Telon gave me this nice little book, and said I should try keeping a journal, but I admit I forgot about it during the travels here and now I've barely written in it at all.
I've been at the Sanctuary for more than a year now, taking classes and experiencing the life of a (small, they tell me) city. Telon set me up in a dormitory on the upper floor and gave me a city card to cover my food, travel, and whatever else I might need while in the city. There's a lot more here of everything than back home, because they get shipments in from metro trading centers all over the place. Everything within the city walls is free or at lowered cost if you have a city card for the Sanctuary, and it allows access to the outlying township as well. The township is like a rural village that gets support from the city since it's co close by.
I've been spending a lot of time outside the city walls, partially because Telon said that I should make sure to “stay in contact with the land” while I'm here. To be honest, I would have wanted to explore anyway – the land here is so different from Silver Cove. It can be a little boring, since all around the city are flat open fields, and the trails into the tall grass beyond have few features along them. There are some really amazing places around here though, like the Green Bend Park I went to on a field trip (I've been taking a class here on land-work). We saw where an entire small river flowed from the end of a huge pipe sticking out from under a bridge. Above the bridge a wetland trickled down to join the torrent, but below the water coursed through a muddy chasm twisting into the reeds. The land around the streams slopes in interesting thickets, and sometimes water even bubbles right out of the ground!
There are also the places where a watchtower looks out over the land. I went to see the local fortress- I wanted to see what warriors of a sanctuary were like. When I told them who I was, they were nice enough, and gave me a tour of the walls. The walls of the fort are nothing like the city walls, just simple improvements on the trees and branches that are already there. We did eventually climb up really high though, and got to look out across the fields.
From the tower, the fields really didn't look that jungle-like, as they are when you try to go through them on the ground. They just seemed soft and warmly waving in the breeze. Out to the east the fields are very large: there is almost nothing on that sea of grass until a dark hill rises up on the horizon. Those hills are the real thing to mention though. A dark forest-covered bluff, much like the ones from home, but much much higher, and rising over waving silky green instead of waves. A couple lines cross each other: ranges of massive hills overlapping, each one rising a little higher than the last. Then, barely in view above them all, above all of us, I saw tall mountains far far away etched in a rich light blue. Something about the way those peaks reached into the sky gave me a yearning to stand up there, on top of everything. I have such a desire now to explore those dark and intricate folds of the land. Whatever is up there must be magical, because it is so far removed from everything else, and has climbed so high from the primordial waters.
Maybe this yearning for the mountains is why I've been having such strange dreams lately. It could also just be from living in such a different place though. A couple nights ago I had a dream that I was a tree, or that I was looking at a tree, or thinking about trees...it probably doesn't matter exactly. It was more of a sensation: I dreamt of peeling bark, each layer slowly stripping away and revealing some new horizon of existence. It wasn't painful, but I kept thinking it should have been. Eventually it all kind of swirled into a reality-muddle, and as the last layer got peeled away I woke up.
I went to ask Telon about the dreams, but they told me he had gone away on some errand. He should be back in a week or two though, and I'll bring it up then. Hopefully he'll have a good story from his time on the road.
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