Iacobussaga I
The sky was a pitch black tapestry peppered with chinks of light. Streaks of red and blue tore across it connecting the dots like bolts of lightning fixed in place. It was pissing down from the Heavens— it being some kind of precipitation that not many have seen, something rain-adjacent— heavy semisolid globules of a glowing watery substance that crackled and fizzled after impact, before immediately evaporating into nothing, leaving only pain and confusion behind.
In the worst of the storm, there was an Eredi commune. The elders and administrators were deeply unsettled by the weather. Their prognostic almanacs said nothing of any sort of deluge like this, and the numens were completely baffled.
While the entire settlement was thrown off by this strange state of affairs, there was one young man who seemed unfazed. To him this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for his entire life.
The boy carefully made his way from the innermost part of the commune, a dorm or barracks of sorts, to the dining area, and then finally to the gates which served as the main point of ingress/egress. As the commune was several leagues from any major roads and well-warded, the guards were usually extremely slack, but today during this shift they were completely absent. The boy steeled his resolve and made a solemn promise to himself, “whether I live or die, I will never return here again, for surely death in freedom in preferable to life in a cage!”
He watched as the deluge of pebbles continued and focused his breathing while under an awning. After a few moments he felt comfortable with the rhythm he’d settled into, and he experimentally stuck his hand out into the storm. To his delight the globs seemed to crackle and dissapate immediately before they met his skin leaving him dry and unmolested— yet he knew that if he let himself be so moved by this delight that it broke his concentration, that would change in an instant. Surely it would only take a few moments for this downpour to pound him into dust.
After a few more moments of concentration, the boy bolted out from underneath the awning into the torrent. Everyone in the commune was too busy gawking at the sky to notice that he’d left, and by the time anyone did notice he’d be several leagues away, or so he hoped. That being said, there were more worrisome issues biting at him, first and foremost, he had no idea where the fuck he was going, or even what direction the nearest settlement was in. Worse yet, he was wadering into an unwarded area and without anyone else to count on for safety or peace of mind.
Despite his worries, the first few hours of journey were uneventful and the main feeling at the forefront of his mind was excitement. But that excitement didn’t last for long, and the reality of the situation began to sink in. Soon it had been half a day and it seemed that he hadn’t made any progress towards anywhere at all. His legs were tired and his feet hurt, his lungs felt like they were full of glass and maintaining his breath was becoming difficult. Fear grasped him, and his concerns of the distant future were overwritten with concerns of the immediate future “what am I going to eat, where am I going to sleep?” Confronted with these thoughts and exhaustion setting in, the boy decided to rest his back against a tree for a while, not only to recuperate but also to see if the storm showed any signs of abating.
Taking a break was probably the wise things to do given the circumstances, and his body was grateful for it, but the boy could not have chosen a worse location. Within an hour of rest the boy found himself confronted with a monstrosity and he was ill-prepared to deal with it. Frankly, his response was cowardly. The moment he realised the monster had taken notice of him and was approaching him, he screamed like a young child (compromising on the breath he had been going to such great effort to maintain) and was immediately pummeled by the storm rocks, which only made him scream even more.
It’s exactly as he’d sworn to himself before he decided to try and brave the elements, “life or death,” and he was prepared to meet his fate with dignity— or at least as much dignity as a cowardly young man could muster while screaming and covered in wetness. But death was not in the cards for him today. With a sudden glint of light a woman half of the boy’s size quickly dismembered the monster, took the boy’s hand, and then began to run towards a nearby clearing that he’d already passed through, but this time it looked completely different and was populated by several small buildings and a fence lining the perimetre. After being dragged into what appeared to be the woman’s house, he immediately fell to his knees and grabbed her feet, scrambling to find the words to thank her for saving his life but unable to speak through the snot and tears.
The woman smiled at him and his sense of propriety, if you could call it that. She patted his head, and then held him until he calmed down. When it finally seemed like he could breathe again she looked him square in the eyes and asked him to introduce himself.
He said “I’m called Iacobus, although my name means precious little because it was given to me in a commune.”
She said “boy, you’re the furthest thing I’ve ever seen from an Iacobus, and you’re far too young to be talking all fancy-like. From now on you’re Jacques, Jacques Cambrian.”