I ended up walking. The inn was too crowded with the barman and Wrathwrought inside; I patrolled the town in circles, making excuses to myself. Fill up my flask at the pump. Try to find someone selling salted meat. Buy some thread to stock up my stores. Get my boot re-heeled. It only took one pass to know where to go for all this so it became a matter of great concentration to make sure I had to cross back and forth as much as possible. Convincing aimless wandering takes a lot of forethought and planning. The reverse of a mush-brained general making up his master plan.
People took to staring, a favourite human pastime and one a traveller always helps bored civilians to indulge in. Travelling makes you an unknown quantity to people around you. You become intrigue. Mystery. The person they can use as a puppet for their darkest inner theatre because there's no guilt in tying you to the worst of lives. An alien, you are subhuman, so the devil-worthy evil their bored minds create is suddenly no more a blemish on their souls than the acts of an ignorant child smashing dolls' heads together in the street.
Sometimes I catch their gaze and the thoughts echo across my mind.
Has she no home? Has she no roots? Does she stumble around this world with no substance in her life, just the acts, just one task leading on to another with no real meaning and no real joy?
Perhaps she is fleeing the scene of the crime. Perhaps she killed: stood and watched them die. Perhaps she cannot escape the guilt.
No one misses her.
They look away, but the town's need for drama at another's expense is clear. Were they travellers, they would know their home is not the anomaly in that respect.
I have been a traveller for so long the tugs of human imagination on the strings that hold my marionette limbs tie neat and simple seams along the gashes in the facts.
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