—Orion—

  I anxiously sat before Sally as he continued to eat his meal, swallowing strips of flesh with an eager voracity. I felt disturbed watching so much food disappear into such a tiny body.

  It wasn't more than I had eaten, but it was comparable, and that fact was nonsensical. He was a tiny animal—compared to me—and eating at least half your body weight wasn't normal.

  I ripped another strip of the outer flesh off of the crispy-golden roast, and felt pleasantly surprised with how well the unseasoned meat had tasted. It was still worse than most food I’d had before, but I was familiar with how unpleasant unsalted, small game could taste.

  I stopped grinding the chewy meat between my molars when I noticed Sally staring at me. It didn't take me long to realise what he wanted, given that all of the meat I had placed in front of him before was now missing.

  I responded to his need by ripping some chunks of meat from the inside of the animal. Moving quickly so that the hot juices wouldn't burn me, I quickly threw the meat to Sally, who caught most of the meat in h-his mouth.

  As he ate his new round of food, I noted how he seemed to prefer the rawer pieces of meat from the roasted animal. In the future I'll try to leave it as undercooked as I can for him.

  Sh-he'll get much more energy from the meat if it's undercooked, given that his diet seems to rely solely on meat. However, I don't want to risk him getting a parasite from uncooked meat. I don't have any of the pharmaceutical supplies I’d need to treat those conditions.

  A bad stomach bug or illness would be enough to kill either of us, given that [Self-Healing] cannot deal with them.

  With my current piece of meat finished, I stopped eating. I was still peckish, but I didn't want to eat too much after not eating for at least a couple of days.

  I glanced over at Sally, and felt a sensation not unlike discomfort at the sight of his round and bulging belly. He must've eaten his body weight in meat, and in less than twenty minutes. Drakes must have some sort of quality—magical or otherwise—that lets them do such an unusual accomplishment.

  It almost made me wish I hadn't burnt the sticks, just so I could tell him to stop eating more. But then I remembered why I did so in the first place, and which was enough to quash the idea.

  Thankfully as Sally finished his meal, he didn't ask for more. With a cute, squeaky burp, he lay down on his side, his belly too big for him to settle on his front like he usually did.

  I removed the skeleton and its remaining quarter of edible flesh from over the fire, deciding to save the rest for tomorrow. I would need protein for the hiking required to reach our next location.

  As I looked at Sally, I began to feel his exhaustion and drowsiness second-hand replace the hunger I'd felt emanating from him the past day. It was such a foreign sensation, knowing and understanding so… intimately what someone else needed.

  Before I could get lost in my thoughts, Sally began to write a simple sentence in the dirt. It took a minute and Sally miming going to sleep for me to finally understand what the scribbles in the leafy ground meant.

  'Sleep here?' He asked, and after a quick glance to the darkening sky I nodded. We didn't have the time to find a better place to sleep and rest, now that it was already becoming dark.

  ***

  Later, the dusk turned into complete darkness, the sun slipping beneath the horizon, and its sunlight became completely absent.

  With nightfall, the forest gained a strange quality. Instead of the usual thrum bugs made, and the clicking noises of the bats that hunt them, it was quiet. Even the activity of daytime predators swapping with their nocturnal equivalents was absent.

  Nothing moved in the shadows, or rustled the leaves.

  It was quiet, still. It made me uneasy.

  I wasn't scared though, as I'd happily noted that my improved eyes weren't struggling to see in the growing darkness like they had before the mountain. Even with an almost complete absence of light, it was still as easy to see as the hours before sun-down. The only noticeable change, was that some colour had begun to seep from my vision, rather than any actual loss in visibility. Though, given that I barely struggled in a lightless cave, nighttime would naturally be much easier.

  And the temperature was pleasant as well, which had been my only other concern. The air was still humid and warm, and I doubted the summer-air would dip below comfortable temperatures overnight.

  This meant Sally wasn't at risk for any of the troubles he'd been struggling with the past couple of days. Food and the cold were no longer pressing concerns. Even given the strange lack of predators since nightfall, they were much less of a threat now that I could see in the dark.

  But with an eye and ear focussed on occasionally checking for threats, my thoughts about my other issue returned. Especially now that Sally had completely eaten my distraction from our previous topic of conversation.

  Would he ask about it again? Given how badly trying to smile went, I don't know if I could tell him a convincing lie. I rubbed my agitated palms together as I tried to think of some way to distract Sally again—before he could continue that conversation.

  I quickly glanced at Sally, assuming that I'd see him intently staring at me. However, I was pleasantly surprised.

  He was fast asleep, with his belly gently rising and falling with each breath.

  His peaceful form instantly brought back memories of the past few days, back when I thought that he was an infant drake. I was having trouble reconciling the idea that Sally was a man the same age as me, especially given that every bit of my learnt knowledge screamed otherwise.

  When I looked at her—him—especially when he wasn't conscious of my presence, I just didn't see 'him'.

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  I still saw 'her', that traumatised infant who I had to coax into being relaxed whenever she was around me. A girl in the form of a fragile, hand-sized creature, dressed in a coat of precious silver. Haughty and quick-to-anger towards those who irritated her, yet apologetic if she felt guilty enough.

  Yet he wasn't 'her', he was a man who'd recently had the social life I’d been wishing for a week ago.

  It wasn't fair to blame him, it wasn't his fault that I'd crafted this whole idea of who he was, and that it was wrong.

  But I was struggling to change my mental image of Sally. The reveal, instead of erasing my previous understanding of 'her' and replacing the drake in my mind with 'him', had just added to it.

  The man now called Sally was just a faint watermark hidden beneath the history of the drakeling. A detail about 'her' past that I had to constantly mentally reinforce, and remind myself of its importance, otherwise it'd fade in a moment.

  I let out a silent sigh as I stopped considering the issue, my lack of understanding enough to make me give up for now. I'll just have to be careful with my words until I've ingrained the correct thoughts into myself.

  And with nothing to do about that issue—nothing that'd make me less stressed about it—I turned my attention to the other matter on my mind.

  With Sally asleep, I felt comfortable enough to take out [The Hunter's Anathema].

  I felt the cold crystal with the palm of my hand, sorely tempted by the opportunity to get some reliable answers to my many problems.

  I still remembered the danger it put Sally and I in, the risk it exposed us to. It might've not had any other escape route to offer us, but the reliability of it was still in question.

  But there was a risk-free—as far as I could anticipate—question that I needed answering.

  Where do we go now?

  A question without much immediate risk, if I'm careful about checking where it led us.

  As I prepared to give it the blood it needed, I looked down at it, and saw that it already had some blood floating in its gem. When I checked my hands for an accidental cut, assuming that might've been where it got my fluids from, I noticed that they'd become cleaner.

  Not anywhere near as fresh as simply washing them, but the blood that'd stained them had disappeared. The dirt and grime was still stuck in every crease, but somehow the blood from killing the animal had all vanished.

  Another check of the item's description had confirmed my original misunderstanding. It didn't need my blood, it could use any source of the red bodily fluid.

  I tried to test it further by sticking the pointy end of the gem into the cooling pieces of meat. While the amount inside only grew by the smallest increment, the extra droplet floating inside its walls confirmed my theory.

  I removed and wiped off the tip, cleaning it as much as I reasonably could. I then pushed my thumb onto the razor-sharp edge, wincing as the painful slice was replaced with a dull, intense ache.

  The next time I consider using [The Hunter's Anathema], I must make sure to have some animal blood on hand. Or at the very least a chunk of uncooked meat, it'd be a waste to ruin the blood and make it unusable—now that I had a use for it.

  As I tried to ignore the pain seeping through my hand, I looked up at the sky, taking in the fully blackened heavens.

  The sun had completely disappeared, but unlike Earth, nothing had replaced it. The vibrant and lively stars, the waxing and waning moon, were both absent in this world.

  It was one of the most jarring changes I had to adapt to when acclimatising to this new world. Through my Father's training, and my own preference, I'd loved learning about the stars, and their uses in navigation.

  All that knowledge was now useless.

  I looked back down at the arrow, and removed my thumb when I saw that its gem had been filled with my blood. I prepared my question, curious to see how it would react if I left my query open-ended.

  Where should we travel?

  I eagerly watched its surface, but saw no reaction or change in its depths. But it hadn't consumed my blood either, so it had failed to activate. Did I need to make the question more specific?

  Where should we travel that would lead to Sally accomplishing his goals?

  This time it worked without issue, and I saw our current campsite, abandoned and bathed in rays of light. I could almost feel the warm rays of daylight on my face as I leaned in closer.

  The vision began to follow a trail of trampled vegetation that led east, and as it did so, it rose.

  I watched the perspective it was showing me rise above the treeline, and then go even higher. Eventually it had to be a few hundred metres up, and to the west of the campsite, I could just see the base of the mountain. The almost incomprehensibly large rocky peak was where Sally and I had been trapped within the [Mountain Dungeon].

  But to the east I saw something much more interesting, a village.

  It was hard to tell from the kilometres of distance between it and where it was being filmed from, but it seemed derelict. At the very least some of the houses were missing roofs, and it seemed rural, wood and stone slabs.

  But it was clearly an area of interest, and while it was unclear how it would 'help Sally accomplish his goals', it would be a good starting point for finding much-needed supplies. Being in the forest without a bow was a strange sensation. Almost like I was lacking a piece of clothing.

  An unexpected boon that I'd gotten from it was our location. Enough to know my orientation, and generally where we were in respect to Solis.

  The trip from the city of the sun to the mountain was… roughly six days, though it would be three to four if I attempted it solo. However, that was for the trip to the other side of the base of the mountain. To even get there would be a couple of days, given that there were no unexpected obstacles or impassable terrain. Both journeys would be impossible without some proper clothes and supplies.

  Even if travelling to Solis was feasible, how safe would it be for either of us? Considering that Sally is no longer human, and that someone had attempted to kill me inside the mountain Solis was guarding, there were no guarantees. A person had probably snuck past the guards and into the campsite to attack me. If they could do that, then I would not be any safer in a city.

  The village—even if it was abandoned—should hold hunting gear, salt for meat curing, and shelter. A place to stay warm and dry while we planned out what to do next, which would be much more pleasant than sleeping on dewy grass. A surprisingly wet mistake.

  As I moved to lay against a tree, to relax and rest without going to sleep fully—I still didn't want to fall asleep fully—I considered what I should share with Sally. How many details about [The Hunter's Anathema] should I tell him? Maybe I should just say that 'I found tracks to follow'.

  I think I'll just say as little as possible. I can look reliable to Sally, without having to lie fully.

  I threw a branch onto the fire as I shifted into a more comfortable position. A glance at the peaceful Sally led me to deciding to keep the fire going all-night, he looked more comfortable than he had been every previous time I'd seen him sleep.

  [New Status Effect!]

  [Exhaustion]

  After glancing at the notification, I ignored it, already calling upon [Self-Healing].

  [Using: [Self-Healing]]

  [Conditions: [Exhaustion] Cured!]

  [MP: 4/25 -> 3/25]

  It was a useful trick. It didn't completely replace the need for sleep, as mental fatigue wasn't cured, but I could go a couple of days without rest before I began to notice.

  I kept my eyes focused on the dark patches around us as I started to do the math on how much I had to ration my MP over the next few days.

  ***

  The morning sun was harsh, but the foliage above diffused it—such that the forest was filled with a warm golden glow, rather than sharp rays of sunlight.

  With the rising sun, Sally had begun to stir as well. Over the course of a few minutes, he slowly stretched and stood up, taking in the world with a few happy noises.

  When he eventually saw and remembered my existence, he walked over and sat by me. His silver-scaled head tilting with curiosity.

  Thankfully, [Animal Companionship] still worked as well as I hoped. The [Emergence] hadn't stopped being useful now that h-his needs of hunger, hypothermia, and sleep-deprivation had been solved. With them out of the way, it seemed that Sally's greatest need at the moment, was his curiosity. It was also nice that [Animal companionship] had confirmed that his animalistic traits and habits were still what I'd assumed them to be.

  It made me happy that Sally wasn't pretending or performing those little mannerisms, and wasn't like the people I've known before. It also was nice that I'd gotten Sally's expressions right, and that I now had a tool to help confirm them.

  "Should we leave?" I asked the drake. The firm nod I received in response was all I needed.