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Renaer wakes up underneath a tree he doesn’t recognise, with his coat on inside out, one shoe missing, and the worst headache of his life.
A brief inventory of his possessions reveals the following: One water canteen, mostly empty. His other shoe, stabbing into his side where he’d fallen asleep on it. Twelve gold dragons, three silver coins and seven copper pieces. The persistent feeling that this is all somehow someone else’s fault. None of these are particularly helpful for the immediate problem at hand— he has absolutely no idea where he is, and even less of a clue as to why.
He attempts to put his other shoe on, and so discovers the last item in his assortment of deeply confusing belongings. The tiny stump of a black wax candle had been shoved into the toe of his boot, clumsily wrapped in a scrap of paper, which he unfolds with one hand while putting his shoe on with the other.
GO EAST FIND STAR WIN BET, it reads, in absolutely terrible handwriting.
Ah.
That does manage to shake a few memories loose. A crowd he’d joined in the hope that he might enjoy getting out of the house for once. A great deal of free alcohol, a series of incredibly stupid bets and dares. Seeing a star fall through the tavern window. There’s a very obvious conclusion here, and it certainly explains the hangover.
With no other course of action in front of him, Renaer stands up and begins to walk east, deeper into the forest. He vaguely recognises some of the plant life from books on Ansyran natural history, which makes no sense . He was in Ciniath last night, and there’s no way he could have traveled that kind of distance in a couple of hours even on horseback, let alone on foot.
Lost in thought as he tries to puzzle over the exact events of the previous night, he stops noticing the landscape around him. More precisely, he doesn’t notice the scorch marks and knocked-over trees that have started to appear at increasingly frequent intervals— at least until he takes another step, expecting to find solid earth underneath him, and instead finds empty air.
The ground disappears from under his feet, and he falls. He barely even has time to shout before he lands on top of… something. Or, rather, some one. His fall’s been broken instead of his legs— by a wide-eyed, green-skinned man who he’s now lying directly on top of.
“Ow— get the fuck off— “ the stranger says, and shoves him backwards.
“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean— are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.” He makes an ineffectual attempt to dust himself off and folds his arms over his chest, puts his back against the wall of the… wherever they are.
For the first time, Renaer takes a good look at his surroundings. Crater, oddly smooth walls, probably caused by a high-speed impact from… oh. Right.
“You wouldn’t happen to have seen a star anywhere around here?” he says, looking back at the now-very-irritated stranger.
The stranger just looks at him, like he’s not sure if Renaer is joking or not.
“You know— big lump of rock. Fell out of the sky. It’s probably somewhere nearby,” he says. “I’d say it’s pretty hard to—“
“I’ve seen it,” the stranger says.
“...miss— you have? Where?”
“Well, if you want to be exact about it, it was up in the sky. Minding its own business, perfectly fine, until this magical fucking necklace came and knocked it out of the heavens, where it fell to earth and got hit by a very large man who clearly has nothing better to do with his time. ” The pointed look turns into something much more like a glare.
It takes a moment for Renaer to figure out what he’s getting at, mostly because it seems to be challenging the laws of reality itself, but it… does make a surprising amount of sense, all things considered.
“You’re— oh. Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean… I didn’t think you’d be, you know...” He gestures vaguely at the stranger.
“A person?” the stranger says. His tail flicks in a distinctly irritated manner.
“...green,” Renaer finishes awkwardly.
“Right.”
Dead silence. The sound of crickets in the trees nearby, who apparently have no idea that this unfortunate conversation is taking place, or else have an impeccable sense of comedic timing.
“Well, I’ll… I’ll be off, then? I’m certainly not going to use a person to win a bet, and I really do have to find a way back to Ciniath, so—“
“Yep. You do that.”
Renaer turns around. Takes about four or five steps toward the edge of the crater. Stops, and turns around again.
“How are you going to get home?” he asks.
“What?”
“I mean… Do you have money? A way to get back to, you know, up there?” He nods vaguely upward, toward the rapidly lightening dawn sky.
“I’ll figure something out,” the stranger says, and starts doing the glaring thing again.
“You’re not even wearing shoes,” Renaer points out.
The stranger frowns even more and starts to walk toward him, probably to start making a very insistent and pointed case for his own capabilities, which is undercut slightly by the fact that he immediately stumbles and falls over. He hisses in pain, and tries— fails— to hide the fact that his ankle is definitely not a normal, healthy color.
“And you’re injured, right, okay. There is absolutely no way I am leaving you in this crater. Come on.”
Renaer starts to offer his hand to the stranger, and realises he’s still holding the tiny piece of candle he’d found in his shoe. He goes to put it away, and the stranger’s eyebrows shoot halfway up his face.
“Where did you get that,“ he says, and makes an instinctive move to grab it, injuries apparently forgotten.
“This? I… don’t know. It was in my shoe.”
“You just had a transportative candle in your shoe? How— no, I will not even ask how that happened. Can I—“
Renaer hands it over, and the stranger turns it around in his hands, examining it from every possible angle. (He does have very nice hands, which is a thought that Renaer is going to file away and try very hard to not have until later.)
“You said you were from Ciniath? That’d explain how you got here— you can take this back, it’s no good for long-distance travel anymore. It’s got a couple hundred feet left, maybe, good for a short-range blink, but nothing meaningful,” and here he seems to catch himself. He stops talking, passes the thing back over, and twists his hands together in front of him. “Don’t waste what’s left,” he finishes.
Renaer nods. “Right. Well, if I managed to find one of these in Ciniath while I was completely intoxicated and had no idea what was happening, I can probably find another one in a clearer state of mind, and then that could… probably get you back up there? I’m going to guess that’s how it works, which means you need to come back with me— and we could probably use the prize money from that bet to buy one!“ he says. “...and I still don’t know what your name is. I’m Renaer.”
He puts his hand out for a handshake, which may have been a little optimistic. The stranger doesn’t move to return it, just does the irritated-tail-swish thing again, and after a second Renaer drops his hand.
“Vincent,” the stranger says.
“Well,” Renaer says. “Vincent, I think this is going to go very well.”
—
A few hours later, Renaer is seriously reconsidering that prediction. For one thing, Vincent can barely walk, even with the makeshift tree-branch crutch that he’d picked up. For another, they’re both exhausted, flagging and slowing down with every passing minute— Renaer’s head still aches, neither of them have rested since climbing out of the crater, and they haven’t even found the road yet.
“Can- can we stop for a minute,” Vincent says, and Renaer turns around to see that his face has gone from a normal, probably-healthy green to an unpleasant and concerning shade of grey.
“Yes, of course, you should have said something,” Renaer says, trying very hard to keep the note of panic out of his voice. “Sit down, you look like you’re about to pass out- when was the last time you ate something?”
“Stars don’t eat,” Vincent mutters, but he does sit down, curling up against the roots of a nearby tree. Renaer leans against one of the lower branches, takes a deep breath and rests his head against the bark.
They can’t keep going like this, but on the other hand, well… they must be near the road by now, and with that comes the possibility of finding somewhere warm to spend the night. Somewhere with food, and beds, and the chance to clean off all the dust and crater soot. Faced with this thought, and with the extremely injured man next to him, Renaer makes a judgement call.
“You stay here. I’m just going to go a bit further and make sure we’re not completely lost, and then we can keep going. Don’t— don’t go anywhere,” he adds, and Vincent’s apparently perpetual scowl gets even deeper. He says absolutely nothing as Renaer walks away, but Renaer can feel his eyes following him until he passes out of the clearing and into the trees.
—
+ an interlude and/or a dream:
There is a man praying in a roadside church. He has been riding for the better part of a day, but he has taken a brief moment to rest and gather his thoughts; to focus on the task at hand. The stone floor is cool beneath his hands, grounding him, and the dawning of the sun sends patterns of light through the window to play across the altar— a reassuring reminder that the Morning Lord is close at hand.
“Sir, we should keep moving,” says one of the knights that accompanied him. “There is still a great distance to travel, and very little time.”
The man nods, stands up, listens to his armor settling back into place. The beams and arches of the church catch the sound, and it rings through the room like the chime of a bell.
“Do not allow your fears to shake you,” he says.
“Sir?”
“Your first mission is a daunting one— this is a rare event, and one that must be dealt with as swiftly as possible, before this mockery of our Lord’s light can slip from our fingers and vanish into the world. Fear is understandable, but nothing is more important than this task, and I trust that you will be able to see it through.”
The younger knight nods, and Sir Charles flexes his fingers, slips his gauntlets back on.
There is the task. There is the mission. There is the Morning Lord’s light, and the responsibility entrusted to him: to ensure that it is the only light, that no false imitation or unholy creature will ever attempt to outshine it, and he cannot afford to fail.
He takes one last look over his shoulder at the light upon the altar, and walks out into the dawn.