Gulliver was unaccustomed to sharing his home. Sharing it with a perfect stranger was too much progress made too quickly, to be sure, but he could hardly kick Amadius out. He neither had the money to pay his debt to the Brotherhood nor the heart to subject him to their justice. No, he was resolute in trying to learn to cohabit his home with his ( Read more... )

As he scribbled as a man possessed in his notebook, Gulliver's free hand ghosted over the skin of the liquid in his basin. The visions were slow in coming but almost impossible to commit to paper. How could he know which details would matter? Therefore, he tried to record everything he forefelt. His hand was cramping terribly, his eyes tired by the ( Read more... )

The Xanthosien was angry. Gulliver neither required nor garnered an assistant funded by the Brotherhood. The consensus had agreed on sending Amadius to the workhorse; it had only been Gulliver's assurance that he would pay the portion of his patient's debt that set the vanjalists at ease. Reconciling his desire to protect Amadius with the reproach ( Read more... )

He hopped out of the carriage, wishing he'd already made vanjalist as he passed through its exhaust fumes. The masks were a status symbol, Gulliver understood, but how many vanjalists treated the sick at times like these? How many actually put the masks to use? Shielding his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his robes, he made for Guille and ( Read more... )

At sunset, the market shifted character as sure as the colors changed in the sky. The scullery maids and peasant women cleared out to make room for those that sought out the night's company or had no choice but to tolerate it. At every corner there was a table and a fleecer peddling some game of chance or another. The stalls were full of mealy ( Read more... )

Even hermits had to leave their homes on a semi-regular basis. Pulling the robe that he left draped over the front widow as a makeshift curtain, Gulliver threw it on and wrestled a bit to feed his head and arms through their respective openings. For a moment, the heat and darkness of catching his head in a sleeve made his knees knockwith ( Read more... )