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We stopped in the highland town of Koriit-hama, a diocese of Corinth which itself lay far off to the east. The locals floated between over-tall marble buildings wearing kimonos the color of indeterminate clouds, their undershirts rose from beneath wide collars like mountain sunsets of burnt orange, maroon, and apricot. They were rather reserved by Khajiiti standards, always whisking off between the many ornate pillars that marked the streets, temples, and even merchant stalls with a quiet dignity that left a vaguely charged feeling similar to that which preempted a lightning strike.

I visited the lunar temple and without identifying myself proffered my many academic services to them. The pair of gray whiskered priests, who had been talking and wringing their paws when I arrived, both agreed (nearly begged me actually) to act as their weather sign reader for the day. The whole town was on pins and needles apparently over the imminent wedding of two local noble heirs. Supposedly the match quashed a multigenerational blood feud between their village and the one on the next plateau down, but both bride and groom's parents were of the superstitious sort, so the priests wanted to ensure all the wedding signs were all fortuitous in case either side wanted an excuse for any change of heart. Dark clouds painted the horizon and the wedding was scheduled for the following day — leaving the priests as panicked as chickens in a hawk’s shadow as they debated whether to proceed or reschedule.

I, still in a loincloth mind you (only in Elsweyr would near nudity be considered an irrelevance for a job interview), assured them that I was up for the job. With a lit censor of myrrh in hand, I had Keyes help me scale the temple roof, following which I set to spinning the censor on a gilded chain to cast smoke shadows while chanting precipitatory elucidations and intermittently resting it over the cornerstones. I paused frequently to chalk mark the marble with various wind-signs and cloud-form sigils.

The twitchy old fellows seized one another by the shoulders and began leaping, crying out with joy when I announced that the morrow would in fact be a fortuitous day for a wedding — that only clear skies and sun lay ahead. I took my pay with gratitude and wished them both the best fortune and for the lovely new couple.

The coin wasn't bad for a half afternoon's work, and allowed me to buy a carrying sling, a goat-hide waterskin, and new clothes for Keyes and myself — brown jodhpurs and white linen shirts that were common among the laborers that tended the orchards that prickled the horizon and grew from just about every flat bit of soil in that region. Lacking coin to spare on food I am embarrassed to admit that I ate fetid scraps from the refuse pile behind the local sugar house. This would unfortunately become a regular necessity in the days to come, but for my own pride I will not remunerate every instance that I lowered my face into such a loathsome slop-pile. I do recall that specific occasion intensely however — I ate crackers made soggy from cold tea having been dumped overtop. They dissolved into a cakey meal on my waiting tongue but were riddled with grimey little crumbs of what I hoped were ground leaves and stems.

Keyes and I did not stay for the night. We lacked coin for lodgings, so rather than be vagrants we vacated for the southern road, winding around plateau edges, over carved staircases worn smooth by generations of paws, and over bridges that shot over the narrow gaps like marble boarding ramps. Thankfully, the southern side of the highlands was far more gradual in its descent, which allowed Keyes and myself to walk side by side and pass the time in idle conversation as we passed orchards untamed areas with high grass that nearly outgrew the low scraggly trees.

The decision to leave Koriit-hama so quickly was both wise and foolish, for the next morning a torrential downpour began which would last for the entirety of the day. We found ourselves trapped under an overhanging cliff no taller than my shoulders, but in truth I did not regret that I was forced to rest. Between huddling with Keyes and napping I drank water sweeter than any wine — mountain rain that had run over clean grass and trickled in a gurgling rivulet waterfall down into a puddle beside us — I opened my mouth to that flow like a baby bird awaiting it’s meal until my stomach bulged and ached.

According to Keyes it was a rare phenomenon we witnessed, for at that altitude it is common for the rains to arrive as little more than a spitting mist. I believed him for the following days were gray, cool, and the air always felt damp. The landscape remained beautiful and came to be dominated by green fields of cultivated tea shrubs on either side of the road and onto the descending terraces ahead, green broken by plantation houses and pagodas for laborers to rest or worship in. We saw little of the green distance, the Tenmer Forest and the jungles beyond, for almost always a gray haze blinded us to the larger world.

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Those days passed like a waking dream, Keyes’ muffled chattering behind me as we passed through clouds of mist and knotted thickets of low trees in a world that seemed to carry no sound beyond l my shuffling feet. In the distance laborers waded through terraced fields filling wide baskets with tea leaves. In the wilder areas, tribes of baboons picked at one another's backs. I don't recall hearing a single ape hoot or bird whistle though. My thoughts often drifted to home, to Dune or wherever Aiera happened to be really. I finally had achieved enough inner calm that I could reflect on the implications of Aiera and my last conversation at the temple summit.

I was really going to be a father. What grew in me was something like pride, yet not. True, I had matched and mated with perhaps the most beautiful creature imaginable, and the heat of our all-consuming love burned in my heart still, but such boyish preoccupations were secondary. It was the sheer beauty of being involved in the act of creating new life that made the cool mountain air headier than any pipe's draw. I wondered (as certainly you do) what our offspring would look like, and what they would think of me when they stood tall enough to look me in the eye. I found myself smiling for the first time in many days.

Most of all I worried though. Aiera, my heart, was left all alone in her secret and would need to remain as such until some form of peace came — it would never do to be known as the bearer of a traitor’s children. The northern Mane’s victory terrified me, yet I dared not think of what would happen to her if the Mane of Dune were defeated on his mad attempt at conquest and my love be labeled a conspirator with a pretender.

It was an unbearable situation that I swore again then to rectify for the good of all.

As days passed the plateau cliffs grew shallower but the trees rose taller and broader until we found ourselves at the beginnings of the Tenmar Forest. One night as we sat around a small fire — I roasting a baboon leg (the provenance of which are too long to detail here) and him staring into the tree crossed dark with glintless eyes and a chalk pale face made sickly yellow by firelight — I found myself confessing my nature to him, the nature of a Stranger. I told myself it was to feed him on the knowledge for the jungle crossing ahead, for as we progressed south the risk of encountering unfriendly troops and bounty hunters grew, and an invisible thousand gold price tag still hung on my ear. Looking back, I realize now that I had come to think of him as a friend in spite of the eccentricities of his personality and underlying inhumanity.

Keyes was uncharacteristically quiet as I spoke, with only the crackle of baboon fat before me and the swaying chirp of crickets behind as I told him of that first conversation with my deviator brother on my arrival to Dune. When I finished he simply blinked at me, confused. "That's it?"

"Yes that's bloody well it, why is no one as impressed by this as I am?" I felt a bit raw to be honest, he was the first man I had told the tale to and somehow I felt different about it — more vulnerable.

"I don't see the relevance of it… is not every man not a Stranger unto himself, our nearest motives the echoes of other men and their ideas, old habits impressed onto our unknowing infant consciences. And you say you have broken from the lines of fate with this… duplication? But is not every footprint in the sand we make a deliberate break from the order of the world, for however brief a time? I just don't see how it matters."

"It matters because there are two of me now. Well to me that matters, to the larger world it is the extra Mane who is really causing chaos."

"Are there really two of any of you though? Are cuttings grown from the same tree the same plant when one grows a step east and the other a step west? Each will know its own needs — sun, earth, rain — which while similar will vary by even variations in landscape until they bend and grow accordingly to the chance realities of their known world, and as they grow taller they will by living in one another's shadow come to know themselves to be themselves."

"Sure, we are each different," I agreed, rolling the baboon leg over with a stick. "Me and my deviator brother, the Rokashes, and supposedly the Manes as well, although I am yet to confirm that with my own eyes. I suppose that's what I am counting on, that the southern Mane will see reason."

"Perhaps he will be. Or perhaps he will grow to be."

I smiled and began to eat when Keyes spoke again. "Do you know how I could tell you apart from your deviator?"

"How?"

"You bear the mark of our master, yet he does not."

"Hermaes Mora? Me?"

He nodded. "I saw it the moment you walked into my shop, and was baffled when you made none of our signs of fellowship. I was hoping you would explain to me how you came to be marked…"

"I don't know."