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Written forLJ user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: How and when is New Year celebrated in this collection? Are all the worlds ‘in synch’ timewise or are they on different cycles? The story was meant to answer the question, and I think it did in some small way, but it ended up being more about Archer than the new year.
There were the walkers. Every one of them went through years of training and tests before they were permitted to get any of the tattoos that would allow them to travel to another world. It was very rare that any walker chose to travel to all of the worlds that they could. There were merchants. Often a family business, the merchants travelled to different worlds to buy and sell items, once they were verified as being legitimate by the walker’s council and registered. Both had rules. Then there were the demons. Demon wasn’t the descriptive phrase Archer would have picked, but he understood why they had been given the name. No one knew exactly how many demons there were, who they were, or where they went, and that made the walkers scared.
Archer didn’t know how many demons there were. All he knew was that he’d been born with the ability to walk through the doorways leading to other worlds without the tattoos that everyone else needed. Some did use it to do things the walkers really didn’t like – like getting involved in situations that the walkers would have just watched, instead of breaking their first commandment. He never had, but that didn’t change the way everyone would view him if they found out what he was. That was why he was always careful.
Most of the doorways had been mapped by the walkers, but there were still some hidden that the demons could use. There was one in a clearing that Archer used at least twice a year to visit his family in Gaelom. That had been the first doorway he’d ever walked through, accidentally because he’d had no idea he was a demon, and he’d found himself on Athare, the home of the walkers. He’d gone straight back through, terrified that someone might have seen him, because he’d never studied the doors before. After taking a couple of lessons he’d told his father.
It was due to his father that Archer was living on Athare alone and did only travel back to Gaelom. Tattoos were expensive, so he’d never expected to get one, and then his eighteenth birthday present had been a one way tattoo to Athare. Every year he went back to celebrate new year with his family, which was on a different day to Athare’s new year, but he never took anything back with him because he couldn’t afford another tattoo. To keep himself safe he bought anything he wanted from Gaelom off the merchants, just in case someone noticed. He couldn’t take anything to Gaelom either.
Sighing, once again wishing he could take gifts to his family, Archer stepped through the doorway. Gaelom was a very different place to Athare and smelt of magics that no one on Athare used. People knew Gaelom as the weapons world, because it was where almost all the weapons, and wielders of those weapons, came from, but that was just one small part of his home. Feeling comfortable for the first time in moons he walked in the opposite direction to the town centre, because that was where the majority of people would be, going straight to the home he wished he hadn’t left.
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.
