The sun was waning when Tea and Guin found themselves starting back up at the creaking sign of the Bone Quill Scribes.

“Here we are,” Tea said with slumping shoulders.

Guin nodded as he moved toward the stairs. In her heart, there was a sense of accomplishment—and a growing sense of anxiety as the question of ‘What next?’ grew closer and closer to something that must be answered. It was silly that she had it in a game, and yet, because of the quest she had gotten in this building, she had met Tea. Tea and Ath and Zen and, for better or worse, Ibraxis.

What did the next chapter bring?

“Guin?” Tea asked from the top step of the building. Pushing the door open with one hand, he looked back at her. A small bell chimed from inside.

“Why did you come to the Enclave?” Guin asked, still looking at the sign though her vision had glazed over.

“Huh?”

Her vision focused as she looked into his yellow eyes, wide as saucers.

Ibraxis’s eyes were yellow, too, but they had a deep, warm tone, burning like the edge of a flame, glittering in swirls like metallic gold paint. Tea’s eyes, though, Tea’s eyes were the clear, bright yellow of the summer mid-day sun.

“You must have had a reason to leave your home, everything and everyone you knew, to come to the Enclave,” she said. “I’m curious.”

He allowed the door to close and put his hands on his hips. Tail wagging, he asked, “Where did this come from?”

Guin shrugged. “I just... we are moving on, right? Assuming that this is the last major quest we get in the area aside from the Corruption,” she said. “So I was just wondering. When you left—wherever it was that you are from—to come here, how did you feel then?”

“Kind of roundabout thinking, isn’t it?” he noted, scratching his head. “But I guess it’s fine. I came to the Iceberg cities as a tribe representative, but I stayed because of my wife, so my story is a little bit different from a lot of people’s here.”

“You came for your wife?”

Tea nodded. “She’s a sutak,” he told her. “The opposite kind of Ibraxis. She’s a female who looks—and sometimes acts—very much like a male.” He gave a sheepish grin as he shrugged.

Though she tried to recall the details of the lesson that she had attended earlier, she wasn’t familiar enough with the proper terminology for it to have really stuck. She did, however, remember enough of what it meant to feel a pang of empathy strike her heart.

“Oh,” she went, looking at her feet. “I guess that explains why your reaction to Ibraxis was so different than what was expected.”

“I guess,” he laughed. “It’s true that I was probably a bit too open with him; even I noticed he didn’t know what to make of it at times, and I’m a bit dense about personal boundaries if you haven’t noticed.”

“At least you’re aware,” Guin snorted. “Does he know about this?”

Tea smiled and looked down. “Honestly, I think it’s better that he doesn’t know.”

“Why is that?”

“Isn’t it nice to have someone totally disconnected from your reality accept you for who you are?” he asked.

But Guin looked down. Ibraxis had said something similar to her once. “For who?” she murmured in a soft voice. “In the end, isn’t that just... the same as lying? After all, people find out the truth in the end, and the illusion is broken...”

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Guin shook her head. “Is that how your wife felt?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He laughed. “I guess,” he shrugged. “I met her in university, and then I treated her the same way as I treated everyone else, even after I realized she was a sutak. She didn’t even know I knew until she pointed it out one day. She thought I was crazy, but... Well. I won in the end, didn’t I?” The infectious smile on his face told her all she needed to know.

“This was on Yidar, then?” she walked up to him.

“Yup,” he confirmed, opening the door again for them. “We were both students. I was a representative of my tribe, and Sessori—my wife—came as a result of an integration initiative that Dr. Sahae Sere started and the university’s ambassadorial program.”

Guin paused. “‘Dr. Sahae Sere’?” she asked, her mind searching for why that name sounded familiar.

Tea nodded. “He’s pretty well known,” he said. “At least in our circles. Dr. Sere is the reason that a lot of sutak and sutak allies were able to leave Gathori without being prosecuted.”

“How did he manage that?” she asked.

“He’s an Undying,” he told her, continuing to walk through the hall.

Tilting her head, Guin moved to catch up to him, asking, “Wait, Undying are real things? I thought you said they were myths!”

Tea laughed. “It’s like...” He thought for a moment. “It’s like you have wizards and witches in myths and legends, but you have a history that shows that they were apothecaries and chemists.

“For our people, the Undying are the keepers of secrets, the tellers of history. They are exiled for fear of their knowledge, yet revered as those who are favored with the spirits of the land, beloved of the Mother Mountain. Legends say that their connection to the land grants them the power to control the elements, but all that is ever really seen by the clans is the wisdom that keeps our kind from devolving into chaos. And the occasional healing skill.”

“That sounds... convoluted,” she said.

Tea shrugged. “Welcome to being Gaurli,” he chuckled. “Even for us, there are too many different rules and regulations for us to truly keep track of. We are raised to understand but not to teach. The Undying are the teachers; they are the ones who know the various cultures enough to teach others so that our traditions are not lost.”

“If they’re so important, why are they exiled?”

“What would your people do if one country had a powerful weapon but not the other?”

“Weapon? But I thought...”

Shaking his head, he said, “Legends and truths are still very much blurred on Gathori. I study communications here, but I may as well be a god to them with the knowledge that I possess, and that is frightening to a people that thrive off believing that their physical power is absolute.”

“If that's the case, then how did the valkyrian manage to get the garuli to follow them at all?” Guin asked, trying to make sense of the emerging species power hierarchy.

“The Undying,” he told her with a mischievous grin. “The clans listen to them, and the valkyrian fear them. Or their legends. Being mysterious and holy has great power, even in advanced cultures.”

Did that make sense? Guin thought about how that should have worked. The valkyrian had a power beyond anything the humans were capable of, which should have been far more than a hunter-gatherer civilization that she understood the garuli to be.

She looked TeaforaDragon over, thinking of Sathuren and Bahena; however, she also wondered how any of it could be logical. Would people from a civilization as primitive as theirs really be capable of becoming what she knew them to be? They all seemed to be fast learners, able to adjust themselves to different environments and situations very quickly. How old were they when they went to Yidar? Sathuren said he was twenty human years old, and Bahena followed after. Bahena had been on the Iceberg Cities for five years, and she didn’t seem to be much older than Guin herself. So they were, what, twenty-five? Thirty? They couldn’t have been more than forty.

Between five and fifteen years to learn languages, complex social structures and rules, literature, and in-depth scientific theory is enough to become professors at universities after being raised in a primitive culture like theirs? She hadn’t even considered how amazing it was that she could not only read the Garuli’s body language as well as she could but that they seemed to be able to read hers.

It was hard to fathom.

Perhaps that was the true reason that the valkyrians made efforts to integrate them — their innate brilliance. Their potential. That’s where their true magic was.

“Are you ready?” Tea asked, his intelligent yellow eyes blinking at her with curiosity.

They weren’t just a people. They were a commodity.

As we all are, to the valkyrian, Guin thought bitterly, feeling that she had placed her fears toward the wrong people after all.

Her eyes drifted up to the Head Scribe, peering at them accusingly from over the rims of her glasses. It was a cold, frosty glare that sent a chill down her spine, and she saw them: four round mystriks, in a square shape at the corner of her left eye.

“Well, well, well,” the old woman started, placing her quill in its holder. “If you are done with your little chit-chat then why don’t you inform me as to the reason you disrupt our work?”