You do not learn that there are others like you till years later.
It is on a bright, hot day in a busy marketplace, a day when you are not grown yet but old enough to think you are. You have painted many somewheres else by now, and seen many strange places. When you tire of one, as you always do, paint and brush find you and you come to be in another. It has become your way of life, though each new somewhere is still a revelation.
This world has been yours for a week now, and is only starting to give up its secrets. Your bold lines, copper-tinted, and your textured seas of multi-colored people conjured up a world of archaic empires and unsteady alliances, a crossroads city of cultures, ideas, and hidden subterfuge. Walking through a crowded square, eyes wide, you take in the merchants, travelers, soldiers, animals with fascination. Great colonnades and sweeping stone steps rise to grand buildings alongside the avenue, but these are closed for market day. It is all just how you imagined it as you painted, but, as always, the most interesting things you find are the ones you never imagined at all.
As you step around a huge green-white statue in the center of the plaza, commotion pulls you up short. Three purple-clad guardsmen are accosting a merchant for some impropriety, a crowd gathering in a wide circle around the blinding silver gleams of their helmets. You make a swift turn and walk quickly towards a smaller side alley, hoping to avoid becoming embroiled in the trouble. There are dangers here you did not anticipate-- or did you? Did you hint at danger, sadness, anger in your lines and figures? For with each painting you grow more and more sure that the worlds without these qualities have no spark, no vibrancy, and no permanence.
The alleyway is dimmer and less crowded but still packed with merchants. More unusual goods are vended in these quieter side streets: strange menageries, powders with curious effects, carved figurines and charms from distant continents.
"Fresh fruit, saja?" a besmiled merchant asks, using the word which seems to mean both friend, stranger, and rube, but you ignore him.
As you round an obtuse corner in the crooked alleyway, you come to a quieter scene, the fringe of the market day madness. A few here and there are selling, but much of the space is take up by staging: humpbacked beasts shedding baggage and servant boys dashing through on urgent errands. Your eyes flit from scene to scene, taking in the details, but suddenly something hooks them to a stop, and your body too slows to a dead halt, barely aware of the people brushing past you, of the criers in your ear trying to make you a deal.
You see before you a wave, frozen in the instant of crashing against a gleaming shore, grains of sand reflecting the afternoon sun in tiny stars and diamonds. Foam rises in spurts and arcs, interference patterns between water and land. Out to sea, a great whale, caught in the act of surfacing, jets salty air, one eye turned towards you with faint alarm, but also the tiniest hint of curiosity.
The scene is carved into the side of a large clay jar, half-relief shapes curving around a broad middle, and a long moment passes before you notice something even more astonishing. Riddled through the relief but invisible to all but the most trained eye are a thousand minute flaws and deliberately introduced imperfections. To any but a master the effect is to reduce the scene to something not quite extraordinary: good; great, perhaps; but not revolutionary; something that would sell well but not draw unwanted attention.
It is only to your eye that the work reveals its astonishing perfection.
The scene is still wet, you realize with a start, drying in the sun, and the other side is still being shaped. Your eyes move to see strong, calloused hands gripping a delicate chisel and a worn hammer, ticking impossibly gracefully into a corner of the foam on the crest of the wave.
The hands pause. Your gaze travels up to find a bearded face above a simple potter's smock, deep green eyes meeting your astonished gaze evenly. Something inexplicable passes between you.
The worn face shows the hint of a smile. "Well met, saja," his rough-hewn voice calls out. "Do you like my work?"
His name is Malik. He is more than twice your age but you find an immediate affinity, a comfortableness with him. Together, you stay up long into the night, breathing colored smoke smelling of fruit and spring leaves together from a brass contraption he calls a jaffa. He tells you everything he knows.
Most surprising, outside of the initial shock that there are others like you at all, is that not all of them are painters.
"Yes," Malik says, taking a puff of jaffa smoke, "painters, poets, sculptors, storytellers. Musicians, perhaps. Lovers, maybe; thinkers? possible; Those who simply are what they are so complete and glorious that...? Well. It is not for me to descry boundaries for the largenesses we live in."
He leans forward, eyes gleaming in excitement. "It's an intersection, saja. One in a million, perhaps, with the physical talent required, and one in a different million with the right kind of mind. When the two meet in one soul..." He slowly interlocks his fingers, then leans back in his chair, chuckling. "And even then," he adds, "how many never discover they have this gift, or never pursue it, or, worse, never try again?"
Malik calls it Wayfaring. But he tells you there is no one name; no absolute answers. There exists no council of your kind, and there are no schools or cities or gathering places for those with your talent. Each wayfarer goes his way alone through the worlds, choosing his own, singular path.
"But we are drawn to each other," Malik adds, "somehow, across unspannable chasms of chance. Think of it. Each tiny motion of the hand, each of the thousands of decisions made in your art will change the nature of the world you summon. Surely even at your age you have learned this. There must be an infinity of possible outcomes. And yet both you and I, impossibly, came to this same world." He leans forward, stares at you with intensity. "You will come across many others who wayfare, friend, as you grow older, never often enough to be less than a precious joy, but not so rarely to seem purely by chance. Trust this: it is never by chance."
The more you speak with this bearded man with the calloused hands, not quite old but graying, the more your intimidation fades, and friendship begins to grow. You sense a kindness in him, genuine and deep. His is the rare soul which makes those around it feel more warm and fulfilled simply through proximity. He tells you endless tales of worlds visited, friends long gone, a lifetime of exploring, wandering... wayfaring. But he never speaks of his home world, the one to which he was born, and you wonder at that.
He shares with you rules he has learned through long years of experience, not rules of prescription but of simple fact. Some you have learned already; some are new. Nothing comes with you but things you have made with your own hands. There seems no limit to the number of worlds that exist, or the strangeness or bizarreries that can be summoned into them. In each world you will always find a means of pursuing your art, when you again desire it; by trade, discovery, craft or serendipity, all you need to draw or sculpt, create, will sooner or later fall into your hands. The worlds are all habitable, though not all inhabited. And they are all different.
The connections between those who wayfare run deep and seem to exist on many levels. Malik refills the jaffa, knocking leaves and crushed berries out of a tiny pouch as he speaks. "There will be times," he says, "when you'll feel a powerful urge to paint. When you raise your brush it will seem as if another is guiding it; the world that takes shape on your canvas will seem like nothing that could come from your own mind. It does not. You are hearing the Call, when another wayfarer is in need and, mindfully or not, is pulling you towards him. Sometimes there is something obvious you can do to help, but even if it seems otherwise, it is best to stay and do what you can. Some day you may be in need, and hope for another to be Called to you."
It has long since grown dark before you run out of questions, and the two of you sit for a time in the comforting blanket of sweet smoke and silence. Wind rustles the walls of the tent rhythmically, forerunner of the frequent summer storms. A question tickles the back of your mind, one you have not yet dared to ask, but finally you find words to frame it.
"Can you go back?" you ask quietly. "To a world you've been to before, or even... the one you came from? I've... I've never tried." It sounds odd as you say it, but the way forward has always seemed so much more real to you than the way back. And how would you begin to paint that jumbled world you were born to, so indistinct, all those lights and people and half-empty bottles? How would you paint your mother's face, when it faded so quickly from your memory?
Malik scratches his beard, somber. Smoke curls up from the mouthpiece of the jaffa, as if still dizzy from its journey through the long, looping coils.
He is quieter than you've yet heard him, when he speaks, and seems to choose his words with great care. "My sister," he begins, licking his lips, "was named Saidra. She taught me my skill at carving reliefs. We both made beautiful pots and jugs for our father to sell, she and I. When I exceeded her talents, she never once was jealous or unhappy, simply proud of me. So proud."
You stay silent. The wind flaps the tent again, creeping under the walls to send the blue smoke billowing upwards in long, languid drifts.
"When war came, we were taken from our parents, but I swore to always be there to protect her." A deep breath. "But war bred more war, as is the way of worlds, and we lost each other in the madness. I feared her dead. In my grief I took the wheel and spun a pot, and began to shape on its side a scene so rich and real..."
He stands, suddenly, empties and cleans the jaffa bowl in practiced motions, a little too precise, his back to you. "We do what we do by creation," he says, "not imitation. And only once is a thing created. Not even another wayfarer can follow where you go, for none can create the creation of another. And returning to where you once were? That, too, is impossible, for then you only imitate yourself."
He finishes and straightens, his back still towards you. "But who but God can say he created the world to which he was born?" he says quietly. "None. Perhaps not even He."
He turns finally, one hand on the tent flap. You cannot quite see his eyes.
"No, saja," he says, almost in a whisper. "You can never, never go back."
Then he lifts the flap of the tent and is gone into the night, leaving whirls and eddies of vanishing smoke in his wake.