* * *

  From the top of a low hill beyond their camp, Roskvir tried to survey the distant savanna horizon for signs of danger, but saw none.

  Nothing he knew was dangerous, at least. The herds of tall flightless birds ranging the plain were harmless... he assumed. So much was still hazy to him. The last months were a strange blur, like an unpleasant, overlong dream.

  But a dream he was very glad to have awoken from, at last. Slowly, over time, the world was becoming clearer again, and less confusing.

  By then he felt lucid enough to know who he was again, as Roskvir Englihavt. He’d been a war hero of the Albian Royal Marines, until a young girl from a foreign land had changed his life. There’d been… a terrible incident, after which he’d realized she needed to be taken somewhere safer, away from the danger aboard his master’s warship.

  After that, things became a bit harder to understand, again.

  The nine foot tall, twenty foot long predatory cat that seemed to be accompanying them was the biggest sticking point.

  He still almost couldn’t believe his eyes, whenever it padded by. And it had seemed somehow more massive the first time he'd sized it up. Since then, it had… shrunk? To make matters even stranger, Aurelia was apparently unbothered by the beast’s presence, as if finding a traveling companion in a colossal tiger was as mundane as eating lunch after breakfast.

  She was speaking to it again, Roskvir saw, as it returned from a hunt on the grassland. The limp form of a wild Setetic riding bird hung from the beast’s saber-toothed jaws, before it dropped the carcass in front of the girl, as if presenting her a gift. With deliberate care, it bit through one of the dead animal’s thick-sinewed legs, separating it from the feathered torso with a crunch of bone.

  “Hey!” shouted Roskvir. “Stop— put that down, Aurelia! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Aurelia gave him a confused look as he ran over. Stains of bright red blood coated her mouth, cheeks and hands, from the marrow she’d scooped up and slurped out of the bird’s broken thighbone. Far from a royal princess — let alone her nation’s reigning sovereign — she then appeared instead like a feral child, perhaps one raised by wolves.

  “Aren’t you hungry too?” she asked.

  “Well, of course. But, I mean… you don’t usually eat raw meat, do you?”

  “No. But Mr. Gardens said I should try it,” she said. “He says that my family’s ancestor from a long time ago ate this, when she was little herself. He says that’s how she grew big and strong enough to make her tribe rule over everyone.”

  “Well, maybe that was how people ate a long time ago. But we’re going to eat cooked meat, while we’re traveling, okay? I don’t want you to get sick.”

  Aurelia looked back at the great tiger, who in turn almost seemed to glare at Roskvir, between bloody gnashing bites out of the bird’s abdomen-flesh.

  “Mr. Gardens says, that ever since humans started cooking meat with fire, they've been taking meat for granted," said Aurelia. "And also that it makes it taste yucky to him. Also, didn’t you say we shouldn’t make fires, as long as we’re still in territory occupied by Albion?”

  “We’re close enough to the smoke from the forests for one last campfire to go unnoticed,” said Roskvir. “And I’m not negotiating on this. ‘Mr. Gardens’ can eat his share raw, but I’m going to cook your meat for you, okay? C’mon. This can be another lesson in attuning to your sjael. I’ll try to show you again how I do it.”

  That at last seemed to convince Aurelia. She put down the bone, wiping her bloody hands on the grass.

  “Thanks,” said Roskvir, as he cleared out a shallow fire pit in the ground. “Okay. So, do you remember what I told you last time?”

  “Vis are extensions of our feelings,” Aurelia recited.

  “Good,” said Roskvir. “Yes. Sjaels burn as flames, because they really are like the fire that’s burning inside all of us when we feel… ways, about… things.”

  Aurelia furrowed her brow, perplexed.

  “Hm. Let me put it this way,” said Roskvir.

  He went to their makeshift rucksack, where they’d stored some kindling they’d gathered while traversing the savanna.

  “Our passions are like fuel. Like the wood that a campfire needs to burn. That’s why it's so important to practice some form of personal expression you’re passionate about, to develop your sjael. Even if it doesn’t seem related to what you might want to use your sjaelsvaben for, practicing and meditating on that passion is like building up a store of fuel, for your sjaelbrand to burn. Just like how we’ve collected firewood little by little as we’ve gone, so we can make fires if we need.”

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  Roskvir sprinkled their reserve of twigs into the pit.

  “Now, in addition to fuel, fires also need air to breathe, in order to burn.”

  “An oxidizer, you mean,” Aurelia corrected him.

  “Uh… yeah. Anyway, if your passions are your sjael’s fuel, then your desires are the air… the ‘oxidizer.’ Once you have enough fuel, you redirect that built up energy into manifesting what it is that you desire. Such as defending yourself… if you desire that enough, with some built up fuel to work with, eventually your sjael will probably manifest your weapon or totem. Or in my case, now, for example, I desire to start a campfire. I redirect the fuel of the passions, which I’ve long practiced, channeling that energy into producing flame.”

  Squatting over the pit, Roskvir closed his eyes. He willed his red-horned crown to catch fire above his head, and a flicker like a candle’s flame lit in the palm of his hand. Leaning forward, he set the fire down into the kindling.

  “But not everyone can make actual fire with their vis, that really burns hot, like you,” said Aurelia. “Even if they really wanted to.”

  “Well, yes. That’s my particular specialty. What we can actually do with our sjaels is highly dependent on the exact sort of passion-fuel we’ve cultivated and gathered for ourselves. That’s why the abilities granted by everyone’s sjaels are so unique. And if you develop new passions in life, that can end up changing or augmenting your sjaeltak, granting you new abilities or diminishing old ones.”

  “What sort of passion do you cultivate, to make real fire with your powers?”

  “Aha,“ Roskvir smiled, as he strode to the bird’s carcass. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  After less than an half an hour, their meager brushland campfire fuel had been exhausted. But Roskvir handed Aurelia a skewer of savanna bird thigh meat that he knew had been cooked to perfection.

  At first she eyed the simple dish with a suspicious frown, in strange contrast to her unguarded willingness to eat raw bone marrow minutes earlier. But then she took a cautious bite, and her eyes lit up.

  “How did you…?” she began through stuffed cheeks, before swallowing. Her second bite pulled off more juicy flesh with ease, as if the whole cube was sculpted of butter rather than tough muscle. “We don’t even have any seasoning. But…”

  “Tasty, right?” said Roskvir. “Seasoning would certainly help, if we had it. But you can make meat that tastes very decent even without salt, as long as you cook it just the right amount. You just need to get it to the right temperature and keeping it on the heat for the right duration... most cooks never learn how to do it perfect like that. They just learn how to do it well enough, and use plenty of seasoning to make up the difference. But since seasoning always makes it taste good enough, they never learn better.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Gardens,” Aurelia said in Setetic to the great cat, who was still gnawing on the bones of the carcass, behind them. “But Roskvir was right. It tastes better this way.”

  The beast snorted, and Roskvir could’ve sworn the sound resembled a dismissive scoff.

  “So you’re saying that… cooking meat is your passion?” asked Aurelia. “It seems strange that it could help you fight.”

  “Well, one of my passions, at least. And it's not that cooking helps me fight, not exactly. Rather, it's that I love the practice of cooking. I’m passionate about it, enough to spend a lot of time doing it and getting better at it. And that passion I can meditate and reflect upon, and cultivate, and then later draw upon as energy for other purposes.”

  “Well then, what would my passion be? How did you figure out that one of yours was cooking?”

  “I didn’t really ever decide to figure it out, for myself, that way. I was just a poor corporal in the marines once, on campaign with my mates. Far from home, the rations you get are always the driest thing you’ve ever tried to eat, so they’ll last longer. So when we could, we caught fresh meat in camp, and as we tried to make it taste good, I realized I had a passion for making it taste better and better. Getting the heat of the campfire just right, and all that." He shrugged. "I don’t know what your passion would be. You’ll have to figure it out. Maybe it’s something like playing those games we used to play. Cheket, and Sjak. You always seemed to be passionate about playing.”

  “Maybe, yeah,” said Aurelia. She sat cross-legged, and closed her eyes. “So you’re saying… I try to think about how I like playing Cheket, and then make that into energy for what I want to do…”

  “Yeah… sort of, I guess.”

  Aurelia was still for a moment, then peeked one eye open.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “...I don’t know if Cheket is my passion… I’m not really good at knowing stuff about my feelings.”

  “Well, finding your sjael takes time, of course. And it helps to consistently practice your passion, as well, but I assume it's been a long time since you’ve played any games. So maybe we should figure out some way to play again… perhaps we could make a set out of pebbles and twigs, and draw a board in the dirt.”

  “I don’t need pieces to play. We can just say the moves.”

  “Maybe you can.” Roskvir laughed. “I definitely need to be able to have pieces on a gameboard in front of me, to remember what’s going on. I can’t keep that all in my head.”

  “Oh. Then let's make a board,” said Aurelia. She finished the last bit of meat from her skewer, then stood and skipped away to look for items to serve as game pieces.

  Roskvir sighed, as he watched her go.

  The world wasn’t just becoming clearer, and less confusing, he realized.

  In that moment, he was the happiest he’d been in a very long while.

  Hi everybody. Sorry for the late release. Like yesterday's chapter, this one took a bit longer to finish.

  To give you guys some advance warning, in the next few days I'll probably need to take some days off here and there. I need to reset my sleep schedule, and I mostly can't write on the days when I'm trying to do that. But there will still be a chapter most days, and with luck resetting my internal clock won't take too long. Once I'm sleeping at night again like a normal person, ideally chapters will go back to being posted at around 6 PM PST give or take a few hours.

  I'm obligated to tell you to favorite, rate/review, etc. here again, but I assume most of the people reading this will have already done that. Either way, thanks again for your continued support.

  Cloak Of Saffron