Entering Tarask

17th of Adun, year 991

Desert east of Blackstone

The afternoon weather in the desert was still scorching hot although it was starting to cool down a little as the sun hovered slightly above the horizon.

To conserve energy, Blink walked in a plodding manner. He needed a quick nap but there was nothing but sand all around. He ran non-stop from dawn to early morning before eating a late breakfast.

For the first time in the journey, too, he had not drank brewed coffee at the usual hour.

While eating breakfast, several youths around his age who were coming from the opposite direction greeted him and asked for some food and water. Upon finding out that they were part of the group that went after the Blackstone murder suspect, Blink got all the information he could out of them regarding their pursuit of Jormil. He did not tell them that he was paid to hunt down Jormil, of course.

It was close to sundown when Blink reached the trail marker which indicated directions to three places. One was pointed to the north to a city called Fleur. The second one pointed to the northeast to Taraskonia, the capital of Tarask. The last one pointed to a town in the east called Bellena.

Blink decided to head straight to the capitol city of Taraskonia. It was, after all, his primary objective at the moment to confront King Lopondil regarding the planned invasion of Ragha. Besides this, Blink was more confident of finding more clues regarding the whereabouts of Jormil if he were to start his search there.

But just as he was about to take the path going northeast, Blink heard a buzzing sound in his head. It came from the spot in his forehead where the "fiery teardrop" burrowed inside his head.

Blink thought the desert heat must have been playing tricks on his mind, so he shook it off and proceeded northeast. The buzzing inside his head came back once more, this time with greater intensity. Whatever was creating the buzzing noise seemed to be nagging at him.

It was a very weird experience for Blink.

–"I must be out of my mind. The worst part about it is that I seem to get weak in the knees whenever I hear that sharp buzzing noise." –

Blink shook off the feeling from his knees. He took a deep breath before venturing once more to head northeast.

Once again he got an intense attack of sharp buzzing noise inside his head that turned his knees to jelly. Blink was sent kneeling on the dust while clutching his temples as an intense headache battered him almost senseless.

–"You don't want me to head this way?" –

The source of the buzzing noise gave a single "Ding!" in reply.

–"Should I head north then?" –

The question received a series of sharp buzzing sounds that gave Blink a headache.

"You want me to head east then?" said Blink out loud.

He received a single "Ding!" which Blink had come to understand as an affirmative reply.

He tried to get smart with the source of the buzzing noise.

"You want me to head east?"

Ding!

"Are you sure it's not north?"

Buzzing noise.

"Okay let's head northeast then!"

Intense buzzing noise. And a few more as if to warn him not to try to confuse the issue.

"Alright, I get it! Geez, so overbearing!" Blink couldn't believe his bad luck. A buzzing noise inside his head was taking control of him.

– "I've officially gone insane. All that desert heat got inside my head, and now I'm talking to a buzzing noise that's taken me over. I knew I should have charged Zelk more." –

Although he grumbled all the way, Blink followed the path northeast. If anybody stumbled onto him, he would have been thought as a highly-disturbed person who's complaining to a ghost or perhaps an imaginary friend. They'd surely say he took too much heat to the head.

As soon as the sun had set, Blink started running. Pissed off as he was at being forced to head east when he wanted to go northeast, he ran a punishing pace for a full hour before stopping for a barbeque.

After dinner, he trained in magic until his mana was exhausted. He sat cross-legged and practiced the meditation technique he had learned from the journal of the old man by the river.

When his soul was full of mana again, Blink got back to running at a sustained pace. Every hour he would stop running and walked at a leisurely pace. Then, when his stamina had recovered, he would run a hard but sustained pace once more.

Before dawn arrived, Blink had officially left Ragha and entered Tarask through the town of Bellena.

He knocked on the door of the first inn he found, but whoever was in charge of the place seemed to be either deaf, a moron or a jerk. Blink had been knocking for over thirty minutes, but nobody came out to check on him.

Tired and lacking sleep from traveling a vast desert, Blink fell asleep leaning against the door of the inn.