Chapter Text
Tess wears the map of her memories.
She is a systemless planet, hurtling through boundless space at a million miles an hour, snagging bystanders ever so briefly into her orbit before she is gone again. Everything she owns comes with a story hours long. Her favorite shirt, woad-blue and wrapped in the Emerald style, was a gift from a weaver’s apprentice after she helped arrange for his brother’s marriage to a merchant’s son. The homing pigeon on her wrist was painstakingly etched by her uncle in Ironhill, so she would always find her way back to her family. The scarf of painted lace tied in a winding knot around her left bicep - the knot itself taught to her by an old fisherman she once helped out for a day or two - is the token of a woman who had introduced herself with the blade of a sabre in place of a handshake. They had spent a passionate month together two or three years ago, before the wanderlust had set in like a disease and Tess had stolen away with only a scrawled note left in her wake. She still hopes to see her again someday.
Her stout traveler’s pack jangles as she strolls along. Erin’s old broken spyglass dangles on a knotted string, clinking against the tooth charms from the merfolk of Scapula and the battered little tin cookpot she won off a cardcheat in an arm-wrestle. Her limbs, too, are heavy with trinkets and mismatching jewelry: wooden bangles, spidersilk cuffs, horsetail-braid wristlets. Locks of her wiry hair are wrapped lovingly in red twine or bobbed with glass beads by children’s hands. She wears no shoes, but around one ankle is a circle of beetle wings, glinting navy in the light - a gift from the tiny flower fairies she once discovered living in a sunlit glen. She’s gone back a few times since then, to bring them curiosities from the wide, wide world and recount stories of her adventures, and each time they had thrown a party that had lasted from swordrise until the dawn glinted through the canopy.
Tess is untethered. She welcomes herself to visit, but she can never stay - her body will not let her. Instead, she takes a souvenir from every place she wants to remember. This way, she holds on to the memories of the beauty she’s seen, and the people she’s loved, and the home she’s built. She is a systemless planet; she is Tess, the Stormtouched, the Wanderer.