Five

"They wouldn't. The deities would, were there any. Just a thought. Some pantheons are purely astronomical, after all," he said and relaxed further as he sowed from the fourth pit and then looked at Sylvie thoughtfully. "I'm sorry if I'm being rude, and I don't mean to be, but..." Sebastian began cautiously and fidgeted his fingers before dropping his crop into his end, "but you've just made me a little curious about your homeworld." It was more of a question, as a matter of fact.

Sylvie couldn't help but chuckle. Seemed they weren't over the "awkward" bit, after all.

"I'd like to tell you, but where do I start?"

She made a habitual move from the first pit, which kept most of the seeds from it on her side.

He smiled in spite of himself. The chuckle reminded him of the save awkwardness. He looked away and then down at the seeds (beads!), surveying the pits thoughtfully. Shrugging to himself, he picked a pit at random and watched to see what Sylvie did on her move - like any beginner who didn't expect to win his or her first game.

Finally: "Tell me about the people," Sebastian said and raised his green eyes momentarily to watch Sylvie's reaction. It was the one thing he was always interested in, out of pure fascination and some professional instinct.

The immediate reaction was a wry smile and one word, "Many." That was barely easier.

She moved a single bead into the next pit to collect for a longer run, gathered her thoughts for a more informative answer, and talked over the next turns.

"I grew up near the harbour of Yrn, one of the greatest cities, the greatest in the islands. You walked around a corner, and couldn't know beforehand if the first person you see would be a beggar you'd seen a hundred times before or a noble from the fringe of the world - though the first was somewhat more likely.

The citizens... loyalties were so complicated. Craftsmen usually paid greatest stock to their guild, others to their species or race, others to what island or country their ancestors came from, others to their neighbourhood or ship, others to their blood family, or friends, or any combination thereof.

The visitors I remember clearly were sometimes exalted seeing people working hand in hand who they thought would be hating each other, others detested the city for the lack of ironclad boundaries.

When I started travelling, particularly outside the islands, it was... odd dealing with people used to less mixed company."

She shrugged and added with a smirk, "I doubt it's much different here - or where you're from, if that's not here."

Sebastian looked almost only at her as she spoke, glancing down at the game every time he needed to make a decision. He made them very quickly, and did not seem to be rushing at all, although naturally his performance in the game wasn't stellar. It wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, either.

The half-elf's lips curled into a wan smile when Sylvie began to talk about visitors and her own travels. The smirk he acknowledged with a nod. He made another move. "It isn't all that different. Strangers and wanderers are a lower social class here and in most places. The home of my youth... I don't think about it too much either. I remember the corpse of a once glorious country that tore itself apart due to cultural and language differences. It was just a constantly warring mass of 'kingdoms', all isolationist, all plotting against each other. There was scarcely anything left of the old culture except a language and scatterings of ruins and lore..." And there was a lot of humility to teach to certain people.

Sebastian smiled a little, mocking himself with the expression. That place meant so little to him anymore. "I wasn't really raised to be a citizen," he shrugged and gave Sylvie a placid, almost drowsy look. "You said islands, not continents. More ocean than land?"

"More ocean than land, but three continents in addition to the islands. I've travelled part of one of them, but know hardly anything about the others."

Sylvie more than once noticed she had missed an opportunity in the game, but figured that was just as well, since on the other hand she wasn't giving Sebastian more pointers.

"I think the islands would have ended like that, or would be working towards it now, if there was not some feeling of belonging together because they have more in common with each other than with the continents. And maybe because some of the seafaring clans that refuse to call one island their home, but link them all."

Sebastian nodded and smiled at the game. It wasn't looking too good for him. For some reason that made him very happy. On the actual topic, he had little to add about his own experiences with the more oceanic worlds - or with strangers and the welcoming parties they sometimes received. "I see. I can't really fault the islands... I'll take unity over disharmony any day." At least until unity stagnates into disharmony...

He pursed his lips for a moment as he looked up again, once more studying Sylvie's more exotic features contemplatively. "You said the island you grew up on was the largest of them. What was the island like?"

That question at least saved her from trying to explain why "unity" was saying too much.

"Most of it is cultivated land, to feed the city."

Her eyes unfocussed as she tried to call up memories of the city, and figure out what it looked like to outsiders.

"The entire island is held together by ruins. Huge walls... There are stories, maybe true, maybe superstitions, either way rarely ever anyone tries to take them down, so things just get built around them. You can build an entire house in something that looks like it used to be the lower half of a room. In a part of the city things are so honeycombed that visitors need guides to find their way.

"Even of the less spectacular structures you can say that the older something is, the longer it's likely to last. Well, that's obvious," she conceded.

"Some things change so quickly that after a few months you don't find your way through a particular quarter, but the old walls don't change, but get hidden at best."

She narrowed her eyes and paused before summing up, "There's a sense of continuity. The surface changes, but the core stays the same."

Trying to imagine an island, mostly cultivated, held together by ruins wasn't easy. Certainly he was used to ruins, but he was also used to plains, forests, even deserts. The few island nations that he had visited so much into fishing, they had never cleared away much of the trees.

The half-elf stared at her for a while and considered. It was fascinating - but he was bored of saying something like that. There were other, better ways to show one's continued interest in a topic. "I always thought it was wise not to bother ruins. Not every nation builds walls as sturdy as the ones you've just described." He inspected a bead momentarily. At the same time he considered what she had just said, wondering if flexibility was a trait valued in more than one sector of life on the island - or if at all.

"Stories," he said absent-mindedly, smiling a little as he put the bead down. "Of giants? How large is the island?"

Fishing was important, but it wasn't enough.

"In the current form, not large enough it could have been the home of giants, if the size of their buildings is any indication."

Sylvie spread out the seeds from a pit that had become too full to be any use.

"No-one knows who built those walls, or if there ever where giants. The stories are about people trying to take down parts of the ruins, or exploring too deep under the surface, and mysteriously dying, or going insane. Poisoned air, curses, wraiths, sirens, demons, sleeping dragons -" she indicated the present specimen with some amusement "- and whatever else one can come up with as reason has been blamed.

"And it's not like anyone had ever seen a dragon outside of stories."

A wide grin flashed at Ayu-Asra as Sylvie got Sebastian to turn his attention to the dragon. "That's not surprising. I remember similar superstitions about ruins... although sometimes the dangers were real," he said as he flicked a seed thoughtfully.

He was horribly curious about this place now. It wasn't just the culture - any tale of the unexplored and mysterious usually lit a fire inside his mind. His 'charmed' existence had always made him feel both safe and uncertain at the same time - for a thrillseeker, it was a wonderful, wonderful combination.

Sebastian watched sand, shaking himself down from the higher planes of imagination. "What do you call it?" he finally asked as he looked up.

"Call what?" Sylvie's thoughts had been on stories, and she had no idea what Sebastian was referring to now.

"Home," he said, head tilted to one side.

"The city and island are both called Yrn." Hadn't she mentioned that?

"Oh! Right. I'm sorry." Yes, she had said that. "I wasn't too clear, was I," he said with a sheepish smile and drew on the sand with a finger. Where was his mind? Worrying, although it shouldn't have.

"So Yrn is the island and the city... but what about the world? Is the name tied to creation lore or is it just... a name?" He avoided saying 'myth' - saying so had, once or twice, caused him quite an amount of grief.

Sylvie had to think about that for a bit. She didn't want to answer just "the world" in her mothertongue, but there was no common name, as such. But maybe an obscure one...

"Eodea." She frowned. "The name was derived from a language I never learned; I don't remember what it means."

He nodded and collected the last of the seeds he could, musing at the results. It wasn't that shocking that he had lost: Sebastian simply smiled at her and slightly bowed his head in an acknowledging way before he began to set the seeds in his five pits again. "Eodea. I'll remember that. Thank you."

With the seeds in their pits, he watched both the sand - the pits - and her hands. There were some questions he would have wanted to ask - namely the reason behind her leaving her home in the first place, but he had the impression it was not a happy topic. Or, rather, Sebastian assumed it was not one such thing. He quite liked things relaxed - or mostly anyway if purely placid was not an option.

"I hope I haven't been asking too many questions," he said and looked up.

"Well, I started, didn't I." Her smile showed clearly she didn't mind.

Shifting her weight, she said a bit distractedly, "You lost, so you start again."

The ado about the name caught her attention. "So, if you don't mind yet more questions... Have you been in many different worlds?"

A nod. Yes, she had. The half-elf relaxed just the slightest bit again as a breath of warm air swept past them.

"A fair share," he said, although he looked a little uncertain as he picked the seeds from the third pit. "I can't say how many," Sebastian continued in a lower voice. "I don't leave them very quickly, though, unless they're decidedly hostile or just otherwise... not agreeable. The majority of the ones I have been in were all right."

A different question or two came to mind, but Sylvie thought he might not want to answer them, so she went on, "And do they have generally used names often?"

She started again with the seeds from the first pit, and watched Sebastian's hands.