Danundseer was another forest theome. Known for its mushrooms, animal products, and farmergons tending plots of herbs or vegetables rather than great fields of grains, the landscape grew hilly here where the mountain of Inrakaveach loomed over the horizon. Yet the roads remained excellent, if occasionally sided by intimidating ravines.
The group paused at the boundary of Danundseer to receive Choave's blessing. That writhing black shadow dripped from his hands as he repeated that ritual dance; it flowed across the ground and upward into them, filling them with the strength they needed to move quickly across the land though they were burdened. Or though they were still inexperienced, in Denziu's case. The ebullient strength of the blessing filled zir and made the work of keeping pace with the caravan into a delight. The spell sank into them invisibly, but the feeling of it stayed and Denziu knew it would stay until evening.
The caravanners at points had to file along in a single line 1 wagon by 14 wagons long, not because of narrow roads, but because once they departed Inaildoro they shared the road with ample southbound traffic towards Mosdenechrak. Everyone they met flashed Tekagoli charms as though to congratulate the caravan for making its way through Inaildoro. These were a string of little cheerful encounters. The road south of Danundseer into Inaildoro was a popular one for dragons who carried the Tekagoli luck charms that quite famously made Inaildoro into a safe place to visit.
The existence of other dragons on the road was reassuring to Denziu. The roads in Inaildoro were intrinsically desolate for the lack of traffic. Here, the theome was again conventionally mappable. The roads were always in the same places and dragons who went in opposite directions would meet each other. It was something that Denziu had always taken for granted before.
Why had Inadagedyn wanted Denziu to meet an undead geomancer..?
There was a high wind that day in the hills of Danundseer, but Denziu was determined to record the encounter with Taioma and write a letter home about it. Zie had to resort to gripping a writing board in a two-handed grip that punctured the paper on zir claws. From there, the lev-i-quill could do its work. Twice, errant gusts pushed through Denziu's amicus breeze, making the paper flap and carrying off the flying lev-i-quill. This would have horribly punished any bearer of a lesser quill, but Praoziu had enchanted this lev-i-quill herself, and it swiftly flew back into Denziu's possession each time.
The recent experience with an unmappable theome wasn’t going to be the only one of its kind on the journey. They were only going to be in Danundseer overnight. It was a small theome, and after that they would be on a short road to Keltia-Aneya, the infinite forest theome.
They would have three days in Keltia-Aneya, very certainly. That was something that Denziu had read about in the libraries of Querent-Querent. There were roads into and out of Keltia-Aneya, and every journey through the theome from any entrance to any exit took three days. Trying to keep direction-sense in Keltia-Aneya was a ritual prayer, and the roads were occasionally broken or blocked, requiring back-tracking or sudden bursts of labour... yet it was a boring theome despite all this, for no monsters were on the roads of Keltia-Aneya. It was just the land god messing with dragons by making them camp three days in the forests of a mercurially changing theome.
Amidst all these thoughts of the road ahead, the party reached a village in Danundseer, and dispersed to find places in the market. Without much hope, Denziu broke open zir wagon and set it up to try to lure customers in. The open box of warming spelltiles was a new asset here, as it cast an invisible hand of warmth forward to passers-by and helped yet again with making Denziu look the part of magic vendorgon.
Denziu tried zir new sales pitch of selling the pots as points for the warming tiles, which drew attention, then lost two customers who were affronted at the pots' asking prices. Not a good market for artistic pottery, zie concluded. Regretfully, zie went back to treating the pots as a colourful background while selling the other items.
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Comparing with nearby sellers, zie found the local sale price for Tekagoli luck charms was as low as the sale price in Tekagol itself. It seemed like Tekagoli luck charms were dirt-cheap everywhere dragons thought they were good luck to wear. Zie sold a few of them anyways on the grounds that at least zie was making back zir investment piece by piece.
The only thing zie drew a profit on was the sale of a single warming tile, which got a rather good price because the warming tile sold for two bolts of silencing cloth, something Denziu accepted as valuable yet hadn't been expecting to encounter in a Danundseer village market. Two bolts of silencing cloth should be a better trade than the price in coin zie had been asking for.
Perhaps it shouldn't have been so surprising; if the villagers were typically decked out in Tekagoli luck charms and dealing with the Mosdenechrak markets to the south, it made sense that they would want to trade in silencing cloth. It was practically currency in Mosdenechrak, accepted everywhere like a kind of high-denomination coin. Denziu wondered if zie would have to cart it all the way north and then south again to get a good price on it - or would it be a valuable exotic when they crossed the sea to Kelkaith? Zie thought again of Lorvaza encouraging zir to hold onto the silencing cloth until they got to Jiasote, and decided again that doing so seemed like the best idea.
Wasn't Jiasote famous for being a sanatorium theome for dragons who needed it badly? They would need silencing cloth for peace of mind with wounded neighbours. That had to mean it would yield a good Fate to go there with the cloth.
The hours at the market stretched. Denziu had the sense that zie'd made zir last sale of the day long before the market closed. There was ample time to think of Fate.
So zie thought about Inadagedyn again, and about Fate. That necromancer, Taioma. That geomancer, Taioma? They weren't usually professions that were crossed together, were they? It was strange to have met an undead geomancer. Fate tangled around geomancers and necromancers. Geomancers worked with Fate, reshaping it by nudges and negotiations. Necromancers spent their life force to break Fate outright. What Fate governed undead geomancers?
Zie wasn't a rebel against Fate. In decades as a soil seller, it didn't really come up. The ground wasn't Fated to be of good or bad quality, was it? Technically it was, because the land and Fate were together the substance of a land god. Yet the soil worked by rules, and Denziu knew those rules, knew how to sort soils by colour, texture, and smell. Good loam had a balance you could feel. The vrash farmergons learned that feel intimately and emulated it, changing the soil under their crops, reaching into the ground to make it what they needed. They talked about silt, clay, and sand rather than Fate.
Denziu had befriended all the vrash farmergons in Denxalue and many of the vrash farmergons in Tekagol. Zie knew a few of the farmergons in Relny as well, though Relny was a dangerous place precisely because it had no guard against bad Fates. Dragons came to ill ends all the time in Relny... and, no coincidence, there was a necromantic academy in Relny. Where Fate was bad, necromancers were good.
It was a long, boring day at market, selling nothing and having nobody to talk with, so Denziu thought about occult subjects.
That evening, the caravan gathered in a campsite outside of the village. There were no caravanserais in the little villages of Danundseer, but it was one of the most harmless of the Missing theomes and a place where humble Tekagoli caravans were the usual kind, so they gathered in the open with only the posting of a watch. Denziu was excluded from the watch as a novice.
They made a meal of a thick mushroom stew and vegetable pies, with Lorma the Vegetarian (a grey and bronze vrash) exuberating about the foods available in the local market. "This is my favourite place on the corridor," Lorma said. "This little village is the only place where locals cook the kind of food I like, almost exclusively. They’re vegetarian!"
Lorma was never one of the merchantgons crowding the markets, but when everyone else went to market Lorma searched for vegetables in her hopeless quest to lure dragons away from carnivory. Sometimes the result was good. The mushroom stew was thick and savoury. Sometimes the result was less impressive. The hand-pies were an herbal mush wrapped in pastry.