Stories from a World of Fire

There’s everything to love and hate about being a messenger. It’s the best and worst occupation I can imagine, full of marvellous contradictions that give it its perpetual confusion and thrill. These contradictions are what keep me where I am: nowhere, really. Or perhaps everywhere, all at once, blown all across the country like a leaf on the wind.

Contradictions such as these can be difficult to explain, but I’ll try nonetheless, and hopefully teach you a thing or two about my world. The first one that I noticed when I joined the Royal Post Corps ten months ago was that being a messenger really pays quite well. You just can’t spend much of your hard-earned money until you retire, because until then you’re on the road five days a week, and when your two days off come around, you’ll probably be in a little village or army camp where there’s nothing much to do. Messengers eat and sleep for free at roadside post stations, anyways, so the only things to buy are underwear (the uniform is standard issue) and entertainment. Consequently, I wear extremely expensive underwear and I’ve watched incredibly posh theatre performances, but after a couple weekends of extravagance they lose their charm.

The next contradiction I noticed is how much, and how little of my country I’ve seen over the course of these ten months. I’ve been on every kilometre of each of my country’s major roads, and many of the minor ones too. I’ve seen every mountain, been up most of them, I’ve travelled to the heart of every forest and heard every waterfall’s thunder. But I’ve never stopped to breathe, to look out from the highest peak at the little world below and let the land speak to me. I’ve caught a thousand passing glances at my country’s many facets, but never locked eyes with it. I’ve never watched it pulse with life, to learn how the Earth’s blood runs through its rivers to nourish the trees that grow ever taller.

I also became aware of a sense of boredom, coupled with an undeniable excitement. Somehow they find a way to coexist, filling my mind as I travel. Perhaps they can do so because they exist on different levels: a small, temporary but acute boredom as I ride for hours on end through the same countrysides as I have hundreds of times before, and a larger, more chronic excitement as I feel the world turning. This job as a messenger gives me, more than anything else, a sense of progress. Not my own progress, of course, but someone else’s. Or the progress of the world at large. The letters I carry possess a certain energy, and I can watch as their words set the world in motion.

And I feel that I have a good vantage point, and a good angle to see how the world moves. Many of my childhood friends will be looking at the same wheat fields, the same plough and rake and shovel for the rest of their lives. I, however, can observe the affairs of kings and emperors. I am their mouths, after all. I’m in the perfect position to know what’s happening.

It’s often not so simple, though, to judge the goings-on of the world. The truth does not reveal itself all at once. At least, not for messengers like me. It comes in tiny bits and pieces, little fragments of reality. And most of the time, I’m not even blessed with pieces of a straightforward truth. It’ll always be more twisted, more convoluted than you’d have wished. Truth isn’t labelled as truth, either. Sometimes it takes the shape of a series of foggy lies that you have to sort and stitch together like pieces of a grand puzzle. I always feel as though I’m on the verge of discovery, two steps from unravelling some great mystery of the world that lies just beyond my reach, hidden behind glass too cloudy for me to see through.

A traveller, eh? You're new to Irien? Well. That's something we don't see every day. If you're not from Irien, where are you from? They say Irien's a ball, don't they? It's not like you could've just jumped onto our map from your own.

Earth? Like soil? Soil ain't a place, buddy. Unless you mean to say that you just crawled out of the ground like a plains-mole. But I'd hardly be surprised if you did. Strange things are happening here, you know.

What kind of strange things? Oh, all sorts. No, I can't really explain. I pick up a lonely wanderer's tale here and there, but you can't really expect a little man like me to spell out the mysteries of the world. You know, there was another strange bloke just like you around here the other day. Just opened up a rift in reality and stepped casually out of his little nowhere. It was the strangest thing, I tell you.

But I digress. You know, there are some people who are really good at this sort of thing. I mean, the strange sort of thing. The knowing what's going on sort of thing. Some people are real good at having their eyes and ears open. Oh, not me, no. Not me at all. I can tell what's happening one day at a time. Some folks can string together the days, too, to make era-long garlands. But not me. I'm just here to take you across the ocean.