Traveling Too

[Koa Red-eye]

He knew the priests would call it grace. And that the old spider would call it design. Koa could never say how he viewed these chance encounters. Happenstance that turned out important later. He let them discuss them and turn them into something divine while he simply lived them and brought back the tales of his travels.

Not that he met other bears by accident often.

Neither did she by the look of things. How big was she, he wondered idly, not really wanting to find out.

"We are a secretive people," he soothed, when she seemed more troubled by the not knowing than Koa was. He found comfort in doing what he was good at. Finding what he was sent to find. Helping children he saw the ghost of himself in. Rejected, scorned. Hoping to save others from monikers similar to his own.

Stjerne. Koa found it on the map, nestled in the farmland. "I do not imagine there are many." More suited to solitary life, were bears. But there was comfort in having your own people around you. The same as families who never spread beyond a street. People building cities so that they could live nearly on top of each other.

As much as he liked home, Koa liked the going as well.

Eyes drawn away from the boundaries of the map, Koa picked up the leaflet she laid down. Bold lettering splashing across the page to draw attention and keep it. "Interesting." He'd never been to one. His thumb trailed down the list of addresses, spread across Raej like anchor hooks in a web. "Can you sense them?" He asked, eyes tipping back up to her. He never had, the webs built into Raej's very soil.

People talked about them, but Koa never felt whatever it was they did. Or even noticed their presence at all.

[Audun Dahl]

Secretive was one word for it, Audun thought. Secret enough to have been kept right under her nose as a child and still not notice until it bit her.
My own willful wandering didn't help, she allowed. Home had never been quite able to cool her heels enough. More time spent between the walls of her childhood instead of beneath the sky may have sooner revealed the secrets of her family to her. But maybe that was part of the bear too - after all, Koa seemed happy enough roaming hither and yon, and Audun couldn't imagine that all of her siblings were just roosting at home, tallying ledgers and doing farm work.

"I don't know weather I want there to be only a few, or very many, stashed all around." Secret and safe, was the key. She'd been a menace in her fur, during her learning, and a danger. The shadows of her first shift still clung to her worst days, claws sinking as deep into her as hers had then. She wondered if it would be as hard, now, so long from a shift. If having those like her around would be better or worse for it.

She tilted her head back and forth, one of her hands following the motion. "Now that I've been trained to, for the most part. It's hard to distinguish the older ones from the land some, the way the soil absorbs the Craft. New and recently repaired ones are the easiest to feel, they aren't quite so smooth." Like a paving stone lifted and replaced, almost perfect but not quite. Sometimes that was what one had to look for, when finding what the upset in the web was. "I don't do so much work on them, myself. I just determine how big the working is and who might be best for it.

She'd never been able to pin down how the awareness of a web felt to her, and often times no two reports of web 'activity' were the same. People wrote in about feeling wrong-footed, about feeling tired, or anxious, or just feeling like the Craft around their home was 'too heavy' or 'too light'. The first part of an assessment was often trying to see if it was the web acting up or something else. "The ones in the cities are the most obvious, I think. It's like a calming drought I guess, but in your thoughts. People don't tend to be as in a hurry in those places." Although the pleasantness was sometimes strangely artificial to those aware of it, there was a surprising lack of crime in the places where the foundation webs were densest. The compulsion that 'people with horns are perfectly normal, everything is fine' tended to sand down even unrelated nerves.

There were a lot of smiling tourists and immigrants in the cities. Sometimes Audun wished she got assigned there more, just for relief from people being in a snit about her inspecting their property. Those city webs typically had specialists on hand though, and she couldn't claim there was any kind of truth in her frequent desire for a change in scenery.

[Koa Red-eye]

Koa's hand cut the air, flat palm turned one way and then the other. "Bears require a lot of room." And were generally solitary. He found company even harder to keep when he shed skin for fur. Too many pockets and you risked overrunning a whole territory. But were larger, farther flung groups any safer?

He had to believe they were, since they had not been found out yet.

Removing questing lips from his sleeve, Koa nodded faint understanding. "I cannot sense them at all. Or, recognize that I am feeling them." He knew they were there, and had heard discussion on what they did; but otherwise the webs were like air for Koa. Invisible and not often thought of despite being ever present. And possibly just as necessary.

He wanted to question her on how that was determine. The who of the repair, but he kept the question to himself. A secret bonded them, but they were still only just acquainted. He had been taught manners thoroughly, whether they had thought him paying attention or not.

"I had noticed that." Koa stroked his collar bone. He could not hold down an exact image of certain places and things in the cities. Or maybe it was people. It was easier to forget and forgive there than in the wilder country. He supposed wheat fields had less need of webbing. "Where are you headed now?" Their paths were at heads, but perhaps he could give her pointers on the road ahead. And she him.

[Audun Dahl]

Audun nodded, thinking of how many of her siblings there were, and how many townspeople. The difference was staggering. That drive for isolation was what had her so eagerly anticipating assignments, after all. Even as infrequently as she shifted, the drive was there. "We do indeed."

She nodded in commiseration. "It took training, like any Craft thing." Most inhabitants of Raej tended not to notice the webs, was her understanding. And the people who it affected most were those who were newer. She'd never asked any fresh arrival how it felt to enter the territory. It felt - wrong, somehow. Like she shouldn't bring attention to it.

If you knew, you knew. If not, you left it alone.

"It helps to take breaks, to be outside where the webs aren't." she admitted. She imaged the people who lived in the city full time grew some kind of immunity to it, a clarity. Certainly the people who were born in the cities didn't seem to experience the same kind of dissonance she still felt if she was away too long. What was the country like for them? Maybe they'd all go mad if they were let loose in the wild.

The curve of the road drew her eyes if not her full attention. "Not this next town, but the one after." A home web in need of review after the spring rains. She was looking forward to find out how easy the access would be, and if she'd end up crawling around in the mud. She looked back, not quite sure where they stood, now. Strangers with the same secret. "How's the road?"

[Koa Red-eye]

Of course it did. Koa's shoulders gave that fact away, shedding the worry of it like water. Like so many things in life, it must be learned. So many stages of infancy, no matter how old a person got. But this was one kernel of knowledge he would not chase across the plate. He would leave the webs of Raej to people such as this lady.

"It makes sense." Places beyond their borders didn't have that same feel. Sometimes Koa mistook it for homesickness, but upon further examination it wasn't an urge to be home, but... something missing. Like the weather. Or the feel of a well worn pair of boots. Nothing tangible, nothing with a name. Just something missing.

Their time together was winding away. Koa could feel it. Could see it too, in the way her gaze was drawn to away. It made him smile quietly to himself. Such was the nature of bears. They were neither mating or feasting, and so it was time to be on. To be gone from each other. There was no malice or ill feeling. Just nature.

"Not too soggy." He answered, thinking backward. He helped her set her cart to rights again. Making sure that everything was in place. Hauling his own mule by the bridle, Koa convinced her to pull their wagon out of the way. Down the road again in the direction they were going. Transports separating them, he remembered, a nose in the palm of his hand as he shared.

"Oh of them was in mourning. I forget which. Bad accident." He cautioned. Death made people funny.

[Audun Dahl]

Something small and young in her ached to linger. It marveled at their circumstance, at the shifting of the world in her mind, brought on by an encounter that, had any step been different, might not have happened at all.

But they could no more linger in the road than Audun could sprout wings and fly, and she imagined there were those waiting for Koa too. People who needed him more than she did. She tilted her head in the direction she'd come."The same. There is a - dip, a rut, some ways back, after the second fork on the - right, if you go that far, but it's close to the edge." It hadn't proved too difficult to avoid in her wagon, but his was wider, and foreknowledge might prevent damaging a wheel.

Grit reattached, Audun hesitated to take the step that would put her back in the driver's seat, watching him with his mules. It felt - there should be something. Something said, something done. But besides pamphlets for contact there was nothing Audun had on her that wasn't work related, or clothes.

"I'll look out for them," she said. "Thank you. For the help. For..." she waved a hand, at a loss. For being different than almost everyone she had ever met? For being on the same road at the right time? "For this. I hope we meet again."