---HIVREN---
Hivren tilted his head, glancing at the strange girl again, “She seems like she’s just lost in thought.” Jiuhen, his only companion for today, kept pointing out things about her that he noticed as part of his empath training. Apparently he’d ‘gotten bored of all the normal people.’
The girl in question was the strangest person Hivren had seen in his life. She looked like she was trying to act normal, but every so often she would stare at something for a bit too long, or take her notebook out of nowhere and make a note, she also had a weird tendency to glare at anyone talking to her, and her bearing screamed of someone with secrets. Hivren had seen her with the caravan that arrived yesterday, and at a glance, she seemed to always have her head in the clouds.
Jiuhen pointed at her, “I doubt she’d notice if someone robbed her. I mean, maybe she is lost in thought like you said, but her emotions are all over the place, and that only happens if someone’s going through some stuff.”
Indeed, it seemed like the small Tuvei was entirely engrossed in whatever it was she was doing, she’d started making weird gestures at one point and something was clearly off about the air around her, a bit like a mirage. Hivren caught himself staring at the strange distortion. It was a bit creepy. “You never know if someone’s a powerful mage in disguise, maybe she’s fooling your empathy?” In fact, wasn’t that distortion a sign of something?
Jiuhen rolled his eyes and tipped back his drink, glancing at one of the serving ladies a bit too long for someone who’d just started courting a different girl yesterday. Part of Hivren felt he needed to guide Jiuhen through the thorns of female interactions, but there were some things he would have to figure out by himself, besides, you never knew if Jiuhen was just reacting to someone else’s strong emotions.
Eventually the flirt glanced back at the lone girl, who was now staring at a worn notebook laying on the table, “She seems to get a bit more emotionally stable every time she does that. What’s she even doing?”
“Does it matter?”
“I dunno, she’s not bad looking though, her nose is a bit flat but those dark eyes are nice she definitely knows how to present herself too, I think that’s a riding dress, built for practicality, her entire bearing screams ‘I’ll do things my way.’ It’s kinda hot.”
Hivren sighed. Sparks, this guy... “You have a girlfriend.”
Jiuhen rolled his eyes and clapped Hivren on the back in a friendly way, “I was just pointing it out for you, you’re too oblivious to the world, I almost think you wouldn’t notice a girl if she punched you in the face.”
“And…that makes you think that she would be a perfect match for me? We’re both equally oblivious?” Hivren shook his head with a groan, “Jiuhen, I’m not into tuvei, for me it’s harder to understand you people. I’d like a human if I can help it.”
“We both know there’s barely any difference. ~Especially not emotionally~”
Well, that was true enough, there were plenty of halfbreeds kicking around, and most scholars -even all the way in Yera- had long since decided that humans, tuvei, and pitten shared a common ancestor somewhere. Hivren still felt the need to point it out though.“Biologically the way things are-”
“Hivren, you always talk like you ate a textbook. I’m just talking about her looks. She looks nice. She would look nice too if she was next to you, I’m just saying.”
Hivren sighed and looked at the tuvei girl again, “You Jiuhen, are a pest.”
Jiuhen laughed.
“Do you think she might be crazy?”
Hivren’s head snapped up at the word crazy, glancing over to another table and seeing some familiar-seeming guys pointing at the same girl Jiuhen had spotted. One of them laughed, “I bet she’s here just to creep everyone out.”
“Really? I bet she’s one of those dirty squatters in the old palace, you can never trust travelers these days.”
Hivren stood up, frowning at the four idiots joking about the stranger. It was true that there weren’t as many travelers these days, trade was moving to the new capitol, even the merchants from that caravan were pretty well known. Everyone knew when someone didn’t belong.
“-know how crazy people are, I doubt she’d notice if she lost her own head.”
But talking like that just because someone was unknown? The only solution to this in Hivren’s estimation was to remove her from the category of ‘unknown.’ It would help for a start if she wasn’t sitting alone.
Jiuhen was giving him a worried look as Hivren glared at the table of idiots, but he was a good guy at heart, Jiuhen was probably noticing the cloud of negative emotions behind them now that he wasn’t focused on one person, and despite how he acted, he wasn’t an idiot.
“I have to have a chat with someone.” Hivren explained as he stalked off toward a certain table…
---ELIAX---
Nightwind tavern was bustling in the later hours of the evening. Eliax entered the door and for a moment just stood among the obnoxious students of Starsbane, a local academy, hearing their laughs and excitement. She heard the playful melody of a folk song from the piano at the edge of the room, a Tuvei with four arms was sweeping the notes out majestically as several drunkards sang along with blue-flushed faces. There were even a couple of humans here and there.
Overall, it was just like every other tavern that Eliax had been in in her life. Estin had a strange fondness for the places that she really didn’t understand. She was fine with them, but only if no one was disturbing her ability to get things done.
At the moment, it was far from her ideal tavern experience. She couldn’t concentrate on the resonance, but it was definitely feeding her new memories as the moments ticked by.
She remembered a certain table, moderately out of the way, near the edge of the room. It was more worn and beaten up than the resonance thought it should be, but as she passed it, she ran her hands along the carvings, seeing one of those cheesy graffitis with a stylized AxF in the center of a heart.
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The resonance shuddered at that for some reason, sending a volley of new memories at her. Eliax tucked them away for later examination and sat down at the table, glad it was vacant.
The piano player started a new song, the type with a catchy tune that Eliax felt like she’d heard a million times on the way to Reiaran. It wasn’t a terrible song, but it felt off to her that the piano was alone in it, usually, she heard it with a multitude of instruments, stringed ones mostly. That or voices, singing in a chorus together. Most Tuvei were at least partially tone-deaf, but the piano player clearly wasn’t one of those as her four arms swept across the keys skillfully and theatrically without a hint of written note to go off. It was almost as entertaining to watch her as it was to hear what she was creating.
Eliax nodded pleasantly at the waitress who approached her table, ordering something based on the resonance as a test. Usually, those memories were accurate as to what types of foods she enjoyed, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it was wrong for once.
In fact, she was waiting for it to be wrong for once, that would give her some points of data to work off.
The waitress left with her order and Eliax killed time by practicing the space-bending trick. According to everything she’d read, she might eventually figure out how to make gateways. Of course, that would be sped up significantly if she had a teacher of some sort, but until she resolved this whole resonance situation, she wasn’t entirely certain how much she could learn.
So Eliax compressed and stretched the space between the window and a fork, it was more difficult to do without her hands as one of the reference points, but it was still entirely manageable.
After a couple minutes of that, Eliax looked up with surprise as a stranger sat down across from her. The distortion unraveled as her concentration was subverted, though he probably wouldn’t have even noticed it without magesight. His skin had the red tones of a human, even if it was quite a bit lighter than what she was used to seeing. His ears were small and round, and his arms almost bulged with muscle.
Eliax frowned at him, feeling the resonance scream at the audacity. She would destroy him and his entire bloodline for- No no, stop it. She forced herself to relax and plastered on a supremely fake…moderately pleasant face. “Who the sparks are you?”
Okay, so that was the nicest she could manage. Whatever. She was probably glaring too.
“I saw you sittin’ alone. Figured you might be lonely?” his country accent was so obviously fake, she could hear the tones of upper class nonsense lurking beneath. He was probably some kind of noble, not from Reiaran or even the surrounding land since the queen would never give a human a noble title.
Eliax kept her face neutral, giving him the dragoncrapless look that she’d perfected over years of having to deal with Estin. “And the real reason?”
“...what?”
“Come on, if people were really that decent then I wouldn’t be as messed up as I am. What do you want from me?”
The human began to turn a startling shade of red on the edges. Sparks, was that a blush? It looked so wrong for a blush to be red. “I heard some guys talkin’ crap about you sitting alone and acting strange. Things like that spread. I wanted to prove to them that you can’t be crazy.” His fake accent faded somewhat, and his vocabulary seemed to be growing by the second. He’d probably figured out she wasn’t an idiot by now and was trying to salvage her view of him.
Eliax felt her eyes narrow further. “Well, thanks I guess. But you can go ahead and let them talk crap. I am, in fact, crazy.”
He gave her a startled look, but Eliax simply looked down at her notebook and made a note about the table graffiti. She drew a quick sketch of it along with a few other vaguely familiar pieces, making a show of glancing at the graffiti and everything.
The human stared at her the whole time, frowning slightly as a strange calculating look crossed his face. “Are you studying graffiti?”
Eliax didn’t answer for a long moment, “I have reason to believe that a past life of mine drew this, so sure, we’ll go with that.” She set her charcoal pencil down hard when the waitress came back with her food. She accepted the plate, handed the waitress a coin, and put her notebook away.
The human raised an eyebrow, “Past life? An ancient graffiti artist?”
“I have absolutely no idea. I’m crazy, remember?” She examined the plate before cutting off a piece of meat. “What’s your name anyway?”
The human cringed slightly, perhaps remembering how he hadn’t answered a similar question earlier, “I’m Hivren. And you?”
“Eliax.” There was a long silence. She poked at the greens, but mostly she was trying to figure out how to make this conversation end before she told him anything else stupid. Really, telling anyone about the resonance was a terrible idea.
“Have you seen the Ayfel yet? It’s really a nice spot, they’ve got a shrine to the Hero there and sometimes they give tours.”
Eliax shrugged, “I’ll look into it...maybe.” Preferably only if the resonance had something to say about it. That name did strike something in her, but Eliax wasn’t sure if it was just something she’d forgotten.
Hivren deflated slightly. What, was he trying to flirt or something? The forgotten sage would have rolled in his grave if he knew how bad she was at this. “Why?” Eliax added after a moment.
He shrugged, “Well, the Hero’s pretty cool. She saved my grandmother’s life once, you know?”
Oh, he was one of those.
For some reason, Eliax had an instinctive hatred of people who had this much respect for the Hero. In fact, she could rightly say that she hated everything the Hero stood for. All the idiot had done was kill a bunch of people, dethrone the Last King, and send the entire continent into unstable wars and pointless bickering for the last thirty years.
The narcissist hadn’t even had the decency to die like a mortal. No, the Hero had ‘disappeared’ twenty years ago, never to be seen again. Good riddance I say! Eliax agrees with me.
All Eliax could manage was a weak grunt before she pulled out her notebook again and marked something as she shoveled the last bite of food into her mouth.
Hivren sighed, “I could take you there if you want, sometime?”
Eliax stood up. “Perhaps.” She had no intention of doing that ever, but he’d be more likely to leave her alone if he thought there was a chance. She slung her bag over her shoulder and simply left.
Hivren stared at her back with a slightly lost and confused expression. Exactly as she liked it.
On her way out, Eliax stopped by the piano player, who was taking a short break. Three drunkards were exclaiming at her to play some folk song that Eliax had never heard before, but that was the least of her concerns.
Eliax shoved through them, stopping in front of the piano player. “What’s that song called that you just finished?”
She blinked, “What, you mean Aneles’s Lament?”
Eliax stared at her, The resonance was quiet, almost too quiet, but she still got a strange sorrow from underneath the paint. Eventually, she nodded slowly, “Yes, that one…”
The girl smiled, “It’s nice to see someone cares about more than just how it sounds. I’m Illila, and you are?”
“Eliax…” She said with a frown. That name. Aneles…who was that? Perhaps the resonance jus-
A boy. Grinning down at me from a tree, his smile wide and mischievous. A strange feeling of terror from the back of my mind, “get down from there!” He just grinned wider.
“Come on Fari, are you scared?”
Eliax put a hand to her head, “Ah…thanks Illila, it’s a great song, I’ve heard it a couple times I think.”
Illila tilted her head, “That’s an old song, my teacher found it in a personal journal of one of the lost warriors just a couple of years ago. I don’t think anyone but me plays it anymore.”
Eliax closed her eyes, nodding, “I’ll see you around I guess…”
With that, she stumbled away, her usual graceful gait disturbed by this latest memory. The resonance had a name. It felt more like a nickname, but Fari was a lot more than she’d had yesterday.