[ exotic wares ] Far From Home

It had been months since Faline.

That didn't make it any easier. No, as the memory of the chaos caused in the wake of Ivras' most powerful mage going from camelid to monster crystallized (hah!) into its most essential parts, Ioriel found that those parts were, well. Nonsensical. Terrifying. Panicked.

He certainly couldn't be proud of what he'd done at the Feast of Flowering. Not that there had been much in the way of doing. Mostly what he remembered was the grand frame of the Faline effigy, the smoke pluming into the air, and then the archmage, larger than life and growing even larger. Ioriel had always liked stories of heroes. But he was no Order-trained Mage Protector, and his own magic, as little as he knew about it -

Well. He'd always thought it was fitting, for his chosen career. A sign that he'd picked right. But Ioriel himself was no hero after all.

All he could remember was ruined streets, rubble, and running. Lots of it. He was very visibly a mage, too, so he'd seen people looking to him for help, or, or, something. An expectation.

Well, of course Ioriel hadn't had anything for them.

He couldn't remember precisely where he'd sheltered from the beast, but he'd found his way to the ruins of his academy eventually. There had been no questions there, thankfully, and eventually his friends and traveling party showed up, too.

Unna wanted to stay; Ioriel could tell. But the rest of them were done, and they'd headed east away from Faline at the earliest opportunity, promising to write letters as Unna worked on rebuilding. The university begrudged them nothing. Life goes on, Ioriel's advisor had said. You are working on a thesis, after all. The trauma of Faline, so soon after the most recent one, was too close to the heart for Ioriel's interviews to be impartial.

Ioriel and his friends had stayed in this sleepy coastal town for a few months now. The location, south of Namarast, was about as far from Faline as they could get within Ivras' borders, and though people had heard of monsters, here, there hadn't been anything recent. Any storiels Ioriel heard could comfortably called legend.

Mages were rare here, of course, so Ioriel with his brightly-colored neck stuck out, even when he willed his wings away. He was getting to know the village and its rhythms, though. It was a port town, but no big destination; it saw trade ships sometimes, because even in the countryside people had to get at capital-city luxuries somehow. Most of the boats in its harbor belonged to fishers or divers, and then only really enough to service the town itself.

That was fine by everyone here.

They still had a functional lighthouse, of course. No one had expected the signal of an international ship searching for safe harbor, but the keeper and her son had sent welcome, and of course in the morning everyone knew. News traveled quick here, and the village didn't see foreigners often. Ioriel and his friends, too, had drawn attention when they arrived. This would be the same.

The ship had docked very this morning, and it looked grand and ambitious and alien. Ioriel had no gainful employment to speak of - the perks of being born into wealth - but he was far more interested in the people, himself. So he'd waited the day out, visiting all the important market stalls to squeeze all the gossip he could get. People were friendly enough to him now that he'd been in town for a few months, even as a mage. It probably helped, he thought, that they hadn't witnessed Archmage Hagia's corruption.

As sunset reds began to stretch across the sky, Ioriel made his way to the docks. There was a group gathering there already; day-laborers who had whiled out the long hours in the sun and made it to the docks for the breeze blasting them from the ocean. This would be the most interesting thing they'd see in months, after all. And Ioriel had heard that the ship was full of - well -

He had to see it to believe it, but the crew, finally beginning to disembark, really was full of mages. Strange ones, too: the long necks and sparse fur were enough of a pattern on these newcomers that it seemed obvious that they were no mage-parts. Outlanders. That was far more interesting than a little band of spoiled rich children seeking to complete their thesis. Compared to these people, Ioriel practically blended in.

They had a lot of wares, though, so it wasn't likely Ioriel would have time to speak with them any time soon. And they probably wanted rest at some point: this hadn't been a planned stop for them, obviously, so they'd probably been working through the night. They'd be here a few days before new ships came to take their cargo to the populous parts of Ivras, though, and Ioriel intended to track them down then. Well: whichever of them spoke Ivratian, anyway, which had to be a decent amount of them, seeing as they'd packed so much for the journey here. They must've been prepared.

The stacks of crates were testament to that; it took a few of the outlanders working in tandem to bear each one's weight gracefully. In one case even that wasn't enough: Ioriel could see it slipping, and he winced, ready to look away. The crash would still happen, but he didn't need to witness it.

But then it didn't happen.

Ioriel peeked back at the process, not sure what he expected. Skillful use of telepathy, yes. That large, ephemeral hand - no.

As the crowd began to murmur uncomfortably, Ioriel could feel his heart thumping in his chest. Had they really just done that? In Ivras, of all places? And yet the hand did not fade. It lowered the crate gently to the dock, and then reached for another, as though a dam had burst. The other mages started doing it, too, each in their own way reaching out to help the packages make it safely to shore.

This...Ioriel hadn't ever really imagined it was possible. He had known magic had capacity for beauty. That was all his own did. That was what had constructed Faline's unbelievable towers. But this use for it was something simple and mundane, obvious in its utility for everyone. It was no grand, admirable feat reserved for the kingdom's most lauded, well-trained mages. They were simply moving cargo ashore.

He took a breath, and from his place in the crowd began to stomp his approval, hoping that someone else at least would catch on. His friends, at least, and maybe the people who'd heard his stories since he'd arrived. Surely they, too, could appreciate that magic could serve more than the king, holed up in his palace.

Perhaps not everyone. Not right now. But it could be done.