Karma, Part 3 - Sky

Ruune came awake slowly, the remnants of a quickly fading dream still clinging to her, filling her with with the distant echo of melancholy. It was a dream she had often, but one she'd already learned to let go of.

She'd also had another dream last night, a truly bizarre one at that. She'd shot a wyvern and saved a woman, who had then magically pledged her life to her or something. How ridiculous. Magic like that didn't exist.

She drew in a deep breath and blinked her eyes open.

Her bed was nice. Not the nicest she'd ever been in, not by far, but still nicer than you usually got at an inn like this. She was warm, but not too warm, the sheets were soft against her skin, and it wasn't too bright in the room. Wind whistled outside, catching on the corners of the house, on the overhang of the roof, in the nooks of the wood it was all made of. She lay there, listening to it, feeling the weight of the blanket on her.

Her nose started to itch. She lifted her arm to scratch it only for it to immediately protest the movement. That... was a bit odd. She hadn't done anything that strenuous yesterday... had she?

It had been a dream, right?

She sat up and looked around. It was already daylight -- she tried not to worry about sleeping in so late -- and clouds covered the sky, though not nearly as thick as yesterday. The room was all but empty, only a few travellers still in their beds or moving silently around to gather their things.

Very notably, the bed next to hers was empty, with no sign that anyone had slept in it. No sign of a woman injured within an inch of her life.

It was... okay. She had pushed herself a little harder than usual yesterday, so it was probably just that. She was simply a little stiff, it wasn't anything she hadn't endured a thousand times before. She would walk it off by lunchtime.

She got up, stretching to ease the ache, got washed, and headed to the common room for breakfast. It was surprisingly busy, considering the time of day. Most travellers would head out with the dawn, to maximise travel time during the short daylight hours, and this wasn't a place where people stayed for longer than a night. There was only a small farming town nearby, with no more than a hundred inhabitants. The only reason it had any customers was because it was on the route between two significant City-states.

The people in the common room must have been locals, then, a decent amount of them since the room was more crowded than it had been the night before. She did spot a couple of familiar faces from yesterday, but notably she didn't see the woman she definitely dreamed up. With her shoulder as messed up as it had been, there's no way she could have left alone.

Also because she wasn't real. She was a figment of Ruune's dream.

She turned her attention to the boy behind the counter.

"Good morning!" he said cheerily, which seemed unreasonable considering he had been working the graveyard shift and clearly hadn't just gotten here either. Was she getting old? Back when she was a teenager she could also be that cheery with that little sleep. "Breakfast?" he asked, and she gave him a tight smile.

"Yes, that would be great, thank you." She resumed her survey of the crowd as he disappeared into the kitchen, before catching the attention of the old man by the counter next to her. "Sorry, are you local? Do you know why it's so crowded here this morning?"

"Ah, good morning to you too," the man greeted. He had in front of him a huge cup of steaming coffee, which smelled absolutely heavenly. This particular local variety clearly had a lovely blend of added spices that really boosted the aroma of it. "We're here because of the storm."

"The... storm?" she asked. It was quite windy outside, sure, she could occasionally hear the howling even over the crowd, but it wasn't stormy windy, and it wasn't snowing or raining outside. It didn't even look like it would anytime soon.

"Yep, it's one of the sturdiest buildings in town, this inn is. We got good houses elsewhere too, no one thinks they're gonna come down, but this storm is apparently a doozy! So, just in case, here we are. Might as well weather it together."

"There isn't a storm though," Ruune insisted. The man laughed.

"We thought so too. But then granny," he pointed to the oldest little woman she had ever seen, knitting by the fireplace, "said this morning that there's gonna be one, so there will be one, and you can take my word for it."

That's when the boy returned with her breakfast, and that was the end of that conversation, though she did mull the words over as she ate. There were some people who had a knack for predicting the weather, but the old woman didn't really look like one. Even casual divination required quite a bit of focus and skill, which was usually cultivated only by very specific kinds of people.

But the man's belief in her made her pause. Old people had the experience to know if one of their village was trustworthy in things like this. So after she had eaten, she stood up and wandered across the room with the rest of her coffee.

"Excuse me," she started, and the old woman looked up and squinted at her. "I heard that you, um, predicted a storm coming through?"

"Sure did, sweetie," she confirmed, resuming her knitting. "And it's gonna be a big one."

Ruune's eyes followed the spin of her yarn, through the stitch, around the needle, drop the previous, through the stitch... "How do you know?" she asked, squinting.

Granny let out a good-natured chuckle. "Ooh, can't you tell? The Sky itself is singing about it."

"Sorry? The sky?"

"It's not a regular storm, this one. It's ordained." She rocked back and forth in her chair. Her knitting was getting faster. Ruune was barely keeping up. "Someone got the fates all tied up."

"The fates..." she repeated, her head spinning as she kept staring at the blur of knitting needles. Through, around, drop, through, around, drop, through, around, around, around, around--

Oh. She's dropped a stitch.

"The heavens are not happy about that one, that's for sure," the granny chuckled to herself, and Ruune hummed distantly. The mistake was several lines down, so it would be much too bothersome to go back that far to pick it back up. Even if it would compromise the integrity of the finished piece.

She smiled. "Thank you very much," she said, nodded, and walked away.

The old woman was clearly senile.

The human mind truly was a weird thing. Maybe she'd been right about a storm once or twice, and that's what the whole village now remembered. That she was the granny who predicted storms. And maybe she had been able to accurately predict weather before, but now... all this talk about fates and ordaining and the heavens being mad. She had to be senile.

So Ruune dismissed it. Every small town and village had their seemingly supernatural grandmas, or something similar anyway. In her years of experience on the road and staying in these little villages, their powers were rarely anything but imagination, their successes remembered and failures promptly forgotten. She returned to the counter to settle her bill.

"Oh," the boy said while she handed him the money, "but what about--"

"Don't worry, I'll be fine," she said. "It wouldn't be the first storm that I travel through, and it certainly won't be the last. But thank you."

"Alright then," he said, giving her a weird look, but didn't stop her as she grabbed her things and left.

***

She wasn't half an hour on her way when the wind picked up. Gusts of cold, cold air whipped past her, tousling her hair and snaking their way under her many layers. She pulled her coat tighter around her and kept walking.

Five more minutes and the first drops fell. She glanced up at the sky, the grey clouds amassing overhead heavier than they were before. Ominous. Still, it would surely be fine. Even when the water turned to sleet and then to snow and then back to water, she adamantly kept walking.

Three more minutes and the sky opened and started spitting down everything with a force she had never seen before. The wind that had been enough to make the wooden inn sing was now throwing icy water at her from what seemed like every direction, making the rain, oscillating between water and sleet and hailstones, even more freezing.

By the time she stumbled back into the inn and pushed the door firmly closed behind her she was soaked to the skin, freezing to the bone, barely feeling her extremities, and all around miserable.

"Well, look who's back."

Ruune's eyes shot up to see the old woman in front of the fireplace, still knitting, still rocking, still smiling ever so gently.

"I told you there would be a storm, dear," she said, looking a little too smug underneath the sweet old lady facade.

Ruune was about to make a rather rude comment, when a laugh next to the granny drew her attention and made her breath catch in her throat.

Because there, one arm in a sling made of Ruune's nice shawl and a huge cup in the other hand, was her, the woman, the one who should have be nothing but a dream, yet somehow wasn't...

Tikariina.

There was a fire in her eyes and a smirk on her lips, as if there was something amusing about Ruune's complete misery.

"This is what happens if you try to leave me behind," she said and raised her cup in mocking salute. "We're tied together now. You can't just go."

The thread Ruune had thought a dream suddenly became a weight again, one she had somehow not noticed all morning. Or maybe she had noticed, but done everything she could to convince herself she didn't.

"No, that's..." she muttered, before promptly sneezing.

The boy was by her side by then, and she let him lead her back into the loft to change into something that hadn't been thoroughly drenched. The rest of the day she spent sitting in the common room among the locals, in thick woollen clothes and under several blankets, in front of the fireplace, with a steaming cup of coffee, trying to shake the chill from her bones. At some point Granny finished her knitting and pressed the now finished hat onto Ruune's head. She tried not to scowl about that.

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Oookay. You all won't know this when you're reading this, but we're kind of having trouble with the names. Three parts in, and I think we've settled on a name for one of them. The other one doesn't really feel right. I quite liked writing The Trouble With Time in this respect: I had time to find the name that fit who the character turned out to be as the story progressed.

Because names are hard.

The topic for tomorrow is Filter.

~matleena