[Flashback] Welcome Home

[Javen Vyta]

16th Spring, 500 AV

The road to Sunberth was paved in disappointment. Javen hobbled along the endless leagues of winding stretch, leaning heavily on his walking stick. For all his gains, the losses he had seen of late were staggering.

Green Valleys, a small village of farmers fighting against the near-infertile soil, had finally realized that he was the source of the plague he had been treating there. His luck had run out - and he had strained for over a days worth of travel to keep up with it and ahead of the lynch mob. His back strained now - the head of a crossbow bolt was still lodged in his left shoulder.

The burn on his left hand was still fresh, as well - swollen and welted from a well aimed torch-throw. His pants were singed and torn from the brambles he had spirited into to lose the villagers.

He looked ahead and saw Sunberth - a craggy, ramshackle shadow against the horizon. It leered at him now, across the valley.

This, the ultimate admittance of failure, was anything but a promising homecoming.

His coin purse rang with painfully little noise - it wouldn't be enough to get him far here. His medicine pouch was low on stock as well.

But if he was going to have any chance here, he needed to at least look well when he arrived.

He made camp in the shadow of home, and set to removing the bolt from his throbbing shoulder and treating his burns.

As for food and water, a sparse sage grass and a small pouch of water would have to do. He had been desperate before - and he knew how to survive.

His lungs burned, matching the fever that baked within him. He set to making a fire, painfully difficult given his small, broken flint and near useless left hand. When finally the flame took to the dry grass, he sighed with relief.

His mortar and pestle was handy, always near-by, and he set to his weekly ritual of preparing his medicines and poultices.

Tomorrow, he would be facing Homecoming - and he needed an inspiration for how he would get any farther then a pre-mature beating or a back-alley negotiation.

[Liminal]

Inspiration was somewhat hard to come by on the outskirts of Sunberth. A patchwork of small farms formed a ragged ring around the city; one of them was the place that belonged to Montgomery, who Javen had taken his leave of so long ago. Inside that ring, there was a tangle of broken rocks, piles of rubble, and deep, seemingly bottomless holes. It was the leftovers of the mining operation that had once fueled the armies and coffers of Alahea, a set of scars in the earth so severe that even the Valterrian had not obliterated them.

The city itself was a patch of yellow light in the near-darkness. Even from far away, it looked ominous. No, it was hard to imagine a heart-warming homecoming was going to take place here.

In the foreground, closer to Javen than the city proper, was another light. This one was an ugly red, and it stretched several hundred feet from the floor of the valley. The uninitiated would likely have a terrible time figuring out what it was, but as a native son, Javen would know that this was the Slag Heap Fire, a sort of meeting place and gathering spot for the locals. Distant, indistinct sounds came from that direction -- something was going on tonight.

And to the left, there was something else. It was a single light, low to the ground, in a section of ground where a series of abandoned mineshafts gaped open. Quite what it was was unclear, and at this distance, it was impossible to tell.

Some things to think about for the next day, perhaps. And Javen was going to need to do a lot of thinking...

[Javen Vyta]

Javen took the sight in, agonizing on the details. He had seen Slag Heap Fire used for everything from celebrations to public announcements. He had heard, from his father's whispered dealings with his mother, that other sorts of things went on at Slag Heap Fire - it was common ground for Sunberthers.

The other light - this was peculiar. The mines had run dry of ore before any age Javen knew of, his father said it was a long, long time ago. The light there was unusual - and unusual meant that perhaps, there was opportunity there.

Javen's mind was set - his body ached, his fresh wounds sapping his strength, but his curiosity overcame what fatigue and injury sought to steal from him. He trudged down to the old mines - a place that children never neared. He did not know the area.

Javen did not know what he would encounter at the mines, some shard of optimism left within was hopeful - for some reason - but a much stronger cynical mind began plotting - plotting lies, angles, and manipulations.

Coin doesn't walk up to you to be taken. It resides in the hands of men who need it - sometimes more then you do. You can stand on morals - and people will admire you for it - but admiration does not fill hungry bellies and morals do not pay the rent.

Javen smiled as the plots swam through his thoughts and curiosity carried his rock-heavy soles shambling towards the light in the mines. Perhaps today his luck was changing - but then again, he may be walking into his grave.

[Liminal]

Judging the distance of the other light was almost impossible in the low light. It could have been a mile away, or it could have been twenty. The terrain was rough and broken, and travel was slow.

Perhaps fortunately for Javen, it proved to be closer to the former than the latter. He was in a deep, wide scar in the earth, the legacy of a time when the land had been stripped away to fuel the Alahean war machine. The descent in hadn't been bad, but the opposite side was steeper, as evinced by the number of fresh rockslides.

As he got closer, he could see that the light was a fire of some kind -- not something like the Slag Heap, but something smaller and more controlled. It was also apparent that it was recessed from the wall of the chasm, probably in the mouth of a cave or abandoned mine shaft. There was no sound, and since sound traveled a great distance in this kind of country, that was a fact to be noted well.

The light seemed to be about halfway up. The rock here looked firmer than in some of the other spots, and it might be possible for Javen to climb up to the light should he feel so inclined.

[Javen Vyta]

The idea of undergoing the climb sickened Javen in a very literal sense. The trip thus far had been overly tiring. His wounds - which would have been on the mend had he not continually aggravated them on the journey - continued to sap his fortitude towards progress.

Still - there was a chance that this would prove opportune. He had to keep going. There was little in this world easily gotten - the last few days had proven as much.

He prepped a small cup of the Montgomery's cure-all, like Montgomery had shown him, and used the last of his alcohol in the process. It hadn't worked as well with the low grade swill he had been forced to use - but it helped. The foul taste of consuming it was enough to wretch - but he had grown accustomed to the noxious taste.

Catching his breath, he looked up the daunting height.

He began climbing.

[Liminal]

The way up proved not to be as difficult as it might have looked. Which was a good thing, given that Javen wasn't exactly in peak physical shape to be doing any serious rock climbing.

It was very difficult to judge the time, but it might have been half an hour before Javen was finally able to pull himself up onto the ledge itself. It was no more than three feet wide, but it stood at the entrance to a cave, the depth of which was indeterminate. Just inside the mouth, no more than eight feet away, was a large fire. The smoke was sucked upward; the roof of the cave likely had some sort of hole in it.

There was no sign aside from the fire that anyone had been up here. Well, actually that wasn't precisely true -- there was one sign. It was a voice, a woman's voice. The echoes in the cavern made it impossible to tell where the sound was coming from. The voice was smooth, but somehow...unpleasant, in a way that was very difficult to describe.

"Welcome, visitor. Perhaps you would be interested in telling us why you are here?"

[Javen Vyta]

Javen winced momentarily - not relishing in the fact that he had already been noticed. He was trying to think of something to say - the truth - harmless enough it seemed, perhaps he would give the truth a try.

I just recently made it into Sunberth - I am injured, albeit not severely, and I saw this place. I needed to find some shelter anyway before I went into the city and this seemed like a decent enough place to mend a little before I entered the city proper. I came up here because - quite honestly - I am always looking for opportunities and I saw the light. One never knows where a new business partner might turn up.

Perhaps, I can be of service?

Javen was sweating profusely and his lungs burned with the fever, but he strained to hold his frailness at bay - at least long enough to find out whether or not he had made a deathwish coming here.

There is little reward without risk. But your neck isn't worth as much as you might think either...

[Liminal]

The voice laughed. It wasn't an evil laugh, but it had that same skin-crawling quality about it.

"Oh, perhaps you may be of service, visitor. Perhaps you may."

There was a motion off to his left, and Javen would be able to see a female figure walking into view. She might have been forty, with hair beginning to go gray, and she was dressed in a simple black robe.

"Although I don't know that we're looking for business partners, exactly." The woman's smile had the same effect as the laugh -- unnerving, without there being an easily discernible reason why. "But opportunities -- we have opportunities in spades. Opportunities that few people understand, visitor."

She waved her left hand, indicating the whole of the cavern. "Feel free to rest here. But first, do tell me, visitor -- are you at all a religious man?"

[Javen Vyta]

A religious man - how curious a question at a place like Sunberth. That was like looking for rich men in a slave's pen.

Javen chortled rolling the question over in his mind.

"If I ever knew of a god, goddess, demon, angel - I'd even settle for a saint, I suppose - that could do more for me then drain my coin - well, I'd be a believer. But to date, I never met a priest that wasn't a second-rate charlatan pawning out his 'blessings' to anyone who'd buy them. Now, don't get me wrong - and I mean no offense - but religious people steer clear of this town."

That novelty aside, he took up the more important issue - straightening himself a little as he spoke.

"Now - opportunity - well that's a different matter altogether. I am always available for an endeavor - reasonable endeavors that is - and would look forward to helping in any way that I can. Sunberth is the City of Opportunity, after all."

[Liminal]

"Religion," she said, "takes many a turn, and if there aren't any Syliran Knights here, there are plenty who dance to the tune of a different deity."

She laughed again. "Visitor, this may not be the place you think it is. This is a place guarded by the followers of Vayt." She let the word hang in the air. "You know of him, perhaps? There's no reason to pawn imaginary curses off on unsuspecting rubes if the real thing is available, is there?"

The woman's smile widened. "Imagine that, visitor -- to have the blessings of cursing given to flow through your fingertips. That, I think, is what I would call an opportunity." She linked her fingers together in front of her. "Wouldn't you agree?"