With Only Two
The Depths of ReasonTraveing with only the two of them meant that they had nothing to do but to speak to one another. Or read, but Amber wasn't really that interested in books. She did take advantage of the situation to study the drawing in Jinwoo's book that depicted her sword, but from what she could tell, it was a perfect depiction. And since she couldn't read the language that the book was written in, she had to take his word for it that it was talking about a weapon created by one creator to kill another one.
She did take this time to learn more about them, seeing as she was stuck sitting beside a walking history book for hours on end. She learned that there had been nine original Ancali, though there were thought to be more from the way that the letters the nine had written to one another spoke. They came from a place called the Void, and that was where all creation went back to when it died. The Great War started because one of the Ancali wanted power over the others, wantedt o be the first among them, and it ended with all nine dead. The final one to die was the one who gave his power to a human, and from her descendants, the Norian people came to their magic.
"So you're descended from one of the creators?" she had asked hesitantly, looking at Jinwoo from the corner of her eye.
He smiled sarcastically and shook his head. "No, we aren't his descendants. The gifted his power to the woman because she helped him, not because he loved her. We Norian's are her descendants. There was nothing to do romance in the transfer of power."
Amber shrugged at that, tweking a a smile of her own. "Love rarely figures into those kind of things," she said softly.
But she learned from him, and the more she learned, the more she wondered. Was the world pre-set, with each person having a destiny to fulfill? Did the dead gods know her's, and give her the spear to carry it out? But... they were dead, killed by one another in the Great War. So how could they be answering anyone's prayers or be giving anyone help? When she asked Jinwoo if he believed in the dead gods, he took a while to respond.
"I believe in them as in, yes, they were real beings and yes, they were gods. But I don't believe that they're still around, granting wishes and answering prayers. They're dead, and the only gods now are the ones still in the void."
"So if there are more in the void, why haven't they come to Calceryn?" she asked, truly curious. If Obasindran had truly feared losing her world to another god, why had there been no gods to come try and rule this world since the deaths of the nine? Jinwoo had no answers for that, though, and that bothered Amber a little bit. He had the wealth of knowledge of some of the most educated minds in the world, and yet there were things that he didn't know.
And yet, she had to remind herself, he was a mere human. Prone to mistakes, and whining, and many other very human emotions. From all his power, it could be hard to remember what he was - just a man of twenty-six summers. "If you weren't a Magician, what would you want to be?" she asked on a whim on the fourth day that they traveled alone. He had been reading a book written in spidery handwriting, a parasol held out over the both of them so as to shade his book as he studied.
His eyes turned toward her in surprise. "What?"
Amber flashed a grin at his childish expression. "You heard me. What woudl you be if you weren't an all powerful sorcerer?"
He frowned at her use of that term: she had learned over the last few days that Magician's generaly hated to be called sorcerers. But he closed his book, after carefully marking the place, and thought about her question. "A cobbler," he finally decided with a wistful tone to his voice.
"Why?" she asked immeditately. Sitting in a shop making shoes for other people hardly seemed like the most glamorous job on the planet.
Yet Jinwoo shrugged and gave her an easy smile. "Because it's the most important job in the world: no one can do anything without a good pair of shoes." He
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