The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming Book One Read online

  The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming is a work of fiction. The characters, places, events, and dialogue portrayed in this book are drawn from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text Copyright © 2018 by Sienna Tristen Warecki

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Molewhale Press

  http://www.welcometoshale.com/

  First Edition

  Ebook edition ISBN: 978-1-7752427-1-0

  Cover art and interior illustrations by Haley Rose Szereszewski

  haleyroseportfolio.com

  Maps and book design by Sienna Tristen

  For Avi

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Part One: To be fallow, to be fertile

  >>

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: With all his tempting semaphorism

  >>

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  >>

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  >>

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  >>

  Part Three: Subterranea

  >>

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Acknowledgements

  Words on the Words

  Thank you to our Patrons!

  Speak of this to no one.

  Our little ones, the gods lamented, are cut from us like branches barely green. They wake on the earth and forget us, their wombs, their wishers. The shock of separation dislocates them from us, leaves them unmoored from their purpose, from the destiny they were spun for; they feel us no longer, and we all ache from the absence.

  If only they could take comfort in the land, spoke Innos the Orderly. They would find peace in the patient cradling of the ground beneath their feet, pull strength from its solidity, find us in their sense of the familiar. But they wander and forget the shape of their lands. They lose themselves and are unable to appease the craving for a place to belong.

  If only they could seek solace in each other, spoke Pao the Chaotic. Surely the bright thread of community could weave a blanket fit to warm their disquiet souls, could tighten the knots that tie them to us, the knots that have come so unravelled. But they know not how to communicate with one another. They bump into one another uncomprehending. They are alone together, incapable of offering each other support or encouragement.

  If only they could carry our memory with them, said Eje the Universe, from which all the gods and their little ones had sprung. All would be well if they remembered the divinities that gave them life, if they knew to whom their hearts belonged, if they recalled their glorious birthright. But their walls of skin and bone are too thick to reach through, a lonely prison of limb too crude for the subtleties of spirit to permeate, and they drift disconnected from all.

  And as our ancestors strayed across the deserts, bewildered and bereft without understanding why, the gods wept for the pieces of themselves they had unwittingly stranded in the material realm.

  Fret not, for I have a solution, spoke Genoveffa the daughter of Pao. I shall teach the little ones to speak as we do. I shall form the word of the fires of creation, and my brother the winds shall pass his breath across it to cool it for their tongues. I shall weave music into their throats, so that they might talk to one another as the birds sing and the sand rustles and sighs. I shall bestow them each with words of their own, special words, magic talismans that will preserve the knowledge of which you have spoken. I shall gift them with names, and the names shall be their lifelines.

  Said Innos the Orderly, give them a name for the ground, for the lands they are born into, that they may return to their earthly home no matter how many times they depart.

  Said Pao the Chaotic, give them a name for their families, for the human kin they are born from, that they may ford the rivers of their lineage no matter how many generations split the delta.

  Said Eje the Universe, give them a name for us, their source and origin, the point of their departure and arrival, that they may sense the breath of the divine on their brows and know us to be watching over them no matter how many obstacles block the path to their purpose.

  Said Genoveffa, these three I shall bestow, and one more. I shall give them a name for themselves, a way to distinguish from place and parentage and godling, for it is by this distinguishment that they will grow into their reason for being. I shall give them a name for themselves, that they may feel the spark of their own unbridled individuality and know themselves important, no matter the forces which may seek to persuade them otherwise.

  Make it so, exclaimed the gods.

  With pleasure, said grinning Genoveffa. Behold: from language, life.

  And so it has been to this day.

  You don’t deserve your own name.

  That was the thought that crossed Ronoah’s mind as he sat, restless and morose, in the darkened corner of the Tris Mantarinis, nursing a glass of coffee in both hands, while all around him the air rang with unintelligible fervour.

  The coffeehouse’s patrons were all arguing about something. That was why they came here, he understood; for the arguing. The passionate young men of Ithos, congregating and debating to their hearts’ content about whatever topic caught their fancy, history or religion or revolution, politics or poetry or war. The clamour could be heard down the lane, and it was why the Tris Mantarinis was considered a rather unwholesome place to frequent. It was also probably why the coffeehouse was one of the only places in Ithos that welcomed travellers across its threshold. Having already earned a name for themselves as a disreputable establishment, they had presumably decided that a couple foreign faces couldn’t leave them any worse off than they already were, and had thereafter tossed all sense of propriety into the ocean they bordered.

  Ronoah was not from Ithos. He was not from Chiropole, the region whose western edge Ithos occupied. He wasn’t even from this continent—and he could feel it. He could sense his displacement everywhere: in the voices quarrelling and contesting in Chiropolene, a language he could barely speak; in the coffee whose texture and taste were acrid unfamiliar on his tongue; in the way the humidity made everything stick to everything else, his clothes to his skin, his glass to the table, his one thought to the next. It was a message, all of it. You are different, it told him. You do not belong here. Not a guest—an intruder.

  He took a tiny sip of the coffee. He wedged himself further into the corner, protectively. Defensively.

  It was still nagging at him, the name thing. Burrowing into his skull like a termite into its hill, scratching its way back through the well-worn hole in his head. ‘You don’t deserve your name.’ More and more often these days, it was the conclusion he was coming to, the logical, lethal endpoint to every trail of thought. It was probably because of all this—the exotic coffeehouse in the equally exotic seaport, and before that, the island nation of Tyro, with all its secrecy and suspicion of strangers. They made him keenly aware of his unbelonging, made him search for something to hold onto, and his name was the closest to home he could get.

  Between these, there had been the vast and tumultuous waters of the Shattered Sea. He had heard once, from one of the deckhands, that the ocean was the one place every human could come home to, no matter how far from home they were.

  “She is mother,” he had said. “Yes? First mother. This her womb—sometimes silver, sometimes steel, you understand? But always she accepts. She receives. No matter where you born, where you go to die.”

  And at the time Ronoah had believed him, had felt the pitch and swell of the sea as a cosmic cradle, had been hopelessly seduced by the sky wider than imagination and the water deeper than belief and the salt air encrusting his lungs, the tastes of old and new combined. Shapeshifter silver, to match his gold the desert. He’d been entranced, then. For five minutes at a time he had felt welcome.

  He had to have been. He must have.

  But from his seat in the Tris Mantarinis, with the weight of his encroaching gloom upon him, he couldn’t remember the feeling clearly. It seemed silly that he could ever have felt it at all.

  You were a stranger on the seas, a voice in his head scorned, as much as you are a stranger on this continent, on Tyro before it. Even back south, before you so much as set foot on a ship, you were out of place in Padjenne and you know it, and everybody else knew too, it was obvious. You never fit, you only fooled yourself into thinking you could. The truth is there is only one place you can rightfully cla
im to belong to—and after everything you’ve done, you might as well have tossed that right overboard with the ballast.

  He winced in recognition. That’s what it was. His haunting monachopsis, the sense that, no matter how aimless and awkward and lost he was here in Ithos, or in any place before it, he was bound to be equally so in the land of his birth.

  Ronoah Genoveffa Elizzi-denna Pilanovani: first name given, second name godling, third name parentage, fourth name place. There was once a time where it had fit him snug, where it had sat happily on the curl of his tongue, where the words had put him at ease—or at least, he was pretty sure there had been. Like his memories of the ocean, it had smudged out of recollection, obscured by the malaise that could have been his companion for the last hour or his entire life, he couldn’t tell. Now, the name only felt like mockery. Three-quarters incorrect.

  Because birthplace or no, he knew Pilanova wouldn’t have him back. And parents or no, he knew Elizze and Diadenna would no longer acknowledge him as their son. And godling or no—glorious, brilliant, dazzling godling or no—he knew, with dreadful inescapability, that he was failing her.

  Genoveffa. Eldest daughter of Pao the red moon, primal force of chaotic energy; godling of bravery, of adventure, of knowledge. Her chosen ones had a fire in their blood, a fierce intelligence paired with the drive to make something of it. They were world-shakers—and not commonly found among his people. He was the only one of his generation.

  And he was losing sight of her plan for him with every wrong choice he made. Sooner or later, he feared, she was going to give up on him completely.

  That left him with one name. And without the other three, the one meant nothing.

  He jumped as a pack of Chiropolene youth blustered by and jostled the corner of his table, their zealous voices bouncing off his ears—he caught a snippet of phrase, something about the consul? Or the king?—as they settled themselves around the table directly in front of him. Some of them looked around his age, some a little older, likely all in their twenties. They had the effortless look of adventurers, the windswept unkemptness, the raucous voices, the wide gestures with arms and hands. The thought came upon Ronoah, spitefully, that any one of them could probably be of more use to Genoveffa than he could.

  One of the men, sensing his look, nearly caught his eye but Ronoah noticed first and cast his gaze hurriedly down at his glass of coffee, holding his breath, hoping not to be spotted. He counted his heartbeats thrown hard against his sternum, one, two, three, four. He chanced a glance up. The group was engrossed in discussion, oblivious to his shrinking presence behind them. The air pulsed with the sounds of scepticism, cynicism, and while he knew it was irrational and presumptuous of him, still he felt as if the barbs of that cynicism were meant for him.

  Stupid, he thought. Egotistical. They don’t even know you.

  That was sort of the point, wasn’t it? To get to a place where nobody could hear his name and immediately cast judgement upon him for not living up to it. He had conjured up countless excuses for his behaviour when he’d obeyed the impulse that set him on the merchant’s ship from Tyro to Ithos—maybe, he’d thought, maybe Chiropole would have something for him, something he couldn’t find in Tyro, something that he could take back with him to the academy in Padjenne and redeem himself with. Maybe it would make Genoveffa happy, make her proud—the first Pilanovani in a long, long time to reach Chiropolene soil, the first Pilanovani to touch the North since pre-Shattering days. Maybes as many as the stars. But the real reason he had jumped on a ship forward instead of a ship back, he knew, was because he’d sought an escape from what felt like the consternation of nations, the trail of soft and horrible disappointment he’d left behind him all this way.

  Ithos, to escape the failure of Tyro. Tyro, to escape the failure of the academy in Padjenne, capital of Lavola. And Lavola, to escape—

  Well.

  Ronoah lifted his glass to his lips, took another sip of coffee. There was a strange astringency left in his mouth when he swallowed.

  All these places, they had always seemed so promising in theory. They had offered so much in the way of fulfillment—intellectual, emotional, spiritual. But once he finally reached them, they were almost uniformly hollow.

  The point, said the scornful voice, is not the places. The places have never been the point, have never been the problem. It’s not the places, it’s you. The things you’ve seen, the people you’ve met, they’re every bit as wondrous as you hoped they would be, but when you’re faced with something beautiful all you can ever think about is how ugly you are in comparison. When you experience something engaging or thrilling or worthwhile, you say sorry to the experience for being had by you at all, instead of by some more useful, worthy person. You suck the wonder out of everything and replace it with dread and maladresse so it’s no wonder you’ve found nothing to fulfill you on this grand adventure to nowhere of yours.

  He cringed back from his own harshness, but he could not deny the truth behind the bite. All this travel, more than any other Pilanovani in history, and he had accomplished nothing of note. The scenery changed, that was all. There was no revelation; there was no sudden, blinding understanding. The life-changing moment he so yearned for never came. There was only anticlimax, and one person to blame for it.

  And even if the places were the problem, he had run out of new ones to run to.

  The realization overcame him hot and fast and full of disconcertion; nervously, he tapped the side of his foot against the table leg. Chiropole was the furthest he could get from home before his linguistic ability failed him completely—from what little he could understand amidst the hubbub of the Tris Mantarinis, it was half-failed already—so there was nowhere else to go, no other place he could hide and make a brooding nest of his embarrassment, his shame. The small bundle of salt bars the merchants had paid for his services would run out in the blink of an eye, faster if he failed to figure out how to stretch it in the unfamiliar Chiropolene economy. Even while it lasted, it could buy him food and drink but it could not buy him shelter, for Chiropole was similar to Tyro and Lavola in at least one way: the people were leery of travellers who had not been formally introduced to contact families. Anyone who showed up without an address to point to was mistrusted on principle. It was why he had no place else to turn but this coffeehouse, tellingly silent in a house of controversy, amidst these brash and empowered men that he did not belong with in culture or character because he was not a tenth of the rebel they each appeared to be, not a shred of the revolutionary, the rulebreaker. The world-shaker.

  Oh, how he wanted to make Genoveffa proud. To show her he had not been a mistake. She had given him life and breath and salt and spark, and it was his destiny to honour that. To honour her. He had come all this way for her, had travelled across an ocean to find a way to grant her imperious request, demand of the divine: be clever. Be brave. Rebel against inertia.

  But Ronoah was not one tenth the rebel she needed him to be. Inertia had him by the throat, and its consequence was a keen pain squatting ugly at the bottom of his soul, rotting it from the roots up.

  Life is transformation, he thought. You change or you die. So change, already.

  A sound cut across the din, winnowing through his thoughts to snag his attention—laughter, loud and uncompromising. The kind of laugh that made people cease midconversation to see what was so funny. Cease Ronoah did, removed from his litany of self-admonishment by his piqued curiosity. He looked in the direction of the mirth and immediately found its maker.

  It was hard to miss him.

  Two tables down from the group of rowdy young men in front of Ronoah was a duo sitting opposite each other. One was a boy who looked younger than Ronoah, only a few years into adulthood, leaning forward over their table with a fierce expression that his smooth face hadn’t quite grown into yet. He seemed very invested in whatever point he had just made to his partner, who was the source of such uproarious delight.

  Contrast to the boy across from him, the laughing man had leaned so far back from the table that he had tipped his chair on its hind legs. He gave off an immediate impression of control; had Ronoah tried something like that, he would absolutely have toppled over onto the ground, but the man balanced effortlessly. Ronoah couldn’t see his face, turned away as he was. Even through the noise in the coffeehouse, he heard the pointed, emphatic fwap as the chair legs hit the ground again, as the man righted himself and shook his head and gestured at the boy across him. His waving hands were pale as sunbleached bone.