Done for ladycordelia17's Calendar Challenge on The Moogle Nest forum. Check it out if you have the time. December's theme was "Rebena Te Ra" and "reminiscence."
This can be read on its own or with "Seven Years of Feast and Famine." The timelines should match up.
Enjoy!
His first year in the caravan, his first drop of myrrh even, Andy ran past the pillars that marked the entrance to Rebena Te Ra and opened the first treasure chest he saw. He nearly lost his leg to the fake, and old Boris yelled at him something fierce, but he learned a valuable lesson nonetheless.
Each visit after that, he walked sedately to the right treasure chest, avoiding the other entirely. If there's one thing he'd learned since then, it's to avoid unnecessary battles.
In his third year they visited Rebena Te Ra again, and while Andy didn't remember which treasure chest was the correct one, he did remember to stay back far enough not to find out first hand.
Beneath the remnants of a wall in one of the crumbled houses he found a rag doll, somewhat soggy but mostly intact despite the elements it must have endured. He tucked it in his pocket and promptly forgot about it for the time being.
Later, he wondered what little girl the homely creation had belonged to, and what had happened to her.
He decided he didn't really want to know.
"I've been here three times now," Andy mentioned to the newest recruit from the fields in his fifth year, "And every single time I can't help but feel amazed that this wreck has survived for so long. We're talking hundreds of years. If we let Fum down, it wouldn't even take two years for it to change so much that you wouldn't know there'd been a town there at all."
"I always wonder what happened here. Who they were, you know?" Their newest member, a lanky lad by the name of Jake who could have passed for Andy's twin, said after a moment, snapping at the buckles of his handed down jerkin. "Why they fell."
Andy wanted to tell him that they were different somehow, that Fum was not doomed to the same fate, but he couldn't seem to find the words.
The bats, while annoying, were not nearly as annoying as the paralyzing experience of an electric jellyfish. Still, a gravity spell would do more help than harm for their more than capable caravan.
It was his seventh cycle, his fourth visit, and his first year as the Fields of Fum's caravan leader. Failure was not an option.
He had barely started the casting of a fire spell when he heard a low hum begin behind him. He didn't even have to turn. With a partner like Jake at his back, everything would be fine. The world bent and twisted before him, driving the bat to the ground. He dispatched it with a slash of his well worn sword.
Jake already had the chalice balanced on his shoulder. "Lead on," he said, mouth quirked into a grin.
After a grin of his own, he did.
The new recruit looked peaceful lying there beside the pool of water, provided one didn't look at the ruin that marred his body from the neck down. His face was clean, remarkably so, cleared of any sign of suffering. He looked to be merely sleeping.
His name was Garrett, Andy knew. His name was Garrett, he had blond hair and blue eyes and two younger sisters, and he loved striped apples. He ate them constantly, tossing cores away without a care to where they landed. There was a running joke that he was the father of every apple tree they passed.
Andy stared a little longer at the moonlight reflected in those sky blue eyes, then closed the boy's eyelids with a gentle hand. Perhaps it wasn't considered masculine to cry, but he knew that no one would shame him for the tears he shed now. Their cure spells had been too little, too late, his body unable to host a spirit any longer and his spirit not strong enough to heal his body.
Later, he would be the one to tell Garrett's mother how her boy had died on his watch. He would be the one to hold her as she collapsed beneath that grief. For now, he had a caravan to protect and a chalice to fill.
He dashed the tears from his eyes with the shirt cuff that wasn't soaked with blood. Later, he would mourn.
"What do you mean, let them hit me?" Sheula was new to the caravan, and the feistiest girl Andy had ever met. Her sword cleaved the last skeleton mage in two even as she shot a glare at him. "Are you crazy or something?"
He sighed and glanced at Jake, who looked equally bewildered. Upon catching his plaintive gaze Jake's eyes widened and he backed away as far from the two of them as he could.
Andy sighed. Once again, no help from his erstwhile second. "Sheula," he said, eyeing the bones littering the ground. The spell shouldn't take hold again for another few minutes, but that was no excuse to drop his guard. "Look, the way to open this gate involves their magic. I never said this would be easy."
"You're having me on. Pranking the greenie, right?"
"This is the sixth time I've been here. Just trust me on this, will you?"
She frowned. "Why doesn't Jake have to?"
"Because if everything goes wrong, Jake here is going to save our lives." Andy smiled at his friend, only to wince at the pained expression on his face. It had been three years since Garrett had died, their attempts to use Curaga and Life only prolonging his pain. Andy could have slapped himself for reminding his friend of that.
"If you say so," Sheula said doubtfully, but there was no more time for words as the skeletons reformed with a crack and the battle began.
He decided that he liked taking his new recruits through Rebena Te Ra, because by now he knew every trick and trap the old ruin held.
Lulie was particularly new, so new, in fact, that when Jake saw Sheula teaching the newest girl how to hold a sword to begin with, he made sure Andy knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
"We'd be better off sending her home now before we have to send her home in a coffin," the second said in an undertone as he cast a surreptitious glance over his shoulder at the two women walking behind the wagon. Andy raised his eyebrows at the blunt statement.
"We'll wait and see," he replied. If the trials of the caravan were too much for the girl, they would drop her off at Fum with a sincere thanks and best wishes.
He didn't have to wait long. They were barely past the pillars that marked the entrance to the old citadel when Lulie tried to open the first treasure chest she saw.
It wasn't until they were camped that night that Andy confessed the reason he'd burst into laughter at the bit of treasure Lulie had found. The other three had a good laugh at his expense, and amidst the merriment he found himself sitting beside the newly blooded recruit herself.
"Congratulations," he told her. "You're going to do just fine."
The lich king seemed weaker that year, but Andy supposed that it was probably that they had grown stronger. Lulie had taken to magic like a Selkie to water, and now in her third year, easily coordinated all of their magic attacks.
He also thought nothing of the obviously battle scarred room. Chips in the stone walls from weapons, burns and warped areas from magic, all of these built up over the years. So it never occurred to him that the myrrh was gone until, well, the myrrh wasn't there.
"Those Tipan bastards!" Jake yelled, kicking the pedestal. He howled when his booted foot hit the rock and began hopping about. "That's our myrrh!"
Sheula cast a sardonic eye on his antics from where she'd already taken a seat on the stone floor. "They have as much a right to it as we do."
"But it's our territory!" Jake sat and rubbed at his foot with a grimace. "You don't see us taking from them."
"How do you know it was them?" Lulie asked, popping a rainbow grape into her mouth. Andy couldn't help but watch the way her eyes closed in satisfaction at the tart sweetness.
He answered for Jake. "They came through town about a week before we left. Didn't think anything of it, of course." Inwardly he berated himself for overlooking that monumental piece of information. Now they'd done a whole dungeon for nothing.
"Honestly, I'd thought they were just headed out to Conall Curach again. They're involved with something in that swamp, you know." At their confused looks Sheula sighed. "I spoke with one of the women once. So now what, leader of ours?"
Andy turned from where he had been gazing at the dormant myrrh tree. His caravanners were exhausted. He hated to do this to them.
"Now," he said slowly, "We make up for lost time."
The letter was addressed to Andy, and within it were two simple lines. It wasn't signed. Then again, it didn't need to be.
"You win. The cows were more trouble than they were worth."
He folded up the letter with a grin. Revenge was a dish best served cold. He gave a courteous nod to the little mail moogle. "No reply."
"What is it?" Lulie asked, two years older but in the same place and position she had been during their last visit. The myrrh tree glistened this year though, its glow restoring their hope and faith as always.
"Oh, nothing important," he said airily, unable to keep the grin from his face.
Jake noticed the grin and laughed. "Good old Morris, huh?"
He nodded. "Good old Morris. And especially his stubborn, impossibly slow moving cows."
Andy was thirty-five years old. He had been in a caravan for twenty years, and watched Rebena Te Ra appear before and later disappear behind the wagon ten separate times. It had been a long road, a hard road, but a good one.
The others didn't know it, but come next myrrh festival Jake would be leading them. He expected his friend would take them for two more cycles at least before leaving the job to Sheula. By then she'd be ready for the responsibilities. So, knowing what he knew, Andy watched the citadel fade into the distance much longer than he normally would have, until it was not even a bump on the horizon.
The others didn't know it, but he even wiped a tear or two from his eyes.
He wouldn't be coming back. At least, not in this lifetime.