After finally figuring out what that enormous shady organization was, I felt confident walking around outside of Eternal River without being a clone. This way if I died somehow, Fora wouldn’t have a good argument for calling me incompetent because it wouldn’t be my fault.

  Sparks I need to get better at ignoring my needs for justification.

  I walked down the street of Thundercrossing, and found myself glancing to the west, that’s where Kinthek was according to my tracking. He’d been going in a fairly steady loop around the country for almost two years. Ever since he’d left.

  Part of me suddenly wanted to contact him, but… well Fora had already told him to do that when she’d seen him. He probably didn’t want to talk to me, or he’d found better friends or… something. I frowned slightly, deciding that that was a weak spot in my contingencies.

  I continued down the street, finally spotting that tavern my clone had found. Thankfully she hadn’t sent that memory to Fora because I needed to give her plenty of… motivation if I was going to ever get the idiot to actually practice cutting things with dimensionalism.

  I’d found that it wasn’t actually that hard. The only tough part was convincing myself to use it on people, so far I hadn’t been successful in that and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to be. But I knew that one day something would happen, and I would need an ability like that.

  I peered inside the tavern, looking from person to person before eventually slipping in.

  It was just like Nightwind back home. It felt odd to step into a tavern without the familiar tables and staff. It felt odd to still smell the foreign food I’d come to know, to hear strange instruments I’d only seen a few times and only on Arithren.

  I found my muscles stiffening at the contradictions, a sudden well of emotion hitting me out of nowhere. Loss, sorrow. I’d never grieved at the loss of my home. I never grieved for anything, there wasn't time, I had to make it to the future.

  But sometimes things could still hit that piece of me that I’d forgotten how to see. Sometimes the past managed to affect my future.

  I shuddered slightly, continuing forward as the sense of loss continued. I sat down at a table, all of them had at least one occupant, so I chose one at random, muttering a request for the seat and plopping down roughly. I might have taken out my new notebook and started doing something to get my mind to ease, I might have sat there for hours and hardly looked up.

  But I didn’t manage either of those things, as the man across from me spoke, his accent strange for this area, but his voice somehow familiar.

  “Say! It’s my old friend isn’t it? What has it been, a year? Two?”

  I jerked my head up, finally realizing that I was sitting across from a human. A short human with a neatly cropped beard and sparkling eyes as if he was about to start making a joke out of the world. I sputtered for a moment, finally remembering the face that Fora had shown me. “You’re! The guy! The one Fora promised to go drinking with?!”

  He hesitated slightly, examining me, “Ah, I see, you’re a different person entirely. My apologies.” He picked up his mug and sipped at it before slamming it down on the table in a jovial manner, alcohol splashing out at the jolt, “I am called Kenny!”

  I watched him for another moment, startled that he could somehow tell we weren’t the same person. “Weren’t you in Starlight last?” I finally managed to ask, “What brings you down here?”

  Kenny grinned, “Oh, this and that. Mostly too many tears to be healthy. It's refreshing to see a real tavern, friend! I wipe my tears away at its magnificence!”

  I nodded slowly, deciding that Fora was right, this man was an addict of the highest caliber. If he not only remembered but had been crying over a sub-par tavern, then he was a dedicated fellow indeed. “Well, I’m glad you found your tavern.”

  “Do let your friend know that she still owes me a drinking contest.”

  I snorted, “Sparks, Fora does not need to get on alcohol again. It makes her deadful to deal with.”

  Kenny sighed, “and yet another magnificent night is destroyed before it ever begins. It was a shame that I hardly even knew what it might bring.” His eye sparkled slightly, “You never know what might come to light when you go drinking with an immortal.”

  I stiffened, narrowing my eyes at him, “How sparking much did Fora tell you?”

  “Oh, not much, I was terribly sad that day, you see, that tavern was the worst thing I’ve seen in my entire life, I did end up contacting Shoushen, if you know about that. He just gave me another rude note…” Kenny opened his very full money pouch—Fora had led me to believe that Kenny was broke—and took out a note from it, holding it up for me to see.

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  Kenny, stop contacting me. You’re worse than my mother and at least she has a reason to keep lying to my face. Do your damn job and leave me out of it. If you want to blacklist a tavern, contact my son about it, you know that isn’t my job.

  Kenny sighed, pocketing the note, “I still owe him quite a lot of money.”

  “And why can’t you just… pay it?”

  Kenny actually laughed at that, a wide grandfatherly smile spreading across his face before it morphed into a smirk. “Because he also owes me money. Just about the same amount that I owe him I think. Poor gambler…”

  I tilted my head at him, “And the debts don’t… cancel each other out?”

  “Don’t say stupid things like that, friend, I thought you were the smart one.”

  I stared him straight in the face, my crapless gaze boring into his soul. Sparks I remembered Fora showing me a memory of it, but I hadn’t even registered how odd it would seem in person. “Unless you don’t owe something that can be counted, they would cancel each other out. Besides, friends don’t count favors if both of them know it’s always relatively even.”

  Kenny held up the note, raising an eyebrow, “What makes you think me and Shoushen are friends? I do things for him sometimes, but in the end I’m outside of his chain of command. I’m not sure he likes that.”

  “You’re dodging the question.”

  “Ah, so you are the smart one. Alright, I owe something that’s not quantifiable, and he owes me something else that fits the same description. Are you happy with that?”

  I nodded slightly, not quite satisfied, but perfectly ready to ask something more important. “What is up with your soul? It looks like someone was trying to make it look like a dragon and then missed every other step.”

  “Ah, you noticed that.”

  “And?”

  “And that is all. You keep cleverly countering my dodges with wordplay.” he sipped his drink, smacking his lips, muttering under his breath a compliment to the drink, “ah, that’s the perfect buzz there…”

  I huffed slightly, “so you’re not answering.”

  “You have too many questions, if I answer them, you’ll give me another one. It’s personal, I might just have to kill you if you knew!” He grinned stupidly and took another swig. “Besides, it’s not even that uncommon.”

  Come to think of it, Astral also had a tendency to stop answering when my questions got too deep. I suspected that he didn’t want to spend three days dumping information into my brain. I’d just have to figure it out myself then. That was certainly an option. “Right. Awesome.” I trailed off, trying to remember what I’d been about to say earlier. There had been something, right? “You’re not from this world.”

  Kenny motioned for me to continue.

  “But I heard from a very reputable source that open travel between worlds isn’t allowed at the moment.”

  Kenny smiled, “But am I leaking my world into this one? Am I really? I’m just a human, humans are everywhere.”

  I sighed, “I suppose that might be the case, but you’re the first one I’ve seen here.”

  “Of course, I’m currently one of the only humans in this world.”

  “...and do you not see the contradiction there? If you’re one of very few, won’t people start wondering where you came from?”

  Kenny gave me a startled look, his eyes watching me with confusion and then realization, “by the gods, you’re missing a very important piece of information here!”

  “That’s why I’m so confused…”

  “Do you know how bindings work? Like the larborak to their god and the Niortak to theirs?”

  I nodded slowly, “When someone binds themselves to a god they usually start to look like that god. A priest explained it to me. What does that have to do with anything though?”

  Kenny shook his head, baffled, “And yet you’re still missing something important! Think about it friend! What happens when a race isn’t bound to a god?”

  I watched him for a moment, remembering the alanerea, Netun had said that every alanerea had four arms and large antennae, he’d said that their exoskeleton had been more pronounced, that even their feet had been different. It was because of interbreeding with humans, after that, they’d started to look less like alanerea and more like tuvei. At least… it had to be because of that. Was kenny implying it was something else? Had that happened not because of interbreeding but because they’d left their god?

  “They… stop looking like their god?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Kenny took another swig and slammed his cup down on the table, “Wrong! They go back to their natural state!”

  “Which is…”

  “Human.”

  I stared at him for a moment, incredulous, “You made it sound like it would be done after just a few generations. That’s not what’s happening with the tuvei. It’s been seven hundred years and we still look more like the Alanerea than anything. If it takes that long then how are there any humans at all?”

  Kenny scoffed, “The tuvei are a special case.”

  I regarded him, “...why?”

  “Honestly I have no idea.” He pulled out a card, handing it to me, “Anyway, good chat! You best be on your way though, isn’t tomorrow Light day?”

  I sighed, taking the card. I paused though at the words on it. Kenith Ironwood, professional Cheese Maker.

  I stared at it for a moment and then turned it over, confused. It was the same on the other side, “Didn’t this say something else when you gave it to Fora?” I certainly didn’t remember anything about cheese in that conversation.

  Kenny raised an eyebrow, “no, I don’t think so, besides, can’t a man have multiple professions?”

  I glanced at it with my magesight. Nothing. “Alright? I suppose I’ll go to you if I need any cheese made. I’ll… see you sometime?”

  “If you see Shoushen before we meet again, please tell him how good I am at my job!”