Godpath

Chapter 1 of A Journey Most Long

Welcome to Chapter 1 of a short story I've written for Tyrdal's Longest Journey Challenge, Entitled Godpath. If you have not read Chapter 0, you'll find it here: A Faraway Inn in a Faraway City on a Faraway Plane. Otherwise, please enjoy!

"This is a smoke-free establishment, Messyr."
Cholmedrine Elit-Ondra bared his teeth, angling his pipe into an aggressive, upward angle, and turned to the cobbler with a raised eyebrow. "Pardon?"
The cobbler -- a round, short-statured man of perhaps 50 years, skin bronzed by Nira-Nonn's relatively bright Aurora -- didn't seem threatened by the scruffy visitor's display. He leaned forward on one elbow and met Cholm's glowering regard. "The smoke, it dries out the leather. The pipe or you, Messyr."
The pipe's angle lowered, though only slightly. Cholm frowned at the shoes & boots before him, as if a casual inspection could confirm or disconfirm the science behind the cobbler's claims, and quickly gave up. He turned fully to the proprietor, showing respect in the local plane's culture. "I'm here for the finest hiking boots on the continent--" he reached into one of a myriad of jacket pockets, pulled out a coin sack, and jingled it -- "and I'm willing to pay. You turning me away?"
The cobbler blinked slowly, his face a plain mask of consideration, then sighed. "Let's make it quick then." He stood up from his work bench with a light moan, and disappeared behind a curtain. Cholm grinned to himself. Still got it. Retirement didn't dull your edges one bit, you old rogue.
"These," the cobbler announced, returning through the curtain, "will carry you to Havlidis and back, and still be ready for a night of Forbsinian square-dancing." Havlidis was the small plane's concept of the punitive afterlife, Cholm knew, but the rest of the sentence escaped him.
The sight of the boots made Cholm's heart flutter. Sensually curving soles formed the base of richly red-brown coloured highboots, lined to the top with elegant buckles sure to provide adequate ankle support.

The leather was double-lined and double-seamed with quality thread. He allowed his pipe to droop slightly in wonder, before realization hit and he snapped it back into position. His slightly widened eyes shot up at the cobbler, expectant.
"Six hundred sovs."
Cholm grunted out a half-chuckle. "I'm solvent, not royalty. Four hundred."
The cobbler picked up the boots, made to return to the back room. Cholm growled. "Fine, you thief. Four fifty."
The proprietor stopped and turned his head. "Five hundred."
Cholm's eyes danced around the room, pipe doing slight pirouettes of intense thought between clenched teeth. He pointed at a rack behind the counter. "Five hundred and two sets of your finest socks."
"Five hundred and one set. And you put out that monstrosity of a pipe while I fit you."
"Monst...!" One last time, Cholm glared, as wolf-like as he could muster, at his opponent. The cobbler met his eye evenly, and didn't budge. "S... Sold." Damnit. First step on the journey and already I've been bested by a shoemaker. A bad omen? Possible.
"Half up front. We'll get those fresh socks on then get you fitted. The boots themselves will take two days."
"Two days, no more," Cholmedrine growled from the doorway, emptying the stained ivory pipe's ashes and returning the item lovingly to a small, finely-carved box. In truth, he would need at least two days to find the starmaps he needed, but his ego was bruised.

As annoyingly staid as the cobbler was, boots were the easy part, and (loath as he was to admit) less important than the next quarry: starmaps. The standard Empyreal Godpaths -- assuming nothing goes wrong -- would get him from Nira-Nonn to the Silurian Eighth, by way of the Empyrium-controlled Eridún Crux, without difficulty. From the Silurian plane of Glenumbra, however, he would need to traverse the Void "on foot" to reach Waking Materia. And for that he needed starmaps to navigate, lest he wander too long between planes and fade away, becoming one with the nothingness of the Universe's great in-betweens.
He shuddered. Despite being a worshipper of the Rebel Gods skulking among Daybreak forces, it was the Voidwalking that left Cholm most apprehensive. It was a lonely and deeply disorienting experience.

Traveling from place to place wasn't a matter of locomotion on a hard surface, but rather a willful desire to reach a destination; a destination you can only be sure of by keeping your eyes vigilantly on the "stars": the flickering Auroras of nearby planes. At each planar stopover you recover from what's called "Void Sickness", a poorly-understood litany of symptoms from vertigo to insomnia, disturbing dreams to dissociative identity, acrophilia to glossolalia ... Cholm's mind ditufully listed the whole lot.
He spat, in a vain hope of leaving behind the bitter taste on his tongue.

---

---

Cholmedrine yawned, his head lolling about as the farmer's carriage bucked and shuddered over the arid badlands. Even at night the brightness of the Nirran Aurora made it difficult to sleep outdoors, without the benefit of curtains to close.
Two days had passed with no success. Nira-Nonn -- a small agri-plane in the Cymededian Eighth -- didn't seem to have a well-developed enough black market to carry starmaps (and the only markets that carry them are black: Voidwalking was highly illegal in the Empyrium, forcing all but its elitemost agents to take registered Godpaths between planes).
This was a bad thing. It meant he had to navigate the black markets on planes closer to the Crux, and that meant greater risk of Empyreal sting operations. He knew the back alleys a lost ruins of Cymede well enough, but this would be dangerous. That old, familiar feeling began to creep its way through his bloodstream, the stressful but exhiliratingly electric feeling of being a hare among coyotes. It was a feeling he had not expected to feel again. To his distaste, he realized he had begun to miss it. It was getting harder and harder to remember the reasons he decided to retire. Cholmedrine scowled. As slippery a bastard as he was, the Fates still had their grip on him. What a pathetic arrogance, allowing himself to believe otherwise.
He spat out the side of the carriage, not noticing the farmer's disapproving glance, then rummaged beneath his jacket to bring out a wallet of folded papers from his innermost chest pocket. He inspected them for the thousandth time. A litany of lies: a fake name, fake race, fake birthplace, all listed beside an artlessly exact picture of his face, recorded by some stolen piece of Empyreal craft. From the papers he looked up.

The carriage had reached the ridge of the valley, allowing him to see the vague silhouette of the fortified town at the opposite base, and above it the Godpath arch itself, built directly into the cliff wall. The locals called it Nel Irrut, Nirran for "The Puncture". They considered the Godpaths the bloodstream of an ancient sort of Overbeing; the entrances were then analagous to the pinprick of a doctor performing a bloodletting. It was still just a dark semicircle on a rock face only barely lit by the pre-dawn glow: at the ordained time it would "open", swirling and radiating brightly with an ancient magic.
In a Nirran dialect Cholm could barely understand, the farmer declared their parting: ahead were switchbacks that would take the traveler into the valley. Cholm grunted his thanks and, to the farmer's clear approval, placed five sovs in his hand. As was the local custom, he remained facing the farmer, shoulders forward, as the cart departed, only turning after a few heartbeats.
Sitting crosslegged, listening to the cart rumble away, Cholm set to work grinding the dried leaves of a local sweetwillow -- his personal choice -- then packing it into his pipe. He inhaled meditatively, held his breath for a moment, then breathed a gentle gout of flame into the pipe. As dawn intensified, he eyed the fortifications around the Puncture, mapping out plans upon plans in response to an array of colourfully-imagined misfortunes and misexpectations.
Eventually some esoteric cue broke his reverie, and he hauled himself to his feet. In a practiced, almost robotic way, he pressed his hands over his myriad pockets, ensuring the proper contents in the proper places. He finally breathed a great sigh.
"Alright, Daybreak," Cholmedrine Elit-Ondra muttered, not meaning the dawn, "reveal to me your worth."
Adrenaline rising, comfortable in his new new boots, he began to descend.