He was not remotely dressed for that and the first thing he does is put his mace away and drop his pack to pull his coat out of the bottom of it. It's very convenient that he didn't leave it behind at the fort - it's tailored, and not magical enough to retailor itself, so he planned to keep it for future winters. He didn't think any part of the Wound contained a sea but maybe there's somebody throwing around Tsunamis. He thought the archmages were done with the Worldwound now but possibly one of them was bored or something.

Once he has his coat on, and his hat, and his gloves, and his scarf, he puts his bag back on and hikes for the ?fort?.

It's a weird fort made of titanic round pieces of metal. He can see figures walking around near the base, some with flickering lights.

About a mile out a pair of people covered in ragged furs emerge from snowbanks on either side of him, sixty feet away in perfect ambush position. One has a longbow and one has something else they're holding like a crossbow. They're not actively aiming at him, though. They shout some kind of demand or question.

He holds up his hands. "I belong to a signatory to the Worldwound treaty!" he calls in Common Taldane.

That sure doesn't sound comprehensible. But the gesture is a reassuring sign.

Guy has a nice coat, and a metal club for some reason? Sure.

They shout at each other to confer, then the longbow wielder puts the weapon on their back and approaches, also hands up. From close up it looks like this person might be a woman.

She tries, haltingly, French, and something that she thinks might be Nordic? All she knows of it is 'Hej, vill ha kött'...

She scowls and sketches in the snow. Stick figure with mace, stick figures with bows. Stick figures all near the ?fort? around a fire with some kind of animal over it and the weapons off to the side. She makes encouraging gestures at it.

Stick figure with mace leaving the fort with a bunch of round things: She slashes the sketch out vigorously. Stick figure with mace ?attacking? other stick figures, same thing. She also does a sketch of a stick figure with mace being riddled with arrows. For emphasis.

...nod nod.

Glad that's agreed, then. They can all walk the rest of the way there.

They climb a long-packed snowbank and shout conversations with some of the lookouts on the upper level, then fight with a squealing metal hatch encrusted with ice, eventually managing to lever it open. It's a good bit warmer inside, especially once you're away from the entrance. Most of the hatches seem to be rusted shut. Something is rattling and echoing through the structure, and around half the lights strung along the ceiling are flickering or dead.

Then they come to a large hall set up as a kitchen and dining area. There's maybe twenty people here right now. They look worn and gaunt, moreso than even most peasants do.

He has a Create Food and Water prepared. It's a nice spell to drop a casting of on a farmhouse when you're traveling and want a place to spend the night; you give them all dinner, in the morning they invite all their neighbors over for breakfast and polish off the leftovers, you take a chicken leg and a bread roll on the road for lunch.

Blai's castings are technically only rated for fifteen people, not this many, but enough food for fifteen people for a whole day can be enough food for a larger number at just one meal.

He picks out an empty table, marches up to it, makes sure it's not obviously covered in something food-unsafe, and Creates. His go-to when there aren't plates is bread bowls full of chicken and vegetable stew, cheese in wheels, apples and oranges with their peels on, and hardboiled eggs; you can't get too fancy with it and everything needs salt, but this, his spell can just do. The "and Drink" he omits, usually, because it's just water, and he can do that separately. Sometimes you can squeeze an extra piece of fruit out of it like that.

Is that an APPLE????? This generates Some Excitement. Everyone is rather talking at once. Several duck out of side passages, and several more show up, attracted by the commotion.

Longbow Lady shouts over the crowd and gestures people away from crowding Blai. NotCrossbow Man gestures at the food and then fails to articulate whatever is confusing about it in gesture form.

Blai steps back from the food; he's been eating fine and these people do not appear to have been doing so and he's supposed to be good now. They can all have it; he does his best to gesture invitingly.

The fruit is the object of most interest; They very carefully segment it up into small pieces and distribute them. A bunch goes out of the room, presumably to people doing something elsewhere. They fish the vegetables out of the stew and give them the same treatment. The rest is treated less carefully and more covetously.

Someone gives him a bowl of Meat Slices and a slate board and a piece of chalk and a pack of playing cards. Someone else keeps trying to ask where the food came from.

Okay, go heavy on the fruits and vegetables next time, apparently. He bows politely over the bowl of Meat Slices and tries one. He can't really help the person with the question about the food.

It's Meat. That's about all that can be said for it.

He's not picky. Worldwound food is mostly porridge and beef and whatever he makes, and he hasn't been able to cast the spell all that long.

Longbow lady shoves the one confused by the food out of the way and starts trying to teach him English via mime and drawing on the slate. The food is disappearing very quickly, and more people keep coming to the hall. It's crowded. Maybe fifty all told, counting the kids and elders.

He is planning to obviate the not-speaking-English problem by magic in the morning but it would certainly be good to know basics like numbers and "yes" and "no".

Five of the people here have what might be holy symbols. An amulet depicting... A tower with an eye at the bottom? They seem like a bit of a clique, slightly separate from the rest of the community. Two of them are playing chess with each other!

Ooh, chess. He should not look longingly at the chess at the expense of his language lesson. Tower with an eye... he doesn't recognize that, maybe an Arodenite saint with a cult following, given the eye? ...He pulls his Iomedae symbol out of his coat. It is made of a dagger he bought from a passing halfling adventurer because it was the right size and some wire he got out of a miscellaneous supply chest. He was planning to see if he could get a proper one in Westcrown, but it should be recognizable enough.

People seem to assume it's a holy symbol, but they don't recognize it.

The mood is festive. Someone starts playing some kind of improvised string instrument. His translator manages to mime that they use playing cards as currency, like the deck he's been given.

The chess game ends. Black wins... Fairly easily, it looks like. Which might be why white waves off a second game.

These cards are a strange choice of currency but at least they are not backed by the souls of the damned, he's not allowed to trade in the souls of the damned.

Is his tutor done with him can he go play there are clearly more important things happening here, wherever here is, than the chessboard.

His translator seems to be trying to ask where he's from and whether that place would trade for meat.

...if he sketches a very bad map of Avistan complete with crosshatched Worldwound, do they recognize that at all?

They bring it to one of the oldest people here. He talks about it for a while- The Inner Sea looks vaguely right, but the rest of it is off in a lot of ways.

They shake their heads. Someone digs through old files and eventually (after a few minutes) comes up with a raggedy old oiled canvas naval chart showing England, the Baltics, and the North Sea. They ignore the fine, detailed charts on the front and show a more recent sketch on the back. There's landmarks sketched in grease pen, and outlines of bad terrain and viable trails. This one is even less recognizable.

Ah. He is on a different planet. Or this is a close-up map of some detail of a continent he's not very familiar with, is there a sense of scale?

It looks like the first chart is probably a few hundred or a thousand miles across. The one on the back is pretty clearly smaller scale, he can make out these peoples' home and the mountains and sea he saw are a decent distance away.

So much for the 'Worldwound' hypothesis. This is probably another planet.