"...Luke!"
The smell of flowers and the sea, neither quite familiar, hung in the air, and the ground was too soft to be the courtyard. And then there was that voice...
"Wake up, Luke!"
He cracked his eyes open slowly, looking up into the stars distantly above. They were bright, brighter than he had ever seen them, and if Luke hadn't already heard the voice of the woman kneeling at his side, he might have thought he was all alone in the world. He pulled himself into a sitting position as the woman sighs in relief.
"Good, I was worried you weren't going to wake up..." She brushed some hair out of her face, seemingly unaffected by the glare Luke leveled at her. Her clothes were an Oracle Knights' uniform, though Luke was unfamiliar with the specific division it indicated. "Is something the matter?"
"Who are you?" he demanded, incredulous at how calmly she seemed to be taking this. "What were you doing at the manor? What is this place?"
"I don't know," she answered, presumably in answer to his last question, because it certainly doesn't make sense for any of the others. Luke waited a moment to see if she would provide any more information, and when none was forthcoming, he stood up, determined to at least find out what he could about his surroundings.
The woman trailed behind him as he followed the sound of the sea - if he could find the coast, then he could find his way home eventually. He was not lost, not kidnapped again; he was still free to make his own choices. Even as he climbed to the edge of the overlook, Luke noticed that the stones and plants were not those he was familiar with from the area around Baticul. Indeed, he couldn't recognize most of them at all, except for the selenia flowers clustered along the sides of the path and spreading into a clifftop meadow before him.
(Pere had called the selenias a lovely weed, one that grew off of concentrated fonons instead of sunlight. There had only ever been one pot of them at the manor, carefully contained to keep them from overtaking the rest of the garden. It hadn't really been needed; the flowers barely got enough fonons to bloom, at the top of Baticul's towering cityscape. Here, they grew almost to the exclusion of any other kind of plant; the flow of fonons below the surface must be incredible.)
The ocean stretched into the horizon beyond the edge of the cliffs. Luke had seen it before, from the port of Baticul and, years ago, from the decks of a ship to Belkend, but that was nothing like what stretched before him now. The ocean outside of the city suddenly seemed tamed, placidly doing the work of humanity. This was a wild place, and it echoed in the sound of the surf. If ten people had seen this view before them in a lifetime, Luke would honestly be surprised.
"It's beautiful," he said quietly, but if his companion shared the opinion, she didn't give any sign of it.
"It seems there's no way down from here," she said. "If we follow the ravine back inland and down to the coast, we might be able to at least find a road."
Luke nodded, loath to turn away from the ocean, but at least somewhat impressed by the woman's practicality. As he started to pass her to take the trail down from the meadow, she said, "Tear. My name is Tear."
Odd name, he thought, but kept it to himself, instead stopping to look at her over his shoulder. "And the situation between you and Master Van?"
"That's a personal matter," she said smoothly. Luke hmphed and continued on; it was clear he wasn't going to get an answer about that any time soon.
There were a few monsters down the path; while none of them seemed particularly powerful in the grand scheme of things, even the pink boars that came up to nearly Luke's chest, they were still enough of a challenge that Luke found himself out of breath. With a dull blade and not much experience, he was quickly breathing heavily.
Tear, in spite of being a soldier, wasn't doing much better. She had a few fonic artes at her disposal, including healing artes (that, Luke was incredibly grateful for; this didn't seem like a good situation for putting his grasp of the theory to the test), but it was clear that her surprise assault on the manor was the only way she could have come anywhere near equalling Van. The most potent weapon in her arsenal wasn't really a weapon at all, but the fonic hymn she used to put enemies to sleep, so they could sneak past monsters without getting involved in further fights.
They crossed over the stream and were circling back to do so again when they heard the rustling in the bushes. Luke, prepared for another encounter with monsters, put a hand to the sword belted at his hip. But what came out of the bushes instead was a man, carrying a water vessel and looking as shocked to see them as they were to see him.
"Don't tell me you're with the Dark Wings," the man cried out in fright, and Luke and Tear just looked at each other with matched confusion.
"The Dark Wings?" Tear asked, replacing her staff in its holster. Luke dropped his hand away from his sword; this man wasn't a threat, at least for now.
"They're bandits. Two men and a woman..." The man stopped, glancing behind the two of them. "Wait, there's only two of you."
Luke sighed, and tried to quash his irritation. "We're just travelers who got lost out here. Who are you?"
"I'm a coachman. We lost our drinking water when the jug fell off, so I came here to draw more."
A coach! That meant that not only was there a road nearby, but it was a fairly well-travelled one. Luke can't help the way his shoulders sag with relief.
"Do you go to the capital?" Tear asks, no doubt with the same thought.
"It's my last stop. If you two are looking for a ride, though, it'll be twelve thousand gald apiece."
Immediately, Luke started shuffling through his pockets - twelve thousand is a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth of the manor, but he hadn't been planning to go anywhere and didn't have much money on him. A thorough search only returned a few hundred-gald pieces.
"Can we pay when we reach the capital?" he asked, not really expecting it to work but figuring it can't hurt. As expected, the coachman shakes his head.
"I need payment in advance."
Well, at least they had found the road, even if the walk to any of the cities would be quite long. Even as Luke was planning to ask the man about the directions to the road, Tear reached up to the back of her neck and pulled a large pendant from inside her uniform.
"Take this," she said, putting the pendant in the coachman's hand too quickly for Luke to get a good look at it. The coachman held it up to the dim light of the moon, letting Luke get a proper view of the large, dark gem set into it.
"Wow, this is some gem," the man said, before tucking it safely into a pocket. "Alright, hop aboard. The coach is just a little further down the trail; we're starting up again as soon as I get the water jug filled."
Luke just nodded, waiting until they were some distance from the man before turning to Tear. "You didn't have to do that. I would have survived a walk."
She shook her head. "It's my fault you got involved in this. I'll see you safely back to your manor."
Luke didn't argue. If she wanted to spend her most valuable possessions to help him - and he doubted she owned anything more valuable than that pendant; soldiering wasn't exactly a high-paying job - then what right does he have to complain about it?
They climbed into the coach, getting surprised looks from the other two passengers across from them, and Luke settled in against one wall to drift off to sleep.
Luke awoke the next day to the coach being thoroughly jostled, even more so than the bump of the road would usually bounce them around. Tear was sitting with her hands folded in her hand, but the two men across from them were both staring intently out the windows.
"What's going on?" Luke asked Tear in an undertone.
"There's a landship chasing bandits down the road," she answered. "I'm surprised you managed to sleep through it this long."
Luke leaned to look out the window. He could just barely see the edge of the landship, chasing a strange, smaller black vehicle, when a voice boomed out over them -
"You, there! Move your coach before you get caught in the crossfire!"
The driver didn't hesitate to obey the command echoing across the plain, so when he swerved, Luke overbalanced and nearly found himself in Tear's lap. Outside the window, the full length of the landship passed them by.
On its side, in full-view, was the crest of the Malkuth Empire.
A fonic barrier went up over the landship, which also provided cover for the coach that was nearly behind it. Luke squashed his face to the window to see what was going on nearly directly behind the coach, and was rewarded with the sight of the bridge, bombed by an intense fonic arte, collapsing behind the strange vehicle the bandits used to make their escape. The landship came to a stop directly in front of the bridge, protected entirely by the barrier.
Malkuth. They were in Malkuth, which meant...
"Wow! That's Malkuth's newest land dreadnought, the Tartarus!"
The coachman's shouted comment interrupted Luke's train of thought, and caught the attention of Tear, who hadn't bothered looking out the window and thus hadn't seen the crest on the landship. "Malkuth?" she asked, shock restrained in her voice.
Luke nodded. "Then this coach is going to Grand Chokmah."
He wouldn't have thought it was possible for Tear to become more pale - as it was, it seemed like she'd seen the sun maybe three days out of the last year - but she managed it somehow. "I see, I was mistaken."
"Everything alright down there, you two?"
"It's fine," Luke said, probably too quickly to entirely ward off suspicion. "It seems we were more lost than we thought - we were supposed to be meeting family in Baticul." Hopefully, the man wouldn't remember Luke's offer to pay him when they reached the capital, and put two and two together; the red hair of Kimlasca's royal line was well known in its home country, but he had no idea about in Malkuth.
"That's the other direction, then. You should have taken the road south, rather than crossing the bridge. Of course, now that the Dark Wings have destroyed it, you can't go back that way..."
Luke fought down the urge to groan loudly and flopped back into his seat. "What's the next stop?" he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.
"That's the village of Engeve. You want to get off there?"
"It would be for the better," Tear said. "Riding the coach all the way to Grand Chokmah would just take us farther from our destination."
"Alright," came the coachman's voice from above. "Then I'll drop you off there."
Engeve was a tiny village in comparison to the cities Luke was used to; it was perhaps twenty buildings clustered together, most of them the shops of the craftspeople that supported the farms further out. The coach trundled away, leaving Luke and Tear next to a corn patch at the entrance to the village proper.
"We should buy supplies," Luke said. "I doubt we'll be lucky enough to find a coach willing to take us back south." With the bridge out, the only passage from Malkuth into Kimlasca was at the border in the southern half of Rugnica, at either Akzeriuth or Kaitzur.
That border crossing would pose its own problems, with Luke not having a passport (and he couldn't be sure that Tear did, either), but there was no point in worrying about those until they were further south. If they had to sneak across the border, it would probably be easier to do so on the Akzeriuth side; though it was technically a part of Malkuth, the mining town had changed hands in the Hod War, and merchants from both countries came and went regularly. With Tear's skill as a healer and his own improving swordsmanship, they could probably get work as bodyguards in exchange for passage across.
Tear nodded her agreement, a single small dip of her head. "And find somewhere to sleep tonight. We can do our shopping this afternoon and set off in the morning."
They turned towards the marketplace, where Luke was pleasantly surprised by the low prices of all the foodstuffs. He had known Baticul's food supply, itself from Engeve and similar villages throughout Malkuth's breadbasket across the Rugnica Plains, suffered from extensive mark-ups, but it was still different seeing it in person. He was quickly able to pile together two packs full of food, along with supplies from the blacksmith to put a proper fighting edge on his sword, without dipping too deeply into the coin he still thought of as pocket change.
As they turned towards the inn, Luke paused, seeing someone in white clothes - their gender impossible to tell at this distance - sneaking around one of the food storehouses. He had heard the merchants talking about someone stealing food in the market; could this be the culprit?
"Hold on," he said to Tear, before slipping as quietly as he could in that direction. The figure didn't seem to notice him, or Tear following a few steps behind.
Up closer, there was something familiar about the figure's clothes. Luke couldn't place them, but apparently Tear could - he heard her whisper the beginning of a sentence, too quiet for him to hear, before they were interrupted.
"Stop! Thieves!"
"What?" Luke's head snapped up in surprise, but before he could object, two of the men from the market had grabbed his arms and dragged him off, Tear right along with him. "No, stop, there's been a misunderstanding - "
But no amount of his words would reach the men, and so it was that Luke and Tear were dumped before the village's mayor, a round woman named Rose with hair red enough to make Luke wonder if she was some distant relative, descended from a bastard child of the royal family shuffled off to Malkuth to prevent scandal. Also in her house was a member of the Malkuth military - Luke didn't know their rankings by sight, but the man obviously possessed some higher rank.
It was equally obvious that the two were being interrupted, and Rose was not particularly pleased with that fact. "Hush!" she hissed at the men dragging Luke and Tear in. "We've got an important guest from the military here. Calm down."
"How can we be calm? We've finally caught the food thieves!"
Luke made an annoyed noise and tried to wiggle his way free, to have at least some dignity, but to no avail - the men were tall and strong enough to simply lift him up off the floor. "We're not thieves," he insisted. "We were following someone lurking around the warehouse, and theymight be the thief, but the two of us only arrived in town today."
"A likely story!" said the man holding Luke's right side angrily. Rose made a placating gesture towards them.
"Let's all just calm down, alright? We'll hear what everyone has to say."
The military officer set his cup back in its saucer with a clink. "Yes, please do." His tone was incredibly condescending, though Luke couldn't tell who it was directed at. Regardless, he couldn't help but take a dislike to the man.
Rose turned back to him, with an apologetic smile on her face. "My apologies, Colonel. You shouldn't have to hear about our small-town problems."
"No, by all means. The Tartarus is only stopping here to resupply; I wouldn't want to prevent you from taking care of the day-to-day concerns of your position."
"You command the Tartarus?" Luke cut in, and he was rewarded with the smallest of nods. "Then you saw us - we were in the coach you nearly ran over."
"Ah. I wondered if that might be the case." The whole room looked to the colonel as he shrugged and stood from his seat. "Then you couldn't have been the thieves, since food has been going missing every few days for nearly four weeks now - isn't that correct, Rose?"
The mayor nodded her head. "That's right. If they really did just get to town today, they couldn't be the thieves." She gave the men holding Luke and Tear an intense look, and after a moment, they dropped Luke to stand on his own feet again. "Looks like we're no closer to an answer there. Sorry for the trouble."
"Actually," came a voice from the doorway, "I may have an answer to that." Luke looked over to the door, and saw what could only be the figure he had initially followed towards the warehouse, a very small person whose gender was really no clearer up close and from the front than it had been from the distance following them.
The men clustered around the door stepped aside to let them step through, and Luke and Tear both also stepped out of the path. Luke tried to catch Tear's eye, but all of her attention was focused on the new arrival, a thoughtful look on her face.
"I was a bit curious, so I investigated the food storehouse." The figure handed Rose something, their head blocking Luke's view of the item. "I found this fur caught on the edge of the door. There were several other clumps of it on the ground as well."
Rose lifted the fur up to the light, and Luke could see that it was a strange shade of blue. "This is fur from a sacred cheagle," she said.
One of the men beside Luke snorted. "So our culprit is a bunch of those guys? Seems kind of fishy to me."
Rose started to round on him, but the colonel, mostly faded into the background, cleared his throat gently.
"Well, I think that takes care of that mystery," he said. "I'm sure these men have work to do, and our young travelers have somewhere they need to be."
"Quite right," Rose agreed. "I'll figure out something about the cheagles; the rest of you just go on home."
Luke knew a dismissal when he heard it, so as much as he wanted to stay and listen to the discussion (there was something about the embroidery on those white robes tugging at his memory), he and Tear had already made themselves far too conspicuous today. The last thing he wanted was to be discovered as one of Kimlasca's royal heirs, this deep in Malkuth territory for no apparent reason. He followed the group of townsmen out the door.
Once they were outside, Tear's steps slacked, letting Luke and the men carry on down the path in front of her. Luke paused, turning back to look at her. "Is something the matter?"
"Why is Fon Master Ion here?" she said in an undertone, glancing back at the house. Luke almost tripped, shocked enough to forget for a second that he was walking.
"That's the Fon Master?" he hissed, too loudly to really call a whisper, and he slowed to a stop on the path. "I'd heard he was missing, but that certainly didn't seem like he was here of anything but his own will."
"Missing? That's news to me." Tear looked back at the house. "You're right; he certainly isn't behaving as though there's anything to be concerned about."
"Um, excuse me. Are you talking about Ion? Do you know where he is?"
The girl's voice, from somewhere behind the middle of his back, gave Luke another brief moment of panic. He looked around and down to see a young teenager with black hair up in two pigtails, wearing a more traditional Oracle Knights uniform than Tear's (except that the majority of it was a bright pink).
"He's at the mayor's house," Tear said evenly.
"Oh, good!" the girl said with evident relief, a bright smile taking over her face. "Thank you!"
And she turned and ran off, before Luke could get out even the beginning of a "Wait - " After that, he turned to Tear. "So who was that?"
"A Fon Master Guardian. Whatever Ion's purpose for being here is, it seems he's come on an official matter." Tear rested her chin in her hand. "This just grows odder and odder..."
"You're telling me," Luke muttered, before turning to lead the way back to the inn.