Dak And Stell/The Travelers Trilogies

1.1 Calm Before

Floating in a void, a person reflects on many things. Clusters pass by with no more notice of them than any of the infinite number of twinkling stars. The blind emptiness I floated in was peaceful and silent, but the lack of sound was practically like pressure around me.


"Are you ready?" An agitated voice in my head asked irritatingly.


Where did that sound come from? Something seemed off, this wasn't where I had started. This vast void was not my home.


When I was younger, I was raised in a small village south of Valkira. Humble home to the most extraordinary minds across our exotic planet and envy of every gifted student fervently wishing to follow every mage's greatest dream. To learn to shape magic and I don't mean your run of the mill pulls a frog out of your boot. Real magic.


We practice magic for everything, from our fires to cook and keep warm to help with the fields. Everyone can shape basic magic because the air is so thick with it. You can concentrate your will to make it assist with a minor task. The thing that makes the capital the place to be, is the fact you can learn to do more than merely force it and move it. The professors at the academy instruct the students to gather in the magic to an unusual book. At that point, they record the magic into unique words and phrases that allow almost anything that the mind can think up, but it has to be possible.
You can't will something into being that is not there to begin with. Everything has to come from somewhere and go somewhere.

If you wanted to get rid of a rock in your path, you can't just make it disappear. A person could use magic to hoist it out of the way or shatter it into slighter pieces, even dust. If instead, a person would try to remove the rock from existence, it would just not be so and nothing would happen. You can't do something that defies the laws of equivalency. The combined amount of mass of everything everywhere is always the same, so one can't add to it or take from it, we can only change it or the way others see it.


The most significant rules are those that deal with the soul. When a soul leaves the body, it cannot be returned. Magic can perform many things, even reanimate a once-dead body, but it will not be the soul that inhabited it before. Though it may seem strange with all these limitations, for us, the sky was the limit.


"Dak!" someone yelled in a deep voice from behind me. I recognized that voice and as I turned around I could recognize my big friend loping over through the grass.


"Good morning Stell," I said to the giant now towering over me, my big Horndish friend came and sat down in the grass with me. Even at that point he still remained a head taller than me. Horndish folk are all over 7 feet tall and almost all were exceedingly pleasant people, almost all.


"What are you doing here my friend?" Stell asked in that deep and slow rolling of his people.


"Merely enjoying these last moments before we set off," I said without withdrawing my eyes from the sky.


"It's a vast world out there Stell. We have merely been living in an incredibly minor part of it; we are about to journey off into an unfamiliar place and to discover new things. However, I can not help but think how much I will miss the quiet," I said as my mind wandered elsewhere. I could have never imagined how right I was.
We sat for a while longer looking over the plains as the wind swept the grass like rolling waves. The sky was a crystal blue patched with small pearl-white clouds drifting aimlessly to the south. I looked over to see Stell with his broad nose up sniffing in the air.


"That smells like mother's cooking Dak." He declared it with a faraway look in his eye and saliva forming in the corner of his large gap he called his mouth. I looked at him grinning.


"Mother won't feed you if you have drool hanging off of your face," I said. That made him quickly used the back of his hand to clean his face.


"It does smell excellent! Though, if we can smell it, Gren and Hamak sure can and if we don't get back soon, those two will finish the whole meal on us!"