(Part I , VIII , X )
A mild and soft relaunch.
Steffan sat cross-legged in the woods and wondered where it had gone wrong. Somehow his path had become muddled and lost. He had learnt and practised for so long to be a piper, the bards of the moon of Troos, and then succeeded to a level he could not have even predicted, offered the rank of Master in the Guild, but something had swayed his hand from accepting it.
He lay back on the ground in his cloak and stared up at the blue skies to be seen through the small gaps in the tree tops. Was it all that likely that someone could be promoted so high so quickly on the basis of their Rite of Passage? Was it possible that it could have happened to him? It seemed so long ago now, as did the interview with Octavius himself, the Laird of Burgh. Octavius had wanted him to act as an investigator in the scientific capital of Edin, the other grand metropolis of their peaceful moon. Due to strained relations? And vanishing pipers?
The worrying thing was that from all he had seen the Pipers weren't so much entertainers and bards, as they were spies and agents. He had known they acted as couriers at times, and that the senior members were inevitably involved in some of the moon's politics but nothing of the Guild's second role, which was tantamount to being a secret police. Members of that secret police were being picked off, on a world where crime was almost forgotten. What was the need for a secret police on a world where crime was a rarity, a freak event? And would he get over how scary that might be?
Why was it that the Pipers did what they actually did? He would have known if he had accepted the job, but would he have gotten out again with his soul intact? He, confused, had instead said no, and then vanished. Vanishing why? To find something out, although he know not what. Tramping the roads of Troos, and heading inevitably toward the bustling and unknown to him Edin, he had thought deeply about his choices past, present and future, and he had slept a lot. The walking did him good, and although he had seen much of the countryside, no experience of any great mystery presented itself, although the omnipresent network of travelling bards was never far away. The moon was seemingly perfectly ordered, and at peace, even in the metropolis of Edin that he had finally reached a week before.
If the moon was in order, however, then how came there to be armed security forces in the village he had just left? And a dissident for them to shoot down in battle? What on Earth (it was a traditional saying for the colonists still) was there to rebel against?! The sounds of bullets ricocheted around his mentality, and the sights best left unseen hovered over his inner vision. Soon he would have to go back to his lodgings.
Getting up off the grass, Steffan wandered up and down a little as the light dimmed, and walked around the periphery of the village to the monorail stop. He palmed the sensor to tell the next train someone was waiting and stared blankly down the track. In one direction lay Burgh, capital of the arts, and in the other Edin, capital of the sciences. Between them was a demarcation, a profound one, a traditional one, and something that had persisted for centuries. Children and relatives moving from one side of the moon to the other depending on their talents, or families moving out into the countryside should they not care either way. It suddenly all seemed rather unnatural.
How did it all stay so separate?
To be carried further...
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