A defeated look crosses Olly’s face, and he hesitates for a little before answering. When he does, his tone is pretty worrying. His voice trembles as he speaks, but he pushes through. “I’m not calm, Ayre. It’s an unknown and a really bad one. Lilly just said that I apparently have something inside me that is a non-starter to even name lest it risk ‘incalculable suffering’ for the world. It’s apparently bad enough that she is considering not telling me.” I notice then that while Olly’s face and posture are placid, he’s clenching his fists tight enough that I see rivulets of blood dripping down one and that red ichor the other. Each word he speaks next has nearly a full stop between, “I’m just trying to wait patiently while considering what just happened to me causing me to lose track of everything for apparently an hour. That’s never happened before.”
At an utter loss, I reach over and grab the bag from next to Olly and reach inside. Withdrawing my hand, I extend it to Olly and open it to reveal several small marble sized pearls. Each one a different color, but still retaining the mother-of-pearl glossy rainbow sheen one would expect from pearls. “One each of the base elemental essences: Ignia, Hydrus, Terra, and Aero. I figure having a…balanced diet would probably be beneficial? While you’ve got unique needs, everything is still comprised of the same basic stuff, so it can’t hurt to try to even things out.” I go to more length to explain, trying to give Olly something to latch onto.
With great resistance, Olly unclenches his hands, flexing and unflexing them a couple times. From a quick glance, I see whatever scratches he dug into his palms have already sealed, which is a small relief. “That makes good sense. I can’t really argue against it.” He carefully plucks them out of my hand one by one with his left and transfers them to his right.
Each of the pearls takes longer to dissipate than most things I’ve seen him absorb like this — likely due to the essence density that makes these things valuable in the first place. But as he absorbs each in turn, I see tiny, almost imperceptible bits of crystalline “flesh” returning to his arm. He watches with interest, seemingly mesmerized.
“Well, I’m glad that worked, even if only a little. Father always says that small gains are the most important ones, after all.” Lilly’s voice sounds very fragile as I turn to look up at her. The words carry a bit of attempted levity, but it's abundantly clear that it's not levity that she's actually feeling. “I wonder if the amount it returns is proportional to the essence consumed? Or if it has to do with specific essence types?”
It's a clear attempt to shift the subject away from the earlier one, but I'm not really willing to let it go. For all of her talking about honesty, holding this in has gotten deep under my scales.
“So, what's going on, Lilly?” She flinches and flutters back a little bit from me, looking wounded.
“I…can't share. I'm sorry. I really am.” A sharp intake of breath comes from Olly beside me and when I turn, he just lets a solitary nod through, hardening his features as he does. She looks him dead on as she apologizes, clearly trying to wear her resolve, but he looks away.
“I…understand. Let's get moving then.” Olly reaches out and all but snatches the backpack out of my hands and steps off down the road without another word: back rigid and pulling on the sleeve as he goes. It doesn't take magic to see that he's purely devastated by it.
It leaves the two of us alone there for a moment. “Ayre, you know me. I wouldn't do this if I felt there was any other way around it. I really am serious. It's bad.” There's a tightness in her voice as she tries to explain: like a chain under tension bearing a great load.
“Lilly, I'm not going to pretend to understand. I fail to comprehend how something can be that bad to exist purely as knowledge.” I close my eyes, drawing in a breath. I want to be comforting, but this is a bridge too far for me. “I don't disbelieve you that it's bad. What my problem is: now we know it exists. Olly is going to try to seek information about it. He can't help himself normally, let alone for something that might be a part of his puzzle. I'll be helping him.” A bitter part of my brain takes hold. That smoldering campfire in my mind guttering at its final cinders. “Answer me this question, if you can.” The final statement is petty, and I know it, but it's either that or scream. “You're so often concerned with meddling in the affairs of mortals that now you're keeping secrets that you won't share from the person who it matters to most — possibly the only person in the world it matters to. I have to ask what you want out of this journey. Are you here just to observe? If so, and you can't or won't help, what can you do? Or is this just another story to recount in the forest?”
With the final question, Lilly seems utterly despondent. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but…
“Maybe you're right, Ayre.” She casts a glance down the road at Olly's retreating figure. Somehow managing to frown more deeply, even her sharply pointed ears droop along with her wing beats. “If I can't help, then at best all I'm doing is hurting. I left a journal in Olly's pack. You can keep it.”
With finality, she flutters past me and over my shoulder, back the way we came and angles into the forest.
I feel cold as I watch. It really wasn't my intention to play out like this, but if it's what she feels is necessary to upkeep her rules, then who am I to question her? The fae have their role in the world, I guess, and she made her decision where her duties lay.
I'm not going to abandon Olly. We'll figure something out. I can always go home later and make up with Lilly. The fae aren't going anywhere.
Casting a final glance backwards I see her tarnished golden glint disappear into a denser stand of trees. I watch awhile, hoping she'll turn around, change her mind, or anything else. But that doesn't happen.
As such, I turn and jog down the roadway to catch up with Olly. A task made easy by the fact that he made it all of two hundred yards before slowing down considerably. All of his strength apparently spent as he trudges along with a posture that looks like he's got the weight of the world sitting on his shoulders.
“We've got a few hours till sundown, let's make tracks.” I rap my hand on Olly’s back firmly in a gesture of camaraderie, but he flinches. “According to the map, there's a safe rest stop about couple day's walk from here, so we'll only need to manage one night before we get there.” Making an effort to bring strength to my voice that I really don't feel, I walk alongside Olly and pull him into a hug from the side. I make a point of suffusing him with my essence. Far larger quantities than ever before.
The spark of connection is momentarily coherent due to the wealth of essence I share, and it seems to buoy him. It also grows a little more of the crystal back. More good news at least.
He nods, giving me a questioning glance. It's all I can do to just shrug and frown, shaking my head.
The next few hours of walking are quiet. We both make passing attempts at conversation, but inevitably they only last a couple exchanges before petering off. It repeats over and over with false starts and awkward dialogue until we've settled in and are quietly sitting next to the campfire late as the sun draws her final breath for the day to cast it over the world.
“Ayre, why don't you leave?” Olly asks abruptly into the silence of the darkening night. The coming winter chill feels very…appropriate for the mood.
When I go to respond my breath comes out with plumes of steam matching the constant wisps pouring off me anywhere my scales are exposed. “Because I told you that I was going to stay with you and help. That beside, I can't go back to my home and sit there for another twenty years. What would happen after that? Another twenty years?”
The fire crackles: a small, meager thing with barely enough wood to sustain it for the coming night. After a lengthy silence, Olly says, “I get that. But you could go off on your own. Or if you left me, you could travel with Lilly.” Looking up from the flames I've been staring into, I see a resolve and pain matching what Lilly had. “You've known one another for the vast majority of your lives and me for barely a couple weeks. I'm not worth losing that friendship over.” I open my mouth to contest that statement, but he holds up a hand to stall me, continuing. “Ayre, seriously. I'm nobody. I'm nothing. I am, objectively, an unstable monster. The right thing for me to do, after hearing what Vari and Lilly said, is to walk off into the unknown and find something I can't hope to fight and just let it happen. The memories of I have of destroying towns and cities are a clear indicator of the danger I pose if I should ever lose control and not be able to wrench it back. End the risk to everyone else that I pose.” His voice is cold, informative, and factual: brooking no response, really. “Then you and Lilly can go back to being friends, have your fun adventure, and do it without a sword hanging over your head waiting to fall. Without the stress of having me to worry about when you really have no obligation to.”
The worst part, listening to it, is that Olly is right. And I can't even deny it. Him entering my life has caused more strife and hardship in these three weeks than I've experienced in my entire life since my parents were killed. I've had to kill someone to save him after he even tried to kill me. Why am I staying?
Silence fills the area. All except for the campfire flame speaking its own crackling opinion into the void.
What would my parents do? They lived for combined centuries and millennia, and after long lives they decided the best thing to do was to leave. Our kind are functionally immortal unless killed, so they looked at the yawning pit of immortality and decided that they'd rather live in a cave than to deal with the mortal races any further. In perpetuity, even. And they seemed happy with the decision. Should I do and be the same?
Olly takes a deep breath, seeming to smell the air before he stands abruptly from his sitting place by the fireside, a gaping wound clearly visible in his heart through his eyes. “I need to take a walk. Clear my head.” I simply nod, still leaving his statement unanswered. He walks off, stepping onto the cobbled road and starts to walk down it in the direction of Kharbon.
I watch for a while, trying to think of something: a piece of advice, words of wisdom, an anecdote, anything that my parents might have shared to help me here, but nothing comes to mind.
A cold feeling settles in my chest as minutes pass, turning into an hour, and Olly hasn't returned. For all of my thinking, I've come up dry. The only thing I've been able to remember is the tapestries and baubles in our first home. Gifts given by people my parents helped as they wandered.
Being serpents of Ignia like me, they never stayed in one place long, as evidenced by the wildly varying styles and types of gifts they'd accumulated. Wandering between nations and continents. Itinerant helpers. That's what Pa referred to their time as, wasn't it?
They'd never been satisfied sitting still, so they wandered and found things to do. Our essence doesn't like containment. It burns away at restriction. It seeks freedom.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
After their entire lives and only a few encounters with bad people, why did they decide to settle? The more I think, the less sense it makes. I'd always simply accepted it that there were a lot of bad people out there, and they thought they'd be safer that way.
But Ma always said that most people were good and kind. They both always tried to encourage me to view the world with wide eyes. Taught me about helping people.
If they wanted to stay away forever like I thought, why did they temper all their bad experiences so much and stress to me how good the world outside was? Why did they stop wandering? If they hadn't settled down, those people could have never found them. They were made less safe by putting down roots, weren't they?
Even their spirits seemed ready to leave when I finally made the decision to do so.
So little of their decisions adds up, and it makes me wish more than anything I could get one more conversation with both of them to ask all of the questions I've had over the last twenty years. But that's an impossibility. So I sit and try to ignore the moisture steaming down my face.
I sit for a while and another hour passes without Olly returning. I cast my gaze around, and notice that he left the backpack here. Not really odd if he intended to return…
That thought hits me like a hammer. If he intended to return.
A spike of ice drives into my heart. A cold loneliness that makes the forest around me feel immediately hostile. If he left, I'm truly alone.
I have no idea where Lilly is and if Olly decided to make that decision for me, it leaves me worse off than I was at the cabin. There I knew the terrain, knew the beasts and monsters, and had comfortable walls. If I ever truly needed help, I could have gone to the fae, and they'd have helped in whatever strange ways they saw fit. I belonged in that place.
But out here? I know nobody in that town and without Lilly's glamours it's not like I could just walk back in and live a normal life like anyone else. Vari said the big city will be more welcoming, and I’ll be able to get lost there, and I don’t really have a reason to disbelieve him at all. Sleep tonight and just continue on my journey to…somewhere? Without either of them, I really don’t even have a reason to be out here. Lilly wanted to see the world. Olly needed to find his past. And going home would serve no purpose. I was there to watch over the shrine I constructed and having taken in the essential remnants of my parents, I have no reason to be there, either.
Sure, I want to get revenge on whatever killed my parents, but that was twenty years ago. The people who did it are probably old and the memory a far distant one for them. Even considering that, I don’t know where I would start. Walk up to random people and say “Hey, my parents were killed twenty years ago by a monster and three knights in gloss gold and black armor. Do you know any adventuring groups traveling with a twelve-foot tall monstrosity?”
That would be pointless, and ‘Ma and ‘Pa would never want me to lose myself to that kind of quest.
“Don’t live for death. If you do, you’ll find it.”
One of Lilly’s favorite stories comes to mind. “The Winsome Warrior”. A story about a young questing knight seeking vengeance for the death of her betrothed. It plays out exactly how one would expect until the halfway point when the main character communes with the spirit of her dead lover. They ask her why she thought they would want her to risk dying herself instead of moving on with her life. She’d found a boon companion who was willing to fight for her till the end. See the quest through.
After that, the knight realizes the futility of the endeavor, and the story transitions into a sappy romance until the end when the villain returns to “finish the job” and it plays out like anyone would expect. Because they gave up their quest for vengeance and found something worth living for. Not just something worth dying for.
Night has fully fallen, and the air has grown ever more chill. I’m faced with a dilemma, above and beyond the high-minded musings I’ve been having. I’m not safe here alone, and sleeping would only serve to make me more vulnerable than I already am. I should keep moving. I can sustain myself with my magic for a long time, and since Olly left the bag I’ve got plenty of food to make up the difference for the energy I expend doing so. But I need to don my armor first.
I spend the next fifteen or so minutes getting the armor on — a task made substantially more complicated by being alone and relatively inexperienced at it. Eventually, though, I use the command, and it fits snugly to my body, leaving very few slack points.
Immediately, I feel a world better. None of my troubles are actually solved, and I’m making a pointed effort to not think about them, but with armor donned and glaive in hand, I’m about as well off as I can hope to be.
"Just keep your head down and power through, Ayre. You’ve lived alone your whole life, you’ll be fine." The thought crosses my mind and I'm not at all sure if it's a lie or not.
I kick dirt onto the fire, smothering it. The moment it goes out fully, I’m plunged into darkness. It’s no matter, though. I call upon my essence sight and see the world in hues of muted red and black. As winter comes on, though, Ignia’s prevalence in the world lessens, losing the war for dominance over Hydrus essence except during the day when the sun’s breath paints the world. It makes my vision notably less reliable, since everything is getting cold and beginning to emit Hydrus instead. But it’s enough to travel by until one of the Sisters rise. As long as I stick to the road, at least.
Looking back in the direction of Lilly, home, and stifling routine, I let out a steamy sigh, not at all sure of my path, but choosing to do something. There’s a nonzero chance that Olly got hurt and that’s why he didn’t come back. Similarly, maybe he left because he felt he was losing control. It’s impossible to say, but as long as he isn’t running again, I’ll eventually catch up to him in Kharbon.
My travel is announced by the consistent tapping of metalshod boots, the rasp of scales on leather, and the soft thumps of my glaive hitting the ground every other step. Being in motion feels good if nothing else. I’m not really cold — having constant essential pressure within myself emitting Ignia sees to that — but it’s still an unpleasant walk. The roads are well paved, but obviously, they’re only upkept so often, and I’ve nearly twisted my ankle three times after finding loose stones that I would have seen normally during the day or a warmer time of year.
Eventually, the sun starts to peek over the horizon. Bless the Breath Divine. Warmth! With long shadows, her breath begins to infuse me with warmth, allowing me to dispel my admittedly fairly minimal night sight while I bask taking long strides and flexing my arms and wings to expose more of me to the sun. The area around me has turned from dense forests into more wide open rolling plains and for the last hour or so I’ve been walking alongside a fairly fast flowing river. The plains are covered in yellowing grasses, now-naked trees atop each of the hills, and occasional large clusters of what are probably Aero crystals. It’s not uncommon to see them in regions with high essence densities — no different than the Mineralis lodes that Olly found. It’s beautiful in a stark and bleak sort of way and, more importantly, affords me long sight lines in almost any direction. The regular hills break up my lines of sight though, and regularly bunt up against the road.
The nearness of each one sets me a little on edge. Logically, the odds of a monster attack in broad daylight near a well-traveled path are slim according to what I've read, but in my current situation I’m a good bit more jumpy than I normally would be. The lack of travelers I’ve run into also makes me feel uneasy. Though I don’t know how often people actually travel these roads. For our short time in Silverbrook, I didn’t see anyone leave the town and head this way, but I was hardly watching the gates.
Still, something feels off in a way that’s been hard to shake since the sun rose.
As I round a bend, though, I’m met with a handful of conflicting emotions immediately. For one, I see Olly a ways off the road in the center of a stand of crystals jutting out of the ground. That’s good.
For two, he’s lying down at the base of a particularly large crystal some ways away from the road. That’s not good.
From this distance and angle it’s hard to make out much detail, so I hop into a jog with a couple beats of my wings to cover the gap quicker. And as I do, I get a better picture, he’s curled up on the ground outside of arm's reach of the crystal. His arm is extended towards it — out and away from his body — but he doesn’t appear to have actually touched it. The cursed arm is still looking ruddy and red. Worse than last night, even. So he probably used some of his abilities in the night.
He’s unwounded, though, at a glance., which is a relief.
I come to a stop next to him and begin to kneel next to him to shake him, setting down my glaive. I get a much better look at his right arm now. I hadn't been able to see it from the other side, but there’s a pattern on his arm in the purple crystal material that looks like a huge handprint — easily five times the size of my own or more, but with unnaturally thin and long fingers that all but coiled around his arm. Like something grabbed him, and anywhere it touched returned to the original condition I’d met him in. I also don’t see his sleeve anywhere nearby or on his person. He had been wearing it when he left, I think.
Looking like a hand immediately sets my guard and I snatch my glaive in my main hand and rise, scanning around. He’s in a spot that there’s no way I could have missed him unless I walked for a few minutes with my eyes closed. Was that him? Or whatever seemingly grabbed him? If I can infuse Olly to return his arm to its “normal” form, then it stands to reason that something else could as well. But why?
Satisfied there’s no immediate threats but still wary of a trap, I nudge Olly with my foot, but he doesn’t stir at all. It makes me look closer at him and I realize that his breathing is very slow. Slow enough that for a little while I’m not certain that he is breathing. A couple more nudges make it pretty clear that he’s not getting up anytime soon.
Uncertain, I heft him up, onto, and across my shoulders in a carry that lets me bear his weight across my entire frame with less chance of him getting in the way of my wings.
“You damned fool, Olly. What happened to you this time?” I ask aloud as I make my way back to the road and start to head on. We’re supposed to be coming up on a safe haven resting area, and it’ll be a better spot to look into what’s going on with him than out in the open.
Something about where I found him feels vaguely familiar, and after some thinking I realize that it’s probably where Nyssa indicated that she left the corpse of the thing she killed. I’ll look at the map when I get to the rest area.
“I’m pretty mad at you. I want you to know that.” It feels a little freeing to say out loud and lightens my mood a bit. So I use the next five minutes of walking to vent all of my current thoughts at my unconscious companion.
“If you ever make a decision for me again, I’ll probably set you on fire. Just say what you’re thinking.”
“The reason I kept knocking you down over and over while we were practicing was because I was still mad about what you did to me that left me in a coma for a few days. It was a small bit of payback.”
“You made Lilly very jealous talking to that gardener as long as you did. You could really stand to pay better attention when she comes back.”
“I bought you that bag as a gift. Leaving it for me to find was super rude.”
“What even was your plan? Just wander off thinking I wouldn’t find you eventually? Silly.
Feeling substantially better with each admission, I notice the rest area ahead on the roadside. It’s a building, of sorts, with a half dome on top and a wide opening on one side, presumably to allow for smoke to escape and people to enter. The opening has a wrought metal gate that spans the gap and looks incredibly sturdy. White brick reinforced with wooden and metal fixtures. It looks large enough that a fair sized group, maybe ten or so people, could stay within comfortably.
All things considered, it will be a good place to rest for a while and try to figure out what’s going on and what our next step should be.
Arriving and entering, there’s a clear area for a campfire, room for tents, and a handful of stone benches arrayed around the central fire spot. It’s reasonably cozy inside and fully protects us from the wind. I hope these things are common in the more traveled areas that we’re likely to visit wherever we go. But thinking on it makes me a bit wary, so I go over and secure the gate closed with some provided locks hanging on the wall nearby. It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way towards making this place feel secure.
I gently place Olly on his back on one of the benches and start to work him over after setting down my things — keeping my glaive handy. Nothing I do seems to rouse him in the slightest, though. Pinching him, smacking him across the face, splashing water on him. I even try setting a bit of his hair alight to no effect. Nothing.
Frustrated, I sit next to him and think. I stare at the red arm with the crystal handprint and have an idea. The Reflexio gems helped to stabilize him, right?
I reach into the bag and take out a handful of them. I poke his hand open with a stick I find nearby in a kindling pile and succeed at opening his hand up. The stick was taken from the world too soon, but perished serving a bit of vital work.
The silliness alleviates a bit more of my stress as I settle in to spend time manually “feeding” him since he’s been so resistant to the idea. As I get to it, I find the circular nature of the situation amusing. Olly was doing this exact same thing for me, and struggling for the same reason, while I was in that short-lived recovery coma thanks to Lilly’s intervention. That amusement dies quickly though, as the other half of its circular nature reveals itself in my mind. Now Olly is in similar straits, also because of something Lilly did. It sobers me considerably.
Each gem seems to bring some of the purple color back to his arm, but it’s clearly going to take a while as each one takes a few minutes to fully absorb into his hand. It’s a good time to take a look at the journal Lilly mentioned. It might have something useful in it.
With a sigh, I pull out the journal, flip it open, and set to work dropping a gem or pearl into Olly’s hand every now and again while reading.