Written November 2017
“So… the mountains,” said Lona, holding the map up in front of him as he, Tessa, and Sam rode their horses down the narrow dirt path enclosed by trees. The sun was just beginning to rise, and in what little light that came through the branches above, Lona was reading the map that Owleyes had given him before they’d left. “They’re exactly where I’d expect them to be.” Tessa, on the horse ahead with the large, empty saddlebags, snorted with laughter.
“Uh, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, I thought, maybe, the mountains would be somewhere else, compared to what I know. If I was at home, the mountains would be in this exact place.”
“I-I’m confused,” Sam said behind Lona, eyes forward, inspecting the path as more of it loomed out of the trees. “Where exactly is home?”
“I think,” replied Lona, “from all of what I know so far and what's been happening, maybe I came from a sort of... alternate, or parallel, or mirror realm, and the archway was a gate between them... everything is pretty much exactly the same, in terms of... you know, the landscape. But different things are happening here. It reeks of powerful magic, but I’ve never heard of anything like it before.”
“What about Owleyes? Did he know happened?” Tessa asked, and Lona shook his head.
“No,” he said, his breath coming out in a cloud of steam in the crisp morning air. “But that’s my best guess. There are stories about it...”
“Plenty of stories,” Sam mumbled over his shoulder.
“...but I never thought it could happen.”
Going quiet, Lona continued examining the map, stroking his chin as he bounced along on the horse’s back, and then jabbing the empty spot beyond the mountains with his finger, pointing at the words scribbled in there in neat cursive writing.
“This,” he said. “What’s the... Plains of Gesh?” Sam took a moment to peer over his shoulder at the map.
“The Plains of Gesh,” he repeated. “Plains are a flat, open expanse of land--” Lona shook his head.
“No. I mean, there’s supposed to be ocean there.”
“Maybe in your little world, but not here,” Tessa sniffed without looking back.
“This is all there is,” Lona muttered, tracing a line past the western edge of the mountains with his finger, connecting with the southern coast near a chain of islands. “Everything over here... shouldn’t be there.”
“It’s there,” Sam responded slowly. “Don’t you have giants where you come from? The giants live there, and south. And beyond that is the capital. Don’t you have a capital?” Lona shook his head.
“No capital, no giants. It ends here... just an island.” Sam and Tessa were both silent, and Lona stared hard at the map, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. The land he was familiar with accounted for only a third of the map, if that. There were territories beyond the mountains, names of places he knew nothing about. The dissimilarities were only just beginning to make themselves known to him. “But why?” he mumbled to himself. “What does that mean? Why is there a whole continent here?”
“Maybe you should be asking yourself why the place you come from is just an island,” Tessa teased, but Lona went silent again in thought, unsure of whether his own question was more relevant than hers, and the more he thought about it, the more questions popped into his head. He decided it was best to put it out of his mind and focus on the journey at hand, so he folded the map back up and slid it into his satchel and took a moment to breathe in the cool morning air and take in the sights of the forest.