonal.

Beyond the vistas and his alien companions, Vincent was haunted by a thousand doubts. The stormspawn had bowed to him. That gesture alone disturbed him far more than the aberrations' grotesqueness. If he pursued those storms, a second confrontation with those things was inevitable. He knew that when he signed up for this, yet now, the threat felt all the more substantial. Even if he recovered his memories and survived unscathed, what then? What would he do, go after the Stalker itself?

If he accepted that such an entity did exist, what could he hope to do to it? It had passed between dimensions to scope him out. Then, when the time was right, it snatched him from Earth and transformed his body into this mockery. What could he hope to do against an enemy like that?

Only an imperfect amnesia protected Vincent from the full trauma of the experience. He only remembered the idea of pain, not the pain itself. So, he was able to temper his fear of the Stalker with outrage. He tried to spite it. But the truth was that even though his anger nudged him forward, he couldn’t do anything to such an entity. Thal’rin was right, even the powers he had were gifted to him by his kidnapper.

“–remember that you are still small and that your power comes from something that most likely seeks to manipulate you.”

Vincent had to ground himself constantly. He was a schizophrenic. It was common for crazies like him to believe that they partook in grandiose plans that went unseen by the rest of the world. Awareness of this tendency was his strongest anchor to reality, as well as his greatest asset toward fighting his own lunacy. When he had these doubts, when he fret about the stormspawn, about the Stalker, all he had to do was find some smooth surface in which to view his reflection. The goofy-looking creature staring back would renew his outrage and galvanize his resolve.

He didn’t have all the answers, but for now, recovering his memories would get him somewhere. They would offer him some more protection against this trap. Do that first, then figure out the next step. When logic failed and all methods of inquiry fell flat, sometimes problem solving was a matter of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, then extrapolating whatever one could from the result.

Falius was a fast-flowing river and the anger at his ignominy, tempered by logic, was the only thing that kept him from being absorbed into this dream, the only lifeline that kept him from being swept away. The best he could do right now was to hold on. That meant he had to withdraw from his company and remain separate from them. Present, but distant. But doing this was tremendously difficult. He wanted to know more about them despite himself.

They, both groundwalkers and zerok, would raise so many questions. He could feel a hundred of them pounding at his lips, inquiries that he was dying to ask. Do they know what they evolved from? Did they, like humans, ever look at the stars and wonder if they were the only ones in the universe? How did zerok and groundwalkers learn to live with each other? Was it symbiotic? Did one species ever prey on the other?

He wanted to ask the soldiers how they could travel with somebody whom they were told was the incarnation of a myth. Was it part of their culture to believe one’s claim of alien origins so readily? Or were they simply following orders? Though his companions occasionally tried to engage in a little bit of banter in the evenings, the soldiers remained distant and disciplined. But it wasn’t just philosophical inquiries Vincent had to stifle.

Every sight seemed to bring new questions. What is that thing? What is that other thing? That tree just moved, did you see that?! What are those flying disks? Are those...animals?! Did that bird just land, curl up into a ball, and roll away? That worm just split in half and rejoined itself!! He felt a childlike fascination with all the things he was looking at and he desperately wanted to ask his hosts about the world they were traveling through. Yet he had to steel himself against that temptation. This world was drawing him in. He was being seduced.