Honestly, I’m not even going to try and guess what month it is

I haven’t written in a long time and honestly, that’s probably for the best. The last week or so has been straight wild. Orvalys and I were almost murdered by a group of what I later learned were Thori warriors. Apparently, they come from somewhere far across the ocean and there’s lots of confusing history about it that I don’t have time to get into.

I don’t even really have time to talk about the weird man named Lesh who showed up and saved us. I mean—I could talk about him and I probably will—but I have to tell you about something else.

There’s magic here.

I can’t really explain it—not completely, but in this world, they have something called Athe. When Lesh describes it, he pretty much comes up with a new name every time. Bloodwater, Lifeflow, Universesap, Springwindjuice (Made that last one up but the ridiculousness is accurate).

The thing is Athe is… real. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen Lesh use it, and actually, there’s more. I haven’t just seen it, I’ve used it too—drank it, as Lesh says. Or at least that’s what I’m slowly coming to terms with. At first, it seemed that Lesh would just interpret my random thoughts and ideas to draw out some sort of meaning, but the more he ‘trains’ me, the more I’m convinced there’s actually something to it.

The other thing is—it’s hard, really excruciatingly hard. Imagine learning that some of your thoughts could be tapping into the collective consciousness, but not all of your thoughts are. It turns out it’s much, much harder to differentiate between those two than you would think. Lesh says there’s a type of calmness, an order, a ‘rightness’ about it when you’re drinking the Athe, but honestly, I can’t really tell. There have been a few times I felt close, but it was always him who recognized it and not me.

And Orvalys isn’t much help. He keeps asserting that his brain’s expertise is in calculations and linguistics and statistics. Lesh says he isn’t an “Athedrinker’ like I am (convenient I know), but that doesn’t stop him from incessantly asking me what it’s like. I suppose that’s good—to sort of explain my thought processes out to him, but it’s already difficult to tell what’s going on in there, and a lot of the time I don’t really have anything to say. Some of the thoughts come from the Athe and some don’t—according to Lesh.

It’s easy for him though—freakishly easy. He already speaks English, like, almost perfect English. It took him all of an afternoon of ‘drinking into our minds’ (which, even though it sounds a little creepy, definitely impressed and convinced me). This world’s magic is the Athe, and what that actually is, I can’t say, but I can absolutely say it’s real.

I must admit, if there is something that’s a little more difficult for me to believe it’s that what I’m doing and what he does is the same thing. I get flashes of images and ideas and words. They seem totally disconnected, kind of like an impulsive thought. But then there are times I concentrate on something and it seems like I’m sort of tapping in. Also if I concentrate too hard I lose it, so there’s that. It’s confusing.

We do this little test where Lesh hides an acorn under one of three leaves. I have to visualize which leaf it’s under and tell him. At first, I would never get it right, or at least not more often than just randomly guessing. Then I sort of started to get it, I actually guessed correctly five times in a row, but then I started to worry about losing it, and that worry turned into worrying about worrying, and then I did lose it. Everything went back to random again. Lesh promised me this was normal, but it still made me frustrated.

And he still won't tell us why I need to learn all this stuff. He says it’ll be incredibly important down the road, but that honestly only kind of freaks me out, cause he can see… well, everything—so none of that helps either.

I have to say it reminds me of Nymian magic. Not the actual specifics, but just the practice. I remember being so frustrated trying to learn how to manipulate the elements. I would feel like I was getting a little heat to come out of the air one day, I’d have a full flame the next day, and then for three weeks, I'd get nothing. “Growth isn’t a straight line.” Embr would say that. She said a lot of things. Those were hard days, but they were good ones.

Anyway, Lesh says the time for moving on is coming soon. We’ve probably only spent a few days with him in the forest, but it feels like weeks. At the same time, I can’t imagine I’ll learn pretty much anything in so little time, but he insists it’ll be enough.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I am anxious to get across the mountains though. Orvalys and I occasionally feel the pulling of the gateway or whatever is on the other side. Orv comments here and there about how different this one feels, and that always strikes me as strange. Usually, gateways appear randomly and then disappear as well, but we haven’t felt so much as a ripple of one in Tinaria. Besides this big one I guess, if that’s what it is. Orvalys insists he doesn’t even know exactly how the portal-sense works.

Sometimes he talks about other types of Crossworld senses—things you can sense from other worlds. I don’t love when he talks about that because it seems like he's trying not to talk about things that could be sensing out there for us.

I do get curious about that little guy’s backstory sometimes. I’ve learned not to bring it up though, he seems pretty adamant about not discussing it.

Either way, tomorrow is supposed to be a big day. Livrik is a little village on the side of the mountain, and Lesh says that’s where we’re going next. It’s strange because as soon as it appeared in our view, it looked familiar to me. Little red buildings right at the edge of the tree line. Reminds me of a mix between something Tibetan and also almost Roman, though I’ve never been good with Earth's geography or architecture—maybe I should have paid more attention in school (I did most of it twice after all).

I’d like to write a little more often, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to. The way Lesh hints about Orvalys and my next few days… It sounds like we could be pretty busy."

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Genys looked down over the expanding pastel crisscross of the Yarvan lands. Fields and villages reached out almost as soon as the wooded foothills ended, creating a kaleidoscopic effect stretching out below the airship.

They weren’t like Tinarian fields which were square and useful—space-saving. Yarvan fields wound around groves of trees and hills. They didn't make any sense, they were… lackadaisical. It was clearly the product of a people who put efficiency low on their list of priorities. It was good that Tinaria was helping them transform those cultural attitudes into something more desirable, and as they drew closer to the Yarvan capital city, the fields had more of a Republic-like shape to them.

The villages grew denser and denser up to the horizon where they ended in Ullulia and the coast. Some of the larger buildings of Ullulia were already visible from here, which was to be expected given how high up they were.

Most that could be seen from here were Tinarian buildings, built with round Tinarian bricks. Save for one or two religious edifices, they stood taller than anything Yarva had ever built before.

It was poetic really.

But within that modernization were still the roots of rebellion, roots she was determined to dig out and lay bare. Unfortunately, as she found out last night, they were roots that wove their way into her very troops.

The warm breeze that met them as they began to descend was welcome. Genys had been determined to ride out the entire pass at the top of the airship and she had done so. Every waking moment over the last few days she had stood at her post, but it had cost her much of the energy she had left. There would be no hiding her limp after this. Try as she might, something was seriously wrong with her and it looked like it was going to get worse. As the days and hours passed, it became clear she wasn’t getting better, and that meant time was of the essence. There were things to do, and those things were ever more pressing.

Jik had found a dead soldier last night, in their quarters in the middle of the airship. Though it had been staged a suicide, everything in the Commander’s gut told her that wasn’t the case.

She had treated it as such, obviously. It wouldn’t do to let any dissenters among her troops know she was on to them, but she immediately knew something else had happened. Jik had voiced the same opinion. There were still those of her troops that were loyal, but there were certainly others.

They would touch down in Ullulia in a matter of hours now. There she would meet with the local law enforcement—or whatever passed for it. Being stationed in Ullulia was a detestable position for anyone of good Tinarian blood, and therefore most matters were handled by local Yarvan forces.

For the last few decades, Tinaria has transitioned from heavy occupation to a greater degree of autonomy. The local enforcement was generally trusted not to misbehave, and to quash any potential uprisings. As long as they kept things in order and paid taxes and inquests the threat of absolute destruction was usually more effective than a present military force. But that threat was ever real, and Tinaria made sure to remind them of it. Part of that reminder was training a Yarvan squadron to serve in the Republic Militia for several years before returning. That usually weeded out the weak ones anyway. After that, many of them chose not to return to Yarva. She couldn’t blame them for that, who would? But some of them did, and many of those worked in keeping the peace.

In essence, they were contract workers—which meant she couldn’t trust them. How could she if she couldn’t even trust her own? Someone was hiding something right under her nose, and last night she suspected the dead soldier was going to tell her about it.