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A traveler.

To Sajah, who was still an outsider of sorts himself, this could have been anyone or meant anything. Were they a Matorian from other borders visiting in? Or a foreigner of another sort from even further away? The rumors were unclear, though Sajah heard them flitting about. When one couldn’t speak individually, everyone else’s words filled in the space and Sajah was always listening, always picking up on stray bits of information whether they were intended for outside ears or not.

In this case, it wasn’t of much concern. He had plenty to do now that all his time was his own: sparring and honing his knife work with Farako and Ezoli, learning the land, sharing his gesture language with Xewai from time to time, and swimming lessons as well. On the whole, waiting for Nyko to heal fortunately involved a good deal more than just waiting.

And yet.

After long enough there, the lands were becoming more familiar, and he couldn’t fill every waking second of his time with practice or some other form of physical or mental exertion. Having all the hours in a day to himself meant that eventually, there were spares. Stray moments or minutes or whole stretches of day where he found himself idle, wandering, and musing, and it was on occasions like that that the prospect of investigating piqued his interest.

Thus, not on the first day that he’d heard of it, but a handful of days after, when another stray rumor of the mysterious ‘traveler’ being closer — when his hands were empty and his feet free to roam — Sajahka decided to pursue the lead. Nyko would survive for an evening with his healers, and his own legs could use a stretch regardless.

It wasn’t a short trip, and the fact that he had to make it on foot only added to the time — well away from the Buhawi camp and to a different Matori village — but he made it by mid afternoon, and fortunately, the trip was not all for naught. As it happened, the small town was actively in a tizzy, because the foreigner was still there, and apparently, as Sajah drew in nearer to the small gathered crowd at the town’s edge, speaking at that very moment to the ‘audience.’

Sajah lingered at the outer edge of the crowd — close enough to hear and see, but avoiding getting caught in the mesh of it. The speaker was certainly loud, if nothing else. And animated. She stood atop some variety of podium, Sajah assumed, for she had elevated herself above everyone else to show off her ‘proof’ of interference with the timeline. Outside forces she claimed, had clearly made these artifacts, strange and alien as they were.

They did look — Sajah sought for the word as he eyed them glinting in the afternoon light — different. Metallic and bent, like a sword, but more bronzed, like a button. And they didn’t appear to be weapons. Armor, perhaps? And yet they didn’t look quite like that either.

The coiled piece of metal was the most obscure in his opinion, large and winding, oddest by virtue of the fact that he couldn’t imagine what its purpose might be. But then, he had at least heard that those from the prisoner’s island across the sea, newly rediscovered, also had some strangely shaped metal contraptions that they wore on their faces.

All of it was odd, no doubt.

But he did not understand the hubbub to quite this extent. Still, Sajah lingered, listening to both the speaker and the murmurs from the crowd for as long as they remained because he had come this far, after all. Only once they began to dissipate did he, too, begin his trek back, and on the whole, he did not consider it a complete loss.

He was unconvinced that the objects, though strange, had come from ‘a different time’ — surely just a different place. For all he or she knew it could simply have been a wash-up from Yael. That seemed likely enough. But, he had heard an interesting story, seen more of the land, and if he happened to be very bored later, he could relate the tale back to Nyko. Perhaps with a little added flare, since his friend so loved a good story—once spruced up enough to be worth his interest.