The courtyard of the Sandstitched Monastery buzzed with activity. Not a lively, purposeful sort of buzz, but more the wheezing rattle of a man trying to convince his armor to love him again. Sir Wobblethighs, retired knight of questionable distinction and confirmed hoarder of outdated titles, stood triumphantly atop a crate marked “Do Not Disturb (Contains Relics and Mild Cheddar).” One leg was hoisted heroically over a suspicious groove in the wood, giving him the posture of a man mid-reenactment of a battle he definitely exaggerated. His armor clanked and creaked with every motion, as though protesting this nonsense after years of peaceful storage.

  “Boy,” the knight declared, stabbing a gauntleted finger toward the horizon—which, by any map, compass, or local bird migration pattern, was clearly north, despite him calling it “definitely east.”

  “Today we embark on a sacred journey!”

  Derrin of Drizzle, who had already managed to get his foot wedged in a ceremonial offering bucket, grimaced and gave the knight a tired glance. “Are we... absolutely sure about the direction?”

  Wobblethighs gave a grave nod, only slightly undercut by the strap of his helmet falling over one eye. “The Cup of Minor Discomfort waits for no man. Except perhaps in queues. Or occasionally storage.”

  With the sort of poise reserved for those born without self-preservation instincts, the knight attempted to descend from the crate, lost his balance, and promptly dropped one of his gauntlets into a nearby puddle. He stared into the shallow ripples as if expecting divine counsel, then nodded solemnly. “A test of faith,” he murmured, just before slipping in after it.

  Derrin, meanwhile, was kneeling beside his travel pack, adjusting the slightly-mildewed flap where his only true companion—Morinxandar, the muffin—sat nestled in a stitched-together pocket lined with torn prayer cloth and dry lint. The muffin, as always, offered no advice. But a leaf drifted from the monastery’s sacred gum tree, landed squarely atop Morinxandar’s crusty crown, and remained there. Derrin took this as a sign. He just didn’t know of what.

  “System,” Derrin said aloud, already regretting it. “Could you please tell us where we’re going?”

  The sky flickered faintly, as if the clouds themselves were rolling their eyes. A moment later, a familiar glitch in the air whispered into his vision like a groan from the heavens:

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  > [SYSTEM NOTICE]

  > Map Unavailable.

  > Trust Your Feet. Or Someone Else’s.

  > Hint: Don’t Trust the Knight.

  Derrin blinked. “Was that sarcasm?”

  The system did not respond. But a nearby mushroom wilted slightly, and the air tasted vaguely of irony. Morinxandar, for his part, remained stoic. He did not blink, did not twitch, and did not speak—because he was a muffin—but somehow managed to radiate the weary judgment of a mentor who had already accepted failure as a lifestyle.

  Sir Wobblethighs emerged from the puddle with a triumphant cough and an impressive bouquet of pond moss clinging to his backplate. “The road shall reveal itself,” he proclaimed, dripping. “All noble quests begin with confusion and damp socks. It is tradition.”

  “It’s mold,” Derrin muttered, brushing moss off the knight’s shoulder and unhooking a lily pad from his belt. “You’re covered in mold.”

  “Ah,” the knight said proudly. “Then the journey truly begins. All greatness starts with rot. Cheese. Politics. Friendship. All built on decay and hope.”

  The monastery gates creaked shut behind them with the sort of finality normally reserved for long-haul bureaucratic mistakes. Before them stretched the stitched and meandering edges of the Plaid Wastes—somewhat picturesque if you ignored the faint smell of singed thread and the road signs that had been repainted by amateur philosophers. Within five paces, the road forked in three contradictory directions. The map, such as it was, featured a vaguely goat-shaped inkblot and the phrase “Here Be Mild Disruption.” Wobblethighs pointed confidently toward a path engulfed in brambles and the distant hum of angry bees.

  “I really think we should consult—” Derrin began.

  “Maps are for quitters and cartographers,” the knight interrupted, drawing his sword—which promptly lost its hilt and drooped like overcooked spaghetti. “We must follow instinct! And destiny! Possibly signs. But not this sign. It’s upside down.”

  Derrin adjusted the strap across his chest, the one that kept Morinxandar secure against the jostle of movement and regret. He took a deep breath, looked up at the uncertain sky, and nodded to no one in particular. He still wasn’t sure if Voherin had made a mistake, or a joke, or simply lost a bet. But the road was open. And that meant there was at least a chance he could do something right. Or at the very least, do it wrong with purpose.

  ****

  The road to the Sandstitched Monastery had been, in Calla’s words, “a marvelously expressive journey of spontaneous interpretive hardship.” In everyone else’s words—particularly those of the traumatized livestock, one curiously judgmental scarecrow, and a now-estranged family of centaurs—it was more of a traveling calamity dressed in scarves.

  Trowbin the tinker, a man whose profession involved the niche art of repairing magical corks that kept bottled curses from leaking, sat hunched at the front of the cart with the slack-jawed patience of a man who had once stared into the abyss and found it making jazz hands. Next to him, Pip the chipmunk dozed in a tiny harness Calla had fashioned from ribbon and blind optimism, twitching occasionally in a manner that suggested he was dreaming in subtitles.

  “So anyway,” Calla was saying, flinging her hands out wide enough to nearly decapitate a branch, “I said to the bardmaster, ‘Art is not confined to your archaic scales and tonal tyranny! I am art!’ Which, naturally, they misunderstood and accused me of breaking into the staff lounge again. But truly, what is locked space if not a metaphor for the repression of creative voices?”

  Trowbin responded with a grunt that might have meant agreement, indigestion, or a desperate plea for the cart to overturn. Pip twitched violently, muttering something in Chipmunkese that might’ve translated to, “Don’t eat the onions. They know too much.”

  Calla took this as approval and continued undeterred. “And then I said—and you’ll appreciate this, Trowbin—I said, ‘I will take my performance where the world needs me most!’ And wouldn’t you know it, the universe responded. I found this chipmunk, or rather he found me, and through a series of unquestionably significant cosmic signs, he delivered a message. A calling. A summons.”

  The cart, which had been bumping along a path that could best be described as “ambitiously vertical,” suddenly lurched sideways as Biscuit, the horse, executed a sneeze so powerful it might’ve registered on seismographs in adjacent realities. The cart skidded off the path, wheels bouncing, dust flying, and Calla’s ribboned hair streaming behind her like the flag of a small, very confused nation.

  They landed—miraculously upright—in front of the cracked archway of the Sandstitched Monastery. Moss clung to the walls like a stagehand refusing to quit mid-performance. The sky wheezed, the wind made a decision to wait until later, and Calla flung herself from the cart with the force of someone convinced their big moment had finally arrived.

  She posed. “I have ARRIVED!” she declared.

  A small wooden hatch on the monastery door creaked open.

  A single bloodshot eye peered out. “Appointment?”

  Calla blinked. “I… was invited. There was a scroll. A chipmunk. A calling!”

  The eye narrowed. “Ah. You’re late.”

  “I am many things,” Calla said proudly. “But never late. I arrive precisely when—”

  “They already left.”

  “What?”

  “The knight. The cleric. Maybe your questmates, probably. Left this morning. Just after the cheese cart. Can’t miss the cheese cart.”

  Calla leaned dramatically against the wall, nearly knocking over a potted plant made entirely of what looked like moss and mishaps. “Surely you can open the door. I’ve traveled far, endured hardship, and emotionally destabilized an entire caravan.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “No.”

  Calla’s hands fell to her sides. “No?”

  “Not on existential grounds,” the voice added helpfully. “We try not to open the doors for people having an identity crisis. It’s policy.”

  The hatch slammed shut with all the finality of a failed audition.

  Calla stared.

  Then slowly turned back toward the wagon, where Trowbin was already adjusting his harness with the resigned air of a man who expected precisely this ending.

  “Well,” she said cheerily, brushing off her scarf. “It seems the scene has shifted.”

  Trowbin raised an eyebrow. “This was your stop.”

  “Yes, but art is a journey,” she replied, bending down to gently unclip Pip’s harness. “And apparently, I’m still on the road.”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Catastrophe.”

  She beamed. “Oh! You remembered my title!”

  Trowbin gave a half-sigh, half-grunt that could only be described as “emotionally exhausted.” Then he clicked his tongue at Biscuit and guided the wagon away, bumping back toward the not-so-distant chaos from which they had come.

  Calla stood there a moment, hands on hips, Pip now riding atop her shoulder like a semi-retired general with PTSD.

  “Come, Pip,” she said. “We may be a solo act... but we are never without an audience. The world is watching.”

  From somewhere inside the monastery, a faint thud echoed—possibly someone facepalming. And with that, Calla Vint, self-proclaimed bard, accidental adventurer, and walking existential crisis, turned toward the Plaid Wastes with all the confidence of a woman who had just mistaken the prologue for the climax. The road, predictably, did not prepare itself.

  ****

  The fog rolled in with the slow, resigned dignity of a bureaucrat late to a meeting he never wanted to attend. It wasn’t proper fog—this being the Plaid Wastes—but rather a gently confused mist, stitched together in faint crosshatches of tartan hues and the faint odor of what might once have been garlic, or possibly hopelessness.

  Calla “Catastrophe” Vint stood in the middle of a lopsided glade, framed by twisted thistles and stooped trees that looked vaguely embarrassed to be here. The air hummed with potential. Or indigestion. It was difficult to tell. She took a breath, raised her arms like a windmill with a theater degree, and launched into her long-percolating performance piece: “The Collapse of Destiny in Twelve and a Half Sighs.” It had been gestating for years, or at least since breakfast.

  The glade watched in stunned silence as Calla pirouetted into a tree root, rebounded with grace only physics could explain, and interpreted what may have been an existential crisis through ribbon twirling and two errant shoe throws.

  And then, the creaking came.

  From the bramble-lined path behind her, a sound like a wardrobe being dragged across gravel heralded the arrival of something distinctly unprepared for interpretive art. Sir Wobblethighs, encased in armor that shifted like tectonic plates under stress, emerged from the haze, wheezing heroically. Beside him trudged Derrin of Drizzle, one eye twitching, one boot full of mud, and a small pouch bouncing on his hip where Morinxandar resided in silent, crumbly judgment.

  Calla froze mid-flail.

  “Oh!” she gasped, one foot high in the air, the other doing uncertain negotiations with the turf. “You’re here! Perfect!”

  Derrin blinked. “I—what?”

  She dropped into a bow so dramatic it insulted three art movements simultaneously. “You’ve come to bear witness! I knew the glade would speak! You,” she said, pointing at Derrin with a jangle of bracelets, “are clearly the emotional core of this next phase of my performance cycle.”

  Sir Wobblethighs, halfway into dislodging a bramble from his visor, straightened. “Is she challenging us to a duel? I can’t tell.”

  “I’m not a duel,” Calla beamed. “I’m an experience.”

  Derrin let out a long, pained sigh, the kind that tried to leave his body entirely. “Look, I don’t know who you are, or why you think this—” he gestured vaguely to the plaid fog, the performance, and perhaps the general state of their lives “—is normal, but I’m on a quest.”

  “Oh good,” she said brightly. “Then I’ll join you. All parties need a core performer.”

  “We already have a knight,” Derrin argued.

  “Two knights and no bard? Barbaric.”

  “You’re not a bard. And I am no knight.”

  “I am bard-adjacent,” she said, proudly holding up her system notice, which was mostly smeared and partially singed, copied from memory. The only readable bit read:

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  > Class: Interpretive Catastrophe – Bardic Outlier (Tier 0)

  > Status: [??]

  > System Processing…

  > Please Stand By. Or Sit Creatively.

  Pip, the chipmunk who had long since given up on reality, stared from her shoulder with the hollow eyes of someone who had seen too much and understood none of it. Sir Wobblethighs clanked forward and nodded. “I like her. She’s confusing. Confusion is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of justice.”

  “I just want to finish my quest,” Derrin muttered. “And pay my rent.”

  Morinxandar, crumbly as ever, remained impassive, though a beetle attempting to scale him slipped and tumbled off—a sign, perhaps, of divine approval. Before another word could be exchanged, the mists parted with theatrical flair (Calla bowed at them), and a small centaur-like figure emerged. Except instead of a noble equine form, this being bore the lower half of a shaggy goat and the upper half of a disgruntled librarian.

  Behind him, a handful of similar creatures stood with official-looking scrolls and very judgmental eyebrows.

  “Welcome, travelers,” the lead centaur-goat-thing said with a clipped brogue and an air of administrative dread. “Ye’ve entered the jurisdiction of the Fog-Bound Filing Herd. Travel documents, registration stubs, and any declarations of intent, if ye’d be so kind.”

  Sir Wobblethighs blinked. “Is this a trap?”

  “No, sir,” said the centaur. “This is a queue.”

  They were quickly surrounded and “politely detained” until proper documentation could be reviewed, signed, notarized, duplicated, and interpreted through dance if necessary. Which, unfortunately, it soon would be.

  ****

  The sun was somewhere behind the mildly plaid fog that clung to the ground like an indecisive wool blanket. The party—if one could call a knight who creaked, a cleric who sighed, a muffin that stared, a chipmunk on the brink of metaphysical collapse and whatever Calla was a party,—had been herded along a winding trail through the Plaid Wastes by a group of shaggy, cloven-hoofed escorts.

  Goataurs, they were called. Not quite goat, not quite anything else, and far too fond of bureaucracy for creatures whose ancestors probably once headbutted lightning for sport. Their tartan wraps shimmered faintly with woven enchantments, their beards braided with bits of bone, rune, and what might’ve once been promotional ribbons for soup.

  “Welcome tae Baa’d Tuft,” the lead goataur announced as they crested a hill and gazed upon a smattering of thatch-roofed huts clustered around a central bonfire where three elders appeared to be roasting scrolls.

  Derrin squinted. “Is that—are they burning paper?”

  “Outdated permit forms,” one of the escorts explained. “No longer valid since the New Cycle of Sand Classification.”

  The moment stretched, as they often did around government forms, and then they were ushered toward a broad wooden platform where a goat-legged figure stood in ceremonial robes stitched from expired livestock registration tags. He bore the honored title of The Forehorn of Moderation and Slightly Regrettable Decisions, though his friends called him Fergus.

  Fergus gave them the once-over with a gaze that suggested he’d already filled out three rejection slips in his head. “State yer name, purpose, and metaphysical resonance level. Keep it short. There’s a queue.”

  Derrin stepped forward, nervously shifting his satchel where Morinxandar lay quietly in crumb-encrusted stoicism. “I’m Derrin. Cleric. Sort of. I’m on a quest to retrieve the Holy Grail of Slight Inconvenience. I have a muffin, a knight, and—”

  “Knight?” Fergus interrupted, eyeing Sir Wobblethighs as he attempted to wedge his boot into a ceremonial flowerpot.

  “Sir Wobblethighs,” Derrin confirmed. “He came with the monastery. Like mildew, but louder.”

  “And her?” Fergus gestured toward Calla, who had, at some point, donned a crown made of willow branches and woven regret.

  Calla bowed with all the grace of a flamingo discovering snow. “I am Calla Vint, daughter of song, harbinger of interpretive transcendence. This is Pip. Don’t ask about him.”

  Before anyone could protest, she launched into a dance. It involved a great deal of scarf motion, two unnecessary cartwheels, and an emotional stomp meant to evoke longing but mostly resembled a beetle in a tantrum. Her finale was a dramatic collapse into a crouch, where she held out the half-chewed, scroll-stained invitation like a holy relic pulled from the jaws of fate. Or a chipmunk.

  “She’s part of the quest,” she said breathlessly. “Probably leading it.”

  Derrin rubbed his temples. “She’s not part of—”

  Fergus raised a brow. “Is she or is she not in yer party?”

  There was a silence so thick even the wind seemed to step back and give them space.

  Derrin looked at Calla, who beamed as if the world had just finally agreed to be her stage. He looked at Pip, whose thousand-yard stare suggested he was drafting the paperwork for his own soul’s transfer to a quieter dimension. Then he looked down at Morinxandar, who, despite being a muffin, seemed to have developed the ability to disapprove.

  He sighed. “Sure. Whatever.”

  The moment shimmered.

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  > [SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED]

  > Two Opposing Fate-Types Within Proximity:

  > DERRIN: Persistent Misfortune Aura [Stable]

  > CALLA: Unintentional Fortune Field [Erratic]

  > Result: Localized Luck Nullification Zone

  > Effects: Glitches. Confusion. Temporary cosmic detente.

  > Advice: Proceed With Cautious Absurdity

  Derrin blinked at the message. “Wait, what—what does that even mean?”

  Another system cough, followed by:

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  > Quest Update: “The Holy Grail of Slight Inconvenience”

  > Condition: Multiclass Compatibility Required

  > Cleric + Undefined Bard-Type = Party Detected

  > Congratulations: You have acquired your first accidental party member.

  > New Title Unlocked: “Chaotic Conjunction (Tier 0.5)”

  “I knew it,” Calla whispered with absolute certainty, eyes sparkling. “We’re a duet. The universe demands harmony.”

  “We’re a what?” Derrin croaked.

  Sir Wobblethighs clanked approvingly and adjusted his pauldrons. “Ah, nothing like the forging of a noble band. It reminds me of my fourth wedding.”

  Pip squeaked and buried himself deeper into Calla’s scarf. Morinxandar shed exactly one crumb. The Forehorn of Moderation and Slightly Regrettable Decisions just sighed and reached for his emergency parchment. And thus, under the bickering stars of destiny and the begrudging approval of gods that should’ve stayed asleep, the quest truly began.