Is life without profit truly without purpose?
Amid crunching mouthfuls of liquorice-sweet refel biscuit, the question hit Tren Krellos like a starfreighter. For the past month he had been tending nere trees, taking tea with neighbours, learning carpentry and cookery, attending picnics in the grasslands outside Korus… It had been pleasant enough, but these small acts were simply distracting him from wondering who he was without his next paycheck as motivation.
In his previous life, struggling to earn rations or a night at a hostel, Krellos had held no compunctions about hunting down beings for money. Over the years, he’d become an expert in that particular skill. Fugitives feared the Gunmetal Gyre. But now the Gunmetal Gyre didn’t have to make rent or subsist on cheap rations. So what? How did one live when not merely surviving?
“Congratulations,” said the woman next to him, tugging his focus back to the table around which his neighbourhood was taking the Feast of Elforsht. “You look like you just had The Thought.” Krellos turned to regard her quizzically.
“The realisation that your old life is over,” the smiling redhead explained. “We’ve all had it. I used to mine Cerite. That guy was a banker. That Queil there was a pilot. I even spoke to a former curator last week. We all find ourselves thinking, now what?”
“And?” Krellos asked, wondering why the curator sounded familiar. “Now what?”
Shrugging, the woman responded, “I’ll tell you when I find out! I’m El-Zell, by the way.”
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