I started itching between the second and third steps.
It wasn’t much of an itch, but I’d been rather enjoying the total lack of pain and discomfort. It had been a distinct contrast to my standard aches and pains, what with joints that could only be described as problematic and both tendons and ligaments that were weaker and less tightly coupled than they were supposed to be. Still, startling as it was to get kicked in the metaphorical teeth the moment I stepped out of the trees’ shade, I’d probably have noticed it regardless. Maybe not quite as quickly, but by the tenth slow step, I’d taken five breaths, and I was starting to feel the tiniest bit of itching up in my nose.
It was… alarming. I had been noticeably allergic to a lover’s house, something that her girlfriend had used as a way to needle me for the brief period before we’d gone our separate, amicable ways. The itch was different from what I would have expected if I’d walked into their—carpeted, astonishingly—kitchen, but it wasn’t completely different.
If it held true to form, in about fifteen minutes, I was going to feel like my eyes were itching on the inside and I was going to have a definite headache. And given the undercurrent of burning that I was feeling under the itch, true to form was going to be only the start of things.
I took a deep breath—no reason not to, it wasn’t like shallower breaths were going to save me—and sighed, looking out into the endless-seeming fields of grass. Probably tarried too long, I thought to myself glumly, having a freakout and getting distracted by the trees. On the horizon ahead of me, there was a vague blur rising out of the fields; the town, probably, and if it had any kind of wall, that would explain the sort of uniformity of appearance it has from this distance.
From this distance? Well. I couldn’t exactly assume that the planet I was on had the same curvature as the Earth, but if I assumed both that and that I was looking at a palisade that was in the vicinity of ten feet, I was about three miles away. Not a particularly comfortable distance to traverse feeling like I was, much less how I would be feeling shortly, but far from impossible.
Besides, I had been bid by a god, the god who’d dropped me somewhere with my joints all fixed up. No sense in getting all paranoid about whether I should take the obvious route at that point.
May it be your will, Lord our God, I took a moment to pray, that you lead my steps towards peace and health.
The irony of it all—a prayer for safe travels made to a God whose worship I’d walked away from so long ago, about a journey involving two members of the Greek Pantheon—was not lost on me. I did it anyway, without being sure why, and focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
Things… proceeded. I knew, intellectually, that three miles was less than an hour’s easy walk, but walking in discomfort through the trackless grass meant that I lost all sense of time and place. The itch that had settled across every inch of my exposed skin felt like it was taking root and spreading, my lungs burned, and I found myself wiping my eyes clear of rheum over and over again as I cast my eye around the grasslands. There were some brilliantly colored birds gliding on thermals above me, and those kept me distracted for long minutes as I tried to figure out whether it was just a matter of angles and distance that made their wings look odd.
Most of my focus, though, went towards pushing myself as hard as I could to keep my pace up and prevent my walk from turning into a trudge.
Around the time when I was starting to lose that fight, when my steps kept slowing and I was starting to lose the fight against picking at the hard, scaly patches on my skin, I heard—or maybe felt—a skirling, harmonized piping sound, something high and playful over a drone. It was like someone had combined a pan flute and a bagpipe, and something about it sunk into my brain and let my limbs move more freely. The discomfort dimmed, my eyes and sinuses cleared, and I looked in grateful interest over towards where the music was coming from.
It was a goatherd, or possibly a shepherd. They waved at me, sitting, of all things, sidesaddle on what looked like a particularly shaggy-fronted pony, pan pipes lifted to their lips with the sleeves of their brilliantly colorful robes pulled back and tied off to stay out of the way. They had a hat with a short frontal brim and a long, floppy back, dyed in browns and reds, and their baggy pants billowed in a breeze that I definitely wasn’t feeling. There was, yes, a pouch of some sort on the near side of the pipes, so it was a combination of bagpipes and pan pipes—I tried to cultivate the feeling of vindication, because maybe that, too, would distract me from the itch.
I was unlikely, but hope was a better habit than despair. In the meantime, I waved back. I’d never been the type to be rude to kids, even if the wind on my hand and arm when I gestured felt like knives.
The animals they were herding—caprines with back-swept horns and not a whole lot of fur, most of them shoulder-high on the pony-mounted kid—grazed their way through the plains at a slow amble. I caught glimpses of a few dogs, or what I thought were probably dogs, chivvying stragglers along; they were nigh-invisible in the grass, calling out in barks and showing themselves in jumps. One of them was particularly hard to spot, given that the dog in question didn’t seem to be physical so much as a sometimes-coalesced, sometimes-disparate cloud of angles and lines; it said something about how impatient I was to get to my destination and hopefully get the itching taken care of that I just didn’t care.
Even after I lost sight of the kid on the other side of a small hill, I could still hear the pipes. Their music sank into my muscles and tendons, into my joints and ligaments, into my skin and mucous membranes and eyes. The notes felt like they were entering a battle as a third side, isolating the strife from me; it was like I had a shield, a tenuous and porous shield but a shield nonetheless, against the discomfort.
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It let me pick the pace back up to something more reasonable. Three, maybe four miles per hour—the pace I’d intended to keep up, the pace I’d fallen off of disappointingly quickly. One foot in front of the other, maintaining as much momentum as I could, I made it to the gates before I even realized I was getting close to them.
It wasn’t anything like a commotion. There had been a commotion, I realized belatedly; I’d heard, but not paid attention to, people shouting and calling out to me in what sounded like two different languages, one full of sibilants and front-of-the-mouth vowels and another in gutturals and clicks, neither of which I recognized in the slightest. But by the time I got to the walls of the village, my wrists and hands were back to being on fire with itching and I was back to blinking fluid out of my eyes constantly. Distracted, the only thing I really noticed was that everything was orderly and quiet, with someone who was clearly a guard beckoning for me to follow.
Score one for, if not the universality of some gestures, then some degree of parallel evolution. Probably.
I tried to pay attention to the guard and to where I was going, but my attention wound up just cycling between all of the different discomforts I was feeling and the alien sounds of the languages the people around me were speaking. Before I knew it, I was three rooms into a building and trying to figure out whether the walls of the building were painted, exceptionally well mortared, or one seamless expanse of stone and I belatedly registered that the guard had stopped.
My eyes were captured by the circle of blue squiggly rune-like things on the ground, with a tall cylinder of that same shade of blue projected up from the stone. It was like a hologram, translucent and solid-looking at the same time—and at a gesture, I stepped into it.
I grunted inelegantly in relief, with a sound more suitable to being punched than anything else. It wasn’t exactly freedom from pain, but the itching was gone, and my ability to think through and around the rest of the discomforts increased at the same time.
“[Lesser Communication].”
The words cut off my train of thought before my brain had so much as worked through the relief of not being in quite as much pain. It was a woman saying it, but the words had weight, weight like I had heard when Artemis commanded me to approach her a lifetime ago, or alternatively, some hours ago, weight that bracketed it in my mind to separate it from mere speech. She, the woman who’d spoken, flopped casually into a chair—okay, there’s a chair there, why didn’t I see that before?—and the man whose wrist her hand had been on straightened, facing me across the light-blue haze of the magic cylinder.
He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, and he glanced down at them one last time in a gesture that was familiar to me; he was about to say something that was rehearsed, but not rehearsed enough that he had it fully memorized.
“Please be aware that the Skill being used to communicate,” he began, startling me by speaking in perfect English, “permits precisely one sentence, and that sentence is being used to provide you with medical and integrative information, in the former case so that you may be informed before we act and in the latter so that you may be informed and either grant or not grant consent, and the information is as follows: we will be momentarily casting a spell of biological adaptation, without which you will be dead due, among other things—” I felt my lungs burning sympathetically, but he somehow showed no sign of being out of breath. “—to incompatibilities in your digestive system between your home and this world, and which requires your awareness rather than your consent; and you have the option of a spell of integration, which will supplant your known extra-planar languages as well as providing you with access to the empowerment of the Stolen Flame, and which you may signal the acceptance of, a choice I strongly recommend, by ringing the bell on my desk before leaving the room. [Biological Adaptation].”
It took me a long, timeless moment to realize what had just happened, that he’d done another one of those spells that echoed in that same command voice. It might have taken minutes; I spent them vomiting my guts out into a suspiciously convenient bucket, a bucket that slowly glowed brighter and brighter blue as I filled it.
After a subjective eternity, a wash of almost comfortable frigidity swept through me. The stink, the copious former contents of my stomach, and what felt like a few layers of skin up through my throat and mouth disappeared, along with the urge to, or so it felt, voluminously piss my intestines out my ass.
I quite literally collapsed with relief.
The bucket was a dull steel-gray when I managed to get up again, and the light blue cylinder around me was gone. So was the itching and the burning, and after a nearby cloth was applied to my eyes and nose—in that order, always in that order—I felt at least two thirds human again.
The room was simple. I could even look around and pay attention to it now, and I took a moment to study it for what it implied. Hardwood floor, not shiny but not overly scratched up; more of those seamless stone walls, with corkboards overflowing with paper covered in a dense, flowing script that looked like it was written right-to-left. There were a couple of armor stands with what looked like multiple layers of a bunch of stuff and a weapon stand with a couple of swords, some strips of cloth, some spiked maces, a couple of satchels, and some shields; they probably would have told me a lot about how they fought, if I knew anything about pre-modern warfare. Or warfare at all, really, other than what I’d picked up from video games. Which… wasn’t much. Neither Celeste nor Fallout: New Vegas was exactly a historical primer.
I didn’t have to think about my decision all that much; I wouldn’t have been sent there if I weren’t supposed to take the offer. I walked over to the desk—wincing as I barked my shin on the bucket in passing—and noted that where the man was sitting was the little desk in front, not the big desk back in the corner where the woman was.
He had the bell out, obviously having shifted some paperwork to make space for it while he worked on something with intent focus, pencil—unmistakably a pencil, which meant they had some kind of graphite processing—scratching away. He paused in his writing to grab a knife, whittled off a few shavings to sharpen it, and then noticed me standing at the desk.
He cocked an eyebrow and, smiling, I hit the little lever on the side of the bell. It chimed, and he nodded in obvious contentment, smiling back at me. He called something out to the woman in back in yet another language, neither the sibilant one nor the guttural one but rather one that sounded like he had a mouth full of potatoes, and she looked up from her own writing and smirked at me.
“[System Integration: Kingdom of Shem, Duchy of Aluf, Dungeon Village of Kibosh],” they intoned together without any preamble, and my world went black.