Mez was no place for children, Oduin's mother used to sigh after a long day lugging rock from the quarries or felling trees for timber. It was a cold, rocky, windswept place that liked to make it clear that the earthlings who insisted on living there were defying some sort of natural order in doing so. They didn't belong there. Better that they had chosen to settle in the south, in Kesris where they could work the land and draw fresh water from nearby ponds.
Still, Oduin didn't mind Mez. Perhaps it was all he had known as a child. He enjoyed the camaraderie of the small settlement, where everyone knew everyone else's name and where the same few men and women worked side by side, day in and day out. A trust existed there that was difficult to replicate, as well as a routine.
Those were the days when other people who looked like him - and then the occasional member of the Ice Tribe - were all Oduin had known. Perhaps it was all he had cared to know back then, fair-haired Windlings and the occasional stiff, cold Icelings. Oduin hadn't minded them, for all that they thought they were superior to his people. He had only wondered why they were so unfriendly on the rare occasions when he'd seen them. Beyond that, there had been no cause to worry or even to think about people outside of Mez.
And then, they had grown. The year his family began to travel again was the same year that all the Tribes had begun to intermingle. His father had mentioned once that it was unprecedented, the amount of freedom everyone now had to cross Tribe borders and visit places once thought completely out of reach. Suddenly, Oduin's world had expanded exponentially, from the tiny settlement of Mez to the entirement of Sauti and everything beyond it. Countries he hadn't even known of before, entire lands that had never been discovered... It had been a lot to take in.
The transition from close-knit home to the whole wide world had taken some adjustment, but Oduin had found that he quite loved the experience. Everywhere they went, they began to see more and more colorful people, dark skin and bright crystals and even patterns on their skin. Fanned ears, antennae... the list of new and surprising sights grew and grew, and Oduin took it all in with wild abandon.
He had never been a shy child. From the day he could talk, he'd babbled anyone's ear off, and once outside the tight-knit circle of Mez, he found that the gift of gab was instrumental in helping him make friends. It didn't matter who it was or where that person was from - if he could sit them down for a nice, long chat, he could make a friend out of them.
With each new city visited, Oduin grew more and more confident in his abilities to befriend new people. The more strangers he spoke with and the more stories he swapped, the more he came to realize that, for all their different looks and their different beliefs, earthlings were just... earthlings. Regardless of race or home, there were good people out in the world, just as there were evil ones, and mostly it just came down to the individual.
Before long, the jobs that had taken them throughout the land of Sauti began to draw them beyond the borders of their home. Oduin's family went wherever there was work to sustain them. They went to Oba, to Matori, to Tale. They caught a glimpse of Mout Xi and traveled briefly by boat en route to Yael. By the time their feet landed on Sauti soil again, their eyes had been opened - the world beyond their home was vast and opportunities abounded.
Oduin had loved every step of the way, from being on home turf to feeling out of place on foregin soil. Nothing had forced him to adapt and to learn of other cultures as quickly as feeling like he knew nothing, and the mental gymnastics involved with understanding the way someone else thought were oddly exhilirating, as was the feeling of having as least partly integrated himself into another culture.
There was nothing quite like it in Sauti. That was alright. So long as he was with his family, he would be happy. But that didn't mean he didn't continue to yearn for travel and for the chance to try his hand once again at become an insider in a place where he was clearly an outsider.
wc 764
