The Wanderings of Gwen Crossing

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

The Peony Valley was not a pulled-together city of any stripe at the time, it was a wild and verdant land rich with rubyfruit and the titular fluffy flower that grew well under the shared stewardship of different nomad clans.

On this fateful day of the arrival, the clans had gathered and, according to traditions as old as the rocks, intermingled the tents and wagons, steeds and pets, retainers and merchants and musicians. It was a sprawling encampment.

At first, the fairy tales ascribed this coincidence to some grand weave of fate or the rays of the stars, but the dragons had to know what they were doing when they approached humanity for the first time when all the clans of the Valley had gathered.

When the first of them came, it was in a human form, comely and fire-blooded. They approached the eastern edge of an encampment without steed or wagon, seeming to be untouched by the dust of the road or even a crumb from rations.

They introduced themselves as Kagasfindryll, the First Among Heralds and they came bearing peace. The shadow cast by a dragon in their human guise still bears their wings and whiskers, manes and antlers. The people of the Peony Valley were intrigued.

More came throughout the day.

Tyrrenzattraxx with shining eyes and spiny shadow, Warmaker Prime, the Unbidden.

Gallynnidracht with a shining morion and an aura of breezes, shadow splitting into thirteen trumpet-like tails, the Sayer of Winds.

Kecendaruum came, not even bothering to anchor their human feet to the ground, a cloak of stars billowing, called Moonglimmer.

It went on and on.

Niktomoeller with a humble head and a grand headdress of horned shadows at noon.

Maccheraeia as regal in dress as in wingspan in the evening, announced their presence with dazzling illusions.

At nightfall came Lal’Lythannic, the penultimate dragon, the Stranger, hooded and cowled, leaning upon a lantern-staff.

Midnight brought Acevendryxx, the Apex, Prime Among Dragons, Knower of Worlds Beyond.

Some pulled tents from open umbrellas or just thin air. Some had keys that fit quite squarely in the locks of doors that just simply weren’t there before. Some had covered wagons drawn by odd beasts of burden. One dug a deep hole and another simply stepped inside a mirror. All had their doorways back to their lairs, their perches, their treasure hoards.

The leaders of the nomad quorum took audience with the Court of Dragons.

The Apex, Prime Among Dragons, is said to have been high-cheeked with crescents in their eyes. They offered many gifts to the nomads of the Peony Valley, many secrets and insights, wisdom, talismans, spells, and incantations beyond what their most learned and seasoned witches, sorcerers, shamans, or druids.

But there was a price.

Acevendryxx bade the people of the Valley to allow the dragons walk among them in bideal forms, to become members of their community, to partake in and shape a new culture, to intermarry and allow a new kin to be born. For this, all that the dragons had to give would be the Valley’s as well, to the exclusion of all other places in the world.

Not all the nomadic clans agreed to these terms.

Three of the ten clans departed the valley, and seven remained, agreeing to the terms offered.

The Grand Concordant was struck, the foundational covenant that united the seven clans in their welcome of the dragons.

It’s the foundational myth, you know, one of the classic, basic histories you hear when you’re a kid.

Gwen Crossing was one of those kids who heard the stories with excited, eager ears. The rise and boom of the Peony Valley into a city of wonders, how faerie light would float on the winds, the secrets to making eldritch tools, all these and more were told to young Gwen by a traveling tutor.

He was in the care of his Uncles Prentice and Lyle, faces serious and soft, respectively. Little Gwen sat on a wide mat woven from batik grass with the other young of Temper’s Dell and listened with gray eyes rapt.

The Valley could not stand, with its wonders and graces, too tempting by many measures for any wantful leader to deny. The first sieges were fools’ errands; with full-blooded dragons still among them, the people of the Peony Valley could repel anything. It was said a dragon’s shadow shifts first, stealing away the human guise from the body until the forms of rage and light and shadow are left.

But that did not last.

In time, the powers of dragons gave way to humbler forms as they joined humanity. In the Peony Valley, both dragon and human ceased to be and a new breed was known. Each successive generation bore a little less of the draconic transformation of shifting shadows and sudden blasts of scalding magic. And as is the way of things, the curious warlords and hungry empires turned keen eyes and keener weapons upon the Valley without their draconian defenses and sacked the hold of wonders.

“That’s the usual march of history,” Uncle Prentice had a habit of saying, a casual sweep of a statement that dissatisfied Gwen. If history was a series of usual marches, then that was to be a miserable existence indeed.

Prentice loved the stories to a magnitude that can only be measured by a three-tiered degree and a grim sense of duty to the historical canon. He would hear Gwen’s recitations from school and click their tongue in reproach.

“I’ve a mind to find your tutor and lead them in a corrective of their warped retellings,” Prentice would sigh and shake their head, sometimes removing their glasses and rubbing their eyes. Normally a stickler, Prentice would bend the rules and lecture Gwen on the finer details of the truth until the smaller hours of the night.

“You’ve a heart of chaos, like me,” was Uncle Lyle’s line of choice. From tot to teen and beyond, Gwen struggled to keep a schedule and routine. This uncle knew no single job, but many diffuse duties performed around the Dell for pinches of coin or bites of bread. Lyle avoided doing the same thing two days in a row and couldn’t adhere to a deadline of his life depended on it.

Lyle’s words furrowed Gwen to a frown too; did that mean no control at all? Were they always going to live on rapid heartbeats, careening from thing to thing?

When Lyle heard the stories from school he’d smirk into his calloused hand or chuckle into his tankard and lean back in his seat. “It’s like they take the stories and wash their mouths out with soap,” he’d say. A pipe would be lit, bringing smells of charred nuts and oak and Uncle Lyle would beckon Gwen to lean in. “That’s just the start of it, what they’re telling ye. Do you think things happen so cleanly, so to-the-number and on-the-jot? C’mon! It’s a muddy, low affair is history. Muddy and funny and cruel.” And the other “true” education commenced.

The days in Temper’s Dell were idyllic in some memories and mercilessly dull in others; that funny dance of recollection. Life there knew a pace that changed with winds and seasons. In spring, the hills would explode with wild clover and chirping insects. Summer would bring humid mornings and storming afternoons for the gawkers who would come for Thunder Season. Autumn brought flocks of black geese with angry red bills and the deepening blush of amaranth in the farmsteads. Winter wouldn’t always mean snow, but almost always meant a veil of clinging ice descending and sealing over the land.

These were things known and seen in other towns too, in the cities tall and wide, in the hamlets unknown and unsung. It’s not that Temper’s Dell or Uncles Prentice or Lyle or even young Gwen Crossing himself are particularly special; indeed they’re all about the garden-variety, standard-issue level of special ascribed to any given thing. To be clear, you could pick any other place on the map, blurt whatever name might occur to you, and would quite likely find a tale as special or potentially special of an even greater measure than the one you’re reading.

The value here isn’t in finding a story that could never be told anywhere else. To be clear, no setting that begins with the arrival of dragons lacks for special or even just entertaining stories. Why then, will you hear of Gwen’s?

Because it’s the one this narrator has chosen, that’s why.

At age 19, Gwen Crossing stood at a slightly-slight height of five feet even and regarded the world from under an unkempt mop of whitening hair. It was a moderately strange thing for Gwen to have the mane of a young bravo but the coloring of an elder. “Ageless” is the word Prentice gave him and “baxjanxing head-trip” is Lyle’s.

His mouth rests in a slight smile, even when mirth is furthest from his mind. Among his fellow kiddos in the creche where they took instruction, Gwen was a champion of the glass bead game the children played. Even at 19, he still remembers his favorite strategies and forms, how Turtle formation could always beat Hawk, how the off-white beads with just a prick of reddish pink were so rare, Gwen’s pretty sure he never actually saw them; the tales of them so often repeated and they took on the shape of a memory.

As Gwen follows his crechemates through the schoolyard, he sees the younger ones grouped in tight clusters on woven mats or patches of unplanted earth, setting up their beads or collecting their haul to quiet cheers. There was a time in the past when it felt like Gwen might be growing up too fast, when he would see these kids and wish to be in their place, staying put in the simple, easy familiar rather than step over into the unknown.

No, quite to the contrary, Gwen Crossing was ready for his Wandering.

That’s the day we begin with Gwen, the end of his generation’s time in the Temper’s Dell crèche and the beginning of their Wandering: their search for purpose and place in the greater world. People find their craft or trade or calling in their Wandering.

To Gwen, this was the beginning of his great rollicking adventure, the open door to all kinds of grand victories and daring escapes. The histories are littered with the lore of lurid wanderings, of death-defying wanderings, of wanderings like traveling festivals or feasts, of wanderings like mummer’s faires, of wanderings like religious movements and rebellions and the changing of history.

Eybiri of Downhope built the first Journeyer’s Lodges, safe places to rest the head when out adventuring, while on their Wandering. The Marvelous Muscad conceived their famous Cinema Arcand on their wandering. Cyril the Dragonslayer, the finest wizard known to the world, perfected their deadly arts on their wandering.

In an amphitheater, where echoes of past classes and dramatizations still hover in memory, Gwen stands with his twenty crèchemates, slightly withered and shy under the attention of the entire town seated in the tiered benches around them. There’s a performance from the dance interpretation team re-enacting the Arrival of Dragons story that Gwen loves so dearly.

“When Peony Valley fell, sacked by all around, there was a fear that the light of the dragons had been snuffed, their gifts lost and ravaged,” intones the headmaster, wide hat wobbling slightly in the breeze and half-moon spectacles perched on their nose. “But that was not to be. Hope remained with the Peonie folk that escaped through wiles, luck, and mercy, who bundled what small things they could and ran to the furthest corners and reaches they could find. Their settlements would grow and the dragon’s legacy would live on. Temper’s Dell was one such settlement, founded by blessed Pochabell Temper. Now in this lesser age, we offer our brightest new kin to the great community, so that they may find their best place within it, whether it be here or somewhere out there.”

The kids shift uncomfortably on their feet on the hard stone. Coda and Miro sway slightly from the kitchen sherry they nicked and offered around earlier. Prett and Kriss are wearing their finest caftans. Delfeather, the closest of Gwen’s friends, moved to O De Long with their family the week before, leaving our boy to float in a sort of social purgatory. His heart is big and giving, but Gwen’s found he keeps fewer, but more treasured friends, at least that’s how Uncle Prentice puts it. Gwen scans the crowd and finds his uncles by the brief red flare of Lyle’s pipe. Prentice holds a book-shaped gift in his prim hands.

A portrait is taken with a flashbulb camera of sleek make that leaves nothing of the white vapor given off by current models. This was the item Temper brought with them to their Dell from Peony Valley: the camera with a single, tireless flashbulb that has never been replaced that snaps the crispest images without a wisp of vapor and to top it all off, the pictures render in color. The finest camera made and sold in the known world is only able to produce a lukewarm sepia.

“Ye’ll find all sortsa quirky little wonders everywhere you go,” Uncle Lyle mutters later over celebratory spring-pea and ham pie at the Grouse & Garland. A frothy ale sloshes around in a stein. “Not everything’s that useful, ya know? Sometimes it’s like, just a fun little fidget of a toy of a thing.”

“Tosh, any remnant of that blessed time is worth noting and celebrating,” Uncle Prentice scolds, swirling a cordial glass of clear liquor they take nominal sips of. “Although that does remind me,” he says, taking the book-shaped gift from their bag. The gift is wrapped in grainy paper pressed with tightly coiled ferns and sprays of honeyblossom, Gwen recognizes both from their yard.

He looks into Prentice’s hard blue eyes and sees tears welling there. Gwen squeeze’s Uncle Prentice’s hand.

“Carefully!” Prentice warns as Gwen lays hands to part the paper. Their graceful hands swoop in to neatly fold and stash.

The gift is, as predicted, a book. Gwen feels a certain smugness come over him. What was it this time? A guide to the best bistros in all the free cities? Birdwatching guide for all altitudes? An illustrated history of the rare violet broccoli?

“Bound that thing with leather scraps from Cash-Only Lewis down the way, in exchange for clearing out his stables,” Lyle says around a mouthful of ham pie. He swallows, relishing the relish he so liberally heaped on his forkful. “Yer Uncle Pren here milled and pressed that paper himself and we made the thing together.”

Gwen is stunned, speechless.

“Th-thank you,” he stammers out eventually. “I really appreciate the work, truly. I’ve always wanted an… um, a blank book of pretty paper.”

“It’s a dairy, ye big lunk!” Lyle guffaws.

“It’s a diary,” Prentice corrects, rolling their eyes. “More specifically, it’s meant to be a travel diary. You’re going to see so many other places, other wonders, both blessed and lesser. It’s too much to keep in your head. From the great cacophony of experiences, you’re meant to find your path in life. Do yourself the favor of recording your thoughts and feelings as you go, it’ll make knowing your way forward a little easier.”

“I dunno,” Gwen huffs a bit. He’s always struggled to keep it up when assigned to keep journals by tutors. That elusive routine evades him yet.

“Don’t rule it out, kit,” Lyle says. “I did it.”

“Ya, when peonies bloom again in the Valley,” Gwen says, unctuous smirk returning.

“It’s true,” Prentice says crisply, sparing a treasured smile. “My love, bless him and his spinning compass of heart, even he kept a diary.”

“Like an old marm who needs to eat up the time between meals o’porridge and buttered bread, scribbling away,” Uncle Lyle chuckles. “I did it my way, though.”

“You certainly did. There wasn’t a straight line to be found. You’d write in circles and then draw on top of it. How did you even read it?,” Uncle Prentice says, enjoying one of his usual bits. Years with someone brings a certain patter.

“It’s just how I needed it to be! I found my way and so will our Gwen,” Uncle Lyle grumbles back. “That’s why I wouldn't let ye put lines on yer special paper. Not fer you to decide!”

“And that reminds me,” Prentice says, reaching back inside their bag. They produce a steel straightedge, marked in standard measurements. “In case you need to draw the lines yourself.” And then they produce a small bundle tied in brown twine. “Three pens and ten pencils.”

“Did you make those too?” Gwen asks with a grin. He will almost never turn down an opportunity to tease. Only through draconian-tier force of will could he resist.

“Nay, but I certainly bartered for it like a champion, I’ll tell ye what. So I had this set of pewter spoons, ugly things with wailing faces and Ole Scrivener Jeb has a dozen trained chimps—“

“Making the saga short,” Prentice cuts in, “we assembled these for you so you can fill your journal. Use the pens to draw straight lines and write on them with the pencils.”

“Oh fer cryin’—he’s not a lil tot, you nutbar!” Lyle groans. “He knows how to use them, we didn’t raise some berk.”

“When you have spare time, you should write over your penciled entries with pen,” Prentice continues.

“If he wants,” Lyle says.

“You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll lose the pencil marks to time,” Prentice insists. “It’s the only sensible thing to do!”

If you want Lyle mouths with a wink. Gwen giggles. He’ll always hold onto this moment, though he doesn’t know it now. Now he’s busy feeling like he’s falling through walls of bracing cold water, each new pivot and detail of this brave new life settling with delayed waves of excited, panicked potential.

If you want, so much possibility, so much danger, a mixed bag of experiences between each and every word of the phrase. Gwen’s heart raced, the options stacked like bricks around him: go east by cart or west by air or south on foot but there were bikes and there were always the mountains where the lost tribes were said to lurk and there was also the sea with its promise of plunderable wrecks and cultures beyond any frame of reference he’s ever known, and so on…

“Something to remember, kit: whatever road you go down, you can always double back and try another if it doesn’t work out,” Uncle Lyle says gently. “Heard that one on my Wanderin’ from a pal I still see now and again these days. Amile is her name. She’s too smart for this world, ye know? Good Ole Amile’s holed up in Mount Ptarr with a rotating cast of four-legged pets. Like a witch and her familiars, I like to say.” He cackles. “Don’t breathe a word of that witch line if you meet her,” comes shortly after.

“That leads to an important question,” Prentice pipes back in. “Have you given any thought of where you want to go? Or what you’re thinking of doing?”

Gwen sighs, wishing ardently in that moment that time could pause, time to marshal the exponential potential stretching before him. He wishes with every young-gramps hair on his head for time to rest while he wonders what a scatterbrained, author-of-a-million-false-starts with a demi-deft hand and closest friend on the other side of the world could do out there.

And time paused, right there upon Gwen’s wish. He didn’t notice, of course. Too busy sorting through his myriad cares.

Gwen and Delfeather, they had plans. Or rather, they had parts of plans that they’d push together into mounds and arrangements until the buzz of the exciting future taking shape would overtake them and they’d lose the thread. They’d go off to the Mirelands in search of rarest scrap or buried treasure in the abandoned mines and rocky crags. Or they’d save their coins and pay for a ride on an aeroballoon, one bound for Mangrove City or maybe one touring the canopies of Inishvarii jungles. Even in their most mundane fantasies, they were staring out train windows together on the fastest track in any direction, finding their fortunes and rising and falling, together.

Now making this decision alone, Gwen feels a new kind of vulnerability. With Delfeather, he could rely on someone else’s confidence, lean on their taste. Without them, Gwen would have to come to these decisions on his own, and take whatever came as answer alone.

Gwen’s stolen, unnoticed moment ends and time resumes, our boy feeling the full bore of the expectation coloring his uncles’ faces.

“Someone’s taking counsel with their faeries,” Uncle Lyle says with a smirk.

Uncle Prentice’s eyebrows raise, prompting an answer.

“I’m not sure just yet what I’ll do,” Gwen begins, finding their silver tongue, “but you know I can talk myself out of a tight spot if I find myself in one. I’m thinking I can be of use and service, fetching things and solving problems, and making friends and allies on the different ways out to O De Long and see if I can’t find Delfeather.”

“They’ll be on their own Wanderin’ won’t they?” Lyle’s wondering wanders into Gwen’s musing. “Best ye try to get young Del a letter first, yeah? See where they got off to.”

“Maybe,” Gwen nods slowly, reluctantly, “but the distance to O De Long is pretty great, I figure it’ll give me plenty of time to learn something about myself or find a new skill and still have a misadventure or two. Even if Delfeather has left that city entirely, I’ll pick up their trail and follow it back out. I’ve never seen a place as big as O De Long before anyway, so it’s a destination in and of itself.”

“So your answer to the question, what will you do is you’ll find out?” Prentice’s question is weighted, their intonations carrying doubt.

“Be happy to hear it, Uncle,” Gwen says, smiling with a tired sort of triumph. “That’s what the heroes from the histories are always doing: striking out from home without much of a plan or destination and find their fortunes and themselves in the many adventures they have along the way. I’m painfully average at most things, no slouch with the menial, but no expert either. What I see when I ask myself what I want to do are the stories you’ve told me, the books you put in my hands. I’ll follow that love of them and see where it leads me, see where the stories can take me.”

“But is that enough? Following the stories and floating through the world; where can that lead you?” are Prentice’s quick questions.

“Who knows, I’m not sure, but I know the stories as I love you, and love Uncle Lyle,” Gwen replies. “You followed a similar love, didn’t you? It led you to Temper’s Dell, to Uncle Lyle, to… to me.”

“He’s got ya there, Pren,” Lyle chuckles, nudging Prentice with a kindly elbow. “Don’t ye worry so much about him. Ya know half those kiddos headin’ out into the world go without an idea where they’re heading or change their mind about their life’s goal seven times before lunch. Gwen’ll get along great; he’ll take his lumps and tumbles like the rest of ‘em and come out the other end finer than fine.”

Prentice’s finely-featured face resists a grimace. “I suppose you have a point,” he allows. “Heed my words though: don’t die a hero’s death. That’s the ‘glorious finale’ to more than half those tales. That is not for you, some death to be glorified in a story. Do you hear me? If it means you’re a secondary or tertiary character, then so be it.”

“You might have a point,” Gwen says, smiling ruefully. “Although being the main character has always come easily to me.” He shrugs. “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do my best to keep my nose clean and out of trouble. Trouble could just as well find me.” The stories have plenty of these: rocs diving out of the frigid sky to lift whole carriages from the road, bandits taking you for all your knapsack’s worth, dust devils and miniature hurricanes and angry lungfish, there is no end to the litany of things that can upset a life into its sudden end.

The real goodbyes happen later in the evening, as the setting suns burrow themselves into the darkening horizon. Outside their red-roofed cottage, amongst the swaying batik grass and bold bursts of clover, Gwen is embraced by his uncles. Their smells of rich pipesmoke and ink intermingle into the scent of their home. Even as Gwen swings his back up onto his rickety old cart that Delfeather helped him build and as he urges his pack-elk Kodu foreward, he inhales that homescent as much as he can, from his clothes, the back of his hands, his old-man hair. Gwen remembers the tale of a nameless wandered who’s lover they left behind and how the lover trapped their essence in a locket.

It wasn’t the safest way, leaving with your whole life’s future resting on your actions in the falling dusk of night, but it’s how Gwen always saw it happening in his head. He was never one to rise well in the early morning, when many of his crechemates would be waking to make the start of their trek. Nothing more dramatic, more apt and in proportion to his brilliant potential, than leaving with a heavy, orange moon cresting overhead.

Gwen looked up, absentmindedly driving Kodu forward with half-gestures, taking in every star pinpricking through the ceiling of night. In Temper’s Dell, you could see the stars as clearly as any could wish. Big metropoli like O De Long boast electric lights, but Gwen heard that when everyone has their lights blazing on every corner and in every window, the stars become shy. Best to take them in now while he still can.

That is how Timberlarke found Gwen, great gray eyes locked skyward. Silly thing to do, leaving at night and sillier still to come without a weapon. The elk pulling the cart can fetch a bit of coin for their rare cuts of meat and who knows what kind of coin the fool may have. Timberlarke grips their bow and makes a signal to the two goons laying in wait with them in the brush.

As one, three loping figures dart from the brush and make straight for Gwen’s cart, whooping great alarming calls.