The Metaphorager.

IT BEGAN WITH A SIMPLE question: “What is the most challenging place you’ve ever visited?”

“The place where I learned not to drink,” Prosatio Silban replied, raising a glass of blue duliac.

“But you are drinking now!” pointed out his interlocutor.

“Yes – but no spirit other than duliac, and never now to excess,” said the beefy cook. “Allow me to relate to you the circumstances, which took place more than a quarter-century ago. I had just left the Sacreanthood, and the Uulian Commonwell entirely, and was looking for the next chapter of my personal story. I was also sorrowful over having recently met – and lost – the love of my life, and so decided to go to a place I had never been but of which I had often heard: many-fabled M’zir, home of inscrutable Intuids, masterful weavers, and abundant yava-brewers…”

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IT WAS A DARK AND stormy night, and Prosatio Silban, thoroughly soaked, could feel a watchful gaze upon him as he parked his galleywagon under a crumbling iron roof.

He shivered, searching for the source of his unease. But nothing stood out amid the unfathomable gloom. Perhaps it’s only my storm-tossed fancy, he thought. I don’t need any unpleasant surprises.

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AND THEN THERE WAS THE time Prosatio Silban sold a meal for a song – literally.

The beefy cook had set up his galleywagon in the small, quiet, and mostly indifferent marketplace at the village of Taverner’s Luck, but had so far that day served only a sparse handful of customers. The weather matched his mood: cold, windy, with low-hung clouds portending rain.

A passing woman paused to study the cook’s painted menu board. Her short black hair, wide eyes, and long, multicolored tunic proclaimed her a minstrel from far-off Aydnzmir, City of Musical Harmony.

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EAST OF THE UULIAN COMMONWELL lies the shaggy, semi-marshy expanse called by Commonwell-folk the Emerald Incessance. Few of those outsiders traverse it without purpose, or dread, or both; its green depths do not long hold even well-known paths, and what they do hold rarely emerges.

Prosatio Silban clucked reassuringly to his buopoth, Onward, as the quaint lumbering dray-beast trundled the cook’s galleywagon over spongy ground beneath an overtopping growth of slender wicket-reed. They were following a narrow trail which so far led nowhere.

The beefy cook jerked the reins twice, and Onward ceased his forward trudge with a rattling hoot. Prosatio Silban climbed down from the driver’s seat, slid through the tall greenery and tapped the buopoth’s flank. Something like a trunk lifted him atop what might have been a shoulder. The reeds were now only waist high, and he strained his eyes against the fading sunlight.

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