It would do well for the sake of thematic congruity to ask the reader to picture another landscape. This time it was a coast with red sand, with a sea that looked wine-dark under the night sky. A pair of femurs emerged from the mud in the strip of foreshore that the high tide did not submerge. And once more the metaphorical camera closed in on the local fauna, which mainly consisted of a consortium of hermit crabs and an insomniac seagull who was trying to decide if it was in the mood for a midnight snack.

Again came the whistle, constant and ever-closing. Again a number of creatures turned their heads up and searched the heavens for its source, until they caught a gleam that one would be forgiven for mistaking for a shooting star. As the sound got louder, the crabs scuttled away under the cliffs and retreated inside their shells. The seagull watched the gleam become bigger and brighter. Whatever it was, its flight (falling?) pattern suggested that it was not going to hit him. After a lifetime of flying you became good at these calculations.

And indeed, the unidentified flying thing eventually hit the waterline, bounced a couple of times (how a thing that big and with that shape managed to bounce on the water was beyond him), and then ploughed to a halt on the beach, leaving a deep groove in its wake. It was a massive shiny rock with a blue hue to it, or whatever colour a seagull might see it as.

When the wind rose – it was the kind of wind one would expect to experience during a storm, certainly not on a warm and clear night such as that one – the crystal started to disintegrate into dust from top to bottom, with each grain turning into speckles of light and rising into the air before disappearing for good. In its place stood a skeletal figure, clad in full armour, with a beard growing, for lack of a better word, from its mandibles.

It said, to nobody in particular: “Okay? Where the afterlife for naughty people am I?” It – no, he looked around and, after having confirmed that there was not a living sentient soul in the vicinity, he called, probably as an exercise in futility: “Girl? White?” A pause. “Big guy?”
There was no answer.
“Oh well,” he said in the end. He then walked away to a cliff.


Since nobody was on that beach to greet him, the scene now shifts to a few days later – no more than two or three – and the point of view changes from external to the living (though this is a bit stretching the definition; yet, to use just ‘moving’ carries the risk of making him sound like a machine, or an object that can move only through external factors and not on his own volition) skeleton's internal one.

Mikkel had taken to the skies as soon as he could ensure that nobody was there to watch him, and nobody was there to get in the way by pure accident either. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you never got a better view of your surroundings the higher you got. If anything, the quality tended to get considerably worse. What you did get to see was more of them, and even if was all broad strokes, one eventually learnt to discern the little twinkles above you from those below you, and understand that the former were (usually) stars, and the latter were (usually) campfires. There were lots of campfires going... Uh... Campfirewards. Yes, that would have had to do for now.

And campfirewards Mikkel did find the first signs of civilisation, which consisted of a small group of bandits who pointed shivering scimitars at him when he landed mere yards away from their base. It was not a very long fight. The conversation that followed was, however, actually much longer than he had expected it to be. It touched topics of displacement geographical and temporal, for Mikkel could not recognise, for the undeath of him, any of the toponyms mentioned that the bandits mentioned one after the other, and they had never heard of any of those that Mikkel brought up instead, which was as puzzling as it was pretty damn annoying.

After this summary of a flashback – for one needs some preliminary context for these matters – where Mikkel was at this moment was some city called Provo, a behemoth of a port that might as well have been a hut of reeds the last time he was there, if the temporal displacement theory had any credit to it. Still, he had been around for long enough to know that geography did not change that much that quickly. Not, he thought, on its own, and that raised three possible explanations: one, it must have been more time than he would dare imagine; two, some serious shit had gone down while he was absent; and three, the only place where the aforementioned thing had really gone down was his metaphorical throat, and, by inference, had never left since.

He had found the entrance of the tunnels below the city itself fairly quickly, which probably was those poor sods' only solid contribution to his situation, and plodded his way to the infamous Tonberry Colosseum, where he bought a ticket with some of the money he got from mugging a man who was guarding one of the beach resorts nearby. Mikkel had set himself three objectives: the first was to find a place where he could set base, the second was to figure out what the hell happened to him (and also where he was – technically the bandits had already answered that, but it didn't really help), and then decide what to do from now on, in no particular order.

So unparticular, in fact, that this visit might as well been part of step two: for starters, there were Tonberries in there. He had been travelling with one until, as far as he was concerned, quite recently, so maybe there was a connection there – also he didn't really hear of any Goblin Colosseum or Dog Colosseum or even Himself Colosseum, so that was as good a place to start as any. He looked at the number on his ticket and walked thet terrace looking for his seat, found it, raised the ticket again and stared into the empty space ahead of him for around five seconds, which was about as much time as he felt he needed for any kind of self-reflection.

“Ah, what am I even doing?” From up there, Mikkel could see almost the whole stadium. Contrary to most dwarfs, Mikkel rather enjoyed the high ground enough that he didn't feel the need for the ‘ground’ half – more often than not, he rejected it. But at a Colosseum, this just meant a bad seat. And he'd bought the ticket. With money. Which he stole, but that was only a partial consolation. He pocketed the small piece of yellow paper and made his way down until he spotted a group of Tonberries confabulate with some person who, if anything, did not look like a Tonberry, as they stood next to the gate from which the fighters were going to make their entrance.

Mikkel hopped over the guardrail with a lithe movement that he dared people to expect out of a fully armoured and highly senior citizen, and scanned each creature through eyeless sockets. None of their reactions were indicative of any of them being the one Tonberry he did know, which was to say that any of them could have been, well, them. Or that was what somebody who thought all Tonberries looked pretty much the same would have thought. Mind you, that somebody wouldn't be wrong, but after that much time spent together you eventually learnt to recognise at least your Tonberry in any crowd whether you liked it or not.

“Oh, for intercourse's sake, he groaned, which was not an easy feat when you had to simulate having vocal cords with pretty much nothing but wind magic and just a little bit of creativity. “You didn't happen to see a Tonberry who is like... different from the lot of you but for the undeath of me I couldn't tell you how, quiet bloke, actually not even a bloke nor for that matter a lass, and also very single-minded? No? I thought so.”
He turned to what he was going to call a hume until proven otherwise.
“'sup? Say, if I say ‘Ronka’, does that ring any bells for you? I'm new around these parts, in case you didn't catch that already somehow.”