Scouting For Romance

Entry 65, Part 1

Day 12, Month 1, Year 573

It's bright outside, and warm.

Heading through Peldor's Crown, the train tracks twist and bend around the mountains, chugging through tunnels or massive divots that we're carved through the rock. There are the occasional plateaus, valleys, and lakes between the mountains, a whole ecosystem up here in the north, just often cut off from each other by miles of mountain. The altitude slowly climbs as you get closer to the north pole, the peak of one mountain might be level with the base of another a few dozen miles north

The mountains were anything but uniform. Varying in size, shape, and height (not that we could easily tell the height but I'll get to that in a moment), some were nothing but pillars of rock, others were covered in a firm layer of dirt, grass, and trees. Birds fluttered, animals scurried about, and everything was a constant, warm orange glow. It's been decades since I left Peldor, but this is how I remember the feel of sunlight.

Mixed between the peaks of mountains is a thick, overcast layer of dark clouds. There's a lot of volcanoes in Peldor's Crown, and they're constantly spewing out heat and smoke like massive geysers. This smoke can't rise higher than the mountains, and it can't dissipate faster than the volcanoes can add more, so it sits up there, hanging over our heads as if we're underground in some cavern.

So there we were. In a train, on a raised bridge of tracks, coiling through the Crown. Below us was the glowing orange forest, around us were bare rocky mountains, and above us were dark clouds. It felt slightly claustrophobic, I understand why the locals feel skittish under open skies.

"It is hard to believe King Arus walked this far on foot." I said, looking out the window.

Tytus leaned over me, his shoulder on my back as his left arm gripped the back of my chair for support. "Yeah, I can't imagine it. All these mountains, and they had to deal with the cloudlanders too?" He shook his head in disbelief.

"It can be argued that this land is more dangerous than the Ashlands."

Tytus glanced out the window, looking left, then looking right, our cheeks close enough that I could feel the warmth of his skin. "This place looks peaceful enough."

"We are protected by outposts of monestaries. Temples built by warrior-monks defend these train tracks from the cloudlanders."

"You mentioned something like that before."

"I did. The cloudlands are the only places on Peldor that were never conquered. There are similar cloudlands to the south of Peldor's Crown. The most famous cloudlands are to the far east."

He pulls away enough to turn his head and give me a wide smile, "you think we'll have to leave the train and 'clear out' some clouds?"

"It is possible. Cloudlander raids slip by the line of defenses from time to time. It is theorized that they dig large networks of caves and tunnels around their territory."

"Hmm." He sits back down in his seat, "so what's the story of those temples and warrior monks?"

"They were established before the Church. Nobody knows who started it or what religion they originally were built to worship. Saint Ader joined a monestary as a young man and eventually took the entire system over in a violent coup. There exist no surviving records of who built the first temples or for what purpose."

Tytus raised his brow, "but that doesn't mean you don't have an idea, right?"

"There are theories."

"So what are the theories?"

"Explaining them would be very long and boring. I am sure you are not genuinely interested and I would not want to irritate you."

He grabbed my shoulder and shook me back and forth, "hey, c'mon, you're interested, right? Then go ahead, I'll listen."