[h1]Nouveillie Machauex[/h1]
[h2]Claimoinx[/h2]
[h3]Chateau d'Bagouyne[/h3]

	“I had the rumors confirmed to me by a flier.” an old unicorn said, reclined on a long velvet couch under the shade of an orange tree. The smell of fermenting citrus high in the humid summer air. Canopies had been erected in the grove to expand the shaded area except for under the wide crowns of the old trees that made up the orchards of the Bagouyne family estate. Servants in finery stood with fans and casks of drink at the ready as the elder statesmen of the state of Machauex talked.

	“He had come quickly from the island and spook hurriedly and excitedly about the opening of your ancient portal. He said that the air crackled with an unfamiliar energy.” the old horse continued to say. He was stately as he was old. His silver white mane fell long and lose from his neck and head and even appeared to fall about his face human like as he spoke. His red coat, now graying was taking on a mangy texture, neck and shoulders rimming with sweat under the weight of a heavy coat. Despite the heat, he appeared to only shiver. He was the Duc d'Purgoin, Yeiux Rouges, chief of state of Machauex, the Duke of State. “It's been a long time that it was said the day of return would come, and it seems it has. That gate is open.” he spoke in a low voice. A light breeze blew through the grove and the rustling branches let some dappled sunlight hit his face. His eyes, light blue blinked back against the sharp rolling of the light.

	“And the whole of parlement has no doubt been called?” asked Baron Clarion.

	“The first have no doubt already received their emergency summons. If they weren't already in the city already. My stallion has already told me that the Sieurs of the Island have already taken of themselves to come early. While they're on their way, we do have to set the agenda. They're not going to wait I presume.”

	“I'd imagine security is going to be the first concern they'll have. If the ancestors stepped through that gate to here, there is no imagining what or who else might come through.” Clarion said dryly.

	“More than that: I heard that already a peasant youth wandered through the portal the night it opened. No one has heard or seen of him sense. The common men of the island are already tense over the gate. If it's not quickly secured they could try to attack it or go through it themselves to find the moron youth.”  Yeiux Rouges grumbled, “The State has already been charged for his absence to the value of five silver lievre. It's preposterous and embarrassing, Sieur d'Cain Allegmiene Brioux is going to whip it up at Parlement for sure. I want to make sure it doesn't get out of hand if you can make sure the first motion will be to establish a formal guard at the gate.”

	“I'll do better if it effects our standing: I'll order some of my personal retinue and my son take personal charge of the situation. Is there anyone there now?”

	“Barely. The local manors don't have much in arms to put towards the grounds. They'd levee a militia, but who knows if they'll just go in on their own to chase the boy down. I really want a mainland retinue.

	“And, for your offer: it's gracious. I accept the offer.”

	“I'll make the order now.” Clarion announced, and rose from his seat. His joints hurt and he winced at the pain but summoned over a young servant. “Bring us a piece of paper and a pen, we have a quick order to give.”

	“Absolutely sire.” the page said, bowing and he dashed off.

	“I ask myself if you're even going to pay the humiliation off.” Yeiux said with a dry laugh.

	“No it's not our humiliation. Leave it for Allegmiene.”

	“It's important we move fast on reeling in the incompetence of the sieurs. They are all drunk on wine and port. To think they once terrorized the mainland. But I see the best of them came to settle here. I should send some of my own.”

	“No, don't. Let them think it's a coup of responsibility. They'll be divided before they even arrive.”

	“Splendid. What do you think: should the rest of the barons of the city send out men?”

	“I would think about the calculus.”

	The page returned with a sheet of paper and the writing implements. Clarion took the board and immediately began dashing out a quick order for ten men at arms to be dispatched. “Send this to our son: we're appointing him the commander of this mission.”

	“As you wish, you're honor.” the page ran off with the order.

	“It's done. This'll manage the immediate fallout.” said Clairon, “So what say you to a drink?”

	Yeiux bowed his head, “I would be honored. Your estate has long produced the best orange brandy.”

	The baron summoned another servant, asking him to pour them both something to drink and the young man complied, moving to the kegs and pouring out a goblet of dark amber liquid. “I don't think managing simply a short shock though is why we're meeting.” Clarion started up again as the goblets were delivered. Yeiux took up his in a blue glow of magic and playfully swirled the gold cup around, “There are going to be a lot of nobles and freemen who will want to go through.”

	“Precisely,” Yeiux said, “And I do want to prevent a mass exodus of our nobility. What is to say that the gate closes on them all as soon as they go through and the realm is cut off from our very best and fortunate. We'd return to civil war. I want to see a plan made when we're all together to manage the expeditions and emigration through. I really do not know what to expect on the other side, and I doubt anyone does. They will plead that they will. All chances the sieurs will insist they do, they've stayed there for that reason.”

	“But they do not go through.” Clairon laughed.

	“Ha! They're all bastards and cowards anyways.” Yeiux laughed, taking a long drink, “They're going to petition us. I know that. They'll want immediate land claims or something. But I want it more careful. We have to know what that world is like before we do anything with it. It would be insane to proclaim for anyone who goes through with a host even five acres where ever they can find it if whatever destroyed the realm beyond just turned it all into sand. No, the mature option will be to scout it in as full a capacity we can.”

	“And what of you?” Clairon asked, referring to the Equestrian races, “Do you think your noble kin will have the same eagerness? Is that world for them?”

	Yeiux thought for a moment, holding the cup in his magic just below his mouth. For a time he seemed to have frozen. A silence filled the grove where only the sound of the wind dared announce itself in the trees. Somewhere an orange dropped. The duke of state broke the spell, downing a deep gulp from the cup. “I have thought about that all my life but could never determine an answer.” he admitted sorrowfully. “If I knew I think it would make this easier. I've considered all other possibilities but the thought that the gate would ever open was neigh mythical. A mind game as if preparing to meet Death himself and make a deal to prolong your life. I would not think I would ever in earnest summon demons.”

	“So this is the big battle before Parlement?”

	“It'd seem so. In all fortune the state will preserve! After all, are the men who live now the same as those who came through the gate?”

	[h2]Cherbourg[/h2]
	[h3]Ville-de-san-Sable[/h3]

	Striding into village the young nobleman walked with a weighted bag at his side. It had been just over a day and by now the contents of the sack had congeeled and the linen bag was stiff and tacky, the fibers sealed through with dried blood. Its contents had to packed with an amalgam of clay and tar coxed from pine trees and boiled for it had begun to putrify and rot early and carried a heavy disgusting smell. It was far less so now, only tolerable, and so long as the bag did not get wet to loosen the congealed filth that sealed it the smell now mostly stayed within the pouch. But followed by his retinue Rodri D'Aquiea walked proud with his shoulders high, confident in having finished his job.

	The peasant women who watched him from the porch of the first farm house he passed before the village eyed him with tormenting suspicion, the same as he had received when he first left the village. At their spinning wheels they spun new fibers to sew into their clothes. Their chapped and calloused hands nimbly feeding the strands of fiber into the spool as their legs kicked the spinning wheel into motion. He felt no particular guilt for being the center of their attention and he in fact adored the thought he carried the head of the mystery brigand that had tormented their community for the passed year. Their husbands, deep in the rye fields did not quiet see Rodri with the same suspicion. As they rose from their duty of culling the weeds among the crop to wipe their brow they only regarded the southern prince with disinterest amusement, he certainly wore finer traveling clothes than any of them had seen in the village proper.

	Going down the long dirt road the density of the cottages and of their fields picked up. The fields of wheat or barley or rye becoming narrower as they became deeper to reach the stream they butted against. A towering wooden mill soon dominated the sky, surrounded by a grassy common where sheep and cows grazed on the meadow that grew there. A few passerbys stopped and looked at the bag that hung from Rodri's hip, blankly inquisitive before shortly realizing something and becoming shocked and whispered low to each other below Rodri's range of hearing.

	The square at the center of the village was not much of a square as it was a dirty place, marked by where two roads met at different levels. At the middle the town center was split by a rock enforced retaining wall for where one road swept the next. At this upper level of town their tallest structure outside the mill stood, the combination of tavern and local magistrate's office. Scattered around it, like wise facing the public square were the various small shops for the local villagers and black smith. This high noon few were disposed to be in the center of town, this day out in the fields or forests to work. A handful of old men all the same sat in the shadow of the covered porch of the tavern, their muddy, wrapped feed spread out in front of them. A particularly thin looking pegasi sat in the window, foorhooves wrapped around a wooden tankard as he watched the southern prince and his entourage enter up the tavern's steps and into the warm shade of its beer bathed belly.

	With his boots sounding heavy on the straw hewn tavern floor, Rodri announced himself loudly, “Hail! I, comte-prince Rodri have returned!” he seemed to laugh at his announcement, holding out his arms as if he should be embraced with cheers. But for all his bluster he merely shook the bar mare who was so shocked by his entrance her mane shot up on end and she half dived beneath the bar itself.

	“Who the- why is the Gods' names!” she shouted, “The hell do you want you imbecile!”

	Rodri, offended stepped forward and prepared to raise his voice, but stopping himself settled, “I'm here to speak to Demiens!” he said, his voice trailing from the explosive rage he had been about to respond with. He ignored it. But he told himself he should see to this creature to be herself run out of the job for showing disrespect.

	“You break in here like you're a beggar that picked up a piece of silver and you want an audience with Demiens? Who even are you?” the bar mare scoffed.

	“I am Rodri, I have business with the man.”

	“The hell you aren't.” she scowled, “This isn't your country. You can't be coming in like that.”

	That comment drove his heat up. Flustered he stepped forward reaching for the bag at his hip. He heard something move behind him and saw that the haggard looking pegasi had shuffled from his table and was ready to set on him, “I've found the villain Demiens had a bounty on. I would like to collect!” he demanded, “So you'll step aside and let me see him bar wench.”

	The mare twisted up her face in surprise and indignation, “I work strongly nobly here, more so than you, hired sword?”

	“What do you want, proof I have it finished?”

	“Moron I want you to settle down!”

	Grabbing the bag at his belt, he tossed the head of the changeling across the room to the bar. It hit the floor with a hard thud and rolling forward picking up hay and unwrapping itself as it went. A graying ear peeked out as it came to a stop. Horrified the bar mare shot to the back screaming, “You mad man!You want to curse this entire house, this village?” her face was pale and her pupils narrowed as she pawed her hooves against the rear door and slipped into the darkened back room. Peeking out around the corner to scowl at Rodri.

	“I have performed the job and I am here to collect!”

	“The only thing you'll collect is misfortune! And besides: Demiens is not here! Get out!” she screamed horrified.

	Rodri could feel the weight of eyes on him and turned to see that now the windows of the tavern were full of faces looking in, pale in horror or darkened by the sun. Man and equine alike with long face and angry terrified expressions. Instinctively he put a hand on his sword and was ready to fight if he had to. The sickly pegasi had not given up its distance and even rooted itself.

	“My lord, we're not going to be able to fight our way out. We should just leave. Forget the coin.” Goldenblood advised. Rodri saw, like the bright flash of the sun rising out over the sea, what had transpired and the heat ran out of his veins and turned to ice.

	“I agree, we need to go.” he said flatly, his voice dry and dead. He turned once to look behind him, and headed out the door. No one stopped him, but all watched him. The pegasus followed them briefly from the village.

[h1]Gaia[/h1]
[h2]The Crossroads[/h2]

	The youth, who stood perhaps no more than four-foot-five resigned himself to hiding a distance off from the rift in a small crevice formed in the remains of a burnt out tree. All around him tall prairie grass reached for the sky and many more live trees crowded in on the plaza of what had once been a grand temple structure, or a great courtyard for a palace long gone. The youth could only speculate, and at that only so much; his vocabulary for such things being so small. But he huddled there in the tree clutching the handle of his long bone knife between two hands so tense and tight the knuckles were bleached white. For days he hid in numerous little holes, scavenging the mushrooms and herbs he found in the area, and returning be evening to the site of the gate in hopes that someone might come through to rescue him. But none that looked familiar came to him, the magnitude of the portal was incomprehensible. It gave him vertigo when he looked up at it. Its sheer size seemingly to make it top heavy. No matter where he stood in his shadow it looked ready to tip over one way or the other. So he always camped off to its side. There he'd spend his evenings and on into night watching the first tentative explorations of foreign races and creatures come through the might portal. Some immense. Some small. He observed what seemed to be a race of winged gnomes come through, pulled in chariots by what he could best describe as salamanders. But as soon as they came they disappeared into the grass and for a full day he was terrified of going in the grass least he encounter one also out and on that evening he climbed into the branches of the trees and slept and found fruit and rainwater trapped in the knots of the wood.

	But in the day that followed the portal seemed to be silent for a time. And he bothered to work up his courage and step down from the tree, weak and smelling of shit to again investigate the ground. He reckoned by day that perhaps no one would come through, because perhaps at day everyone would be in the fields working and would not have the sense to come through. Whether they were his people or not. He figured – without much evidence to the matter – that he only had to be there in the morning or evening to watch anyone come through so he went about the strange world.

	But curiously, the world was not much alien to him as the world was at home. He had no trouble relating the things about him in this strange place to things that existed back home. It was much like the old songs about the fields of barley and streams of milk and ponds of honey. But of course, it was much unlike those songs. For once: he never found a single stream of honey, or a pond of honey. But many of the grasses he knew to be of barley and wheat, or like barley and wheat. So much so he had no little fear to dig a hole and with some management set some water collected into  makeshift bowl of leaves and rocks boil some to make as a crude mash to stave off the worst of the hunger. He could as well find berries much like those he knew at home and to eat them, and being close enough – he figured – live. There were rabbits and birds alike in the wilderness and he worked out ways that he might catch one for some meat, though he never did; but the idea was tantalizing, because here there were no lords and magistrates to tell him he could not and to flog him for poaching a sieur's game. This world was full of an abundant freedom and wealth and he was contented with that until he remembered the warmth of home and wanted to go back, and he observed the strange aliens that came through the great gate at a trickle.

	It was in one of these adventures for food that while fishing at a stream a great shadow blotted out the sun and obscured the sky and he was harried into terror when he looked up to see sailing the air a sky bound ship trailing long streamers and banners.  The sight was monstrous and froze his blood. He felt his skin go pale and death-like and he went fleeing into the brush least some unseen eye gaze on him and think he was as tasty a meal as the fish he had been spearing for in the brook. The sight of the sky-bound ship, that terrifying hawk of the clouds put the final fear of the Goddess into him and he learned that no, it did not matter what time it was: anything was coming through that gate and perhaps some men from the estate would be back to find him. And it was then that he exiled himself to the bosom of the burned tree among the buck thorns and stone-hard mushrooms clutching his knife at all times, because even going out he feared that from the sky some new great terrible eagle would snatch him in any one of its dozen talons and carry him off and he best be able to force them open by cutting a few fingers off.

	And that is what he, Emiens the Lost Youth had been up to in the old world.