Steam's Story

Siham Jal’Zuun, for all his calm sensitivity and spontaneous cascades of quick wit, found that strangeness clung to him in this new city like the prickling aftertaste of a bitter herb. Shal’Azura was not his birthplace, and the rooms of his aunt’s high-perched home, though full of the warmest light and the most fragrant teas, could not quite silence the subtle thrum of being out of place. His loving aunt, Zahara, tried in every way to fill the void—a relentless fusillade of confections, stories, gentle chidings, and the unsolicited wisdom that relatives dispense—but Siham’s homesickness was not a wound that could be sutured with sweets and reassurances. Even the company of his uncle, the famed naturalist Tholim Coppermantle, whose exploits and catalogues of the world’s rarest metals and the mines their ores originated could beguile any gathering for hours, left Siham feeling like he was forever peering in through a slightly frosted pane, unable to fully join the warmth on the other side.   The sound of "Siham" from his aunt's lips still startled him after he had arrived a week or two ago in the city. Back home, he had only ever been "Steam"—a name whispered by his mother when she found him curled asleep by the hearth, called across the calm oasis waters of Ayn Almara by his father, shouted by childhood companions as they raced across sun-heated dunes and giggled by teenage sweethearts in the small hours of the mornings when the rising sun painted the sky in light while the lands lay still dreaming and forgotten.   At night, the city’s distant hum—so unlike the soothing, rhythmic quiet of the oasis he’d known—kept him awake, his mind looping through crisp memories of places and faces now irretrievably distant. He would wander the narrow balcony outside his room, chin resting on the cold rail, and watch as lanterns of roselight bobbed in the night air like lost souls, each one burning from some strange kind of inner fire that neither wavered nor flickered. Sometimes, when he felt like walking, he would hop down to garden level and meander through the nighttime promenade of Lavivun’s Awlaan Esplanada, a lakeside road of immense breadth where palaces and luxurious boutiques stood sentinel above the water’s edge. There he would listen to the echoes of laughter from other homes, the kind of laughter that made a place truly belong to someone.   He tried to be grateful—tried to see himself as lucky, as Zahara often reminded him—but gratitude was a grown man’s virtue, and he was still very young: all nerves and hunger, all the time searching for the familiar in a world that delighted in remaking itself every morning. His cousins, twin girls born only two years before him, but city-children to their bones, sometimes poked gentle fun at his rustic manners. Steam bore it with stoic dignity, but he felt, acutely, the invisible wall that their different histories had built.   Yet he could never confess this to his aunt or uncle, who had so generously taken him in after one accident after the other had scattered his family to the winds. He could only rehearse gratitude, and hope one day it would flower for real.   Usually, he came to Jamin at the end of the day, after hours of walking, working and searching, to find an hour or three of solace before returning home for the night. As always, the air here was heavy with a mineral warmth—humid and scented, like an emerald grotto. The district was a strange spill of pleasure and repose; bathhouse windows glimmered opal blue, and out the open alcove doors, steam drifted against curving walls slick with condensation. The strange panorama of mountains only fifty feet high, and alleys that curved between them like tiny valleys, always filled him with awe. He had heard these mountains and valleys had been crafted by Shal’Azuran wizards, just because they wanted a place to relax. The evening crowd was already here: wine-swilling patrons winding from one alcove entrance to the next, old men trailing whorls of smoke, slick-muscled masseuses leaning languidly against walls.   Steam liked the anonymity, and the way the orderly, sky-facing architecture dissolved into organic, cave-like interiors. It made him feel unknowable; a pulse in a vast, subterranean heart.   He caught the eye of some bath mistress at the corner, her shoulders broad, her teeth crowned with gold like expensive lanterns. He nodded, as always, but tonight she did not nod back. Her gaze slid right past him, and kept going, as if he had become a shadow or a memory of someone else’s acquaintance. Steam slowed mid-step, then looked over his shoulder: her attention was fixed instead on a gathering storm in the distance where toiling clouds and pale, flickering lightning had crept up and now dominated the horizon. This looked like a dangerous night to be caught outside. It was going to be his first desert storm on a city that flew one thousand feet above the ground, untethered, held only by the invisible bonds of some arcane force or other that was supposedly put there by this grand sorcerer from ancient times. He would be fine. Yeah. Right.   On second thought, maybe he really ought to spend an evening every now and again with his aunt and uncle, and this seemed to be a good one to stay indoors.   Resolutely, Steam veered right toward the shortcut he'd stumbled upon days earlier—a narrow passage promising swift return to Lake Haiyeti's shores. The press of bodies and voices fell away as he slipped between weathered walls. Just as the lake's surface came into view, catching fire from the sinking sun, a prickling sensation crawled across his nape. The air changed and he realized he was not alone in this alley any more.   A deep, resonant voice, said with a voice that resounded from afar, like a bell tolling from deep underwater, “I bring to this house the words that have traveled far."   Steam's breath caught, then released in a slow, controlled stream as he drew himself upright. His body betrayed him—muscles coiled to spring away even as they locked him in place. When he finally pivoted to face the voice, he schooled his features into the careful blankness he'd perfected for his father's creditors and awkward visits from caravan guards and their masters.   At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about the figure cloaked in lavender and cream colored silk, fine embroidery stitched with motes of gold so fine they flickered in the weak evening light like the roselight streetlamps that floated throughout Shal’Azura. But then Steam noticed his hands, pale as desert-bleached bones and wrinkled like a corpse that died from thirst, poised with the subtle danger of a blackfeather spider above the lumpy blankets around a dying campfire. He seemed tall—maybe even too tall—and his face was impossibly blurred and warped. What stood out most were his eyes: glacial, mismatched pools, one a blue like the clearest oasis water, the other clouded and broken like a poisoned well.   "Siham Jal’Zuun," the figure intoned, each syllable popping in his skull like embers. "Son of Sahira and Tahir. Son of the second house, of the survivors and of the sundering." He approached with an unsettling fluidity, the figure’s shadow, cast large across the closed facades of the alley, fractured itself on the mosaic stones, a premonition of violence or miracle depending on which culture's omens one trusted.   Steam stood frozen in place, breath held, feeling like a droplet of water teetering above a burning stove.   “What is it you bring?” Steam asked, his voice trembling but trying. He did not want to sound afraid in his own homeland, even if this was, for now, only a borrowed fragment of it.   “A word. A promise. A name,” the stranger replied. “All three are the currency of what comes next.”   With a single fluent motion that seemed to start and end at the same time, without bothering with the space it traversed from start to finish, the stranger took a small box - lacquered ebony inlaid with a sliver of mother-of-pearl in the shape of a crescent moon - from the satchel of his rich garment and set it on top of a nearby windowsill.   The box trembled on the windowsill, its lacquered surface rippling like disturbed water. A faint hum emanated from within—not quite a sound but a vibration that made Steam's teeth ache, like the ripple that announced a tsunami from many miles away, and the tiny hairs on his arms stand rigid.   Steam stared at the small box on the table, his eyes wide and unblinking. His muscles tensed, as if locked in place, and his hands trembled at his sides. The air felt thick around him, and he could hear his heart pounding in his chest, yet he remained rooted to the spot, unable to break free from the invisible grip that held him, to get further away from that stranger, and that box.   “I want no part of it!” Steam hissed through gritted teeth, jaw locked to keep it from trembling.   The stranger pulled a card from his belt, unimpressed by Steams objection,a card ecru in color and thick with the texture of handmade vellum. He set it down beside the crescent-shaped box with the calm and precision of an ancient master. Lamplight caught the still-wet ink of the card's calligraphy, making each curve and flourish shimmer like the ebb and flow of water. Steam's stomach tightened—the handwriting mirrored his own with eery precision. His gaze dropped to the lower left corner where dark foil formed a crescent moon identical to the box's emblem. Above it, delicate metallic threads wove an elaborate pattern that shifted as the dying sunlight struck it, momentarily revealing what looked like a blindfold hanging in empty space.   Steam stared at the card. No address, nor any name, just a single line:     *To You, the Named and the Nameless: The Blind Storyteller bids you join him at the Market of Melodies, Last Bell.*   The invitation shook between his fingers, its script rendered in an ink so dark it seemed like midnight water. The paper's edge whispered against his calloused thumb as Steam shut his eyes—just one heartbeat's worth of darkness—searching for whatever courage might still reside within him.   When he opened his eyes, ready to face what might, he was alone again.   Gone. Not a trace of the stranger lingered: no footprints, no vapor, no imprint in the fabric of the air, only a violet crescent fading above the marble slab almost as if the box, too, had never been there at all.       He stood holding her breath a second longer, wondering if the thin air up here in the clouds had finally caught up to him, trying to remember as many details of the strange and intimidating confrontation. However, as the violet crescent faded from her sight, so did the memory of the strange encounter. Forgotten was the stranger and the box, the talk of names and of promises.       Only one line remained in his mind; as the thick vellum card remained in his hand:       *To You, the Named and the Nameless: The Blind Storyteller bids you join him at the Market of Melodies, Last Bell. *