“And there they all went,
That glorious three;
Upon their mission,
A student to see.

But what in Kyosem,
For them did await,
Were other meetings
Set forth there by fate!”

- Excerpt from the “The Ballad of Jysalef” as Written by Gulosc the Bard

Chapter 10: “Named After Milk”

With a mandate handed down to him straight from the mouth of the most renowned sage that Corsinthia had ever known, Jysalef wasted no time in beginning his trek with Terus and Latte towards the city of Kyosem. Although it is true to say that Jysalef definitely questioned the accuracy of the conclusions that the Tallus Osmaard had drawn from the words of his divinely granted vision, the former soldier would have marched boldly into hell itself should it have been handed down to him as a mandate from a man as important as the one he had just had the honor of speaking with. That the person he had just been lectured by had not exactly been of a polite nature towards him did not factor into this at all, one who correctly knew his place would not dream of going against commands – no matter how venomously they had been issued – from so great a superior.

As the trio stepped past the edges of the little town of Elpsiod, to one side of their way could be seen the abandoned mines that had once seen this run down place flourish spectacularly during the days when the religious feud with Skrande was still in full swing. To keep the mighty armies of Corsinthia properly equipped, such that they could continue to constantly push into the lands of the enemy with great prejudice, there was a time when the miners of Elpsiod toiled here day and night to retrieve the ores necessary to construct all sorts of instruments of war. But today, when the coffers of the capital had been tapped dry by the never ending waltz of the very same conflict that had once made the mine of Elpsiod a place of constant bustle, not a single person could be seen walking around this abandoned former place of industry as no longer where there orders to fill from customers with adequate coin.

With all that had transpired back at the house that now served as an orphanage – either as a result of the greater meaning and implications of what was said, or perhaps a side effect of the way in which it was delivered – there had up until now been an uncomfortable silence present in the air between the triumvirate of travelers. Thusly, Terus Kyreon, desperately grasping out for any form of respite from the tension which presently clogged the arteries of all socialization venues, at long last spoke up with a simple question that couldn’t possibly make things worse as far he could fathom, “So, Latte, what perchance is the tale behind your most unique name? I mean, I must admit, that I haven’t ever before in my travels with Master Soresh met a single person that was named after milk.”

Immediately, upon hearing these words issue forth from Jysalef’s student, Latte laughed nervously as she cast her vision downwards towards the dirt road beneath their feet. “Ah, yes, about that… You see, when Master Via first discovered me he was still living at his family’s estate in Dulsnik, and I had – in my desperation driven clumsiness – alerted him to my having snuck into his house when I spilled an entire cask of milk all over myself.”

“That would indeed explain,” began Terus, upon receiving Latte’s explanation regarding the matter of the peculiarity of her nomenclature, “why Master Via asked you to not spill any milk on yourself last night, should we have found that we were presently still hungry, when he unwillingly arose from his sleep to let us all in.”

“I swear that I haven’t done that again ever since!” blurted out Latte defensively in response to Terus’s moment of realization as to why things had been stated the previous night. Then, after a painful pause wherein her eyes glanced nervously about, she then sighed before releasing a saddened addendum, “Well, almost never again since that day.”

It was then that Jysalef suddenly broke out of his cogitations upon the matter of how reckless Miran Via’s protégé must be to jump so easily to outlandish conclusions like the one wherein he was the ‘Great Corsinthian Vagrant Swordsman’, “Wait, how could it be that you were first found by Master Via in Dulsnik, the very capital of the Corsinthian Kingdom? Although I am greatly surprised to see the former underlings of the accursed Death Hawk successfully journey all the way out here to Elpsiod, just to avenge their deceased leader, it completely befuddles my faculties that you could have back then so simply walked all the way inwards through Corsinthia to the Via Family Estate itself.”

“I’m very sorry, Sir,” apologetically stated the pink haired girl as a result of the swordsman’s musings, “But I honestly do not remember much of anything at all that transpired in the days before I was discovered by Master Via.”

“Well,” responded the former Corsinthian soldier in the matter-of-fact tone befitting one who has come to accept that something – in this particular case: the acquisition of trivial knowledge - simply can not be achieved, “I guess that at this point it doesn’t really matter anymore how it came to pass, as the likelihood of ever recovering the answers to that particular mystery have probably been ravaged utterly by the passage of time.”

And so, with the proverbial ice now broken, the trio continued to converse while they put ever more distance between themselves and Elpsiod; all the while trekking forth towards the city of Kyosem, where the sage Miran Via’s student Tallus Osmaard was said to be actively seeking to speak with one Jysalef Soresh.