Beyond the Western Deep

“Can I open my eyes now, please?” Cain’s voice was on the cusp of agitation, a blindfold having been fitted over his eyes for close to an hour. He was being led around Nessa by two paws, one on each shoulder, both belonging to his best friend, Yurk. The ermehn had been pushing him through back alleys and city streets at a relatively constant velocity, with his canid companion tripping and falling over more than a few times along the way.

“Aaaany second now, bro!” Yurk had tugged Cain to a complete stop. “Just gotta get everything ready!”

“Ready?” The canid sounded incredulous. “Ready for what? What’s going on here-?” He made to pull the blindfold off, but Yurk smacked his paw away.

“Nah-ah! I said wait! You gotta wait!”

“Yeeouch!” Cain pulled his paw back and winced. “Fine, just… do whatever it is you want to do.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll just stand here. Like an idiot. A blind idiot.”

Cain heard nothing for a moment, ears perked for any hints as to what was going on. He and Yurk had not exactly been on the best of terms the last couple weeks — seeing as how Yurk had accidentally burned their home to the ground.

It had been an honest mistake, as far as arsons go. Actually, Cain hadn’t the foggiest idea how exactly Yurk had burned the place down — just that he’d left a candle burning too close to a drape, and things had gotten out of hand from there. But they used candles all the time — they weren’t a foreign concept to either of them. It could have been worse, of course: somebody could have gotten hurt. Nobody was, and the only things they lost were random objects they had collected over time. Neither of them had money or “valuables” per se, and truth be told, their home wasn’t even theirs — they had just gotten lucky, finding an abandoned top floor apartment in a tall building deep in the Blue Quarter that some old Vulpin had left to his children who never showed up to claim it. He and Yurk had discovered the place on one of their near-daily explorations of the city, always on the lookout for something new and exciting.

Cain sighed. He doubted they would find a place as nice as that again. Nothing important had been lost, just creature comforts. Some tapestries had hung on their walls – threadbare but adding that little bit of warmth and decoration. Some furniture they’d found here and there, mostly cast-offs and botched orders from woodworkers who would rather give away their work than throw it in a trash heap. There had been a blue pillow he really enjoyed, a plush thing from a small camp of gypsies out in the desert. It wasn’t too firm, wasn’t too soft. He’d paired it with a cloth blanket he’d bought off a Tamian trader, woven from fibers found within the forests of the Western Deep. It wasn’t one of a kind by any stretch, but when you didn’t have any money and didn’t like stealing more than you had to to survive, losing those simple things had been quite the disappointment.

Yurk had seen it, he knew — the look of closely-guarded pain and anger slipping across his best friend’s face. Cain had tried to mask it, to tell the ermehn everything was fine — but when he had stood there in the entryway, their home nothing but smoke and ember, Yurk had seen it. He knew it. The ermehn quickly turned overly eager — a defense mechanism when he knew he had disappointed or hurt his canid friend. He was always trying to “fix” things, always trying to cheer him up. If he’d stolen the last candied chestnut perhaps, then things would have been quickly mended in an afternoon.

But no, Yurk had burned their house down. This would take a little bit more time than that. How much time was yet to be determined.

“Any second now!” Yurk’s high-pitched voice was more than telling — he was excited about something. But what?

A holiday? A birthday?

No, there were no holidays, and neither had a birthday. Cain knew his birthday, but Yurk didn’t know his. Cain had instead picked a day an even distance into the year away from his own, so both of their birthdays were the same number of days apart. The two friends circled the year like the moon around Dunia.

“Aaaaall right!” Yurk said. “We’re just about ready!”

“C’mooon, enough already!” Cain groaned. “What’s taking so long?”

Yurk tch-ed. “Ya can’t rush a good surprise! You gotta dole it out, slow-like! Like a… like a fine wine.”

Cain couldn’t help but laugh. “You know nothing about fine wines or the doling thereof, ya lummox!”

“I know a lot about fine wines!” Yurk said, sounding curiously hurt considering the jibe. “I know everything about wine, because I studied!”

“Studied?” The canid cracked a grin. “You mean you studied a bottle as you drank it, right?”

“How many different ways can ya think of to call me a drunk?”

“At least four or five right now, maybe more if I ruminate a bit on it?”

There was the sound of a large wooden door opening, sliding along the ground. Cain’s ears perked at the sound, but he couldn’t figure out why he was hearing it.

“Right, well!” Yurk said. “Maybe you’ll change yer mind once you take that blindfold off!”

“Are you saying I can take it off now?” Cain asked, paws hesitantly raised to his head.

“You have my permission,” said Yurk. “G’wan, off with it!”

Cain wrapped his claws around the cloth, then lifted it away, blinking a bit in the mid-afternoon sun.

He was standing on the edge of Nessa, where the shanties of the Blue District met the exterior wall that guarded the city from the endless sands of the Desert of Zin. The wall, massive and several stories tall, abutted almost directly with the packed-in slums of the Blue District — to the untrained eye, it looked as if many of the shanties were built directly into the wall, and some in fact were, stretching high into the sky.

At ground level, homeless Nessians wandered about or slept on the side of the road. The shanties built overhead blocked out most of the sun, only a few errant shafts of light working their way down to the street where Cain and Yurk now stood. The smell was terrible, and guards rarely made their way this deep into the Blue Quarter, making it dangerous to be there no matter the hour.

“Uh…” Cain looked around nervously. “You marched me, blindfolded, into the worst part of town?”

“Sure,” Yurk said. “Who’s gonna rob us? Anyone who doesn’t know us can at least see we’re a couple’a vagrants down on their luck!”

That was true. Neither of them carried any valuables, and they both looked precisely like the sad sorts you’d expect to see with their necks poking out through jail cell bars. Also, most of the worst sorts in the Blue Quarter knew Cain and Yurk — they were used as go-betweens for some of the less-savory elements in Nessa, often to deliver messages or contraband (though most of the time they had no idea they were being used as such). After all these years, Cain and Yurk had at least earned respite from panhandlers and muggers. Any who tried to steal from them just found themselves disappointed.

“So, refresh my memory then,” Cain said, blinking a few more times as he spun around in place. “Tell me why we’re here, and why it was so important you blindfold me?”

“‘Cuz THIS!” Yurk said, gesturing exaggeratedly toward an open doorway. The structure was old and made of wood (not a good combination with Yurk’s history of setting fire to things), with an entryway shaped curiously like an ostrich barn. Cain had seen many of these in his travels, but never one in the Blue Quarter. Nobody in their right mind would stable ostriches in this part of the city.

“It’s a barn?” Cain stated it, though it was still somewhat framed as a question. “It’s a barn in the worst part of town. Are we going to start a farm? Are we going to start growing crops in this scummy back alley?”

“Maybe!” Yurk laughed. “Whatcha think? Cabbage?”

“Sadness,” Cain said. “We can plant a few nice rows of sadness, and maybe get some hatred in there when the crops rotate.”

“All right, ‘nuff ‘a that,” Yurk said, gesturing into the open doorway. “C’mon! Inside! Got something to show ya!”

Cain sighed and nodded, stepping forward into the structure.

It took another few moments for the canid’s eyes to adjust, but when they did, all he could do was stare, jaw agape.

“Y… Yurk…”

The interior of the small barn was not a barn at all, but a cozily decorated apartment. Wooden crates had been set up throughout and covered with threadbare sheets and blankets to emulate furniture. On the splintered, wooden walls, the old tapestries hung, singed at the edges where the fire in their old apartment had burned them. Inexplicably, at the center of the small room was a crate with a wooden plank set over it, making a small table. A blue pillow sat on the dirt floor, with a Tamian blanket folded neatly beside it.

“D’ya like it?” Yurk asked, sheepishly stepping into Cain’s view. “It took me a few weeks to get everything… you know, everything the way you like it.”

“You…  you found another…” Cain walked into the barn, stupefied. He knelt down by the pillow and picked it up, holding it like some forgotten artifact. He squished it between his claws — the give was exactly the same as the one that had burned up. Cain turned to Yurk, eyes wide. “How did you find another one? It’s… it’s exactly the same.”

The ermehn shrugged. “I, ah… I remembered how you liked it. It’s a nice pillow. Found those gypsies in the desert, an’ I just kept feelin’ around until I found one that felt right.”

“How did you afford it?” Cain asked, not entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

“Well, I’m a strappin’ young ermehn!” Yurk said, puffing out his chest. “An’ those Sand Spiders are always lookin’ fer some help! I just ran a few extra jobs for ‘em is all!”

Cain frowned — the Sand Spiders did not deal in matters of the legal persuasion.

“You broke the law repeatedly… for me?”

“Well, for yer pillow,” Yurk said. “An’ the blanket! That was the harder one to get. Had ta’ ask that polcan there… what’s his name?”

“Rook,” Cain said. He knew him well enough — a decent sort, if not a little dry in the humor department. But then, so was Cain. “You had Rook get this for you?”

“Well, no,” Yurk rolled a paw in the air. “But he told me where to get it, so I hitched a ride up to an outpost ‘bout a day north ‘a here on the Trail ‘a Zin. Sunsgrovian merchant there. Very nice stuff!”

The canid couldn’t believe it all. He sat down onto the pillow and ran a paw over the blanket. The fibers and materials were exactly the same as the one that he’d lost. “Yurk, this is obscenely kind… what I mean is…”

“You know I’d only do this for you, right?” Yurk winked, hurrying over to a small box on the other side of the small barn. “Also, got another surprise!”

“Another… hold on a second.” Cain raised a paw. “You pulling some extra jobs with the Sand Spiders is one thing… but how’d you get us a new… you know…” He waved a paw at the barn around them. “How’d you get us a new house? With no money?”

The ermehn spun around from the box, a candle, two wooden goblets and a bottle of wine in his paws. “It was condemned!”

“Condemned?” Cain raised a curious brow. “Like… too dangerous to live in?”

“Yup!” Yurk gleefully ran back to the small table and set the materials down on the wooden plank before plopping himself down opposite his canid friend. He reached into his kilt and pulled out a dagger and a piece of flint, setting the candle upright and then striking the flint to light it. He noticed Cain wince when the flame caught.

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” Yurk said. “It’s a candle.”

“That’s what I thought last time,” Cain said hesitantly. “But then you burned the place down.”

The ermehn sighed. “Look, so… I never explained what happened.”

“I didn’t want to ask.”

Yurk nodded. “I ‘preciate that.” He sat back on the floor, arms draped over his knees. “I was thinkin’, neither of us had a night off in a while, you were always workin’ in the quarry or doin’ that apprenticeship at the blacksmith’s, an’ I was always doing stuff for the Sand Spiders or, uh…”

“Or running around on top of buildings trying to get yourself killed.” Cain grinned.

“Or, right, that!” Yurk returned the grin. “So I figured, y’know, we hadn’t done anything together in a while, so…”

“So you thought we’d hang out and drink some wine?” Cain’s grin widened so much that tears began to force their way out of his eyes. “You burned down our apartment because you wanted to spend an evening hanging out?”

The ermehn grabbed the bottle of wine and pulled out the cork with his teeth, spitting it out across the table. It clonked against Cain’s nose, making him wince.

“Yup.” Yurk poured the wine into the goblets. “I’d lit the candle and forgotten the wine. Went to go get it, forgot to blow the candle out.”

Cain picked up the goblet and held it aloft. Yurk poured one for himself and did the same.

“You did all this… for me?”

“You’re my bro, bro.” Yurk smiled. “Cheers, mate.”

The two friends took a long, silent gulp of wine.

Cain looked around the barn again. “So… condemned?”

“That’s right!” Yurk nodded enthusiastically. “Great, huh?”

“What, uh… What was it condemned for?”

The ermehn slammed a paw into the floor. “Being structurally unsound!”

Cain blinked. “So… this whole place could come down around us any second?”

Yurk took another sip of wine before nodding again. “Yup! But hey!” He raised his goblet again. “We get the place to ourselves until that happens!”

The canid laughed, glancing around the place once more. “I guess I’d rather live in a deathtrap than out on the streets. And I suppose it’s better having you here to share in the misery!”