“Wanderer! Im going to port Ormos today. Would you like to join me?” Nahida chirped as she cheerfully opened the curtains in the Wanderers room. He let out an audible groan, his eyes adjusting to the light.
He had been Buer’s prisoner for three months now, and his experience had been… an odd one, that’s for sure. The dendro archon had shown him to his prison cell after the Traveller had left that fateful day, a large spare room in the sanctuary of surasthana.
He assumed that she chose it because the sanctuary didn’t have any actual prison cells. She would regularly come in to talk to him, most likely to make sure he hadn’t escaped. Sometimes she would bring him stupid plants to ‘help brighten up his room’.
He thought they were stupid, yet he never let a single one die and researched the proper care for them meticulously. He had an assortment of fertilisers, watering cans and pots in his room now, and every plant was thriving.
He would never tell Nahida how much he enjoyed caring for his plants.
“Come on Wanderer, you’ve been cooped up in this room for weeks now! It’ll do you some good to get out!” Nahida lectured, pulling his clothes out of the wardrobe and throwing them up onto his shoulder.
Wanderer scowled down at her, as the action has jolted his hand causing him to draw an unwanted line on his paper. “Ah! Apologies!” She gasped in return.
“I am no mortal, Buer. I can remain in this room as much as I like without it affecting me.” He scoffed at her, trying to make the line on his paper less noticeable as he drew a design for a doll of the forest watcher he had once met in the Avidiya forest.
Nahida had once brought him some fabric and thread, commenting on the little doll from his memories. The one she had watched him recreate with a faint smile on his face when they bumped into a merchant in the streets of Sumeru.
She had asked him if he could perhaps make a doll of her too. He rolled his eyes at her, but that very same night he had worked on a small doll, and when Nahida awoke the next day she found it sitting outside her door.
Wanderer had a little collection of dolls now, of all the people he found important. They sat on the shelves with his plants, often matching with the plant they sat next to. Nahida was on the shelf with his orchids, his doll was with the doll of a sweet girl from the Akademiya, Layla, whom he had helped get books off the top shelf one time. They both had blue hair and clothes, so he kept them with his blue flowers
Then in the corner of the room he had a small maple tree, the doll of the descendant of Niwa sitting on the edge of the pot. Nahida had caught wind of his arrival in Sumeru from the Traveller and dragged Wanderer out to meet him and apologise for his sins.
The experience had been… surprisingly pleasant, with a lack of Wanderer getting stabbed, and the two had been friends ever since.
“Wanderer. You need to leave the sanctuary today. So you can either come with me to Port Ormos or join a study group at the Akademiya. I hear Madam Faruzan has decided to supervise this one~”
Wanderer groaned again. Faruzan annoyed him to the abyss and back. All her talk of being old, when compared to him she was as young as anyone else in the Akademiya.
Though he couldn’t hate her that much… there was a small doll of her sitting on his shelf as well.
Nahida has signed Wanderer up for the Akademiya after he’d started correcting researchers on the history of his homeland. Suddenly he found himself attending lectures under the name ‘hat guy’ and writing more papers than he had planned on, even being forced to join an event as the vahumana scholar.
That was another time he had bumped into the forest watcher. He had no tolerance to the desert heat, and Wanderer had given him his water. Nahida had asked him to keep an eye on people there anyway.
The Traveller of course had assumed his intentions were to poison the watcher, sceptical about everything he does.
He can’t blame them though…
“You know…” Nahida began, “I hear a certain ship that a certain samurai is on has just docked in Port Ormos~”
Wanderer sat up straight.
“You mean…” he whispered. “That’s right! Your darling Kaedehara Kazuha is in Sumeru~”
She handed him a letter from Kazuha, saying that he was going to be in Port Ormos for a week. “It arrived today!”
Wanderer snatched the letter away from her. “Don’t go through my mail!!” He hissed at her, holding the letter oh so delicately. Kazuha’s handwriting always looked so elegant, though one could tell that this one had been written on the Alcor, as his words were shaky. He had still managed to draw a maple leaf in the bottom right corner though.
Wanderer smiled gently at it, pinning it onto his wall just like he did with all the letters he had received from Kazuha. “Alright. I’ll go with you.” He whispered. Nahida jumped and clapped her hands. “Marvellous! Come on, let’s head off!” She giggled, grabbing the wanderers hand and pulling him out of the room.
He looked back one last time, at his plants, his dolls, the letters on his walls. The books on his shelves, that were mostly about gardening, the desk that was covered in his patterns for his sewing projects.
It sure was one strange prison… Perhaps he was starting to enjoy his time there.
