Jan. 22, 2025: "A tiny traveler stumbles upon a hidden village, nestled deep within the fabric of a giantess’s clothing."
So it was that I packed my bag and left my village, picking my way across the rumpled landscape to chase after the broad horizons that had haunted me since childhood. I suppose no one really tried to stop me, as I’d been talking about this for all my life and my friends and family accepted it as an eventuality. On my journey I had plenty of time to rethink their reactions, or lack thereof. It could be they knew the greater world posed no serious threat to our kind. Perhaps they didn’t view my departure as any kind of loss, maybe even as a blessing.
Well, right back at them. If they weren’t going to hold me back, at least they were no longer around to hold me back. I wrapped my feet in linens and, finding a cockabur by the path to munch, I struck out for whatever the great distances held.
The first mile was uneventful, I have to admit, as were the next six. I had assumed that once I escaped the aura of civilization, I might encounter unruly beasts or mind-bending new laws of physics. Instead, I found several miles of the same material I’d traversed upon, until the only difference between where I was and where I’d started from was that my town was missing. It was in all other respects similar, identical, and another word along those lines.
The weather was clement, at least. The sky was its usual display of blurred colors moving swiftly past, blues and greens and reds and browns racing across our firmament. The sky was only truly still at night, when all was dark and nothing moved. But it wasn’t raining and it didn’t stink, so I counted my blessings and trekked on.
Sparing any ostensible reader the agony of my detailed trajectory, let’s race ahead two days and focus on the new down I encountered. I heard them long before I saw them, the broad alley of my trail rising far above my head before opening into a settlement, bustling and thriving. It could have been a festival, or it could just be how other settlements conducted themselves normally, so far away from any other. I didn’t know! What did I know of the world?
As it turned out, it was a festival. I wandered through the rolling buildings, doors and windows peeking from great beige waves, and into the town proper. The area was filled with entertainers and lined with buttons selling all sorts of wares: smoked meats, shaved ice, shiny bits for children and works of art and household items for the adults. I smelled the booth of soap before I saw it, working past a surprising amount of booths selling handmade brooms. I wasn’t sure how such a community, large as it seemed, could need to stock up on emergency supplies of hand brooms, push brooms, and general sweeping brooms, but there they all were, hawked by glitter-eyed sellers. Later, of course, it was simply a matter of the abundance of a broom’s raw materials and a dearth of imagination as to what to do with it.
I took a deep breath of the clean linen air and marched right up to a food booth. A burly man, Levijn was his name, folded his arms and eyed me as I approached. “It ain’t for free,” he grumbled before I’d even reached his button. Shrugging, I pulled out a pouch and showed him a handful of bobs, melting his demeanor considerably. Over a couple luis skewers I learned that he simply wasn’t familiar with my mode of dress and had made me out to be another freeloader, what they called “lint-balls” in Falthan, the town in which I found myself.
“I’m no lint-ball,” I assured him. “I’m a tailor of the first order, apprenticed under Guild Talea.”
The large man was unfamiliar with this guild and asked what part of town it was from. “No part,” I said, “for I’m a traveler recently come to this city.”
“And from where do you hail?”
This is where things turned south, I’m afraid. No sooner had I pronounced the name Rafelen than he swung a heavy arm at my head. Fortunately, what with him being large and fat and old and me being spry like a sparrow, I simply stepped out of the way of the obvious assault and bounded back a pace. “Your kind’s not welcome in Falthan,” he roared, attracting the attention of many people around us.
I waved my skewer sticks entreatingly. “And what’s wrong with my money? How have I harmed you, in supporting your business?”
“Never mind that,” he said, struggling to heave his button aside. With only a mild curiosity as to what a large, brutish man of mercurial disposition might to do me, once he got his hands on me, I slipped through the gawking crowd like a needle through burlap and disappeared from his reach and sight. I made a mental note not to mention where I was from.
It was my poor judgment that brought my rump to the stool of a fortune teller, then. Madame Truden accepted my bob, as did the luis-griller, and launched into her two-part spiel: first, assuring me of the mystic covenant we have formed, at this dusty, sunlit corner of the commons, and second, tossing her not-so-subtle questions about my life and current status, fodder for the lactation of her predictions.
It was my good luck, or something passable (there, that was the third word, I knew it would come to me), that the ground shifted, as it does in my hometown. We apparently shared the custom of throwing ourselves to the ground, digging our toes and fingers into the weave, and otherwise letting our slack bodies roll and sway with the adjustments until the ground settled once more. Madame Truden’s cards and crystals had been thrown from her button and I helped her gather them, despite her protests. “Your coarse fingers will mar the mystic thread-count of my Tarot,” she croaked, but four hands got the work done quicker than her arthritic two, and soon we were back at it.
“And from what region do you join us,” she said, shuffling her cards defensively.
Having learned my lesson at the food booth, I slumped casually and declared myself a lifelong son of Falthan.
“What neighborhood, I mean.”
Hmm. I sucked on my bottom lip, still tasting of luis-glaze. I looked around the commons, hoping for any indication of what she was asking after. “Well, that would be …” My eyes picked out a hand-lettered sign. “Most recently I’ve resided in Comes.”
She blinked repeatedly, leathern eyelids flapping over ebony marbles. “Oh, you’re from Comes, are you? Member of the police, are you, or just a lifelong reprobate?”
I threw back my head, sniffing. Apparently this innocent gesture, learned in childhood from the adults in my town, was as betraying of my true identity as actually telling the cook the name of my town. Up went Madame Truden, around went her cards, and off went I on another flight.
Well, what kind of adventurer would I be if I couldn’t take a hint? Or four more hints, as the rest of the afternoon unveiled. I did not understand the jokes at the puppet show, which evidently every suckling child appreciated. Apparently the folk of Rafelen clap the wrong way, as I demonstrated at the jongleur stage. I thought the master of the gambling arena was cheating me with my change, but the denominations break down differently in Falthan, which I did not know. And trying to find a prostitute to alleviate my tensions was a very particular nightmare I will not outline here.
At the end of the day, it was a sizable portion of Falthan that rallied to escort me to the city limits, not leaving me to run up the rumple like I’d come but guiding me to a badly assembled thread-bridge spanning a vast linen chasm. All I could do was attempt to cross, praying against hope that the landscape did not shift while I was in transit, as it had during the fortune-telling (which I paid for but never actually received, I’m just now realizing). Luck was on my side for a change, and my bound feet nimbly picked their way across the strands of serge-de-nimes, and I reached the next rumple without hassle. This infuriated the good people of Falthan, apparently, who began to flood the thread-bridge, doubtlessly hoping to mete their own justice that the World spared me.
I noticed the luis-griller in the first three of the light charge, but he was the first to go down as the World sought a more comfortable position in which to arrange herself. The air was filled with the screams of buskers and businessfolk alike, losing their grip in shock, their legs buckling beneath them, as they released the serge-de-nimes strands and tumbled into the yawning abyss of a vast wrinkle. I was sure they’d be fine, it was merely an inconvenience to drop down there, and so it was in clean conscious that I fled.
Muttering my little prayer, “Phug dimmup thu pute-shute.” It’s traditional when fleeing adversity.
The next town was called Vouwen, and while they were not in the midst of a celebration, nor were they half as hostile to a weary traveler of misadventure. Also, they’d never heard of Rafelen and its unstable, spreading borders, so they welcomed me as part of their community. I’ve since made the acquaintance of a lovely young woman, Fayen, and am laboring under her father’s direction, a stitcher named Seef, teaching me basically the opposite of everything I’ve learned. It’s a slow-going process, full of hiccoughs and missteps, but I’m sure it’ll work out soon, one way or the other.