He needed to think. This was what he set out to do, fumbling a clove out of his pocket and sticking it in his mouth. The spiced oil seemed to burn against his lips, but he tried not to think about that. Instead he was fumbling for a match. And all the while he was thinking to himself. What had the fellow sad? The first time, what had he said? The match scraped down the side of Skandra's face, and the fire whispered beneath his nostrils as he lit the clove. One giant sucking down of air quelled that uneasiness in his gut. And as it streamed out of his nostrils he offered the clove to Aeotha.
"You'll feel better," he told her.
All of this was taking him back there.
And it was not a pleasant feeling.
There were other worlds, of that much Skandra was sure. Or thought he was sure. The man in blue and Shantar seemed to agree on this point. Only the last time something like this had happened, he'd found someone on the other side to tell him what he needed to know. Why wasn't there some half-dead, facedown man here to tell him what he needed to know? What had the fellow in blue said? It was there, right on the edge of his lips, taunting him. The key was traversability. That's what he had said. Traversability. What Skandra had later read said something about traversability... fuck! He was not a reader.
"It was a connection," Skandra fumbled the clove back between his fingertips, and shoved it into his mouth; it stayed there this time with the Immortal puffing away. "You start out in one place and enter a tunnel of ... well, I guess it's a tunnel of energy. Don't laugh. But Shantar said something like that was impossible. He said you could go in through one side, and even see the other side, but you'd never make it there before the tunnel collapsed around you."
In fact, the older Immortal had nearly called Skandra a liar. Maybe he was having some second thoughts here.
"But the last time I saw that was in the midddle of a fucking desert," Skandra was now objecting to his own ideas. "What the hell could have happened to cause a thing like that here? And why didn't we end up in the same place?"