The Wizard of Elsewhere

2.2 - Landsend

It all changed after that night.

I remembered how clear it had all seemed. How obvious it was that a flint knife could become an Un-forged Blade and how a queen's circlet of too intricately woven silver could become a Band of Weak Metal.

How The Wand of a Witch That Never Was was really just a pale stick and how a roughly fashioned whistle became a Musical Pipe of Wind and Wood.

Now... I looked and my eyes felt dull.

My flint knife was just stone and there were chips in the blade no matter how I looked at it. And that circlet — I gasped in wonder just thinking about it.

But... I remembered seeing More and Something and Other.

I remembered thinking around the actual and giving from myself meaning beyond the mundane.

It just all felt so dreamlike now that we were safe back in Landsend in the light of day—

So I bought the cloth in the market during the day, but then waited until hours after night fall to measure the cuts and stitch the seams....

— Leinan of Landsend (An accounting)

* * *

Leinan was summoned out of her bed by a frantic knocking at the door of her families cottage.

Well, she had no business still being abed anyway, she thought gloomily as she dragged herself to the door, not by the cacophony the birds were making outside and not by the gold light breaking through the cracks of her window besides.

Also because her father had already left — Leinan could tell that by the feeling of the cottage — and so too had her brother Theilan — Leinan could tell that by the unwashed bowl he'd left by the hearth.

Of course.

So she really had no business still being in bed.

But it would have been nice to stay in bed a little bit longer, she thought sullenly.

She hadn't slept more than blinks and when she had, her dreams had been filled with icy cold white, a blood red grin and eyes filled with moonlight and which were not kind.

"Good morning!" She hissed waspishly as she swung open the door and squinted into the suns rays.

Then she lowered her gaze slightly. "Cal." Leinan said shortly and lowered her eyebrows at him.

Calithuan Naviti'dalison — or just Cal to those who knew him — was her junior by about five winters, and was also widely known from one side of Landsend to the other as a trouble maker of township wide proportions.

He was also rather fast, Leinan knew, because of... well, the troublemaking, so he was also often used as a sort of indentured messenger by many who did not realize why this was a bad idea.

Now he stood blowing his cheeks out and panting on the door step and he was also blinking at her with wide eyes.

Leinan looked blearily down at herself and at the shift she was still wearing, then back at Cal, and rolled her own eyes.

Really now, she thought. Like he hasn't seen someone wearing a shift before! What did he expect banging on the door at first — Leinan, did suppose the sun was rather high in the sky at that... but that only made her more waspish. "What, Cal?"