Why Paul Temesch isn't in Providence

[bickando 3967]

Along old cobbled paths did the young man walk, guided by torchlight - amber hues flickering against the red leaves of the autumn seasons. Beside him, a trusted steed - the lame-legged mule, Julia (unrelated to the Saint), carrying a week's worth of supplies for one. The smell of thistle among the undergrowth; of sea-bream sold by a fisherman by the wayside. These were the smells of his homeland, still recovering from the war, its shining capital rebuilt yet again.

 

An old crossing stood before him, though its picket-sign was newly replaced; the beginning of a highway, where once stood unmarked footpaths. To Ebonwood; it cried to be explored. A journey for another time, for the young man was weary from the year's travels already. He had time, though, to pause at the watering hole; a campsite of misplaced milk farmers, their fields salted years ago by Sedanites, the nobility too embattled to pay foreign drui to heal their ruined lands.

 

Cloaked in a plain brown cape, its shape contorting around the sheath of a far finer blade, his tanned skin and rust-colored hair seemed misplaced among the pale folke of the refugee camp; indeed its combination would be misplaced anywhere in Almaris. He pulled from indigo-dyed pockets the letters he carried with him; of Fealty, and of Independence. Moere, warm and coastal, had never wanted for much - a small lakeside village of five raised into a county for a political game the boy had no part in playing. The land, beautiful but infertile, could host little more; yet he had remained there dutifully all the same, bound by oath to cousins that hated his mother, fishing, drinking, lazing about - for the invaders that had so crippled the rest of that Principality had left his Moere alone, the single young man more than enough to fend off the the odd coyote.

 

Yet now he was released, and his father had called for him. He oft wondered after his siblings - he had left home at the age of five, when they were yet whelps cradled in their shared mother's bosom. A brother and a sister he had never met, a keep he never cared to visit, a city he remembered only by the dizzying array of colors plastered onto its walls and the stench that so very often accompanied large settlements.

 

Perhaps home could wait. His steps led him into the Pale.

[Tigergiri 3073]

In a new yellow dress, the small bob of brown curls, Apollolina waited at the gates of providence looking for her cousin. "what do you mean he's not here, senor? where else could he be? are yu sure hes not here can you check again?"  her voice unsure as she watched the guards shake their head.