The Great Pandemonium: Nobilitas Obligat

Part II. Across the Sea

Part II. Across the Sea

Drystan had never seen so much water in a single place in his life.

The Maelmar Sea was the expansive and frequently stormy body of water that separated most of the Oribian from the Holy Empire of Haren, and Drystan had never before in his seventeen years upon Eral laid eyes on it. They had been thirteen days at sea and already weathered three windy, rainy storms that the ship's captain had called “hurricanes.” According to the captain and crew of the Tide Windward, for the time of year and the temperature of the water (Drystan still had no idea how any of them could discerned how “warm” or “cold” the sea was, since everything on board the ship felt freezing cold to him), passing through three hurricanes was about as noteworthy as sneezing in the springtime.

From what the sailors had told him, they had only hit the “leading edges” of these colossal storms. Apparently the closer one got to the “eye” of them the more likely it became that the ship would be ripped apart by even stronger winds. Thinking about such a thing baffled his mind, and as he tried to puzzle out just how large a hurricane might have been, he never failed to become seasick yet again.

While he managed to keep hold of his stomach most of the time, he spent every single storm holed up in his bunk feeling as though he would die the next time the ship slid down the backside of a wave. The only thing that had been keeping him sane was listening to the crew relate fantastical stories of sea monsters to the member of Antenox and her traveling companion. It may have been a bit morbid, but hearing tales of sailors dying in horribly pitched battles against beasts from the blackest depths of the sea made him feel a little bit better about his own misery while upon it.

Shifting between being either wretchedly ill or slightly queasy had given him a great deal of time alone to reflect on what he had done, too. He had leaped at Coord's offer to be anywhere except his Affirmation. Even after he had sobered up and realized that he had just thrown a lifetime of studying and training out the proverbial window he only regretted a single thing: leaving Tiernan a hastily scribbled and half-drunk note inside the book his friend always kept at his bedside as to why he would not be there in the morning. Drystan loved the man like his brother, but Tiernan would never have agreed to leave the Rectory. His dream was to become an Inquisitor and it had been since they had met—and no matter how much the Seneschal Inquisitor said otherwise, he was good at it, almost inhumanly so.

Drystan was most definitely not.

That much had become clear as the leagues he put between himself and Whiteshire grew but the guilt he had expected to surface never did. He was not going to miss the training drills or the inordinate amount of study and memorization that came with learning how to investigate, track, and then confront heretics and renegade witches. He wasn't going to have to recall whether or not a book was on the List of Ordained Works at the drop of a hat in order to determine whether or not the person owning it was in need of excommunication. And he certainly was not going to miss Haromir breathing down his neck at every opportunity telling him he was doing it all wrong. The further away he went the more reasons he could find as to why leaving the Rectory had been the right thing to do and not just an impulsive mistake.

Honestly, I thought waking up with a hideous tattoo on my forehead would be my penance for deciding to do something while I was stupidly drunk...

As the days wore on, the more and more he asked himself, what was he going to do now? Coord's offer to find out more about exactly who he was had been tempting, but it certainly was not going to take his entire life to discover who his parents were and why he had been dropped on the doorstep of a church as a baby. He had a host of skills, certainly, but no actual trade. It wasn't as if there were good samaritan guildhalls in every city where people posted odd jobs that needed doing and he could exchange noble deeds for good coin.