The Long Way

We've been walking together for four days now.

I say "together," but that's not quite right. We never actually agreed to travel as a group. Brannock never asked if he could join me, and I never invited him. It just... happened. One day he was walking in the same direction, and the next day he still was, and now it's been four days and we're still walking in the same direction.

I think that's just how Brannock operates. He doesn't make plans. He has a direction, not a destination. When I asked him where he was going, he thought about it for a while and then said: "South, mostly."

When I asked him why, he said: "Never been."

That's it. That's the entire reasoning. A man with a war-boar the size of a small cart is walking south because he's never been south.

I nearly turned around and walked back to Thelsamar out of sheer frustration.

But I didn't. And here is what I'm learning about Brannock.

He stops constantly. Not to rest. Not to eat. Not for any practical reason at all. He stops because something caught his eye. And everything catches his eye.

Yesterday it was an unusual flower. Bright yellow petals, the kind I'd have walked past without a second thought. He crouched down and studied it for almost ten minutes. Not picking it. Not cataloging it. Just... looking.

"Look at that," he said.

"It's a flower."

"Aye. But look at the way the petals fold. Like little cups."

I stood there with my pack getting heavier and the daylight burning away. "We're losing daylight," I said.

He looked up, genuinely surprised, as if he'd forgotten the sun existed.

"Aye," he said. Then he pointed. "But look at that flower."

Today it was a beaver building a dam in a stream we were crossing. Brannock stood ankle-deep in cold water for twenty minutes watching it work.

"Fascinating," he kept muttering. "Never seen one build from scratch before."

Then there was the fisherman. An old man mending nets by the roadside. Brannock stopped to watch him too, and when the man offered to let him try, Brannock sat down and spent the better part of an hour tangling himself in fishing line. He was terrible at it. The net looked worse when he was done than when he started. The old man was laughing so hard he had to sit down.

Brannock laughed too, thanked him, and kept walking.

"Why did you do that?" I asked when we were back on the road.

"Never mended a net before."

"But you didn't learn anything. You failed completely."

"Aye," he said cheerfully. "But now I know what failing at it feels like."

I didn't have a response to that. I still don't.

The thing about Brannock is that he doesn't seem to collect stories the way Willers does. Willers collects information — who knows what, who owes who, what happened where. It's strategic. Everything has a purpose.

Brannock collects experiences. The flower. The beaver. The net. None of it leads anywhere. None of it is useful. He just... wants to know what things feel like. All things. Even failure.

I found myself telling him about my father today. I don't know why. We were walking through a quiet stretch of forest, Loaf snuffling along ahead of us, and the words just came out. About the burned house. About the herbs he used to grind. About how he never answered my questions.

Brannock listened without interrupting. When I was done, he walked in silence for a moment.

Then he said: "He sounds like he loved ye."

That was all. No analysis. No follow-up questions. No attempt to uncover more than I'd offered.

It was the first time I've talked about my father without feeling like someone was trying to dig deeper than I wanted to go.

We're approaching Dun Algaz now. There are Dark Iron dwarves in the pass — Brannock spotted their patrols before I did. I expected him to suggest we fight our way through, or at least come up with some kind of clever plan.

Instead, he waited. Sat on a rock and watched their patterns for almost two hours. Loaf dozed beside him like a giant black dog.

"They switch at noon," he said eventually. "There's a gap. About ten minutes. We'll go then."

And we did. Quiet, careful, staying low. We slipped through the pass without a single arrow fired.

He's not reckless. Everyone assumes he is — the way he talks, the way he laughs, the way he treats the world like a curiosity shop. But he's not. He's observant. Patient, when it matters. He just doesn't advertise it.

I'm starting to think I've been traveling wrong my whole life.

Not wrong, exactly. But... narrowly. Head down, eyes on the road, focused on the destination. Meanwhile this ridiculous dwarf has been stopping to smell every flower between here and Loch Modan, and somehow he's still moving forward.

Maybe there's something to that.