The desert wind blew softly around the corner of Firth and the Queen’s Road. There was a certain stench carried on the breeze that couldn’t be rid of, but the people walking up and down the sidewalks were long since nose-blind to it. They were used to the chaos, the heat, all of the unfortunate side effects of capital city amenities.
That also meant they were used to hearing all manner of frustrations when passing the purple ramshackle tent that had popped up on the sidewalk a couple months ago.
“Hurry up, old wench, I haven’t got all day,” declared the rich man sitting inside today.
The ‘old wench’ in question peeked open an eye to glare at him over the glowing mist sphere. “My Lord, despite your hairline’s best attempts, one cannot rush the future”
“Last I checked I was not paying for insults.” he said as his left hand betrayed him and went to touch his aging brown hair.
“Is that so?” she smiled, pausing to look up at him, summoning a quizzical expression and then suggestively glancing down to the mist sphere as it glowed purple.
“…most interesting.”
He leaned forward conspiratorially. “What? What is it? Have you found it?”, he said in a hushed tone.
Tatiana stared at the man, “god you even look like a fat, greasy fish”, she smiled to herself. These guild merchants could be so superstitious.
“Oh, nothing. Now hush.”
He grumbled as he leaned back, crossing his arms.
She closed her eyes as she thought, “Now, how to set the hook with this one. Best to give him a touch of the old language” and suddenly choked out a gasp, clutching the sphere with both hands and shaking, mist seeping out between her fingers. “Elihu,” she whispered, “je’ khai’em dei baunte bu.” “and the hook is set” she congratulated herself.
“What! What do you see?” Mr. Robert Westerland breathed.
Another gasp escaped her lips, and she wrinkled her brow as if in great focus. “I see…”, “How to swing this one… ah, yes.” ,“I see a brown, fat rat.” She opened her eyes to find the lord’s face contorted as if she had just told them he must eat the rat as well.
“And just what does that mean, O ‘Sister of the Fates’?” he demanded.
“It could signify any number of things- having a spy in your employ, for one thing. Or possibly you could have good luck utilizing seemingly questionable sources of income, much like a rat eating moldy cheese. Perhaps you regularly deal with people lacking good character and possessing a rodent-like face. However, I think it’s most likely a warning that if you don’t purchase the proper oils, within three years you’ll be wearing a rather poorly-made wig resembling a rat perched atop your head.”
He seemed to barely resist growling at her, then tossed his hands up into the air and shoved out of his stool, muttering, “Can’t believe I paid for this blather…” as he the tents flaps away and glared at the faces waiting for their turn.
She smirked as the tent swept closed, fingering the heavy coin purse at her hip. “He’ll be back”, she thought to herself. They always come back, “eventually”.
“We are closed!” she called to the crowd waiting outside her tent.
As Tatiana finished her day and packed up her things she though about the people she’d met today. She would call these people “poor souls” if she felt it was an accurate term, but it was hard to feel sympathy for these merchants who made their living off of enslaving debtors.
Really, it wasn’t a con, what she was doing. These were people looking for entertainment, in the end, and she provided. Someone else had thoroughly conned them already, so really she was just letting them live the fantasy of their choosing.
Despite all that, everything about her was still a lie.
For one thing, her name wasn’t ‘Tatiana’. It was Juno, and for another, ‘she’ wasn’t even a she, but an ‘it’.
Juno liked to think it was beyond the limiting human genders, and it in fact was. It was about as human as these fortunes were true.
So what was it, then? Juno had lived a thousand lives in its time and yet that was something it had never been overly concerned with. Others of its kind were called ‘idols’, but even being limited to a specific type of being never sat right with it. Partly because it didn’t perfectly fit into the category; it had met some of the others before and thought it was above such levels of intelligence, and even besides that there were other factors… At any rate, the few that truly knew it could call Juno what they wanted to, but by nature it didn’t like being limited to anything.
Not appearances (though it did have a base form). Not countries, continents, or entirely different realms.
…Not even time.
Juno went where the winds took it, and the hidden gusts traveled far and changed fast. It was about two months ago they’d finally slowed over one of the dirtiest cities it had ever set eyes on.
As Juno walked through Linesh Aktos it took in the city and how it lazily sprawled itself over great desert sand dunes, its streets winding right and left, up and down like rivulets of water moving over a cluster of rocks. Under a layer of perpetual dust sat sandstone houses and businesses packed so closely together it was hard to imagine the walls being any more than a suggestion. Decorative rugs in doorways and lines of cloth strung up over narrow streets provided the barest hint of shade and color. Not a single centimeter of the city was wasted space-the people were everywhere. Vendors called out in the streets as soldiers on horseback trotted by. Women swept sand off cramped balconies while men worked under the blistering sun on the construction of a new temple and east wing to the already disproportionately spacious palace. Silk Larks flew over all the chaos, adding bits and pieces of song to the chorus of noise.
It had taken Juno just an hour of walking in the slums to fully understand this place. It had seen many a city like this one, but Linesh Aktos possessed a special sort of cruelty.
The “fortune-telling” tent was nothing more than a means to read the energy of the place. “And perhaps for a bit of entertainment.” But after sunset, the tent sat empty and ‘Tatiana’ disappeared while Juno roamed.
On this night, the air was a bit cooler than it had been. The turn of the seasons was near; maybe even a sprinkle of rain. Juno had a sixth sense for these things. But it was still hesitant to refer to this as a nice evening.
The street it presently wandered down, The Queen’s Road, was without question the worst place to be in the entire city, even within the slums. The impoverished had transformed the place into less a street and more a rag market; trading booths and tents poured into the road, causing traffic to swivel and slow in strange places.
It puzzled Juno, that even in a capital city with such riches, the citizens lived in such poor conditions. Nobody was free of dirt. All had been touched by hunger and desperation; it was obvious, looking at their hollow eyes and the bitter set to their dry lips.
Maybe it would have brought some life back to their expressions, seeing Juno in its true form. But it knew that such things were best left unknown when you resembled a pale wisp with deep black pits for eyes; moving through the city in secret required little more than the most basic knowledge of “light-craft”.
Even in hiding, though, Juno did its best to aid individuals.
The fat coin purse jingled at its side as it floated past the nightlife and found an old man slumped against a wall.
“Please,” he muttered, eyes closed. “Please.” He repeated it several times, Juno watching him helplessly pray, holding his hands out.
It sighed, and dropped a few gold coins in the mans hands. They’d be sufficient to buy him food and water for awhile. Juno moved on, slowly gliding over the streets in search of what? Others of its kind, another quest to turn?
Juno didn’t know why it had been led here, but Juno, the “Winds of Ages”, had glided down stranger paths before, and it had served less noble purposes than to offer the broken a small kindness.
It was about ready to start serving a different one when it came across a small crowd gathering around a platform at the edge of the street. There were continuous “Ooh!”s and “Ah!”s coming from the place; Juno wasn’t easily diverted, but something about this felt especially interesting after a long night of floating around… it began to approach the crowd, but just then a ghostly cold breeze blew against its back.
A shiver shot up Juno’s body. It knew this wind well. “Not now, not when something interesting is finally happening!” it grumbled as yet another cold breeze came. No, the hidden gusts wouldn’t be spiriting Juno away yet, not if it could help it.
In spite of a beckoning settling in its gut, Juno came to the edge of the crowd to watch the happenings.
There was a tall, long-limbed man with an immaculate black mustache and a red top hat standing atop the wood platform. He was smoking a fancy wooden pipe.
At first, it seemed that was all it was, but just before Juno became disappointed, the man exhaled an elephant.
What in the name of the Mother? Juno thought as it watched the white, smoke animal slowly dissipate. It immediately returned its gaze to his pipe just as a dragon took the elephant’s place, with edges so clearly defined that it shouldn’t have been possible. Juno had seen a lot of things, but never someone doing this.
Another shiver-inducing gust blew against Juno’s back, and the feeling in its core grew stronger; there wasn’t much time left. It defiantly looked back to the man with the pipe, but on the way something caught its eye:
A little boy, picking pockets in the audience.
Suddenly it all clicked. This was a scam. The smoker was providing a distraction for the boy to rob the clueless onlookers. This, unlike the specialized smoke animals, was something Juno had seen many times before.
Juno pursed its mouth, and looked longingly back at the pipe. It was a true shame; such an interesting talent to possess. If I could ever learn to do that… But wait. An idea came to it.
Perhaps an action was to be taken in the name of justice?
Light-crafting Juno took on the appearance of an old woman in the crowd, Tatiana, just as the boy finished picking the pockets of the man next to her.
“Psst,” she whispered, looking at him. The kid startled at the attention, likely thinking he was caught, but Tatiana quickly added, “I have a deal for you.”
He suspiciously moved closer and whispered, “What is it?”
She subtly nodded to the man with the pipe. “You get me that pipe, I’ll give you this whole coin purse,” she said, patting the heavy sack at her hip. The boy’s eyes instantly widened, and he held out his hand to confirm the deal.
She would have laughed at his overeagerness if that insistently cold gust ceased reminding her how much of a time crunch she was on. She shook his hand and left the crowd to find a secluded spot in the shadows.
The next ten minutes were the longest in the whole two months spent in Linesh Aktos. When she saw the boy searching for her in the crowds, it took all of her strength to not wildly wave him over.
He finally found her a moment later. Tatiana didn’t even bother with words, just held out the coin purse and took the pipe as he gave it to her. The boy looked ecstatic, but she wasn’t going to be there to see it much longer.
As soon as his back turned, she shifted back into her true form. Juno, having returned to itself and in possession of the pipe, finally allowed the beckoning winds to sweep it off the street and swiftly into the sky.
It didn’t look back; it never did. No, as the wind gathered around Juno’s body and merged with its spirit, its last thought was of all the tricks it would learn to do with that pipe.
Juno smiled to itself as it left another realm behind.
