“Do the machines spark it within me?” Redana considers it for a moment, cradling the bread bowl in one hand. “I don’t think I can be curious. I know all their parts. I can figure out what needs to be fixed. And it’s a good workout, too. When I get it running, I’m satisfied. But I’m not curious. It’s enough to know that it’s working again, that I took something broken and made it better.”

She looks out at the swirls of red and white, biting her lips thoughtfully. The thought works through her. “That, though. Out there.” She points at a swirl that might have been the flick of a tail from some sea-dwelling beast, disappeared back into the dust. “That! I want to see what’s beyond that, what’s hiding inside it, and... I want to see it all. I never could have dreamed that this would be out here! I’d seen drawings, but the real thing is, wow! That’s what makes me curious, Master Hermetic, that’s what makes me want to walk! Is that the Saffron path? Or something connected to it?”

She turns and looks hopefully at the priest of Hermes, suspended in a moment of possibility where she’s ready to believe anything. It’s so painfully earnest, isn’t it? The hope that she might be told her wanderlust is contained within the saffron, or that there is an ancient order of knights-compass in whose steps she could follow, or that the Hermetic might tell her to follow the rainbow road of the mariner-priestess...