forum Interloper Upon My World | one on one | closed

Started May 05, 2025 by @Mojack group

tune

The answer caused a bit of familiarity to reach Kyrios’s mind. My kid. He continued to look at the photo a few more seconds. Looked young. A tad bit older than…
No.
Not going to think of them right now. Not when there’s so much already going on.
He opted not to push any further on that line of speech.

Kyrios was stiff in the seat. The sudden jolt of the truck made him glance up, eyes alerted and scanning, but it didn’t sound like they hit anything. Just bumpy roads. When Wes started up conversation again, Kyrios had relaxed again — albeit still tense like an animal ready to react.
“I was traveling, yes,” Kyrios started. “To the…” he drifted off, beginning to understand that if Wes didn’t know what Ter Kvis was, then he’d likely have no clue what the Golden Lands were either. If he wanted to know his destination, all he’d need to do was ask, but for now, Kyrios fell silent, neglecting an ending to that sentence.

Running from someone?

Quite the opposite. Kyrios let out a quiet noise that sounded somewhere between both a huff and perhaps, a chuckle. But when he spoke, there was a tinge of ambition beneath his voice, like he’d said this same thing to others, or to himself, many times.

“Running? No, I’m hunting someone. I’ll be damned if I leave this mortal plane without sending her out of it.”

But his words did cause a new idea to rear its head. He still didn’t know who had put him under the ground to begin with. It probably wasn’t Istrad…at least, not her in person. But he knew more than anyone else that she had a web of connections that stretched throughout the land. She’d probably sent someone to get rid of him.
That did make a bit of sense. But so many things were still confusing.

“That ain’t the kinda thing you just say, man,” Wes muttered under his breath, leaning into the steering wheel like it might give him some answers. He blew out a breath, the smoke from his cigarette curling toward the cracked window before the wind yanked it out into the night.

He glanced up, squinting at the green reflective sign just off the road.

Rudy’s All-Nite Grill – 5 Miles Ahead

Not far now. Good. Maybe a greasy burger would make this all easier to digest. That or heartburn would finish the job.

With the highway empty, he’d let his foot sink down on the gas without thinking. The needle hovered just shy of a hundred. Not the worst he’s done, but faster than he usually went with a passenger.

“You’re huntin’ her?” Wes repeated after. “Not just lookin’. Not tryin’ to settle a score. Like—like actually gunnin’ for her?”

His eyes flicked sideways, really studying the guy now. Kyrios didn’t flinch at the words. Just kept looking out the window, dead serious. Wes whistled low through his teeth and shook his head.

“She your ex or somethin’?” he asked, half-joking, trying to process it with something that made some sense. “You talk like a man who’s been burned, I’ll give you that.”

He hit a bump hard enough to jostle them both. “Shit—sorry,” he muttered, easing off the pedal slightly.

Wes reached up, rubbed at his eyes like that’d push the exhaustion back in. It didn’t.

“So,” he said finally, voice low. “What’d she do to you? This woman. You act like she’s the damn devil.”

He pursed his lips for a second.

“Is she?”

Is she?

Oh, Istrad.

There were a great many things Kyrios could say about her, most, if not all of them, very negative. He might owe his existence to her.
Doesn’t mean he has to like her.

Kyrios looked down, eyes straying away from the windows. What was Istrad, aside from an enemy? Ironically, the closest thing that could be considered a mother for him. But not a mother in the traditional, human way.
Gunning for her. He supposed that implied that he intended to kill her, or at the very least grievously wound her. He caught the meaning.

“She is…someone who has hurt me deeply, yes. Many years ago, she was the closest thing I had to a mother.”
Even if that relationship was far from conventional. That was something he noticed shortly after meeting Synha, and subsequently becoming more integrated into the human world.
The jolt in the road made him fall quiet, head looking up again. He hadn’t even realized how fast this thing had been moving. Or maybe he had. He’d just been looking down to avoid seeing the scenery whizz by. A part of him filed away the speed that these…trucks were capable of. Much faster than horse drawn carts or carriages. Still prone to the bumps and pits in the roads, though.

Was she a devil? There was a bit of irony in calling her one. Aeth users were called them on occasion, more common in the centuries past though from what he knew of history. Even the old Serloven word for Aeth user — Nhvil — had a similar meaning to devil, or demon. A negative connotation.

So, after a prolonged silence, aside from the noise of the truck, Kyrios responded. It was not hard for him to remember what Istrad had done. He recalled it often, if only to keep himself on track.

“She killed a woman who I loved very much.” There was more. Like his daughter. He did not mention that, preferring not to get into all the personal details with someone he had just met within the past hour. Just yet. He fell silent.

Wes didn’t say anything at first. Just kept his hands on the wheel, knuckles pale under the dash light. The cigarette burned slow between his fingers, half-forgotten.

“Mother figure, huh?” he said finally, quiet. He let the words settle between them. Not accusatory. Not sympathetic either. Just… turning them over.

“And now she’s got a target on her back.”

He exhaled smoke out the corner of his mouth, eyes narrowing at the stretch of road ahead. “Sounds like family to me.”

It wasn’t meant as a joke. Or maybe it was. But it sure as hell didn’t sound like one.

“That’s a hell of a thing to carry,” he muttered. “You got a plan now that you're here? Or just… hopin’ fate drops her in your lap?”

He didn’t look at him as he asked. Just kept watching the road. Like the headlights could guide them both out of the mess they were dragging behind them.

The diner lights were starting to show, distant but steady.

A plan.

In a way, there was one…though a major roadblock was presented, seeing as how Kyrios had ended up in a world that he did not recognize. He had been trying not too think too much about all the red flags— the fact that the twin moons were vacant from the skies, or the complete lack of Aeth in the surroundings.

Not to mention the things encountered so far… Kyrios thought, eyes flicking down to the dashboard.

But a plan— oh, he had one. Had one, though it seemed now he needed to find a way around that blockade.

“It was to hunt her down,” originally, like a wolf on the trail of prey. But for reasons already established, he was at a temporary standstill. Although Kyrios did not intend to stand still and do nothing. “I suppose I’ll just have to orient myself and figure things out later for now…” he added on in a mutter. In other words, his way of saying that he didn’t quite have any plans in mind.

The shifting of lights in the distance caught his eyes. Kyrios glanced back out the window again. More strange lights, he internally mused. After a bout of silence, Kyrios decided to raise a question.

“When you first saw me— you mentioned that I looked like a knight.” He recalled the earlier encounter in the graveyard. The one that could’ve gone in so many different ways, but ended up like this…seemed to be a relatively decent outcome, all things considered. “That is considered unusual in this land, yes? Then would my current appearance not bring attention to us, once we arrive at this…” he paused, searching for a term that seemed adequate. Unable to find one, he decided on ‘destination’. “…our destination?” He kept looking ahead as he finished his question.

Kyrios could be blunt in his way of thinking and problem solving at times. And yet, he was not entirely oblivious to things. Even to the people of his land, his appearance almost never went unnoticed in a crowd. Here, judging by how Wes had reacted upon initially seeing him…it was safe to assume that others would be similar.