Something occurred to Kashan as he stepped outside the oddly immaculate guild hall. It wasn't a guild hall at all. He had assumed due to the amount of armed men and women walking through its threshold, when it was the mayor’s manor. Villages in their infant stages did not have the resources or local personnel to support guild activity, so the mayor likely stepped in to ensure a strong connection to the capital via news, trade, and bestiary and botanical information. Kashan had never heard of an appointed noble opening his doors like that. It made him glad to know that perhaps the greed he’d seen before would remain a distant memory.
Earlier, the guild official, named “Tuscea”, offered a simple acquisition request to gauge Kashan’s ability to follow simple instructions. Tuscea read off of a scroll with a deadpan tone, stating, “Alright, so, ‘Head out into the woodlands and secure a bundle of twenty Fuentis Flowers. They grow near freshwater ponds and lakes as their delicate roots handled fast-moving or contaminated water poorly,’ Can you do that?” Kashan remembered planting seeds of these flowers near water sources during a ceremonial patrol during his first year as an imperial knight. He doesn’t remember why, but he recalled that it was the right thing to do. Kashan nodded with confidence and made his way outside, leaving Tuscea with the scroll he was supposed to take with him. As he strolled towards the northern entrance, the very same from earlier in the day, he noticed a graveyard. Something about it… pulled at him.
Before long, Kashan found himself standing before a monument. With morbid curiosity, he read the epitaph worn by rain and snow.
“Though the commander and his loyal knights fell here, their names forgotten, may their deeds live on amongst the sun, moon, and stars,” he read, running his fingers along the engravings. He thought of the brave men and women who’d abandoned everything to stand by his side. “They forgot our names, but they remembered us… I suppose that counts.” It made him slightly annoyed that he wasn’t buried with his comrades, but knowing the survivors who’d left with the caravan, he knew they’d rather die than not have Kashan on a pedestal. He felt a tug on his shoulder and thought it was a subconscious reaction telling him to leave. Then it tugged at him again.
“How was your first day?”
The woman’s voice snapped him back to attention, almost prompting him to swing his weapon again. Instead, he turned on his heels and took a few steps back. When he expected the woman to come into view, he only saw a haze of stars in a nebula, with a single 4 pointed pupil twisting and churning the abyss inside of it. Kashan replied as calmly as he could, slowly recalling more and more of the interactions he had with the… He’s not really sure anymore. “It was eventful, Should we even be speaking? What if someone-” Kashan cuts himself off as he sees the people outside the graveyard, frozen. Every creature, every simultaneous moment locked into place by a force greater than imagination can muster.
“I will not be seen. I am sure. Your synchronization is stable. You will continue to see memories. Should you desynchronize, you will seek out the nearest grave. We will synchronize once again.” It spoke like a royal decree, written to be brief and exact. It made him miss the playful banter he had with the… the… What was it? He recognized the haze, but beyond the woman, the memory it should allude to is gone. Before he could think of any questions, he watched the pupil consume the haze of stars then itself out of existence. The birds began singing again. Voices of the townsfolk were cheery and excited. Should he tell someone? Could he tell someone? Would they even believe him, or simply lock him up like a hermit gone mad? For the first time outside of the sarcophagus, even surrounded by the memory of his comrades and the bustle of commerce, Kashan felt hopelessly alone.
After the harrowing meeting with the… thing, Kashan continued on his path, heading west. It was the opposite direction from the sarcophagus he came from, lower in altitude where he’d be more likely to find lakes and ponds. The path he took was well worn by the wheels of carts and the prints of boots. Some branches were hanging low enough to sweep across Kashan’s face if he tried to walk further, so he took the opportunity to practice swinging his weapon. Muscle memory and memory memory couldn’t be the same thing, and testing himself was the best way to ensure he’d be ready. As he swung his weapon with the memory of practiced strikes, he noticed the disparity between the perfect swings copied out of a treatise and the flowing, cleaving bladework he remembered from his final battle. There was a bright side, however. Kashan knew that bladework like the back of his hand. The only opposition to the mastery of his greatsword was time, and time he had in surplus.
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After half an hour of wandering, finding a stream, and following it to its mouth, Kashan located a sizable lake. It was only a hundred yards or so across, but the flow of water was slow enough that he could spot bright white flowers littering the earthy shores. After a short jog to a particularly dense patch, he began to use a fairly flat rock to dig up the plants by the roots. As far as his disjointed memory could tell him, leaving the roots in the water itself after digging them up would keep them fresh for the trip back. Without a sheathe, he kept his greatsword near his work area resting flat against the ground.
After his eleventh flower, he heard a low hiss like the breath of a specter. Kashan froze in place, evaluating his situation. His weapon was within reach, but his objective was entirely exposed. He’d no idea what he was up against, and was caught between the brush the noise came from and the shore of the lake. With little other option (but mostly out of pride), Kashan picked up his greatsword in preparation of the enemy, only to see a fat lizard squirm from the treeline. No where in his memory has he ever seen a lizard like this one, double his height in length and half his height in width. It moved easily enough, making Kashan second guess his plan of turning the creature over for a mortal blow. The scales looked thick and full, most likely shrugging off his cleaving attacks… but he had an idea.
While Kashan was contemplating, the lizard began to charge him alarmingly quickly. With little room for error, he gripped his greatsword by its blade and swung it like a warhammer, stunning the creature with an audible crack. As it reeled from the impact, Kashan took the opportunity to use its flat head shape as a step stool, launching himself upward and out of reach of its razor-sharp claws. With the weight of his body and the impact on landing, Kashan impales the base of the fat lizard’s tail, wrenching the blade side to side to dig deeper and deeper into its flesh. In a fit of panic, it began thrashing about, leaving a trail of mud and broken branches as it slithered into the tree line. Kashan with one final pull as he hopped to the side, dragged the blade alongside him to finally cleave the tail off. It wasn’t a clean cut and Kashan rolled sideways on his landing and dropped his sword, but it worked. He couldn’t kill the beast, not with his current skill, but it ran without its tail between its legs! He was proud of his first victory after his final loss, only to look towards the lake shore and see that his gatherings were trampled in the process.
When Kashan arrived back at the guild hall/mayor’s manor, he carried in the severed tail using his greatsword as a skewer as well as the twenty Fuentis Flowers he was sent to collect earlier. The flowers themselves needed constant hydration, so he figured a small patch of damp moss would help them last.
Tuscea was enjoying a nice warm brew of tea made from honeyspore when he coughed back into his mug, some filtering through his nose causing him to cough even harder. As he recovered, the first thing he asked was “What the hell is that?” while pointing at the tail Kashan carried by skewering it with a sword.
Kashan shrugged, replying with a curt “A tail,” as he handed the bundle of herbs to a receptionist too enamored with Kashan’s trophy to immediately note down his findings.
“Kashan, boy, do you know what you fought to get that?” said Tuscea.
Kashan replied, “A fat lizard.”