Tales from the Triverse

Interludes & contemplations

Bruglia (aka the Mesa). Palinor.
3201. Frostfield.

The season was cold, the mesas offering little in the way of protection. The city was built for the baking Brightsun heat, when enclosed courtyards and stone dwellings made perfect sense. Come the depths of Frostfield and the lack of formal heating systems in most homes became uncomfortably apparent. The most better nights didn't last for long, mercifully, but those few weeks felt long each year.

None of that was a problem in the palace, of course. Daryla was quite comfortable with the open fire in the centre of her chamber, or the fires of the central dining hall, with its huge extraction chimneys that were larger than most houses. She felt entirely luxuriant wrapped in her furs while she ate grapes and strawberries imported from Mid-Earth. If there was one thing the Mid-Earthers were good at, it was getting things from one place to another. The notion of the shipping container had not caught on in Palinor: cargo unloaded from the portal station was transferred to a true menagerie of transports. Horse-drawn, camel-borne, wyvern-slung - there was no shortage of imagination when it came to moving things inefficiently.

Daryla's fortunate circumstances were ironically the precise source of her discomfort. She was all too conscious of the plumes of smoke rising from the palace, drifting over the city, mocking its inhabitants as they huddled together for warmth. Such was the privilege of the aristocracy in the city states of Palinor. She was highly educated, even at only eighteen, trained as a skilled micrologist and heir to a family wallet that meant she would never need to work a day in her life.

Comfortable. That was the fate of a princess on Palinor. She would wield increasing power, as it was passed to her, so long as she maintained the family name.

She pulled the furs a little tighter around her as she sat on her bed and turned the page of the morning's newspaper. There were the usual reports of infighting in the other city states, and of how wonderful everything was in Bruglia. Everything on the up, always getting better. Daryla always skipped to the section of the paper that covered foreign news - as in, foreign dimension. What happened in the other realities somehow felt more real than anything on Palinor.

Ah yes, the kengto incident in London. An embarrassing incident, caused by a tiny portal tear opening up in a most inopportune location at the Bruglia museum of zoology. A newborn kengto slithered its way through before anyone had noticed and popped out in London. The portal tears worried Daryla. They suggested that whatever spell had been cast two centuries prior was still active in some form, but with its wielder now long-dead there was no-one at the rudder. It was surprising that the one at the zoo hadn't been spotted and isolated sooner.

There was a photograph of the detective, Lola Styles, alongside some of the Six Blades. She was amusingly diminutive compared to them. Daryla sighed, thinking back to the reception aboard the Pluma, when she'd met Lola. There had been many meetings that evening, of course, given the nature of the event, but Lola's had been the one to fix in her memory. It occurred to Daryla that she'd invited the detective to visit Palinor, but had never followed up formally. Whispering a few words, the fire in the room dimming as a flicker of its energy was drawn towards her, she severed the paper bonds and cut the picture from the surrounding newspaper, floating it in front of her.

It would be fun to have some Mid-Earthers come to stay. She would send out word.

London, Mid-Earth.
1973. February.

The White Horse felt so ordinary that it made Lola feel out of place. The last time she had been in there it had been to locate the Six Blades, and the days since had been one adventure after another. The kengto incident had been terrifying and terrible, with deaths now estimated to be in the forties and property damage unlike anything outside of an actual war, which made Lola feel all the more guilty for mourning its ending.