The Written Works: Welcome to Euthawal

When she opened her eyes after what seemed like a decade, the sun beamed down in her eyes and her head pounded with the fury of a thousand sledgehammers. She sat up and covered her face, noticing that she was covered head to toe with who knows what, and a trashcan sat behind her, knocked over. People walking on the streets looked at her with dirty glances, and mothers refrained from letting their children look at her.

After she’d collected herself, and was less star-struck, she sat on her toes ready to stand, when a mother and her son stopped right in front of her. She looked up at the two curiously. Their clothes were very ornate, and the mother had a snooty expression on her face.

“Mommy, is she okay?” the little boy asked, giving her a concerned look.

The mother grabbed something out of her pocket and held her hand out to Jordini, and she saw bronze and silver coins inside her palms.

“Take it, you filthy beggar, and leave this town.” the mother hissed under her breath, and when Jordini refused to take it from her, she dropped the coins at her feet and sped away.

Jordini spent a long while trying to understand what just happened, but no amount of thinking could help her with that, so she grabbed the coins and stood up, counting them. She had no idea what these coins were worth, but she assumed the silver ones were worth more than the bronze ones, and there were more silvers than bronze.

She looked around the street, realizing that it’d worked. She was inside the world that she’d made; specifically in the town she’d written about. Lekinan. The name sounded intimidating, and like it would be some powerful war city with a large militia, but it was just a dock village with a booming spice infrastructure.

Soon, she was engulfed by the crowd, and people seemed to forget about her besides the ones unlucky enough to be rubbing shoulders with her. She realized that she was covered in trash, and her clothes were utterly ruined. Yet, her hat was untouched by the stains, and had stayed on her the entire time, thanks to how tight it was. That was a good thing. She couldn’t get another one, after all.

But now that she’d gotten here, there was only one thing she could do- find her main characters. They were already in this world, and probably together already. She’d done some thinking about the novel she wanted to write, so if they were together, she had about a month to find them before they’d disband to go back to their kingdoms.

“A month?” she muttered to herself.

She had been thorough with her thinking, and while she had thought of many things, she also knew that the continent of Euthawal was just larger than her home continent. She was unable to tell where they would be by now, since they were constantly traveling. She doubted if she could travel around the entire continent before they’d disband, and it was unlikely they’d meet. But still, what was the point of going here if she refused to try?
She found her way out of the crowd and looked around for an inn that she could stay at for the night. Lekinan was far from any other towns, and though it was midday in Euthawal, it would take her far longer to get to the nearest town. She might as well find a place to stay for the night.

Of course, while she’d been given a bit of money, inns were quite expensive in Euthawal. When she walked into a hotel, they either assumed she was homeless and kicked her out, or told her that she needed gold coins to stay. After the last hotel in her walking range had turned her down, and the sun was preparing to set, she decided to find somewhere else to sleep.

In Euthawal, while the homeless and beggars were reviled, they also had many places to hide during the nights. First, she tried to sneak behind a butcher’s house and sleep behind the trough, but the butcher caught her and chased her out with a sword in hand.

Next, she tried to hide inside an empty barrel left carelessly outside of a shop, but it was too small to fit her. By then, the moon sank low in the sky, and the sun had just set. She could hardly see, because the buildings were blocking the moonlight and there were no other lights.

Finally, she walked to a tree and sat beneath it. She’d hoped to stay somewhere in town because she would be slightly safer, but she had no luck today, so she leaned back and went to sleep. Goosebumps rose and fell on her skin, and the bark scratched against her shoulders, but she was tired enough that she slept anyways.

 

She woke up early in the morning. Not of her own choice, but to the sound of a mob of angry villagers. She opened her eyes to a crowd of the townsfolk, holding pitchforks. The mob was shouting at her feet, but she was just tired enough that she couldn’t hear what they were saying.

She made out a couple words, though. Mostly “beggar”, or “trashy”, or “scruffy”. She did seem like all of those things, covered in trash and sleeping under a tree on the outskirts of town. What she didn’t know was why they woke up this early in the morning to harass her.

After a while of sitting there, trying to wake up, she decided it would be better to oblige the crowd. So she stood up, grabbed her poncho and draped it over her, and left, the crowd hurling insults after her. She wished she had some sort of power to do anything about it, but she didn’t.

She disappeared into the bushes of the forest that surrounded them, now fully comforted by the trees surrounding her. She still heard the villagers crying out after her, but the rows of trees muffled their sound.

The forest was very thick, and bushy. Because there was no other way, she was forced to trudge through the thorn bushes. Her jeans had large cuts from the knee down, and the thorns were scratching on her skin.

“How do they do this?” she said to herself, pulling one leg out of the brambles only to see there was another bush ahead of her. 

She looked around to try to see a way around, but there was none. So she kept going through the bramble bushes. Every time she was able to skip around a bramble bush was a miracle, because she usually wasn’t so lucky. The thorns grazing her skin were too small to do any real damage, luckily, but it stung like anything. And she had to keep doing this all through the day. And most of the night too…