The Etra Anthology

154th of Gnielm, 297 EA

Freehold of Roullac, Beslan

Ceufroy knew better than most that there portals out of Roullac, ways to leave the Freehold.

People there weren’t forced to stay, not in any literal sense. They could leave the refuge of the factories, where the work was physically demanding and drainingly mundane. They could leave their positions as servants on the whims of capricious merchants. Even the most destitute could leave the delving mines, leave the deeper and deeper draws which correlated with more frequent monster attacks.

Day in, day out, those apertures between worlds filled his mind. He had devoted his young life to the knowledge of them. He worked, and worked hard, to read the leylines those portals crossed. To maintain the finicky arcanotech, wide rings of interlocking metallic scales, which held them open. To keep up with the latest developments out of Athal, when they would come to some new method that would save the process a tenth of a degree of the latent spell energy it required. All in all, to help others to pierce the aether and jump from one place to the next.

Because there were portals! And if you moved far enough along those portals you wouldn’t just leave Roullac or the demiplane but the whole cluster of Beslan! You could go anywhere! You could meet faerie pirates on the Expanse of Lasa, or run with the noble werewolves of Harlobe. In Katravok you could walk endless city streets and find a god of your own, and on Athal at the heart of the League’s vast pull you could learn literally anything you could ever want to.

It was rare, though, that people actually and truly left. Left for good, that is. The Freehold was massive, a metropolis, Ceufroy knew, and so for some there would always be spillover. Ceufroy was happy for those people, the one’s who had been pushed out of this hard place. But he also knew why it was that most people stayed, because it was the same reason that he stayed.

His family was here. So was Long Shadow, all lit up in sunken light, where he had spent so many nights carousing with his friends. The manufactories on Spiriab and Pitchild put out smoke, but also constant wonders of artifice at a pace unmatched by any in the world. The Hallior Quarter was tight knit, and you wouldn’t find a band of brothers more committed to one another than on Bofeont Street. It would take more savings than he had to make a trip out, and it would mean that he wouldn’t get to see the way that the Corrolier River flowed up the cliff face in the most impossible waterfall. When the sun hit it just right it bathed the whole garden of the Whiodlac in rainbows, and he didn’t want to miss that.

It was life, just life, in that way that life can root you to something that grew so incredibly beautiful by all the many small trials it inflicted on you and people like you.

So Ceufroy tended to the portals. He helped people to leave the Freehold, understood them as they moved on with their lives, and he stayed to be there in Roullac.