Chapter Text
Prologue I
Phainon kept his eyes closed for a while longer. There was no particular reason to open them yet. The wind was cool, the ground beneath him was soft, and nothing nearby sounded as though it was trying to kill him. There was water somewhere close by and birds overhead, neither of which told him much about where he was, but they at least suggested that wherever he had ended up was relatively peaceful.
For one brief moment, he expected to hear Aedes Elysiae around him.
Instead, there was only the sea, the wind, and the cry of unfamiliar birds.
Phainon opened his eyes.
The sky was blue.
Phainon watched a cloud drift overhead, then another. There was nothing unusual about either of them. No fire burned behind them, nothing disturbed their slow passage across the sky, and after a while he realized he had been staring longer than necessary.
"All right," he said quietly. "That's new."
His voice sounded rough. He swallowed and pushed himself up on one elbow, sending sand sliding from his hair and coat. His head turned with him, and for a few seconds the beach tilted unpleasantly to one side. Phainon stopped moving until the sensation passed, then sat up and looked around properly.
The shore was narrow, bordered by the sea on one side and pale cliffs on the other. Grass covered much of the upper slope, and a worn path climbed between the rocks before disappearing inland. There were no buildings in sight and no people on the beach, but somebody had used the path often enough to leave it clearly visible.
Before standing, Phainon checked himself. His coat was dusty but intact, his boots were still on, and his weapon was where it should be. He ran his hands over his arms, ribs, stomach, and legs, then flexed his fingers and rolled both shoulders. Nothing hurt. Everything moved as it should.
He had expected worse.
"I'm alive," he murmured.
He considered that for a moment, then smiled.
"That's a good start."
Memory returned while he was getting to his feet. Aedes Elysiae came first, followed by the Flame-Chase, the Titans, and the companions who had stayed beside him until they couldn't. Their faces returned more readily than the order of events did. There were stretches he could remember clearly and others that seemed to have collapsed together, but the end remained intact enough.
He remembered the end in pieces. Irontomb had destroyed everything. Afterward, even time seemed to stop. He remembered finding Cyrene again, but his thoughts lingered on Stelle.
Phainon remembered reaching for her. Or perhaps she had reached for him first. That part shifted whenever he tried to put the memory in order, but he remembered her hand in his and the relief of realizing that they had somehow made it through another ending.
Later, there had been a celebration. That memory was easier. Nobody had needed to hurry toward another battle, and no new disaster had arrived to interrupt them. There had been food, conversations allowed to reach their natural conclusions, and the unfamiliar experience of having enough time to wonder what came next.
Stelle had invited him to travel with the Astral Express.
Phainon remembered asking where she would take him first. Stelle had considered the question with far greater seriousness than he expected, only to give him an answer that immediately led into several qualifications, two warnings, and an argument over whether one particularly disastrous experience should count against an entire planet.
Phainon had pointed out that this was not especially reassuring.
She had pointed out that he had asked.
He laughed under his breath at the memory.
There were worlds beyond Amphoreus that Phainon knew mostly through other people's stories. Xianzhou. Penacony. Other places whose names he had heard but whose skies he had never seen. Until then, knowing they existed had been enough. Once Stelle started talking about actually visiting them, however, Phainon had found himself asking more questions than either of them expected.
He wanted to see them.
It was a simple enough desire, but it had taken him some time to get used to having one. For most of his life, plans for the future had been difficult to separate from whatever needed to be protected, defeated, or endured first. Now he could apparently spend an evening arguing with Stelle about which world they should visit before any of the others.
He had rather liked that.
At some point, he had told her that he wanted to find another village surrounded by wheat fields. It wouldn't be Aedes Elysiae, of course, and Phainon wasn't looking for a replacement. He simply wanted to know whether somewhere among all those worlds there was a place that might remind him of home.
Stelle had seemed willing to look with him.
Then the memory stopped.
Phainon frowned and tried to follow it farther. He could remember the celebration, Stelle's invitation, and his own plans to see the worlds beyond Amphoreus. He could remember being happy about the prospect.
There was no departure he could recover and no journey afterward. He did not remember falling asleep, being attacked, or being caught in anything that might explain why he was now sitting on an unfamiliar beach. His memories simply reached a point beyond which there was nothing, and the next thing he knew for certain was the wind on his face.
Phainon tried approaching the gap from another direction, but that accomplished very little. After a few minutes he stopped. If the memory was there, he wasn't going to recover it by repeatedly asking himself the same questions.
Forcing it was getting him nowhere.
He turned instead toward the place where he had awakened. The sand held a shallow impression of his body, but there were no footprints leading toward it and no marks suggesting that someone had dragged him there. The tide had left a darker band farther down the shore, well short of where he had been lying.
Phainon crouched beside the impression and ran his fingers through the sand. It was dry near the surface and cooler underneath. Nothing unusual. He checked the area around it as well, looking for anything he might have missed from where he had been sitting.
There was nothing.
So he had probably not come from the sea.
Probably.
Phainon walked along the waterline anyway. Shells clicked beneath his boots, and pieces of driftwood had collected between some of the larger rocks. He found the tracks of several small animals but nothing resembling his own. A crab retreated beneath a stone when he approached, so Phainon lifted the rock to check underneath it. There was nothing there except the crab.
"Sorry."
He carefully put the stone back.
The crab did not forgive him.
The rest of the beach was no more informative. There were no discarded supplies, pieces of equipment, or anything else that might have arrived with him. Phainon checked the base of the cliffs in case he had somehow fallen from above, but the rock was unmarked and none of the plants growing from its cracks appeared to have been disturbed recently.
He walked in the opposite direction next. That accomplished just as little.
By the time he returned to where he had started, Phainon had several possible explanations and no reason to favor any of them. Someone might have brought him here. Some phenomenon might have transported him across a distance he couldn't remember crossing. He could even have done something himself and forgotten about it afterward. Without evidence, one possibility was as useful as another.
He searched the beach one more time because not doing so would bother him later. It changed nothing.
"Hm." Phainon folded his arms. "That makes things difficult."
There was little reason to remain on the beach after that. Whatever had happened to him, he did not have enough information to work it out alone. Whoever used the path might know where he was, and that seemed like an easier question to answer first.
Phainon climbed toward it.
From the rise, he could see little beyond the next line of trees. The path continued inland between low hills, disappearing and reappearing as it climbed. It was not a particularly informative view, but it gave him a direction.
His stomach growled.
"A promising sign, indeed." He chuckled.
Preferably, civilization came with breakfast.
He had no pack and no food, though his weapon had arrived with him. A search of his pockets produced nothing that improved the situation. Even if some forgotten coin had survived whatever had happened to him, he had no reason to assume anyone here would accept it.
Work was probably the easiest solution. Phainon had no idea what sort of work people here needed, but that was something he could ask once he found them. Language might make the conversation more complicated. He had traveled enough to know that gestures were not nearly as universal as people sometimes assumed, although food and money usually gave strangers a good place to start.
Before worrying about any of that, he dealt with the sand in his boots. Phainon sat on a flat stone, removed each boot in turn, and shook it out before putting it back on. It was a small inconvenience, and one he was quite happy to have.
Phainon checked his weapon out of habit before leaving it where it belonged. If he encountered trouble, he could deal with it then. There was no reason to introduce himself to the first inhabitants of an unfamiliar world with a sword in his hand.
Besides, if breakfast was his first concern, frightening the person who provided it would be counterproductive.
He stepped onto the path.
The grass shifted around his boots, and for an instant warmth passed through the ground beneath him.
Phainon stopped.
The sensation disappeared almost immediately. He looked back toward the beach, then down at his feet, but nothing appeared to have changed. After a moment he crouched and pressed his palm against the earth.
The soil was cool. Grass moved against his fingers in the breeze, and something small shifted beneath it nearby. He moved his hand several inches and tried again, but the warmth did not return.
Phainon remained there for a few seconds longer. Whatever he had felt, there was no obvious source for it and no sign that it had affected anything around him.
"...All right."
He stood and brushed the dirt from his palm.
The path was uneven but well traveled. Its center had been worn bare by passing feet, while old wheel marks crossed the softer patches of earth. People traveled this way regularly, and the road curved inland toward a stand of trees.
Phainon followed it.
He had no map and no idea what country he had arrived in. He didn't know how far he was from the nearest settlement, whether anyone here would understand him, or whether the local currency happened to be something he possessed. He also had no idea whether the statue in the distance marked a city, a temple, or the grave of someone sufficiently important to receive a monument larger than most houses.
There was no point trying to answer those questions by himself. The road had been used recently enough, and wherever it led, there would probably be someone there who could tell him more than the beach had.
He followed the road.