Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 6: Healer's Guild

Toren Daen

I numbly walked the streets of Fiachra, slowly weaving towards the more mercantile parts of the city I had passed the previous day. The implications of my current appearance were being very deliberately ignored.

I really didn't want to consider parallel realities, multiverse theory, doppelgangers, and cosmic flukes. I was a stranger to all of those things, and contemplating my current situation would only drive me down a path of mad futility.

That didn't mean I wasn't unnerved every time I spotted my reflection.

At least I had been able to brush my teeth. Alacrya didn't quite have 21st-century amenities, but they were pretty damn close.

People were up and about now, trailing the streets in steady droves. Mages were remarkably common, easily identified by their open-spine clothing to flaunt their runes and various mana-enhanced artifacts on their bodies. But what really drew my attention was the city of Fiachra itself.

The closest thing I could equate it to would be Venice, with its canals and pole boats carrying people about an entire city of interconnected islands over a lagoon. But Fiachra seemed even more complex. The city was naturally hilly, and the channels were designed to compensate. I saw several tunnels cut into steep slopes, the artificial waterways snaking through and allowing passage. The streets and canals of Fiachra were also far more ordered than in Venice. Instead of building to suit the natural landscape and islands of the Venetian Lagoon, the mages of Fiachra bent the elements to their will, carving and scraping routes into the earth.

The architecture of the buildings was a strange collage of medieval, Victorian, and modern styles, merging together to create something truly unique. There were no market stalls lining the streets: instead, storefronts and cafes were more common. And finally, I had found somewhere that would feed me.

The sign above read 'Halidar's Bakery,' which was a rather bland name for a shop in my opinion. I had passed back into the more well-to-do parts of the city, so the bakery was clean and tidy. The similarities to stores from my previous life were uncanny.

I managed to buy a loaf of bread from the shopkeeper, unsurprisingly named Halidar, for two of the copper marks I had in my pouch, leaving only another two remaining. I assumed the marks were named after the runic spellform rather than the old German currency. Stepping back outside into the sun, I spied a nearby bench, perfect for a relaxed meal.

I hungrily devoured nearly half the loaf of bread before something occurred to me. Now that my hunger had slightly abated and left me more clearheaded, I looked back at the sign for the bakery.

'Halidar's Bakery.' The letters weren't exactly the English alphabet. They were slightly altered in places: an extra long stroke of the brush here, or maybe a wider loop there. In some places, there were gaps where a long, continuous line would be. It wasn't Ye Olde English: that was backward, in a way. Instead, this language felt more like a step to the side of common English script.

Another weird similarity to my previous world. It felt wrong to me that cultures a world apart could resemble each other in such common ways.

I banished the thoughts from my mind, finishing the rest of my bread. Very shortly after seeing my own reflection, I resolved to ignore multiversal mumbo-jumbo. So what if I looked like my past self? So what if everyone in an entirely different world somehow spoke a dialect of familiar English? So what if humans somehow evolved the exact same way on two different planets?

That was absolutely not my problem.

Coming back to the current situation, I considered my options forward. I would need to find a way to make more money. My first thought would be to sell the beast core I had obtained from the whip-lizard-thing. What was it the guard at the gate had said? A barkskin grohd? That was probably what I fought, just from inference. But there was something I believed took precedence.