Talo

Birds chirped, bugs buzzed, goblins gobbed, and Talo sat. As the professor in charge of her classroom went on with his lesson, she sat and watched out the window at all of the activity she was being excluded from. She had stopped paying attention once their last assignment had been returned to them,  the professor had most likely said everything vital to the lesson and she would get the rest from her friends after school, right now she was watching out the window and nursing her empty stomach. Everything seemed to know it was time for food, the bugs got nectar, the birds got bugs, the goblins got whatever birds weren't fast enough, and all she had to look forward to was cold noodles; everything knew it was food time, everything but her teacher who kept talking and talking and there was the bell ringing that she waited for all day. She shoved her books into her bag, with the unextraordinary  paper with them, going at the same pace as all of the other students so as to not betray her haste to eat. She was nearly the last in the room by virtue of her seat placement, her  friends dawdling so they could walk to the benches and eat together, but the professor called out to her before she could safely pretend she hadn't heard him. "Miss Biali," Talo stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him, "yes, you are the Miss Biali I was talking to. Take a seat, we need to talk." She looked to her friends.
	"I'll meet you out there," Talo apologized to them.
	"It's alright, we can wait a little bit," Riaka, the sweetest one among the group, responded and they left Talo behind in the classroom.
	"Talo'ara," the professor, Mr. Sturmhun, began, "may I call you Talo?" Silence from her, implicit permission to him. "What's wrong with you, Talo?" He asked, causing her to flinch at the tone. "I see this wonderful young woman, so much potential, walk into my classroom and just sit there like a wart on an Ogre's back. How much time did you actually spend on the last assignment?"
	"uh...."
	"Be honest, Talo,  law magic can discover the truth but I want to hear it from your own lips." He said, tapping the side of his desk in a rhythmic fashion. His military uniform with blue and white cuffs confirmed his assertion, and Talo had seen the head master who wore the same garb draw the truth from an unruly student with magic so she had little cause to lie.
	"A....night?" She asked, seeing if he would accept that answer and his tapping stopped with a smile spreading across his face.
	"A night," He stood up to his full height, he had the frame of a former warrior who spent all his time reading, "and you spend all your time on your carvings, don't you?" It was rhetorical , he didn't need her to answer since she had sold him one of her carvings at the festival earlier in the year. "Talo, it befuddles me how much time you devote towards crafting, and it amazes me to think how much you would accomplish if you put that energy towards something worthwhile like magic."
	"It's worthwhile," she objected quietly,  "my dad taught me how to do it."
	"Ah, yes, you're from the flatlands, a very earthy people." He sat down once more, the smile gone. "Do you know where my name is from? I was born in highmount, once I was a lot like you Talo, I thought I would go back to Highmount and be a miner like my father, and his father. You can see I chose to aspire to something more than my lineage , I followed the path of Admistrum to learn magic and be better than I was." Talo was fidgeting uncomfortably by that point, the professor either didn't notice or didn't care. "I'm sure you have the aptitude to use magic, it doesn't even have to be blue or white, try red or green for example."
	"I.. don't know," she looked nervously to her friends who were waiting outside the room, as if they could support her somehow.
	"Look," he sighed and polished his glasses," I'm sorry, I'm sure I came on too forcefully, but that's only because I think you're wasting literally limitless potential. You can go, but I want you to think about what I told you, Talo'ara: this is the spring of your life and it's called that because the seeds you plant now will be what you live with for the rest of your life. Go, be a kid out there, doing kid things." With that, Talo did a quick bow to him and went out of the door before her could change his mind.
	Outside she repeated what had happened to her friends and they offered platitudes about how he was being a jerk, and then conversation moved onto gossip and news from among the clubs but Talo dwelled on what Professor Sturmhun had said to her. "What do you think," Raban, the leonin among the group asked her as she too was left behind by the conversation, "people are saying the goblins burned down their dormitories again." It was a prompt to some of the news, since it seemed obvious Talo wasn't paying attention.
	"Well," she thought back to what she knew of goblins, "that is sort of what goblins do, right?"
	"I'unno," Raban leaned back in the seat, "goblins party and fight, but I didin hear anything that would start a fire last night, Goblin fires are loud," she emphasized.
	"Doesn't Jorge's Pact prevent us from going to war?" Talo asked, she did not pay attention in history class but she thought Jorge, the millennial ruler who was said to return from something something eternity, laid down a magical pact across the world that something something stopped the fighting.
	"As long as the city of Asimdean stands, yeah," Raban yawned,  infecting Talo with her own drowsiness or perhaps just being the catalyst for her own realization. "Probably nothing big, just keep an eye out, yeah?"
	Asimdean, she was told it was the at the center of Asimdea as laid out by Jorge to something something, Talo wondered how a city could fall if no one could war but those thoughts were pushed out of her mind with her friends starting to disperse. "Yeah," she finally responded to Raban, "you too." She bid farewell to her friends and set off down the mesa towards her dormitory since her parents couldn't afford to set her up in apartments.
	Reaching the road that would take her down from the academy section of the city, a malicious breeze picked up and scooped the hat off her head only to deposit it on a branch overlooking the river that run through the city below. "...." She looked in horror as the cap, not that nice, and the button her mom bought her, the object of real value, dangled over the city threatening to be lost forever. "You can do this," she pumped herself up and moved towards the ledge, putting down her bookbag before reaching out and trying to grab the hat from the road. Almost there, if she had a few more inches, and she leaned on the branch as her hand creeped closer to the hat. Not quite, Talo could practically feel the fabric on the hat and she just needed to edge a little closer to rescue her beloved button and the hat it was attached to, and she put a leg on the branch. Most of her body was on the branch when she grabbed the hat finally "Yes!" She cheered and everything seemed to slow for a second as the branch gave way from under her and the hat slipped from her loose grasp as the hands of gravity pulled her down. The thoughts that went through her head were, in said order, 'Oh no, the hat' 'I'm falling' 'oh shit, I'm falling' and 'I'm going to die here!'. As her mortality and how it was about to end occurred to her, the world beneath her peeled away plummeting Talo into an inky darkness and a sudden jolt knocked her out.
	The next thing she knew, she was immobile in a bed and staring up at a rather plain ceiling. She cried out in pain when she tried to move her arm and the limb remained at her side. "Ah," She could hear a door open and plodding footsteps, "you yet live." An old and tired voice, one she couldn't place. "I was worried, that the fates crashed you into my garden as a cruel joke." a chair squeaked as weight was put on it.
	"Wher- where am I?" She mustered, breathing was painful.
	"Jukai Forest, of course," the wilting voice said.
	"I-I want to go home," she vocalized in a crying voice, not the dormitory but to the farmstead she grew up on where no one pushed you to learn magic. She wanted the smell of bread in her nostrils and a day filled with hard work being paid by supper, she wanted to see the elves from the gladelands come to trade their trinkets in the town market. Talo could feel her homesickness taking its grip on her but the pain shattered her thoughts long enough for the grip to fade
	"Home is a long way off," the crinkling voice responded, "and I can show you how to get there in time, but as it is you are lucky to be alive." She heard the chair being relieved of weight and shuffling over to her bed. A man with a face like a prune looked over the young girl, was this the old man the voice belonged to? His features did not soften at her apparent pain. "Let me teach you, and I will heal your body and show you the way home when the time is right."
	"please," she muttered, she wanted to go home and she wanted to stop hurting. With her consent, the old man placed his hands on her chest and the pain that caused was overcome by white mana knitting her broken body back together. Talo gasped for breath as he removed his hands, every part of her body feeling like she had woken up from a pleasant nap. "Where am I?" She asked still frightened, she knew enough forests around her home and Asimdean to know Jukai Forest wasn't one of them.
	A tired old chuckle came from the old man. "Kamigawa and my name is Tendo Jubei," he stepped away and motioned for her to get out of bed, "You had the good fortune to fall into another world instead of wherever you would have fallen. Come now, you have much to learn if you want to go home again." He exited the room without another word and Talo managed to stand up and follow him. For a few weeks, he assigned her chores around the house, as a means to repay him for saving her life according to the Jubei. Talo was confused when he would tell her not to rely on magic for completing tasks but never brought the fact that it would be hard for her to rely on magic because hey, no need to lower expectations.
	Weeks passed and he called Talo out to the garden, she had on garb he had told her to make from supplies given. "Talo'ara, I told you that I would show you how to go home, and I am a man of my word." He was sitting on a stone bench built on one side of the garden, holding his cane in his lap. "Stand up, and reach out to the mana in the land."
	"...." She looked at him, spreading her arms to see if that would help. All those times she hadn't told him she couldn't use magic, maybe it would have been actually helpful to tell him. "Um...." her arms shook as she tried to force herself to form connections with the ground, but to no avail."I...can't" she admitted, defeated by the instructions so simply dispensed by Jubei.
	A moment of silence followed by a smile spreading across the old man's face, a hoarse chorus of laughter, and Talo's face reddening. "I've been praising your inability it seems," another round of laughter, Talo buried her face in her sleeves, "countless mages I have known, try to breach the fabric between worlds with no success and yet here you are, accomplishing more through coincidence and luck than lifetimes of research." He was slapping his knee at that point and Talo was wishing she could drop dead in front of this one man audience. "Ah," he caught his breath, "looks like I will have to teach you more fully before I can fulfill my promise. Calm yourself, young lady, if this is the worst embarrassment you suffer then consider yourself lucky." He pushed himself up with his cane and began making his way towards the house "Come now, Talo'ara, you still have much to learn."
	It started with him teaching her how to tap into the land around her for mana and form bonds with the lands, then harnessing that mana and converting it into spells. A mouse beset by a small dragon grew to meet its foe through Talo's magic, and a devoted warrior born from white mana answered when she reached out for it. Jubei taught her of Kamigawa and its history throughout her training, weaving lessons of bushido from each story to help her in her journey. He told her of the Kami War, ignited through hubris and good intentions of an ultimately foolish man, so that she must act towards the natural world only through wisdom and humility. Through the teachings and lessons in swordplay, Talo learned the way of the samurai and how to act with honor. Among his final lessons were  the Champions, Betrayers, and Saviors of Kamigawa along with the battles they fought and their fates.
	Many years later, She entered the same room she woke up in with a tray of tea in hand. Jubei had fallen the previous week and taken ill, and the old man had rebuffed any of her attempts to heal him using her magic. "You're still here," he chuckled hoarsely as he sat up in bed," what happened to the little girl who wanted to go home?"
	She placed the tray into his lap and took her place on the chair. "You never taught me how to, and every time I asked, you went off on another Lesson." She had wanted desperately to go home many times during the years, and felt the pull of her home on her heart but remained confident that Jubei would fulfill his promise and that thought kept her at his side long enough for loyalty to replace it. "Master," a word she hardly ever used anymore, he insisted on it early on but as time went by it was a titles that fell by the wayside, "why won't you let me heal you? I know how."
	He laughed some which drew coughing, and he placed the tea he was holding back onto the tray to avoid spilling it. "I have lived a long time, and without magic I would have passed long ago. Here is my final lesson; we are beings known as planeswalkers, you and I, and there are many more like us. Once upon a time, before you were born, before the rifts threatened to consume every world, we were comparable to gods and many acted as such but we've since been cast back to being mortals as it should be." He took a sip of tea, possibly waiting to see if she would react but she didn't. "When I found you crashed in my garden, I took you in so I could pass my teachings on and so the lessons I learned from the Kami War wouldn't die with me. Now I can die without regrets, Talo'ara, and you can in time find your own students and teach them as I have taught you." Talo had steeled her expression, not wanting to look up at him for fear that she might cry if she looked upon his face.  "Speak, my student."
	"I- I don't want you to die, Jubei," she told him with a crack in her voice," I don't know what to do."
	"You will travel the planes on the multiverse, following your own heart. You are a good person, Talo'ara, that much I know of you; if you weren't I might have just mended your bones and sent you on your way." He coughed more after the laughter but Talo looked at him nervously.
	"You would have taught me how to go home right away?" A slight pain down in her heart resonated with those words.
	"Or I would have taken you to one of Kamigawa's cities and left you there, but I believe having a spark ties us each to something greater and that something brought you to me." He set the tray aside and shifted so his entire body as facing her. "Reach out to your home, Talo, conjure the memory and give it shape in your mind, then will yourself there using mana; that's how you planeswalk."
	"Thank you Master," she stood and bowed to him.
	"Not, yet." he held up his hand to her. "I have one last gift for you, a gift for graduation as it were." He coughed once more, his body wracking. "My armor and my house, while we had gone into town a month back, I had the armor fitted for you and the estate put in your name. Once I pass, they'll be yours to do with as you wish."
	"You shouldn't have," she said with a reddening face.
	"But I did, now calm yourself girl." He laughed and shifted himself back into bed. "Now go on, I want to see my one successful student in their armor, should do my old heart some good." Talo collected the  tray and its contents before leaving the room as she had for the past week. She debated whether she should don the armor as he wished, or hope that not doing it would keep him alive for a few more days; but quickly admonished herself for such thoughts. When she entered the room again, Talo was clad in the refitted and cleaned armor.  "Hah, such a butch woman." Jubei's laugh was cut short by another coughing fit. "I would have no other person carry on my legacy."
	"You never taught me how to pretty up, so you are the only one to blame for having a butch woman as a student." She replied to him, he had made fun of her enough over the years she figured she should get at least one barb in.
	"So it is, I will teach you in the morning I suppose, but now I rest. Go, my student, you still have much to learn." With that, Jubei waved her out of the room and closed his eyes, Talo closed the door behind her.
	He passed during the night and when she found him at first sunrise, Talo took it upon herself to clean him, dress him in formal garb, and wrap him clean sheets before burying him in the garden he loved so much. By mid-afternoon, Jubei was buried in the ground and Talo's eyes were red, but she had accomplished the task by hand as he would have liked. The rest of the day was spent getting everything in order, cleaning pans and the sheets Jubei had died in, donning the armor he gave her, and finally locking all of the doors to the estate. Evening had come and surrounded by the blackening forest, Talo reached out to her home and the farmstead, the tall fields of golden wheat, and she felt herself being swirled up before being deposited on a country road.
	It was early evening, everything had a golden feel to it, and Talo tried to recognize and find where her house was but the instinct that she had hoped would lead her home wasn't there anymore. She resolved to find her parents once more and approached the door of the nearest house with boldness, hoping that the inhabitants would point her in the right direction, and wrapped on the door three times. Seconds passed and Talo considered knocking again, but an older woman with a nervous look about her opened the door slightly "Yes?" Talo could feel the fear in her voice and decided it wasn't uncalled for due to her strange armor.
	"I'm sorry for disturbing you this evening, but I have traveled a long way and I am looking for the Biali household. I remember they lived in this area when I visited last." She said in her softest tone. The door opened more and she could see more of the old woman.
	"Oh, they haven't been here in many years, young lady." As the words left her mouth, Talo's face must have dropped. "They moved about a year after their daughter died going to school."
	"Do you know where they are?" Desperation entered her voice with these words, how much the world had changed since she had left.
	"Holeste," the old woman responded, "I saw them a few weeks ago during the festival." She moved to the side and motioned for Talo to come in "Come in, I'll put some tea on and you can rest."
	"I mustn't, I need to find them soon as possible."
	"Nonsense," She took the samurai by the hand and led her into the house, "you said you had traveled a long ways and they'll still be there in the morning. You'll eat and you'll rest for now, the road's dangerous for young women at night you know." The old woman left Talo behind in the main room to go fix some food and she took that time to look around at all the memories displayed in trinkets and carvings along the wall. Her eyes lit up on a carved figure, poorly done with plenty of rough edges, she had given this to Riaka before they had gone to the city to learn. Talo picked it up, turning it over in her gloved hands to find the inscription on the bottom they had done. "My daughter gave that to me, it was a memento from little Talo'ara, the Biali's daughter." A pain gripped Talo's heart as she put the figure where she found it and sat down at the table.
	"You're Riaka's mother?" She asked and took the tea she was offered.
	"You know her?"
	"I did, she was always such a sweet girl," Talo replied, putting the cup down after a sip.
	The old woman, Mrs. Poleen sat down with a heavy look in her eyes and a sad smile. "She is a good girl, it's good to find someone who remembers her before she became an Officiate." She looked back to the figurine and took a drink from her tea. "It becomes hard for people to remember how sweet she was when they see her now."
	"I'm sure she's still a good person," Talo responded, trying to cheer her old friend's mother up with a smile.
	"She is, but she isn't surrounded by good people and when you spend your days fighting, people don't see the sweet girl inside." Tears ran down her cheek as she kept speaking and Talo put her gloved hand over the old woman's hand. "I'm sorry, you didn't come to hear my tales of sadness."
	"Don't be, you invited a stranger into your house as a guest and gave her food. Nothing you've done requires apology." She said, squeezing her hand lightly.
	"I would never let a stranger into my home," Mrs. Poleen said and Talo removed her hand out of instinct and shock, "you look just like your mother, Talo'ara." At least it wasn't a trap, or at least Talo didn't get that sense. "It's been how long?"
	"Years," she said, leaning back in the chair. A deep guilt ran over her, feeling like she could have returned sooner and seen her parents all those times but some sense of duty kept her on Kamigawa too long. "I'm sorry about Riaka, if I'd been there for her..."
	"You would have been in the same position, or similar," Mrs. Poleen told her, "I still love Riaka very much, and part of that is knowing that she chose her own future." The rest of the tea time passed in silence and after it was done, Mrs. Poleen made a bed for Talo in one of the unused rooms before bidding her a good night.
	Talo sat up on the bed looking out the window, wondering what else changed while she was training with Jubei and scolding herself for thinking that going home would be as simple as showing up on her parent's doorstep and being like 'surprise, I'm not dead! I would have written but you know, being on another plane complicated that... oh there are multiple worlds out there by the way, just thought you should know!" Once many years and another life ago, she would have been home and content to work the farm and live a simple life; but now, her home was in the Jukai forest on Kamigawa and she was but a visitor to this world. She quieted her despair, knowing that no good could come from dwelling on what could have been, and drifted off to sleep.
	In the morning, Talo woke and had breakfast with Mrs. Poleen where she learned of the events of the plane since her ignition. In exchange for the hospitality, Talo told her of the planes and her time on Kamigawa, of Tendo Jubei and the lessons he taught her over the years when she was absent from Asimdea. "I don't know if I can believe that," the old woman said after Talo finished recounting her tale and the samurai stood up.
	"You don't have to, I suppose," Talo said as she gathered the plates, "but that is my story as I have seen it." She accompanied Mrs. Poleen to the kitchen where she helped clean. "Do you know how to use magic, Mrs. Poleen?" She asked off hand.
	"Oh, Riaka tried to teach me a year or two after you left, but I've never been good beyond a few tricks." She said with a slight laugh. "She wanted to teach me, but the only lands I could ever feel are the forests and plains around the farmstead." She put a plate up after drying it off. "Even then, I doubt you could call it real magic."
	"I have a spell you might try," She said and helped finish the cleaning, when that was done Talo led Mrs. Poleen into the main room much as she had done the night before. There she tried to condense the spell into its most basic form of how to convey it, she told much the same story Jubei told her, recounting the details of the beginning of the Battle of Silk. By the end of the story, she had hopefully conveyed how Mrs. Poleen might use magic to summon her from wherver she wandered and that  Talo would come quickly as possible.
	"Thank you, though I don't know if I'll ever be able to cast like you and I hope I won't need to." Mrs. Poleen said, slightly happier than she had been the previous night.
	"Then try," Talo told her, "you never accomplish anything if you don't think you can." The old woman said her words and pulled from the lands around her and Talo felt a brief tugging at her being like she did when she was walking. "I hope you won't have to use it Mrs. Poleen, but if you do: I will come." She went into the room she had slept to don her armor and set off.
	"Are you going to Holeste?" Mrs. Poleen asked, following her to the door. "They would be overjoyed to see you."
	Guilt gnawed at Talo as she thought of her parents and then her plans. "One day I'll go," she responded, "but I don't know how the world or the Council would react to the Multiverse if they found out. Please, do not tell them if you see them before I do, do not tell anyone of me or what I told you lest I put you in danger."
	"What will you being doing then?" Mrs. Poleen posed the final question of their meeting.
	"I...I need to go, there is still much I need to learn before I return home." Talo told the old woman before anchoring herself to the blind eternities, just feeling for anywhere to go but here, she was through the door and in a flurry of petals made from the aether she was gone.