The sun might have been sheltered by a thick smog, yet the pavement still felt like a sandpit. Already, at eight in the morning, the smell of melting rubber in various side streets and acrid sweat clinging to students in their cheap cotton t-shirts wafted on a tranquil breeze. It wasn’t often that Dimitri prayed for rain, but he figured, with a little luck, a storm would soon rise to dispel the overabundance of chemicals that surrounded the city. Days like these made him dream of Norway and Sweden, of fjords and snowcapped mountain peaks that were as dangerous as they were untouched by man. Yet Norway or Sweden were not the countries he’d chosen to make his home. Not this century, at least.
Instead, he traced the pavement from parking lot to the shade of a coral tree planted inside the college grounds. There were some students on the green, but not many, and the early morning only seemed to make the few stand out all that much sharper in their laughter and their many-colored backpacks. Dimitri glimpsed the silver laptops with the Klutotechnes logo emblazoned on the lid and smiled. The old ways lived again in new forms, with new purpose. It was just as he passed the Young Research Library on his way to meet with someone responsible for the public affairs of the university that Dimitri caught sight of a familiar face on a shadowed bench along the path. It wasn’t so much recognition as it was a powerful tug upon the thread that still held him tethered to his old life; the one that he had left behind so many years prior.
She was a professor, now, but her eyes were cold and she still wore her scars for the world to see. Perhaps, thought Dimitri as he approached, they all did. Suffering was not reserved for mere mortals.
“If you’re considering which of them deserve a smiting, you might be here all day,” he remarked with the casual nonchalance of a stranger greeting a handsome woman in a place where flirtation went hand in hand with knowledge. “On the other hand, if you’ve got a mind to send them on some terrifying quest, I’m sure we could come up with a few candidates. Those who managed to dress themselves this morning already show promise.”