Chapter 31 – Two Cultures

Shaelith loved the night in Myzelemaerlazin, when the bioluminescent glow mushrooms dimmed their intensity and bathed the city in a deep, warm, velvety violet. Even Vyrnara Palace didn’t really sleep, but rather slumbered, and in this twilight Shaelith moved silently through the corridor.

Behind her lay Benderast, who had been snoring like clockwork for the past hour on the bed he had made for himself on the floor. At least he stuck to that.

Honor was hanging outside the door, so Shaelith tried to be quiet. The banner hung limply, the embroidered griffin of the Grevue dynasty slightly sagging, and a soft, rhythmic murmur came from the folds of the fabric.

“…formidable… quite formidable…”

Do Tulvian battle standards sleep? Apparently, they doze, at least.

Shaelith crept past. A corner of the fabric twitched.

“Hm? Who… is there?”

“Shhh.”

“…enemy? An assassin…”

“Shhh. Keep sleeping, Honor.”

“…but the guard…”

“It’s all right. Sleep.”

One last, sleepy murmur about unwavering vigilance, then the fabric collapsed again. Shaelith waited three breaths and moved on.

She was naked. The servants she encountered acknowledged her with a polite bow and moved on. One of the younger servants smiled knowingly when she saw which direction Shaelith was heading.

Vyriz lay in a room in the hospital wing, three corridors away. Shaelith opened the door quietly and slipped inside.

He was sleeping on his back, his mouth slightly open, one hand on his chest, the other, with the mushroom finger, next to him on the pillow. He already looked much better than he had a few days ago. Maybe not completely fit yet, but better. The healers had done a solid job, and the regular meals did the rest.

Shaelith slipped under the blanket and gently bit the tip of one of his wonderful jug ears.

Shaeravyn ears were pointed, sensitive, and, as Shaelith knew from twenty years of experience, could be ridiculously ticklish. They were also an erogenous zone. Vyriz flinched, opened his eyes, and made a sound that was half protest and half suppressed laughter.

“You’re… stop it. Shaelith!”

“Good evening.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“What difference does that make? We live underground.”

He turned his head and looked at her. His gaze was warm and familiar, if still a little sleepy. He raised his hand with the mushroom finger and pushed a strand of her hair back. The pale mycelium under his skin shimmered slightly.

“I’m not quite back to full strength yet,” he said.

“I know. I’ll make sure you don’t have to move too much.”

He smiled. It was the first real smile since the fortress, one that reached his eyes and dispelled the shadows behind them for a moment.

“I missed you,” he said quietly.

“Me too,” said Shaelith, sliding further down.

And then there was nothing more to say for a while.

 

~

 

She returned in the early morning, just as it was getting light again. She was three steps from the door when Honor awoke.

The banner rose like a cobra, and the embroidered griffin seemed to open both eyes.

“LADY SHAELITH!”

Oh no.

“WHAT HAPPENED? Your clothes! What scoundrel, what DISHONORABLE MISCREANT dared to rob you of your clothes?!”

“Honor-”

“GUARD! GUARD! AN ASSAULT ON THE VIRTUE OF THE-”

“Honor, be quiet.”

“…NOBLE WIFE OF MY BEARER! Oh, what a dark day, that such shameful deeds should occur in these halls…”

The door opened.

Benderast stood in the doorway, wearing pants and a crumpled shirt, his hair sticking out in all directions, his eyes still half closed. It took him about two seconds to process the image. Shaelith standing in the hallway, naked and with loose hair.

His eyes first opened wide, then narrowed.

“Where have you been?”

Shaelith simply walked past him into the room and reached for the silk robe hanging over the chair next to the door. Not out of shame, but because it was a little cooler than expected.

“With Vyriz.”

Benderast stood still.

“You’re… you’ve…” He swallowed. “We have a, um, a contract, Shaelith.”

“Yes.”

“You’re my concubine.”

“Yes.”

“And you just go over there-”

“Benderast.” She turned to face him, tied her robe, and looked him straight in the eye. “The contract means that you hold my contract and I am your concubine. It does not mean that you own me. Shaeravyn concubine contracts do not include exclusivity unless it is explicitly negotiated.” She paused for a second, letting that sink in. “Ours does not include it.”

“But-”

“I thought we talked about that already. You agreed to the contract without reading the details. Grimbart tried to explain the terms to you, and you didn’t listen to him.”

He clamped his mouth shut so tightly that his jaw muscles bulged.

“Your human way of looking at these things is not mine,” Shaelith said. She swallowed the word “anymore.” Not mine anymore.

Shaelith had actually wanted to avoid this. She realized that the moment, especially given his current bad mood, could easily escalate. She wasn’t sure if he would get angry, withdraw, or perhaps perceive it all through his gaming perspective and conclude that this was some kind of loyalty test event or a jealousy mechanic that he had to pass.

Shaelith waited, ready for all three scenarios, and to her great surprise, he chose none of them.

“Okay, then explain it to me,” he said.

Huh, look at that.

“I think you’ll have remembered enough of Thaelon’s explanations to know that for us Shaeravyn, nudity and physical affection and sex are a little more commonplace than they are for you humans… and, um, probably humans from your world, I assume?” She flinched inwardly at the last words.

Benderast nodded attentively.

“In any case… relationships among the Shaeravyn are not exclusive,” she began, searching for words that would make sense to someone who had grown up in a culture where monogamy was the standard mode. “They are much more fluid, and a relationship usually has a purpose. Emotional closeness, political alliance, physical pleasure, or strategic procreation, things like that. And not every relationship has to fulfill all purposes, and different relationships can fulfill different purposes.”

“So… Vyriz is…” He visibly struggled with the concept. “Your fuck buddy?”

“He’s my closest confidant. My oldest friend. And yes, we have sex, because that’s a natural extension of trust and affection. For us here, at least.” She gestured to encompass the room and the city and the entire culture. “It has no bearing whatsoever on anything between you and me. It’s a completely different category.”

“So Shaeravyn are never jealous?” he asked.

“No. But it’s considered immature and embarrassing. A sign that someone hasn’t mastered basic social mechanisms. Children are jealous.” She shrugged. “Jealous adults are about as embarrassing as an adult throwing a tantrum because their favorite food isn’t being cooked today.”

“So… if I…” Benderast made a vague gesture, obviously intended to appear casual. “If someone… hypothetically speaking… if someone were interested in me…”

There it is.

“…then that wouldn’t… well… bother you?”

Shaelith looked him over. His intention was relatively clear. Part of him surely wanted to understand if the rules were symmetrical. That was okay. But it was obvious that despite everything she just told him, he still hoped the idea of him with someone else would make her jealous.

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to be a jealous concubine. If someone is interested in you and the interest is mutual, that’s your business.”

He seemed to realize he had tricked himself.

“I can introduce you to one of the servants if you like,” Shaelith added. “Nyralith, for example. The tall one who brought us the spore tea yesterday. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t mind having some fun with an exotic human.”

Benderast’s ears turned red.

“That wasn’t… I didn’t mean… it was purely hypothetical-”

“Of course.”

“…not right now…”

“Sure.”

He looked at her, and despite the blush and the awkwardness and the fact that this morning had probably not gone as either of them had planned, he seemed to be slowly realizing that he was in a world he didn’t understand, and that the woman sitting across from him, lived by rules he had never learned. And that perhaps it was worth learning them.

Perhaps with a little patience and mutual respect, this whole concubine situation can become somewhat bearable after all.

 

~

 

Over the next few days, Benderast diligently “translated” the journals for her and “taught” her English in the process. He translated a few sections for her and then explained the English words to Shaelith with great patience.

And Shaelith played her part well. She repeated the words with a carefully measured accent, “struggled” with the grammar of “to be” and the difference between “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”

“The,” said Benderast, articulating exaggeratedly. “Thhhhe. Tongue between your teeth.”

“Ze,” said Shaelith.

“No, thhhhe. Here, look.” He stuck out his tongue.

“Ze.”

“Almost! Again.”

Too bad they don’t give out Oscars here.

Once she lost her concentration and read a whole sentence fluently by accident before catching herself and stumbling in the middle of the next word. But Benderast didn’t notice. One the contrary, he was rather impressed.

“You’re learning incredibly fast,” he said for the third time that morning.

Belyssere, who had brought the spore tea and overheard the whole thing, raised an eyebrow. “Shaelith is an experienced scholar of languages, you know. She speaks numerous languages fluently.”

“Yes, but English is different, it’s from another world after all!”

“If you say so,” Belyssere said politely.

Shaelith saw Benderast pull Grimbart into a corner during dinner that evening, trying not to look too conspicuously at Shaelith, and whisper something to him enthusiastically.

Grimbart also glanced briefly at Shaelith, then gave him a long, sympathetic look, whispered something back, and patted him encouragingly on the shoulder.

After that, Benderast looked a little dejected.

Shaelith felt a pang of guilt. It was only a small pang, which she quickly filed away under “necessary evil,” but it was there. Especially when Benderast was so genuinely enthusiastic about teaching her something, and she saw how much it meant to him to be able to share something from his world with someone else.

But what the journals revealed was much more fascinating than her guilty conscience.

The Warlock had a real name: Dalibor. He had arrived in this world about seventy to eighty years ago and had spent every single one of those years obsessively documenting it in his diaries.

The entries began enthusiastically and became increasingly depressed, driven, and ultimately insane over the years.

His companion, Maenwallon, appeared repeatedly.

Dalibor and Maenwallon had met by chance in a tavern on the border between Tulvia and the Sunveil Desert about twenty years after Dalibor’s arrival in this world, and had recognized each other as isekai heroes by the way they talked about the world.

Maenwallon had been here even longer, perhaps a decade longer than Dalibor, and had already begun to look behind the scenes. Together, they had plunged into what Dalibor called the second level in his journals. Conspiracies, secret orders, mysterious artifacts in forgotten places, clues to something behind the curtain that were always just tangible enough to keep them going, but never concrete enough that any of it actually led anywhere.

For twenty years, they had gone on one quest after another of this kind, and then decided that swords could not solve this mystery, and traveled to Cobalt City, where they enrolled at the Collegium and spent a decade systematically studying magic.

They were successful enough to become respected mages, make real theoretical breakthroughs in magic, collect valuable magical artifacts, and accumulate some insights into the magical nature of this world.

But they never found an answer to why they were actually here and what it was all about. Dalibor had eventually come to suspect that even the scholarly phase was just another circle in which the Story Engine was leading them, a scavenger hunt that would never end because it was never meant to end.

Maenwallon had seen it differently. The rift between them, as Dalibor described it, had not been a single moment, but a slow drifting apart. Dalibor, who wanted to use more radical methods to get to the bottom of the Story Engine, and Maenwallon, who kept believing in the academic path and pursued a different theory.

Until one day Dalibor left the Collegium and never returned. And became the Crimson Warlock.

Some of his diagrams and magical theories went far beyond what Shaelith or Benderast could decipher.

The human way of systematizing magic was mathematical, abstract, and written in a notation that, to Shaelith’s horror, reminded her of differential equations. A pattern that Dalibor had repeatedly noted in various forms and that seemed to puzzle him reminded her of Brownian trees from probability theory.

“I think we need one of those crazy math wizards from the Cobalt Collegium to understand this,” Shaelith said to Benderast one evening as she sat over a diagram that looked like the floor plan of a four-dimensional building. “We can’t figure this out on our own.”

“We need Maenwallon,” Benderast said emphatically. “Whatever he and Dalibor were doing, maybe Maenwallon has made progress in the meantime. We have to go to Cobalt City.”

“Then we’d better talk to the others.”

 

~

 

They gathered the party in Shaelith’s study, which adjoined her chambers, which were now much more accurately their chambers.

They had left Honor outside the door, where he was “standing guard” and lecturing a servant who found the talking banner amusing on the seven virtues of Tulvian knighthood. Shaelith had closed the door.

Grimbart sat with his arms crossed on one of Shaelith’s padded footstools, which seemed tailor-made for his size. Thaelon leaned against the window and looked up at the cave ceiling with a frown. Mirrsoss, on the other hand, sat cross-legged on the floor, her wings wrapped around her, and inspected Shaelith’s mycelial ink set, which she had taken after examining Shaelith’s quarters with enthusiastic curiosity immediately upon entering.

Shaelith summarized what she and Benderast had found in the journals and let Benderast add the details. He reported on the English texts and that there was no doubt that Dalibor also came from another world.

The other three listened attentively and had to process the wealth of information first.

Grimbart spoke first. “So this Dalibor believed that something was controlling the events in our world. Patterns that repeat themselves and heroes who are brought here from other worlds and stuff like that.” He scratched his beard with a finger of his chronosteel hand. “I don’t want to say that sounds crazy-”

“It’s completely insane,” said Thaelon from the window.

“-but,” Grimbart continued undeterred, “I was an archivist. And in the archives of the Crucible, which go back further than the living memories of even the oldest peoples, there are records of certain anomalies. There really are patterns that we have documented but could not explain. I don’t think it’s far-fetched that people from other worlds have actually come into ours on several occasions. I don’t know if I believe the rest of this mad Warlock’s theories,” he looked seriously from Thaelon to Benderast. “But I didn’t just imagine the portal that opened above the Warlock. That much we know.”

“No, definitely not,” said Mirrsoss. Her antennae twitched thoughtfully. “My antennae are much more sensitive than your noses, and through this crack in the air… you know, it smelled like another place. Like rain on stone and water and plants and there was something disgustingly metallic that I’ve never smelled before.”

Exhaust fumes, thought Shaelith. She smelled the diesel exhaust from that old tour boat.

“If that’s true,” Thaelon said after a pause. “If Benderast really comes from another world and all this isn’t-” He made a circular motion with his hand at his head.

“He really is from another world,” Shaelith said with finality.

Benderast looked at her. Then at the rest of the group.

“I-” He stopped, and Shaelith noticed that he was struggling to swallow the words that were obviously on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he took a breath and said, “I can’t force you to come with me.”

Hmm. That’s a new sound.

“Maenwallon at Cobalt Collegium is the only lead I have. Dalibor’s research is incomplete, and I don’t understand much of it, but this Maenwallon may have picked up where he left off. And the portal-” His voice broke briefly. “The portal means there may be a way back home for me.”

Shaelith placed her hand on his shoulder.

“I’m asking for your help,” Benderast said.

Grimbart hummed thoughtfully and stroked his copper beard again. “You know, the Matriarch gave us a tidy sum for our help against the Warlock. More than I would have earned in three years of mercenary work.” He leaned back. “I don’t have anything better to do right now. And I’ve never been that far northwest. Could be interesting.” He nodded briefly. “Besides, you’re my friend. Undoubtedly my craziest friend, but a friend is a friend. So yes, I’ll come with you.”

Thaelon moved away from the window. “I’m more than happy to get away from here. Nothing against your home,” he added in Shaelith’s direction, “but I miss the sky.”

“Understandable,” Shaelith said.

“Besides, I go where Grimbart goes.” He looked at the dwarf, and the two exchanged one of their wordless nods. “And I consider you a friend too, Benderast. If you need my help, I’ll help.” A rare, almost imperceptible smile appeared on the Sylvyn’s lips.

Mirrsoss jumped up, her wings unfurling with excitement, leaving a fine shimmer of her golden dust in the air. “We’re traveling again! New places, new smells, new people! Ha! You helped me out of a very unpleasant situation when we first met. The merchants would almost certainly have torn me to pieces. I’m happy to help you. Besides, I want to see if humans are just as strange at a university as they are in the rest of the world.”

“At least as strange,” said Shaelith.

Benderast looked at the group. Then, to Shaelith’s quiet surprise, he addressed her directly.

“Are you coming too, Shaelith?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I’m your concubine. I have to come wherever you go. You know that.”

“Yes.” He held her gaze somewhat awkwardly. “But I would prefer it if you came willingly. Not because the contract requires it.”

Well, well. When did you learn to actually care for what I want?

“I’ll come,” she said. “I want to help you get home.”

He took a deep breath, ran his hands through his hair and over his face, and rubbed his eyes, which were suspiciously moist.

“Thank you, guys! I don’t know what to say. On Earth,” he said quietly, “I never really had any friends. No one who would have put themselves in danger for me.” He looked at his hands. “Well, maybe one.”

Shaelith said nothing. But something tightened in her chest.

You have no idea, buddy.

“Then we’re in agreement,” said Grimbart, standing up. “It’s cold in Cobalt City, which means I need to prepare good equipment for us.” He patted Benderast on the shoulder with his chronosteel arm. “And you’ll need a banner pole if we’re taking this cloth with us.”

“I’ll start gathering supplies,” said Thaelon.

“Oh yes, I’ll pack too!” said Mirrsoss, whose concept of packing, based on experience, consisted of wrapping shiny objects in her Pilgrim’s Shawl and forgetting everything useful.

At that moment, Belyssere entered the room and nodded amiably to the group before turning to Shaelith and Benderast.

“The Matriarch requests your presence, and you are to bring this banner with you. A letter has arrived from King Gelsevier.”