Talasin-Zo had just sat down in a near empty tavern, crouched deeply in the mud at the fifth crossroads, in Old Zamora Town. The taproom was dim and dank, as was most of Old Zamora these days, yet the voice that addressed him over the bar was anything but, and worse, it was a voice he recognised.
‘What brings you hither, Wanderer?’
Mellifluous and molten, armed with meaning beyond its words and prone to speak words beyond meaning, it did not belong to this waning crossroads den when there were better ones across crossroads one to four, though with the owner of this voice that was usually the point. Talasin-Zo had never encountered this voice in any expected place, but amid watery beer and sticky floors was a new one.
A self-proclaimed ‘second-rate’ sorcerer, the owner of fell voice was, as far as Talasin-Zo knew, neither second-rate nor a licensed barkeep. He was a dangerous pretty, a roguish merry, and he was Talasin-Zo’s easy reminder of the frozen tundra where they’d first met.
He was sleet and snow, skinned palms and a world door; the boy from the frozen wastes.
‘Same as always, Sorcerer,’ he grunted with the barest hint of warmth slipping in-between his gruffness.
A world door was not to be played with, only to be used by Talasin-Zo’s father on clan business as purveyor of Tithion’s Southern Provinces, land that belonged to Talasin-Zo’s kin, the Wild Blue, the Zo-Yonder. The Deathless. Talasin-Zo was only half their kin and half a mortal too. Only clan leaders were allowed to summon the gateways that drew on the gifts of the Under-Tree, outside of the city sanctioned way stations. It was not a door to be used to transport the youngest of three brothers to Seeth.
‘Drinking.’
A cover, a lie, but it was not Talasin-Zo who’d started this.
Since the wastes, he’d heard that same familiar voice, seen the boy in the man who’d claimed to be a dancer though he was then a priest, serving the vigil of the forgotten desert god, half-dressed in the Massimo heat. The same man who’d passed him in Pendragon, on the avenues near Provocation Way, sun disks dribbling from his pockets, a high-collared coat and prince’s circlet adoring his swift-moving frame. Talasin-Zo had considered it an unamusing joke that they had passed on a street called Temptation and he was even less impressed to see him now, a dirty rag tossed over the shoulder of barkeep’s blacks.
Without a word, a tankard slid to a stop in front of him, the pale silver-gold of ale turned black inside it. The Sorcerer flipped the rag over his arm and shifted his hips like he had moved, though Talasin-Zo had not seen him reach for the tankard, let alone pour the drink.
Grabbing the tankard, he gulped down a few swallows, grateful for the curl of fire after the cold rain outside before the taste of cinnamon hits him and his tongue starts burning, followed by the smoke of ash and the slow glide of honey. The aromatics rushed up his nose, causing his eyes to water. With little dignity, he turned away and spat the vile mead onto the floor, ignoring the peel of laughter rising from the other side of the now-empty bar. No wonder no one wanted to drink at the fifth crossroads with Loke Maradon behind the bar.
Talasin-Zo had never intended to trail the sorcerer all across the Overlands, yet his feet continued to find him. Loke did not make it easier on him; much of life was a game to Loke and he seemed to rather like playing it with Talasin-Zo.
The sorcerer wiped down a bar top that would never be clean with an almost imperceptible hum crossing his lips and switched Talasin-Zo’s drink back to the ale it was meant to be with a small, sly wink. He slung the rag out of sight when he was done.
‘Well performed, Sorcerer.’
Loke’s mouth tilted in fun. ‘Well missed, Wanderer.’
Before Talasin-Zo’s unimpressed gaze, Loke’s clothes shifted from his barkeep’s blacks into something violet and Shenon-styled; high-collared like his days in Pendragon and unfairly tight-waisted. It made his skin glow. Or, Talasin-Zo supposed darkly, he was using his abilities to boost the radiance himself because he was an under-damned flaunt as well as a sorcerer.
Talasin-Zo watched Loke sweep out from behind the bar, pulsing like a falling star elsewhere of the establishment, the rain giving a wide berth to his form, and disappear. The door swung shut on Talasin-Zo and his room-temperature ale. He raised the pint to his lips unhurriedly, alone in the tavern. And when he was done, he poured himself another.
*
The ground beneath his slowly numbing fingers was cold; more than cold, the strange crunch of freezing snow stuck under his nails. Pushing himself up on his knees, which were wet and starting to numb as well, he left two stark prints of red in the blinding white. Snowflakes stuck to his lashes, a gift from the grey skies. It did not snow in Tithion and the winter skies were deep rose and orange, the stars violet and blue in the dark. Here, he could not see them beyond the shifting grey. Sleet was steadily falling away on the breath of the wind. What shapes he could see were the brown stubs of hardy shrubs, poking out of the white, and hard sheets of obsidian rock squatting on the ground.
Talasin-Zo wiped blood-warm slickened palms on his new favourite coat of carnelian dusk and stood up, just in time to see the blue light of the world door shut behind him.
‘Oi, bastards!’ He yelled in the vain hope that the dissipating tendrils of blue would carry the message back to his brothers.
‘That’s rather rude.’
Talasin-Zo whipped around, scattering snow and ice fractals, the landscape glittering like Tithion’s diamond mines even in the low greyness. He peered in the direction the voice had come from, shading his eyes, but could see nothing beyond the dotted shrubs. Then, slowly, as if the snow was receding from him the longer he looked into it, one of the shrubs moved.
Uncurling from its crouch over a dug-out hole in the ground, the barren earth splaying through, Talasin-Zo’s supposed shrub started to resemble more of the boy it actually was. He looked cold too, though not as cold as Talasin-Zo, with ice sticking to his skin and the sudden thinness of his dusk-woven shirt.
The boy’s layered fur tunic unfolded around his knees as he calmly stood, his leggings were grey and tan animal skins, insulated against the cold, but as Talasin-Zo stumbled closer, he saw the boy’s feet were bare and tinged with mauve, as were the ends of his fingers and the corners of his mouth.
A shudder wracked through Talasin-Zo and he shoved his hands under his arms to conserve some warmth. A half-mortal of his standing could last longer out in these conditions than a full one, exactly how long Talasin-Zo did not know and could not guess.
The other boy seemed to be inspecting him through his tangled mane of hair and then proceeded to promptly ignore him, turning his concentration on the barren burrow without another word. Talasin-Zo huffed angrily, hearing the crackle of ice in his breath.
‘Hey…hey, you!’
The boy’s eyes flicked over with a glaring request that he stop. Talasin-Zo crunched and crashed over the ground towards him, shivering but determined, teeth chattering and well aware that unlike many Wild Blues, he was not Deathless.
The boy continued to ignore him. Splaying his hands over the sad, little hole, biting his lavender-tinged lips and glaring into the black dirt.
‘Oi,’ Talasin-Zo called, this one lost under the wind. He tried immediately again, ‘Oi! Where is this? I need to find the closest way station and someone to open the world door!’
The boy shot a look that was only half as menacing as the one he’d been giving the hole and shushed him gently. Talasin-Zo stomped over and grabbed the boy, swinging him till they were face to face.
‘Hey!’ The boy cried.
Any further confrontation was stemmed by the sound of a dull popping and then a thump as two round black stoned pushed themselves up through the ground.
‘Ah,’ the boy exclaimed excitedly and reached down to pick them up, ‘It worked.’
He raised a brow as he came back with the stones to Talasin-Zo’s hand still clasped around him. Talasin-Zo coloured and let go. The boy smirked a little and turned over the stone from his hand into Talasin-Zo’s, taking a moment to raise it to his lips and blow first. It dropped rough and hardly stone-like at all and hot, burning, blazing hot into his hands. He hissed and juggled it, until under the other boy’s attentive gaze, it became comfortably warm.
The boy’s smirk pulled upwards into a proper smile.
‘What is this?’ Talasin-Zo asked carefully, eyeing the not-stone, while holding it close to bask in the small heat.
The boy’s grin widened as he raised his stone to his mouth and bit into it. He chewed messily and gestured to Talasin-Zo’s own dark not-stone that was apparently some sort of strange vegetable.
‘Lunch,’ the boy announced, taking another hungry bite.
Talasin-Zo took a cautious bite of his, savouring the pocket of warmth, though the black ground-grown thing still tasted strongly of dirt. Talasin-Zo tried and failed to hide a grimace.
‘Stuff like this doesn’t usually grow in the wastes, so you have to give it a little extra kick,’ the boy said, sparks kicking up between his fingers and dancing among the falling snow.
‘The wastes,’ Talasin-Zo burst out, barely registering what the other boy was doing, ‘Those bastards sent me to Seeth! How in the under-world am I supposed to get back?’
Mauve-tinged fingers, the nails crusted with black dirt, closed around his. The sparks danced in shades of colour and kissed heat back into his skin far more effectively than the quickly cooling black stone.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ the boy said.
The dull, cold air between them grew steadily more bearable, until Talasin-Zo could barely feel it and the boy didn’t look so frost-edged. Talasin-Zo’s eyes traced the movements of the little magic fizzles up the boy’s wrist to his elbow, from shoulder to his pointed chin; from there to his sharp cheekbones and then to the two-coloured irises of clouded frost-metal and swirling blush. Combined with his notable skin and dark, tangled hair, Talasin-Zo was coming to the conclusion that this boy might be a Rime Born. One of the people of the ice with natural inclinations towards conjuring and older, unlearned magics. The Seethian climes reportedly saw many, though few wandered beyond its borders and even less attended the athenaeum for training. Talasin-Zo vaguely wished he could look half as interesting.
‘You’re lucky. If whoever sent you here knew what they were doing, you should’ve ended up at the way station in the Shatter Halls, up in the Teeth,’ the boy sorcerer gave him a slow glide of a once-over, ‘You’d likely die out here otherwise. But I can get you home.’
‘You can?’ Talasin-Zo looked down at the sparkling magic, a natural scepticism creeping into his voice. The boy, after all, could only be a young sorcerer and an untrained one at that. Only the Leaders and Masters in Tithion were able to conjure the good will of the Under-Tree; surely even a Rime Born had to offer something significant for such a powerful gift.
The boy looked surprised and a little miffed at the doubt in Talasin-Zo.
‘Of course,’ he declared, as if accepting a gauntlet that Talasin-Zo hadn’t known he was throwing down. The boy paced away, taking their little bubble of warmth with him. The wind smacked into Talasin-Zo, making his head spin with the rush of frost in its touch.
The boy crouched down and slapped a hand into the drifts of snow, leaving a glowing blue handprint behind. The blue energy shifted and cracked outwards into a thousand tiny root forms, drawing itself into the fissured sphere of an illegal world door.
The boy stepped back in a satisfied way, the upturn of his mouth a twinkling ‘Ta-da!’ for Talasin-Zo to swallow. He gestured grandly, with a bit of wobble, towards the door.
‘Go home, Wanderer. May we meet before we miss.’
Talasin-Zo nodded, understanding the sentiment if not entirely the words, and offered his arm to clasp the way he had seen his father do. The boy looked at it strangely.
‘You take it,’ Talasin-Zo explained, ‘it means farewell.’
The boy’s chin bobbed slowly and then he grabbed the proffered arm and gave it a little squeeze. He released Talasin-Zo quickly and brought a hand to his face. His palm rested on Talasin-Zo’s cheek, fingers grazing his ear.
‘Farewell.’
Talasin-Zo echoed the movement. ‘Thank you, Sorcerer.’
Talasin-Zo stepped into the sphere, the blue light cutting through the snowfield and drifting into the air like a pillar of smoke.
‘Tithion Yonder,’ Talasin-Zo commanded and before the white closed in and the light shattered, he heard the boy call out once again, ‘You owe me lunch.’
And Talasin-Zo was gone.
*
In a bar in Old Zamora Town, Talasin-Zo cursed the careless words of sorcerers and the damned Under-Tree that took them seriously.
*
Talasin-Zo considered that time in the bathhouse a personal offense.
*
The steam was wispy and swept low over the ground, curling around Talasin-Zo’s feet. The air was made humid by the array of large pools surrounded by open-air colonnades and high, half-domed rooves, splashed with shimmering frescos. In the night, the bathhouse was lantern lit and Talasin-Zo had the sinking feeling he was in trouble, though, so far, the establishment was blessedly empty.
His sorcerer was chest-deep in under-lit spring waters. He was alone, splashed with shine from fire glass sconces and ghost lights. As soon as his feet had turned towards the large sign hanging over the entrance to the huge bathhouse, Talasin-Zo had stepped cautiously, mind carefully blank.
Loke’s two-coloured eyes opened slowly and he stood, water running off the smoothness of his skin, everything given a dull glimmer by its reflection. He cocked a sleek, suggestive brow at Talasin-Zo and opened his mouth to remark or invite, nothing that might issue from it anything that Talasin-Zo was prepared to hear.
Talasin-zo cursed at him in his mind, stomach roiling, blushing two shades darker than the hue that stared out from Loke’s provoking gaze, turned around and left before the sorcerer could utter a word.
He stomped away from the bathhouse, body lit like a beacon inside and out, muttering curses entwined with Loke’s name. He’d repay his debt another day.
*
The circumstances of Talasin-Zo’s particular curse were specific and careless. Talasin-Zo had to share a meal with sorcerer Loke Maradon at the time in which the sun in its ascent to properly be called lunchtime or within a culturally accepted notion of it, such as the midnight noon traditions in Peribow. Such requirements meant getting Loke to stay still long enough for Talasin-Zo fulfil the stupid sorcerer’s frivolous conditions and evidently throwing a sandwich at Loke’s back as he prepared to under-travel or in his face as he emerged, stunned from a Pendragon artisanal shop did not count.
Sorcerers often dealt in bargains and trades, a premise that determined the rules of their game. What would Talasin-Zo give up for Loke Maradon to not have to ask that question? Years, certainly. Yet if Talasin-Zo had managed to swallow his feelings at the bathhouse and miraculously grow a spine, he had a notion that Loke might have abandoned those rules just long enough for him to finally catch up. Though, in exchange for a front row seat to Talasin-Zo nebulous internals. For him to ask the question would be to let the sorcerer abscond with and entitle certain of Talasin-Zo’s vital organs, for Loke to know it too, and for Loke to know it and choose to walk away.
Half Wild Blue maybe, but Talasin-Zo was still a man and common sense said a naked sorcerer was not to be trifled with. Or swung to.
Loke’s unruly spirit, Talasin-Zo did not possess.
‘Will you have lunch with me?’
‘Do you want some lunch?’
‘Come to lunch?’
‘Lunch?’
‘Lunch.’
Talasin-Zo shuddered as the words rang back at him through the empty tavern, the ability to ever get them past his lips anywhere near Loke a possibility only many more stronger drinks than ale would incur. That loophole Talasin-zo had yet grown weary enough to exploit. His cheeks still grew warm to spot the wayward sorcerer and the winds grew slightly chilly when he was gone.
Not weary enough but weary of it still, because while Talasin-Zo owed Loke Maradon lunch, Loke owed Talasin-Zo thirty years and one heart. A steep price for any vain, frost-edged, miss-stepped, two-tone eyed, unwise, bastard sorcerer.
Talasin-Zo put a foot down from his stool and felt the earth thump beneath his heel. The beat threaded up through his calf into his knee, echoing the rhythms of the body. Loke had over-landed somewhere out there, the steady pulsing Talasin-Zo’s lure to find him.
He downed a final watery ale, pulled out his illuminated compass, stood and wandered out of town. The steady thump dimmed in the opposite direction to which his feet laid their tread. The Wild Blue, fierce and determined, were in Talasin-Zo’s blood and he walked against his curse until the only pulse that rattled his body was his own. The winds grew colder and snow began to fall.
All the while, he whispered to the Under-Tree. Because, while Talasin-Zo owed Loke Maradon lunch, Loke owed Talasin-Zo thirty years and one heart. On that, Talasin-Zo was finally ready to collect.
*
The athenaeum at the Tithion Academy of Sorcery was distinctly lively and distracting for a place where students supposedly studied, though from the laughter and chatter that constantly bubbled up from the lower courtyard, along with the pops and crackles of impromptu demonstrations, little study ever seemed to be attempted by anyone other than Talasin-Zo.
Over the past year, his mortal blood had reached its waning and time bothered Talasin-Zo less and less, as if he were a full Deathless and felt its touch not at all. Days he spent, without consequence, pursuing the studies appropriate and useful to his father’s third son. The languages and customs of the Overlands were his most recent interest. The few moments trickling away from him, while he stared unblinking into the depths of several light-imbued marbled pillars of varying colours rather than at the simple redwood of his usual table, were small against his new qualities.
Stacks of books surrounded him on all sides, many lying open, their original pages of focus lost to the breeze that ruffled through the large hall from the open skylight spiralling through the stone ceiling. Talasin-Zo’s nose twitched as the breeze blew salted earth and herbaceous wafts from the racks of under growth that spilled down shelving gaps in the sections that might need them as ingredients. The plants had a tendency to shiver with the constant humming aftermath of sorcery. The one across from Talasin-Zo’s desk started wibbling dangerously. With a cry and an applause, an explosion of colour and several powder fireworks shot into the air from below.
The explosion dissipated, streaks of shimmering colour raining down on the students below. Talasin-Zo’s reading balcony was high among the geometric book stacks for obvious good reason, seclusion and safety from the rest of the rabble.
Across the way, there came a laugh, louder than the usual sounds Talasin-Zo had learned to ignore. It was high among the balconies like him. There was teeth in it and the taste of dirt.
Talasin-Zo breathed in the scorching scent of frost. His perusal of the light fixtures ended abruptly as it rang across the space, eyes roaming along its waves to reach the balcony opposite and the spill of inky hair above an apprentice’s peacock smoke cloak. Frost-metal and blush flicked over, and the laugh snapped shut behind a vaguely mauve-edged smile.
The apprentice rose from his table and its company. Hasty steps drummed from the stacks behind Talasin-Zo’s little nook and, in a shower of fuzzy sparks, the boy from the frozen wastes tripped once again into Talasin-zo’s world. He stopped himself with his hands smacking down onto Talasin-Zo’s table and collapsed in the only other chair with a breathless, ‘Ta-da!’
Talasin-Zo’s stomach rolled and dropped into his intestines.
The sorcerer flicked his hair out of his face and quickly shooed away the lingering flurries of energy, sitting back in his chair with a critical eye on Talasin-Zo. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
Ridiculous, Talasin-Zo thought, a little uncharitably.
‘Well performed, Sorcerer,’ he threw out with reluctance.
The smile grew in warmth and cheekiness.
‘Well missed, Wanderer.’
Talasin-Zo looked down at his stack of books and shut them all. A dull pop drifted past his ear with a finishing fizzle and when he looked up the sorcerer was at his elbow, chin propped in his hands, on top of another forgotten stack of books, grinning.
Talasin-Zo met the intensity of the sorcerer’s stare and felt his internals spill into a syrupy mess beneath his feet. The floor began to thump like a heartbeat.
‘Impressive, Sorcerer,’ he replied choked, to the slow arch of the sorcerer’s jet brows climbing high and interrogative on his forehead.
The brows started to wiggle.
Talasin-Zo’s stomach rumbled, the strange creep of forgotten remembrance scuttling across the backs of his shoulders. The black alchemy clocks chimed noon, drawing Talasin-Zo’s attention.
‘Um…uh?’ Talasin-Zo started to ask distractedly, turning to the sorcerer, the question and the memory behind it only half-formed, but he was already gone. His name was struck from the rosters when the black alchemy clocks struck dawn. Expelled.
Talasin-Zo laughed though, as he ran with the sun, following the pulsing earth from Tithion, his blood singing in his veins with the beginning thrill of something entirely unexpected.
*
Light flashed in the sky behind Talasin-Zo. He heard cursing and continued trudging, shivering and determined, towards the far-off mountains and heavy drifts of snow. Footfalls waded at his back, sloshing snow in every direction with every difficult step.
‘What are you doing?’ Loke’s voice called out, breathless, the pulsing earth jolting into rhythm beneath them.
‘Walking,’ Talasin-Zo called back, gritting his teeth as a blast of more than slightly chilly wind swept through the valley.
‘This is dumb,’ Loke shouted, cresting incredulous over the wind, ‘And you owe me lunch.’
Talasin-Zo felt a small smile play at his mouth despite the miserable surroundings and let it stay, only because the sorcerer had yet to catch him and therefore couldn’t see it. His tone was far too amused as he said, ‘Nope, not anymore. Not doing that.’
Deciding that if he was giving up he ought to do so completely, he turned away from the fluttering slurries to watch Loke struggle towards him and didn’t bother to school his face. Loke was looking less and less the pretty merry and more the boy, with his natural colour blooming in the cold, though his Shenon styles left him severely underdressed for the weather.
‘I’ve never known how to ask anyhow.’
‘But,’ the usually eloquent Loke sputtered, a burst of sprinting catching him up to Talasin-Zo so unexpectedly they nearly knocked over into the white puffed landscape. Crackles of embers around his ankles betrayed an instinctive use of magic. ‘But you owe me. It’s binding.’
‘If you think that’s what made me trail the Overlands after your shadow, this isn’t dumb, you are.’
Loke’s expression pinched, his eyes boring unseeingly into the elsewhere behind Talasin-Zo, recognition of the slight insult making its way into the open tilt of his mouth. Talasin-Zo chuckled at his confusion before taking pity on him.
‘Yes, Loke, I am bound to owe you lunch for the rest of my natural life unless I miraculously fulfil the conditions of your ‘curse.’ Except, there are no consequences for an accidental curse.’
Loke’s mouth lost its offended crease, opened in halted speech and then closed again. He hummed at Talasin-Zo, mouth pursing, before he turned and walked a couple of paces away. He marched back, hands on hips. He opened his mouth again to speak but again nothing came out. He sighed at last, and his shoulder dropped.
Talasin-Zo tried, though not very hard, to not find it endearing.
‘No,’ Loke said, flat out disbelieving. He shook his head, hair whipping out and across his face. ‘No. Because that means for thirty years…and we both thought – and you could’ve just…’ Loke trailed off, gesturing elegantly, if urgently, to the air and drifting fractals between them. Thoughts coalesced and spun, frantically ricocheting off each other in the sorcerer’s growing, wide-eyed horror.
‘Did you come here to kill me?’
Another man might have, though Loke did not deserve it. A man with less time than Talasin-Zo would have washed the curse away in Loke’s blood long ago or actually tried to walk away to discover nothing would happen if he did.
Talasin-Zo laughed at Loke instead.
The cold cracked down his throat and stuck icy needled into his lungs so he had to stop, but the big grin remained firmly on his face.
Loke transferred quickly from apologetic and vaguely afraid to biting and irritated, his face falling into miffed sulking. He poked Talasin-Zo in the chest and shifted further into the wanderer’s space, ‘If you’re not going to revenge yourself upon me, can we get on with it? There’s a masque parade in Shenon calling our names.’
Talasin-Zo swallowed his mirth obediently and curbed the wideness of his smile, something fateful brewing in his eyes.
‘I want to go to the Edge of the North,’ he said and waited for the reaction.
Loke’s immediate indignation sent up an unexpected shower of thunder through the mountains.
‘What? No! Why?’
Talasin-Zo borrowed an expression he’d learnt from Loke, a provoking combination of near-smirk and a carefully raised brow. Loke’s eyes narrowed.
‘Why? To see if you’ll follow me.’
Loke’s eyes slitted further. ‘I won’t,’ he promised darkly.
Talasin-Zo looked down into the sorcerer’s upturned face. His blood thumped wildly in his veins along with the Under-Tree’s pulsing call to Loke. He daringly rested a hand on the stretch of Loke’s waist, the sorcerer’s exhale misting out before him. A dull glitter surfaced in Loke’s two-coloured eyes and understanding pulled at the corners of his mouth.
‘You followed me here,’ Talasin-Zo rumbled.
Loke’s chin rose, unable to resists any bargain, negotiation or debate. ‘I was briefly concerned that you might be dead.’
‘A delightful sentiment,’ Talasin-zo quipped back.
‘You owe me.’
Talasin-Zo traced the fall of Loke’s hair behind his ear, trying not to linger on the glow that lit the sorcerer’s eyes at the contact, ‘Loke, you are the most interesting thing about the Overlands, but it is impossible to buy you lunch and it just isn’t going to happen.’
Loke gave a considering touch to Talasin-Zo’s fingers at his waist, tracing a ways up his arms, brows drawn together. Even in his less than seasonable clothing, he was still doing better than Talasin-Zo, whose blood would be slush if Loke weren’t standing so close.
‘Fine,’ Loke eventually agreed, expression transforming from pensive to clear and wicked, ‘Let’s do dinner instead.’
Grinning victoriously, Talasin-Zo pulled away from their little pocket of warmth, eyes twinkling, and began to trudge away.
‘Wait!’ Loke shouted out, lodged firmly in place. He pointed a menacing finger at Talasin-Zo and then back the way they had come. ‘I am not going to the Edge of the North.’
Talasin-Zo stopped, shrugged and wheeled around. He sludged back towards Loke, catching the sorcerer’s hand in a lightning fast swish as he travelled past.
Loke left a glowing print in the snow and a world door cracked into existence in front of them. He graced Talasin-Zo with a toothy grin.
‘You’re an appalling negotiator.’
Talasin-Zo shrugged, ‘But dinner I can do.’
Loke laughed and squeezed their linked hands, pulling Talasin-Zo towards the rift of light, ‘Shenon, then?’
Talasin-Zo squeezed the sorcerer back. ‘My shout,’ he offered with a chuckled and then they were gone. The door closed behind them and their footprints filled with snow.
*
Elsewhere in the Overlands, Loke Maradon, Sorcerer, peered through the eyes of a shifting and smoky blue jay mask and said to the tall man he was dancing with, one partner faring far better than the other, ‘You still owe me.’
The man in the silver-wrought hellion mask grinned. ‘Find me at star set. I’m thinking at least two courses, with some light curse breaking on the side.’
He twirled his partner off and legged it into the crush, the sound of the sorcerer’s delighted sniggers aimed at his back.