Hot Under The Collar (Open)

Irrakam was resplendent in the high summer months. The sun, unbearable even at its weakest burnt its presence into the tiles of Jya’s Keep and deep down into the bowls of the earth. Nobody, nothing, not at all escape its wrath.

“Do you think we could move the stall?”

Mordelain had been awake since before dawn. She had stood behind the three trestle tables laden with fine silks, golden jugs, etched, and be speckled with jewels and rare shells for five hours. Whilst the market was heaving, some stalls surrounded shoulder to shoulder, nobody was at hers.

Suresh had decided to take the prime spots surrounding the bazaar’s memorial fountain. The grand vizier and his guards, depicting a forgettable occurrence centuries ago that somebody deemed recordable stood watch. Their sandstone features worn and weary, the people at their feet did anything but remember.

“No.”

The merchant left no room for a follow up question. His tone put his daughter in her place, and she folded her arms across her chest in a huff.

“But-“

“No.”

Silence descended over them. One or two haggard women crept up to the stall, the weight of the sun bowing them until they could stand it no longer. They scuttled away again into the crowds, hoping to find shelter under an awning of a particularly large foreigner. Between olive skin mothers and reddened travellers plying their hard earned gold to the task of souvenirs, hulking orcs and Unbar (sand men), waded carefully through lesser beings.

“Why is it so busy today?”

Unbeknownst to Mordelain, it was this busy in the bazaars of Irrakam every day. Only sandstorms, rarely ever descending upon the city put a stop to trading. That, and the many hours in the day dedicated to prayer, napping, and eating. Soon, it would be eleven o’clock, the first of such long delays. Traders and shoppers alike would retire, leaving a ghost market in their wake until the high sun died proper, leading into the hazy, thick and humid afternoon lull.

“You have been working on this stall for three days, Mordelain. Is the summer sabbatical from university really so odious?” Suresh raised his unusually bushy eyebrow.
Though the il’Jhain very much loved her father, she had grown to hate his businesses. For two months of each year, Irrakam’s university took a long break from teaching. It became too hot, even in the cool interior of her classes, to put the eager students through their historical paces. There had been much talk in recent months, tenders by the plenty put to the Keep, about noria coolant systems and magical runes to allow education to prosper.

“I miss my students.”

She missed not having to stand in an inferno, but she would never risk an argument telling him so bluntly. Always Be Surreptitious was their family motto.

“Your bed, you mean,” Suresh chuckled.

He tended to the silks on the middle table, returning messed corners into neatly folded shapes that followed an archaic, but well thought out presentation plan. He turned jugs to face the right way and sprinkled scented dried flowers, spice balls (whose contents mystified the senses), and counted the changed in the leather pouch about his ample waistline.

“Fair point. I’ll get us some more water.” The youthful exuberance in her voice fell away.

She wore a simple black sari, tight leather sandals, and an array of sashes about her waist. Bangles, part-Tama, part Fallieni dangled around each of her wrists. Red hair, redder by grace of the suns’ withering powers trailed behind her, untied and unkempt. She longed to run away. She longed to slip into the void and dance amongst the Other Worlds. Instead, she picked up a silver jug resting on the side of the fountain.

“And pour it over your thick head,” she mumbled, leaning over the edge to begin filling two amphora for their stall. Legs dangled, a reach extended just an inch too far. The sound of the crowd overwhelmed as something started to happen in Irrakam. Something that would make summer seem like a blessing, not a curse.

Jacques stared uncomfortably ahead through the crowd, his eyes squinting in the brightness of the marketplace. He sighed, wiping the sweat off his forehead before continuing his trudge onward into the packed marketplace. The heat was overbearing, and the people bustling around him only made it worse. He looked down at himself, the bleached-white tunic and dirt-brown pants, a sturdy pair of boots, and a belt that he paid more for than the last three orders of beef he’d bought for the Bounding Tankard. Typical attire, to him, but starkly different from the resplendent robes of some of the richer merchants and the dresses adorning the women. He sighed again, wishing he’d just bought new clothing here.


“Curses on Jordan, curses on it all!” Jacques muttered, thinking back to the man recommending he take a trip to Fallien to find some rare vintage of wine in the markets of Irrakam. He looked forward. A hundred or more stalls stretched down the boulevard and into the narrow alleys beyond. Jacques scowled, glaring at some of the merchants. He walked on, advancing towards the fountain at a miserable pace.


“Care to look at some spices, sir?” “Silks and gold, silver and glass!” “Tomes of ancient lore, historical accounts!” The merchants barked, their voices in a constant bid for volume. Jacques ignored them all, shuffling onward with the crowd, hot sun beating upon him from its place in the heavens. He adjusted the sun-bleached mantle on his shoulders.


“Move, outlander.” Grumbled a guard from behind him, voice low and filled with displeasure. Jacques, absorbed in looking at the tables before him quickly sidestepped, realizing too late that the sidestep would lead him to a table and soon after, into the table. Jacques gave a bit of a yelp as his hip impacted the display, disturbing the carefully arranged silks and jugs on the table. He stepped back carefully. Running his eyes over the carefully arranged wares, he hastily righted one of the jugs as it began to teeter on the edge.


“Oh! Oh! My apologies, my sincerest apologies, sir! I didn’t mean to- The guard-” Jacques stammered, trying to find a way to explain himself without invoking the merchant’s ire.

Mordelain’s ears pricked. The unmistakable sound of her father clearing his throat in his trademark, soon to shout manner righted her. She turned and put the full jug down on the fountain’s edge in one movement.

“Sur…,” she trailed off.

A jug fell ceremoniously from the edge of the stall. It clattered onto the flagstones, worn and sand dusted by the undeniable presence of the Fallieni desert. It echoed through the crowd, drawing fleeting glances until passers-by realised it was nothing more than an accident. It took pickpockets or murders to hold a bazaar to ransom during the high shopping hours.

“Oh dear.”

The il’Jhain disappeared. The jug could wait. Adrenaline overtook all sense of tiredness and humidity that had soaked into her bones and muscles. She landed in a jungle far hotter. For a brief moment, she felt alone. Bulganin tricked the weary into such follies, before reminding them with a flurry of howls and an earthquake stampede that in the wilds of the world forest, you were never alone.

She drew on the Void just in time to traverse the infinite unknown a second time. She caught a glimpse of titanic horned beasts breaking through the treeline to the east. Each could level cities in their own right, but a herd of Horneck could crush empires. Grit teeth and flexed muscles carried her back, sprawling and anxious, to her father’s side.

The haphazard customer bent to retrieve the jug at the same time, avoiding any awkward questions as to why a messenger had quite literally appeared out of thin air. Mordelain prodded her father in the ribs, and drained his anger with a turgid, ‘don’t you dare’ stare.

“Oh, it’s quite alright sir,” Mordelain began. Her stare turned into a warm smile she used on her students. “It’s not valuable.” Even if her father touted it as the last relic of Coradan himself, she knew it to be cheaply produced tat from the artisan’s workshops on the southern banks of the Zaileya.

“These things happen.” Suresh’s flat tone told Mordelain they would have words later.

“Pop it back on the table, and tell me,” she leant closer, like a jealous girlfriend, “who does your hair?”

Jacques placed the jar he'd nearly destroyed back onto the table, fiddling with its angle for a moment before saying 'good’ and nodding. He smiled up at the vendor and opened his mouth to apologize for the disruption to his business, but suddenly, he was asked about his hair.

Jacques raised an eyebrow at the question, somewhat stunned by its suddenness. He shook his head and raising a hand to comb his fingers through his dark brown locks. With a modicum of caution, he began to answer.

“There’s this woman not far from my home who does it. She does decent work, and sells these beautiful combs made from horn and bone. Excellent quality.” Jacques said, his demeanour lifting. A smile grew on his face.

Jacques reached into his bag and rummaged for a moment, pulling out a fine toothed comb carved from a piece of horn. It was intricately carved, but discolored from use and age. He thumbed the teeth of it, attempting to display the quality before setting it on the table.

A few shouts of “final opportunity for the morning!” went up from the other side of the boulevard, indicating the time was nearing eleven. He pulled out a cheaply made watch from a pocket of his bag and looked at the time, grumbling something about the market’s ‘closing’ soon. A few muttered curses later, he shrugged before leaning on the table, careful to not disturb anything.

“Enough with me, my question is this, why is a woman whose items I nearly just threw to the dirt with my clumsiness asking about my haircut of all things. Why not the fact that a Coronian man is in this accursed desert city, roasting away his days?” Jacques inquired of the woman. He looked at her curiously, cocking his head to the side. Swatting a fly away from his face, he waited patiently for an answer.

John only went to Fallien once a year. Aside from its extreme distance, culturally and geographically, from his home country and current residence, he had never particularly liked the place. The populated places were overcrowded, and the rest of the country was desert. Beautiful desert, but desert still.

Though, seeing Tazok had been pleasant. The old master seemed to be ageless, and John absently wondered if he really was a hundred years old as he picked up a chunk of Damascus. He had resigned himself to never be as fast as the old man, but they still had a few good spars during his visit, and he'd even showed Tazok a trick or two.

He smirked a little. Maybe Tazok had lost a step.

Though there'd be no end to it if he actually said that out loud. He picked up two more ingots of metal like the first, nodding at the shopkeep, needing to bend down to be able to see him under the awning spread out for shade. He paid the man, silently wishing he could wear his armor in the market; as it was the last time he wore it here there had been a terrible fight.

Either that or be shorter, He thought, turning to walk away through the crowd, unknowingly swinging his bag as he turned, striking an unsuspecting man in the back of the head.

Mordelain let out a polite, chording chuckle. It mingled with the hubbub of the bazaar, and then drowned beneath the sweltering heat and thundering torrent of haggling that erupted from the stall to their right. She rolled her eyes.

“There are always many questions here in Irrakam.” Darting daggers to their neighbour, the il’Jhain folded her arms across her chest and sighed. Her brief, fiery, bout of normalcy ended as it often did. With her mind once again on why she was still here. In this heat. On this day.

“There are so many of you of late it’s.”

Suresh’s ever-helpful timing put Mordelain’s point across perhaps too bluntly.

“What he means,” she interrupted, “is that since the Accord we’ve gotten used to seeing more and more Outlander’s here in the city.”

The Fallieni tide each morning turned slowly but surely into a multicultural river in the three years since Jya’s death. Mordelain had grown increasingly excited by the development, enjoying newfound prosperity as a teacher of the newcomers (in the ways and histories of her homeland). Eventually, she grew tired of it’s overwhelming pace.

“Never spending.”

“Go. Away,” she snapped. She brushed him away and bit her lip. “This polite gentleman is simply making conversation.”

“I am sorry, perhaps I should go?”

She reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder comfortingly.

“Not at all. Tell me,” she walked him to the end of the stall, backs turned to her father. “Why have you come to this fine island?” Her gaze settled upon a rather nasty skull crack in the distance. Whatever the man’s tall tale, it would have to wait.

“I came t-“

“Did you see that?” She jolted her hand away and reached for her kukri.