He opened his eyes, expecting to see himself besides a low fire in the wilderness, stoked and fed by Kiran who happened to hunt a beast a few hours prior to his awakening. Months had such a scene been revealed to him in his mornings.
But this wasn't such a morning.
'No—no chains…' He thought as his hands brushed his neck.
But then he squinted his eyes with a deep frown. He awoke to a bright beam of sunlight shining through a window — a window from a wall of stone. Atop a padded bed… surrounded by furnishings in a style he wasn't familiar with.
'A chamber within a fortress,' He immediately thought. His experience traversing the imitations within the hollow Great Mountain overtook his thoughts. Although it wasn't exact, he was slowly pulling together information.
Lifting his arm, he found that it wasn't as weak as when he last awoke, the color and flesh regaining its vigor. Perhaps a little too strong. But his eyes traced to his arm's end.
His nails had grown dirtied and long. Splotches of aged blood and a sickly black replaced much of the surface.
Then more of his awareness returned, chasing away the remnants of his sleep as he slowly reached around his body to touch his hair…
His hair that once barely touched the nape of his neck went from tangling down to his lower back to now just below his shoulder blades.
Once when he was travelling with Kiran.
Then his immensely long furled hair flung out of his helm before he died under the rotting tree.
And now, as he awoke from the dream. Like as though he blinked and he was in a third life of some kind. A dream too… vivid. As though he walked against the riverbank's edge for a lifetime. Thirsty. Weary. Pained. Each impossibly long second.
He wanted to scream, but he also wanted to live. That's right, he wanted to live.
'Longing…'
Something… something happened to him as they ran from the Branch of the Fettered Bournewood.
But he just couldn't recall what occurred all that time ago — no, he didn't know how long ago it was. His sense of time was shrouded and made muddled. Did Kiran join him along with the other fettered ones?
He then tried to remember the brief time he was awake, as he was pried from the felled beast. Yet he couldn't recall something so noticeable. Kiran wasn't present in the battle, nor was he enchained.
'How many… how many years have passed as I dreamt?' Osias frowned, touching his hair.
A deep pain, deeper than mere blades and needles could reach, cut him. A feeling so intense that made everything he endured in his life feel as though it was a lie.
He was alone.
Suddenly, he heard steps falling atop a creaking wood. But then his heart fell and a cold shiver ran down his spine. The steps that approach him from something he can't see.
His hands instinctively curled into a tight fist below the sheets. White as they tensed.
Closer and closer, and he swallowed down his instincts, loosening his fist.
'What am I doing?' The fact was that he was being nursed to recover by someone. Probably of someone under the Tailed Brothers if he was right judging the style of the fortress.
But what appeared before him made him scowl as he thought:
'Is it really so bad?'
When she came before him, he tried to raise a hand for her to notice.
A… maid of sorts, and from what he could sense, she was an Ordinary. But then she yelped dropping a change of bandages, an amount too much for just himself — if they deemed he needed some, he didn't notice any open or bandaged wounds on himself.
"Who are you?" He asked calmly, trying to not frighten the young maid anymore. He didn't want anything unsettling to occur the moment he awoke.
"Y-You're awake! Please wait, I'll call someone to help." She fleetingly said, already storming out of the entrance to his room and running down the hall.
Osias could barely make the last of her words…
The wood might be rough-hewn planks of some kind, he thought as quick steps approached to where he lay.
'If they wanted to kill me, they'd do so already. And if they're all barrelling here to kill me for waking up… I'm dead anyways.'
Mere seconds passed, and four people greeted him.
'I might die though.' Osias thought, silently stifling a morbid laugh.
Excluding the maid who he had already seen, the rest were Path Finders — far from weak too.
Two Third Ordeal Path Finders along with a Second Ordeal.
Osias didn't say a word and just inspected the group, as they did to him.
"You look younger than when we found you." The man in the center said.
Osias looked at him. He looked to be of middle age, but his true age was likely far from it. He was an older man, tall and well-built despite most of his body being covered in thick layers of garments and armor. Though, not as large as the familiar frames Osias was used to seeing. He had silvery grey hair, a short beard, and a long refined face twisted so somberly.
"Young… I take that you're the one who allowed me to recover in this fortress?" Osias said, directing his eyes to match the man in the center.
"Aye. Aeron Grimm. Clan head of Clan Grimm, a lesser vassal clan under the Tailed Brothers. I ordered for your care." Aeron said with a speck of annoyance and a forced tone that Osias found confusing. But Aeron added:
"You don't need to treat me as such, simply clan head is fine."
Osias noticed the small glance the man named Aeron gave to the other Third Ordeal to his right.
"Where am I, clan head?" Osias asked curtly. Perhaps it was perverse, but he did not take waking up in an unfamiliar place so well.
Aeron was right about to answer before the other Third Ordeal interrupted:
"Depends where you're from. Although Aeron has found you chained by that beast alongside some of ours, you're a stranger that shouldn't exist. Tell us what you know."
"Elder-" Aeron said.
"If what Aeron told me is true, then you've been wandering within the Longing Mist attached to the beast for years, how your mind is not shattered as an Ordinary is baffling. " The elder continued.
"Longing Mist… is that the mist's name?" Osias asked.
"That's what we on the far reaches of the western domain of the Tailed Brothers call it," Aeron responded.
"Why is it called so?" Osias added.
"Starting from there are we?" Aeron paused briefly, once again looking at the elder by his side. The elder nodded, and Aeron brought a hand to his beard as he continued:
"What more is there to say? The Mist of Longing is the mist of the Outer Valleys that surrounds the entire western front of the Tailed Brother's lands. As for how far west beyond our expeditions the mist lies… we don't know. Most importantly, if one delves into the mist for too long, one becomes more susceptible to their desires. Their urges. And that comes with months. Longer than that, they'll slowly turn into mindless animals — nothing to them aside from feeding their desires."
Osias listened intently. But an appalling suspicion that if Kiran has remained in the mist unknowing of this for however long he was enchained by the Fettered Bournewood for…
Searching for him as his mind slowly deteriorates into that of an animal.
'That… that can't be true. Kiran must've known of that and took the risk to head inland.'
"...So that leads to how you're sane. No, more than that, you were the furthest from sane when I freed you of your chains." Aeron said.
Osias shook his head slowly and put on a faint smile.
"That? I… I think I needed time. To know if I was in another dream or not."
"Ho?"
"I don't know how long I was chained for. I don't know how long I've been dreaming, how I came about the mist, how I survived." Osias with a sullen face.
But he lied, just at the end. He wasn't going to let being saved from a vassal clan under the Tailed Brothers besmirch his will to survive. If anything it has only gotten stronger after feeling as though he betrayed it.
They were enemies. Heedless if they personally added to the ranks that surrounded the Red Sky.
Then Osias added in a low voice:
"What… what year is it, which moon is it?"
"Thousand and eighty-nine. The next Carmine period is about a month from now."
"I-I see."
Hearing that, Osias tried his absolute best not to raise his eyebrows in alarm.
'The… The Red Sky has fallen seven years ago!' He screamed in his head.
Osias was at his twentieth moon! Twenty-first in a month!
"It seems that I'm almost at my twenty-first moon," Osias said, almost in a whisper. He wore a grim smile upon the realization.
Now it is time for the four to be slightly surprised. Especially the maid who took care of him for the recent weeks. She found the unconscious man's hands were soft as old leather. In the first days of his arrival, the smell of sickness and death she was accustomed to from her time caring for the other clansmen clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly odor…
Aeron raised an eyebrow, but it wasn't too far-fetched. As the man regained his color and vigor, he did look youthful.
But everything else said otherwise. He was tall and lithe from sickness. Tattoos covered him from head to toe — an odd practice, but he has seen them many times over his years from mountain brigands to cults.
"Say, what is your name?" Aeron asked.
"Osias. I… I don't know of which land I hail from."
Then the Grand Elder said:
"You look a mountain brigand, boy. Perhaps a zealot. Henrik, do you know of any vassals under the Tailed Brothers who bear such marks on their skin?"
Just as the Grand Elder finished, the man who stood in the rear stepped forth and inspected Osias, pulling away the sheets that covered his torso.
The man was unlike the Grand Elder, instead donning a heavy, but odd mixed set of thick metal armor forged out of lusterless, bleak steel that covered almost the entire body. It was black in color, trimmed with a thick coat of some creature. As he lifted Osias's arm, inspecting the underside, he finally said something:
"Say, Osias, tell me what you know. All you can recall of your past."
Osias paused. He didn't know what to say in such a situation, so he decided on a loose truth.
"I know of my name — the names of my brother, mother, and father too. I was raised atop a rugged and high mountain with others. They were the same ones who etched these onto me, a practice of our people." He said, brushing against the tattoos that line his arm.
"How'd your people get by? Live?" Henrik added.
"They fought. They fought fiercely in raids. Returning the spoils to our mountain, taking what others had for our own."
Suddenly as he said that, an almost palpable somber tension arose.
"An honest one you are, boy. I'll ask you this… have you killed another before?"
Osias met the eyes of the one who asked, the Grand Elder, before responding:
"No. It was too early for me to join the raiding parties."
The Grand Elder then had an amused expression as he brought a pale hand to his long beard pensively.
"It was a needless question. I forgot your age, apologies. Henrik, this is the spelling of a small mountain tribe. The uncouth and boorish kind, unaffiliated with anyone—"
"We ran away. Into the Outer Valleys and into the mist before the Tailed ones came… no, after they've already decimated our people and our mountain. After my father and mother had died." Osias interrupted.
The man named Henrik sighed deeply upon hearing that and threw a glance at the Grand Elder before saying:
"There are few lesser vassals that fit such customs. But more than likely a straggler from the neutrals. Before the grand attack against the Red Sky was planned, they brought most of the dissidents or neutrals within their borders to heel. Some didn't even know they were considered underneath the Tailed Brothers until the Third Tails came upon them. Such was how large the land under them stretches."
"Though, from around the northwestern reach? Close to none. Perhaps if you move further south along the western border you'll find more, but such vassal factions are difficult to find. If they weren't culled… then most unruly, weak, and purposeless among these conquered vassals were sent to the vanguard of the most dreadful wars. Either against the Crested or those long fallen blood-born. We'll find some of the like if we send a messenger to our friend in the walls. Of course, if they haven't died already"
"Bah, that old bastard doesn't lift a finger unless it's for alcohol or the Crested. Don't bother, I just wanted to know." The Grand Elder retorted.
Henrik and Aeron eyed the Grand Elder as they thought in unison, 'You're quite old yourself…'
But they kept it to themselves — they too were approaching that age.
Henrik coughed before asking Osias:
"I'm sorry, boy to question you as such the moment you awoke… though, your origins aside, it is quite a miracle you're alive. I was there, along with Aeron when you were pried from the beast's side. Perhaps it was because you're an Ordinary you survived? Ah, I should say that it had enchained some clansmen some time ago, and we came upon you while we retrieved the corpses of our fallen."
Osias… didn't know this. His vision was hazy and his mind wasn't proper back then. He greedily absorbed all the information he was given and scrounged together his understanding… He was in the care of a vassal clan under the Tailed Brothers. A guise of being a mountain brigand was most plausible, especially fitting his appearance. Besides, he was but an Ordinary — one that had been tortured for seven years. Although it was best to shrewd…
He was nothing.
Suddenly Aeron broke his series of silence:
"Osias, I had you nursed to health for two weeks after releasing those chains. I'll only ask you now, but you can take your time to answer — what do you wish to do? Where do you want to go? Say the word, and I'll send an escort to the inlands, safe from the lingering beasts that lie between this fortress and the western border… Ah, I forgot to say — we are on Clan Grimm's most outward fortress in the Outer Valleys."
But Osias simply shook his head pensively before responding:
"Thank you, clanhead. You've done much for a stranger, an Ordinary no less. I'll… think it over. Sorry for this, I need time."
"Of course. I'll come again or send one of my clansmen for information… such things are valuable in the Outer Valleys, even from a person such as yourself and all you've gone through. I'll leave you to yourself. Call on your maid, she's a shy one but is dutiful. An Ordinary like yourself." Aeron said calmly, but then he reached behind and gently pushed the maid that Osias scared earlier ahead. "Go on, introduce yourself."
"I'm Myra. Myra Grimm." She said with a small smile.