My fanfare begins to play, and I walk three steps. Three steps and I disappear. "MEREDITH CRAWLOR... THE TATTOED WOMAN WHO CAN DIVINE YOUR PAST, AND YOUR FUTURE!"

I reappear in swirls of blue and gold, the center of the ring. Jesse is tight on my arm, waiting for the right moment to reappear as a solid animal for the crowd. I speak my bit, sway my hips so my costume hugs myself and twirls in a mysterious ways that make this dumb group of people wonder what exactly lies beyond the mountains of the east. It's time to figure out who is my first target, and the man sitting in the second row, missing two front teeth, is perfect.

Portly belly and yellowed teeth. Expensive shirt, but the hem along the bottom is of twine. His hair is a ruddy mess, and his hands are not callused enough to afford his lifestyle. This must be a political figure.  I wonder what secrets his soul holds? Every Tuesday he goes to a race to win money on the rigged races.... good thing his wife is home with their child, isn't it? it says.

The familiar voice. This will be good. Yes... it will be very good.

"The spirits are speaking to me already! Someone in your midst.. a he... yes, a man! HE enjoys... those sweet muffins! No, sorry, not you sir... your girth is not nearly large enough!" The crowd is in awe as they look amongst themselves.  I spin around dramatically, my hand over my eyes pointing around frantically until I stop dead on the man, with Jesse coiling back into existence.

A woman screams, and there are gasps all around. I open my eyes and see the fat man looking at me with disgusted interest.

"You! Yes, yes it is you... I am getting a J." He looks around at everyone in the crowd, thinking someone had given him away to me. Oh, your wisdom is so low... I continue with my ditty, enjoying every second of it and have him crying by the end of it. I bow to the applauding crowd, having Jesse collect the silver pieces being flung at me in a small bag. I take my three steps, moving in a circle and clap my hands above my head, disappearing in the blue and gold once again until I'm out of the light and under the stage. Ella is down below with me, collecting the money I have earned.

"You keep on doing that thing with the snake and someone might suspect we aren't natural!" Ella, the cute little gnome lute-player who always has a way with words, stashed the little sack into the box we keep under our big top. "I have to say, I like what you're doing with the exit, it's getting more gold than just walking off."

"I figured it would be a good idea, little one. Better get topside soon." I smiled at her. Gnomes weren't all too common in this area of the world anymore. In fact, I hadn't seen very many until she joined our circus. Curious little things.

I made my way upstairs and out the back door, and headed toward the kitchen coach. I saw Finn leaning off the side, ladle in one hand, twirling the hair of what I guessed to be a local girl. I caught the last part of the conversation.

"Oh, you are just so beautiful! I would love you to come to my table. Yes, please. You must." The girl giggled and whispered an answer into his ear, and then skipped off. I walked up next to the window and laughed quietly.

"Finn, you won't ever get under the skirts of a girl in these small towns. Wait until the big ones or you'll just get your hopes up for no reason." I grabbed a bowl and motioned toward the big cauldron bubbling that didn't smell terribly of beef.

"But the girls... even the boys! They are both just so beautiful. All of them, almost everywhere we go!" He held up his hands in distress, his hair changing from watermelon pink and green to a more depressed tone before leaning back on the ledge, ladling a good portion of the worker's dinner. "Merry, your life is just too easy.. you do not fall for anyone so easily! But I, a lover.. I love too much."

"Don't worry Finn, maybe some day we'll get you a nice boy for you to settle down with." Finn smiled and waved me off, going back to playing with some of his contraptions, adjusting his hair and cleaning off parts of his face from the grim that comes with cooking duty.

I feel the wind blow a bit more and the last of the clouds in the night sky dissipate. The moon is big on the Western side of the continent. I let my thoughts drift a bit, pulling a knee up under my chin and looking at the reflection of the moon in a puddle that had formed from the last night's rains.

The world here is so much colder than where I began. So much bleaker. There isn't any blinding heat, and no threat of death... life everywhere, even in the summer. But the winters freeze over. It seems vaguely familiar, but for some reason I can't bring myself to remember where it had been that I had felt the winter chill. The world then was so alien to me.. indeed, it's still alien. I can sense in myself that there is something terribly wrong with me. Something beyond Khaeleth and the eyes. The secrets I had gained access to were something unique to this life. But when we would visit the churches, an act of good faith on the part of our carnival, there was something familiar about them, but not all together comforting.

Donovan plops down on my right side, crossing his legs and cracking his knees in the process. He grins and makes the funny face he does when he does something he knows will bug me. I had known Donovan the longest out of the rest of my fellow carnies.

"Well lass! What are ye doing all by y'self?" He gave me a one-eyed look, before shoveling a large spoonful of the stew into his mouth. He always tended to slip into this weird accent whenever he was concerned for someone. 

"Oh nothing. Never gotten used to these cold winters." I rubbed my shoulders and looked up at the moon before giggling at the site of seeing Finnegan chasing after another set of boys.

"You'd think he would learn by now that he won't find a guy that would go to bed with him by now," Donovan said, finishing the last of the stew. The look on his face seemed elsewhere than on the idea of Finnegan. My head was also. I looked at him thinking about what to say, and there was a bit of silence while I finished my own food.

"You'd also think that our bosses would give us a bit more information on what our futures held than just 'Eat here, walk there'." I had known Donovan since I arrived here, and still there were times I thought he was holding out on me when we would speak. Donovan put his bowl down below him and leaned back on his rock, his gaze turning to the stars.

"Simplicity is a nice thing. It's nice when you aren't driven out of town for supposedly cursing a crop, or being wicked. When you are only spending a few days in any given town, you can relax yourself and not worry about people seeing you as a freak. When you work in a circus, well... no one questions why things are. They will accept that they are only well placed tricks of perception." He closed his eyes and smiled. "We know it's not a mystery, but they don't and that's all I care about."

Simplicity. It was the same for everyone else I had talked to... no questions about who you were, where you came from. None even about what you were. There was more silence and I could hear the slow exit of the crowd. It must have been midnight. Slowly a few more people began coming over; Ella weary-eyed. Zalnitarius, the Genasi fire-soul with the strength of a bear, and Finnegan. Frank came not long after clutching one of his pads of paper, carefully drawing Finnegan in one of his many states. Before long our mentors, Varen, Daelus and Shade, came and sat by the fire. Patrick made the biggest entrance with a bang. He was Frank's mentor. We slowly ate our dinner and talked loudly, but before long Varen wanted to speak with us and everyone quieted down.

The show had been a blinding success. We had enough money to tide us over financially for a few months, leaving us free to travel. Everyone had been excellent the last few weeks, and they were proud of us. They wanted to speak with us individually later.. Donovan to Varen, Ella to Daelus and I to Shade.

Shade was an older man of about sixty. His hair had all but disappeared from his head, but where it was gone was replaced by silvered markings swirling around it. His left eye was all but blind... but it had a slight glow from it. He was like me in some respects. He too had made a promise in order to gain power. I was to meet him later that night in his tent.

It was about seven songs later and three deep mugs of mead before I walked to his tent. There was candlelight coming from beyond the flap, with a few dots of color pouring out. I knocked on one of the barrels outside of his tent with my foot.

"What? Oh! Yes. Come in." His voice was scruffy and thick with booze. Inside were his usual toys.. a crystal ball filled with a light colored smoke. The air smelt of thick incense and the books splayed open across his cot. He was sitting at a small makeshift desk with his monocle in his good eye and had some sort of green energy swirling around his hand. "AH Yes.. this will do nicely. Evening, Merry."

"Evening," I said and cleared a spot on his cot and sat down. "What did you want to talk to me about?" Shade was turning a small silver spoon around in his hand and looked at his reflection in it carefully before suspending it above him for a moment before setting it on his table.

"Well.. as you can tell, I am quite old." He hadn't turned to me yet and was still looking at the spoon. He heaved a mix between a cough and a sigh and turned, his face heavy with some sort of deep emotion. "Much too old to be traveling around with a bunch of vibrant people."

"What are you talking about? You aren't much older than I am, are you?" I grinned at him and he smiled in return, hooking his thumbs under his suspenders. "But seriously Shade, there can't be anything beyond our group worth pursuing is there?"

"Ah, but I have been doing this for many years, Merry. You've been here how long, four or five years? And how old are you in this reincarnation?" He leaned back and closed his eyes taking a deep breath. "Meredith, you know I'm nearing my time. The deal I made can't last forever."

That was something that had brought us together when I first became a part of the circus. I had made a deal to get my power. I had seen something during those days in the desert. It never fully revealed itself to me. It seemed familiar but too distant. I can remember what it told me however.

Shade was looking at me intently before he rustled around in one of the boxes he had open. He threw out a few books, and a piece of cloth and threw me something small. It was scrawled in something I wasn't familiar with, but I could tell there was different versions of the same word along the cover. It was heavy in my hands and I could feel something powerful in it. Magic was pouring out of every nook and cranny that was exposed in this book.

"A dear friend of mine gave that to me when I was young. It has everything in it you need to learn the languages necessary to survive around here," Shade came over to me and opened the book, running his finger above one of the lines that was in a language I could read. "Primordial.. Elvish.. even some of the languages of the Underdark.. yes it exists, don't look at me like that.. they're all written here. Their grammatical rules and phonetic sounds."

"Did you use it to learn those languages, too?" I ran my finger under one of the lines marked Celestial, the letters forming beneath my finger in sparkling whisps of script. I felt myself making the connections in my brain of what all the words were and how they sounded rolling off the tongue.

"I never used it." Shade was quiet as he sat back down on his stool. "In fact, I never opened it before tonight. I guess I knew it would have a better owner worth it's weight by the time I felt like opening it."

The book seemed familiar to me, but I didn't know what to make of it. I stashed it away into my pack and had a brief conversation with him before retiring to my tent and turning in for the night. We were due to arrive on a large city in the next few days, so we were to leave early that morning. Something about this next town sounded important. Maybe it was all the people intimidating me, or maybe it was just the idea of a big payout. It was probably the money.

Chapter 2.

When we woke up the next morning, our mentors were already awake and standing by the caravans. Some of the hired hands were helping us pack, and others were just now also waking up. I noticed that a lot of my friends probably were in the same boat that I was; our mentors were leaving their jobs to us. Donovan was standing by Varen, laughing heartily about something terribly funny and Zal's fire was bleeding a bit differently today from his pores. Instead of the usual deep purples or reds that would come out in little spouts, it was blue and green. Finnegan took on the appearance of a timid little man, and Ella seemed a mix between sad and deep in thought. Frank was doodling the sunrise, using yellow and green for the sun.

As I walked over to them, Frank jumped and something caught on fire. It was quickly put out by Finnegan, who just so happened to have a bucket of water near him.