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This is a very not-subtle nod to @RustyFidgetSpinner and his ideas of telling character stories along with AI Generated media for visuals. I've been asked once or twice to share some of the world that my character Rae is a part of, and while I can't do all of that in anything less than a second wiki for it, I can certainly give some insight into her canon existence in that settling, her purpose and allude to her story at large. This is different for me. Enjoy.
The wind takes the sound. My boots make no noise on the snow. Just a crunch I feel in my knees, in my teeth, my joints. Cold soaks through the neoprene and synthetic leather. It's in my bones now.
White. Only white. And the grey sky that presses down on it.
Sometimes a thought comes. Not mine. A different one. About warmth. A room with no wind. The memory has a color. Yellow. Like a weak sun. It feels good. Then it’s gone. A hole where it was.
My stomach is a tight knot. Hunger. I know the word for it. Chewing on a piece of leather helps. Tastes like salt and smoke. Tastes like walking.
A shape on the ridge. Dark against the grey. A box made of stone. Not a natural formation. My feet turn toward it. They know the shape of shelter even when my head is empty. One step. Then the next. Don’t have to think about that part. It just happens.
The man. The one in the clean coat. His face comes back sometimes. He pointed at a screen full of light. "There’s a mistake in you," he said. "A beautiful one. It points the way home."
Home. The word is hollow. A sound the wind makes.
I don’t know the shape of it. Was it a room? A building? The thought is a blank space. A wall I can’t see past. But I remember a feeling. The color yellow. The smell of… dirt. Warm dirt after a rain. The smell of things growing. Green things. The memory is so sharp it hurts behind my eyes. Then it breaks apart. Gone. Just the white again. Just the wind.
The snow is deeper here. It pulls at my legs, heavy. Each step is a fight. Lift. Push. Fall. My body remembers how to do it.
Something juts from a drift. A pole. Metal, bent into a hook at the top. Red paint peeling away like old skin. There are numbers stamped into it. Faded. I wipe the snow away with a stiff glove. 7-1-4. The numbers mean nothing. Just shapes. I trace the 7. The metal is so cold it burns, a clean, sharp pain. It feels real.
Numbers. The man in the coat said mine were wrong. A mistake. But they pointed. They always point. My fingers feel stuck to the pole. I pull my hand back. A tiny patch of skin stays behind. Dark red on the frozen metal. It doesn’t bleed.
I stare at the red mark. The wind whines, higher and higher, until it’s the only sound in the world. My head feels light.
...and the pole is gone.
It’s far behind me now. A black hook in the distance. The ridge is closer. Much closer. I don’t remember walking. My lungs burn with air that is too cold. A tremor runs through my legs, the kind that comes after a long climb. How long was I gone? The sun is just a smear of light in the same place. Time cheats. It steals the pieces.
But the shelter is real. The box of stones. I can see the cracks between them now. The dark lines. That’s where I’m going.
The last few feet are the hardest. The slope is steep, and the wind wants to push me off. I dig my hands into the snow. It’s like climbing a wall of sand. My face is numb. I can’t feel my nose or my lips. Just the ache in my bones and the dark shape of the doorway.
Then I’m there. Out of the current. The silence is a pressure on my ears. The door is a black mouth full of blowing snow. Inside is quieter. The wind screams through a crack in the wall. An old carboncrete table, heavy and cold. I brush the snow off with my glove. Lean on the flat surface. It holds my weight. It doesn’t move.
The shaking in my hands stops for a minute. My breath makes a cloud in the air. I watch it disappear. Another one comes. Disappears.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. But the man said it pointed somewhere. So I keep walking.
To here.
That’s where I am now.
Most of this is an imagined scenario meant to represent the settled world of Falahal, with its feudal lords and regressed settlements, our Vagrant finds solace and isolation in the wilds. She feeds herself with ease from the frozen lakes, and avoids the warbands and scouts. She crosses these ancient swamps once or twice a month, trekking back to a functioning teleporter that gives her access to a network of settled worlds to fulfill her other needs.