Brisk air on your skin. Familiar calluses forming in unfamiliar boots. The chirping of birds that should remind you of home, but only remind you how different this road is from where you come from.
You try to fight the mundane of this trek by focusing on anything else, but the dense fog makes it impossible to pull any visuals from your surroundings. Despite the slowly increasing temperature telling you that the sun is trying to burn off the layer of grey around you, the visuals of your trek take so long to change that you feel your stomach mark the passage of time before the sky can do it for you. Though the memory of the last meal you shared with Elyon and Jarax will linger in your heart and mind for as long as it takes to return to them, the contents of that meal have failed to linger nearly as long as you hoped.
You try to exist in that memory for as long as you can, and remember the two faces with sad smiles preparing themselves to wave you goodbye. You ground yourself with the lingering touch of Elyon squeezing your hand, and the sound of her voice praying over your journey.
“Tevuna, Goddess of Favor and Fortune, bless the journey that is about to be taken. May your gift of favor bring her safety, and your gift of fortune find her enough gold to actually pay off her bar tab when she returns.”
You smile, reliving the laughter that you three shared at that line. And then, suddenly, a new sensation finds its way to you. ‘Well damn’, you think, ‘either a prayer has been answered, or it took me far less time to start losing my mind than I expected it to!’ Because, despite your best approximation, you should be two full days away from the nearest civilization. And yet, you smell... soup?
With your wits still about you (and your inherent lack of trust in your surroundings) you quickly rush forward, hoping that this tantalizing scent is real, and neither imagination nor a trap. And once you are close enough, an unexpected sight awaits. Happily serving up food to what appears to be another pair of adventurers, you meet the eyes of a very short, stout man with a huge smile, a truly impressive amount of bodily scars, and large, jet black wings.
He looks at you and says “Hello traveler! You look like you could use a good bowl of Rajul’s faaaaamous soup!”
You stand, stunned, for a brief moment, attempting to take in everything in front of you. The large wheels on one side of his countertop seem to indicate that this is some kind of traveling food cart, though you’ve never seen one quite like this. Seeing a large, steaming soup pot being heated by deep red crystals, clearly the source of the smell that brought you here, you realize this man has concocted a way to serve fresh food from a non-permanent location with magic and what seems like sheer spite.. One of his patrons, a tall gentleman with blue skin and frilled ears, looks over his shoulder and says around a bite of food, “Trust me, it’s worth it.”
A rumble in your core tells you that that’s all the confirmation you need for this. As you walk up to the counter, before you can even look for a menu or price sheet, you already have a bowl of impossible smelling broth in front of you. You go to reach for your side, but Rajul waves his hand at you dismissively. You flinch at how casually he reveals the multicolored scars dancing across his skin, ones you know most would keep hidden. “Filling your stomach is a far more urgent matter than filling my coin purse. Please, eat”.
You know better than to push away such a kindness, and with a smile, you happily dig in. From the very first bite, the deep, rich broth warms you to your core, fighting off the cold that had seeped into your bones over the last few hours. After quickly draining half of the bowl, you take a moment to let it sit in your hands, warming them through the cheap gloves that you had to choose not to replace to afford the new boots.
You can’t help but think to yourself how lucky it was to come across this cart before you had to dig into your poor excuses for rations. Luck–that word didn’t used to mean as much to you before you met Elyon. Just a way for people to lift the weight of their circumstance and attempt to give it to something else. But as the sun finally peeks through the fog layer, it certainly feels like luck might actually be on your side for this journey.
It’s almost enough to make you believe in a god no one has seen for 113 years.
*art credit: AdriMoralee