Aralim had been so used to walking along a Crimson Highway that was straight as a scar, that the twisting and turning cobblestone way soon became unnecessarily irking to him. Scattered mountains and rolling foothills twisted the Highway like a piece of grey yarn, and Aralim kept thinking, If we only went straight, it would be half the distance… Continue reading Aralim 83
Ellas and his troop of Highwaymen set out early the next morning, and Aralim and his friends continued along the Crimson road for many more days. They saw forests, they saw fields, and now, at last, they saw hills. The first ones were little bumps, where a single copse of trees here or there seemed to grow taller than the rest. Before they reached the Crossroads, the bumps had become rolling hills with rocky spines, scattered many miles apart at times, but growing fiercer nonetheless. Continue reading Aralim 82
“There’s citizens too,” Lerela said, jogging up to the travellers with clinking armour. The rolling beige fields of the savanna had given way to copses of trees and scattered swamps, but the denser vegetation did not hide the troop that was approaching Aralim’s companionship from the west.
“Citizens, marching at such a pace?” Grendar questioned. Continue reading Aralim 81
This wasn’t the first time Aralim walked with a limp, but it was the first time in a long time. He had switched back to carrying his lantern staff today, two weeks after Mulio’s knife had embedded in his thigh. He felt as though he had been stronger yesterday, with a proper cane, while his showy staff put a little more weight on the healing muscles.
He blinked, as he realized how lost he had become in the sensations, testing each step to see how it felt. Lerela and Yovin walked in the lead, with Dullah and Devran murmuring to one another as they walked. They’d been continuing a discussion of some sort since yesterday—Aralim had overheard tidbits, but he got the distinct impression it was a conversation for the two of them only. He hadn’t eavesdropped on anything to suggest that was the case, but they hadn’t made any attempt to include him yet. It was still better than the silence that had followed their stashing of several red-badged bodies in the foliage. Continue reading Aralim 80
There was a little rodent on a bump in the road up ahead, a beige fox that quirked its disproportionately-sized ears in the direction of the travellers, watched for a moment, and then scurried into the tall grass. Aralim looked north, where the fields stretched down the slightest slope and toward the arid horizon. The clear blue sky let him see far. Copses of trees dotted the savanna in the nearest region, but then ceased. It was only to the south, at Aralim’s right shoulder, that the forests to which he had become so accustomed spanned.
“I’m troubled,” Devran confessed, his first words aside from logistic ones in days. He quickened his pace to reach Aralim’s right side. Continue reading Aralim 79
The hubbub of quiet voices seemed to grow quieter after Aralim spoke. He had lain amidst the shambling cots and mismatched bedsheets of the abandoned wooden house, along with a hundred paupers and lost people, but now they were sharing an enormous pot of morning stew that a charitable nobleman had brought to the shelter.
The bowls, lifted to people’s lips or resting on old wooden boards-made-tabletops, paused at Aralim’s question. “What’s the biggest difference between the people like us and the rulers of Maga, aside from finances?” he has asked the man he was sitting with. Continue reading Aralim 78
After a few days on the riverside, Captain Ruk’nor got their vessel underway once more. Many other rivercrafts had passed them, and some offered assistance, but after the initial removal of damaged wooden sections, the repeated varnishing of their replacements could not be expeditated. By the time they returned to rowing along the wide Toringa, they were soon sailing through a fleet of fishers, foragers, and other passenger vessels. They left the chaotic jungle behind and sailed between a forest of golden reeds and tall grass. The Eye of Maga came into sight soon after. Continue reading Aralim 77
Ruk’nor’s crew had incredible endurance. For six or seven hours a day, with only a short break when the sun reached its zenith, the riverboat moved along the Toringa powered by the rowers. Oars splashed water more in the afternoon than in the morning, as the crew sometimes tired. This usually occurred when the river narrowed or was joined by another branch of its basin.
Aralim learned, a few days into their voyage, that the Toringa was the longest river on the continent, according to the captain and a few of the passengers. It not only connected the Eye of Maga to the Stormy Sea, but then ran for hundreds of miles to the west, toward Numa’nakres and the Yurna Mountains. He tried to imagine that the waters that flowed around their rowboat were the same waters that had rained on Rema. Continue reading Aralim 76
Wooden beams creaked as the dark waves were turned white against the shove of the Sunset. Spray climbed the height of the prow occasionally. Between the morning’s rain and the seafoam churned airborne, Aralim’s long hair was wet against his scalp. He watched the cat, sitting near the ship’s mast to avoid getting the same soak. Aralim’s lantern shutter kept the staff’s flame dry and cast a blue glow from his shoulder to his earlobe.
Dullah lavished the water, salty though it was, cooling her skin by lowering her arms over the rail. Devran merely stood beside her, watching quietly the approach of their next harbour. Barnacle, pink and yellow, clung to the wharfs, and only a weathered wooden walk was visible above. Varravar received them with a strange bitterness—the salty droplets on their lips, the pods clustered on the landing, the dreary, low-hanging clouds, the miserable looks of the dock workers, the distant wail of dying man, and the eerie whispering of the painted women at the mouth of each street. Continue reading Aralim 75
It rained from the evening after Hawsi until they reached the Pit. And it didn’t just stop then. When the rain stopped—it could begin pouring as suddenly as their ship’s cat might dash by—the air held such a stiff humidity that Aralim’s robe grew scentless sweat stains. Of course, he sweat a lot too. Dullah and Devran were more accustomed to rainforest life, despite both being city-acclimated, while Aralim suffered in ways he had never known he could. But, by determination, it didn’t limit him in any ways. Continue reading Aralim 74