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Peace Is A Journey (Chapter 18/?)

In which a particularly unpleasant mountain storm offers new and distinctly unwanted challenges. Elsewhere, a Healer and her apprentice do their jobs.

(Chapter length: 19.5k. ao3 link)

Warnings: Warning for respiratory illness and mentions of amputation, and non-consensual administration of sedative/analgesic. Later, comprehensive and graphic depictions of preparation of hunted animals. Read with caution. Also, emetophobia warning.

---

The morning dawned bright and remorseless upon Katolis proper, the light casting dramatic shadows from the walls of the Valley of Graves. Sarli looked outside her window to the Hall of Paragons carved within the stone, and could not help but feel the weight of it. The weight of Mercy. The weight of Justice, too.

When the time came, she fetched Cairon and the bag, and set them upon their walk. “Come then,” She said, more than a little grimly, while the door closed behind them. “Let us see about this business. And pray that the Lord Protector has the sense to allow a Healer’s apprentice within his castle’s walls.”

He very nearly didn’t. It was plain to see on the very, very careful blankness of Lord Viren’s face, when he was confronted at his office with one more party than he had expected. He inhaled too-sharply through his nose, as though he were like to lose his temper without a steadying breath. Then he said “I hardly think it’s appropriate, Healer. You are bound by confidentiality. Your apprentice is not.”

“He is mine, Lord Viren.” She answered to that, flatly. “Though he lacks his holy vows, he is beholden to mine. He knows my honour rests upon his own. I would not allow him to shame me.”

Another careful, audible inhalation. There was a switch, barely-suppressed, at the Lord Protector’s brow. “You must understand, as the protector of this kingdom, I have to be exceptionally careful with how far I stretch my trust.” He said, delicately.

“Yes.” Sarli agreed, because it was true, and said nothing more. She met Lord Viren’s gaze unflinching, and waited.

“…Very well.” He conceded, in the end, with a tightness around his eyes that spoke well of his displeasure. Even so, something bothered her about how quickly he’d acquiesced. It was too easy a victory, for how displeased he was. It set a twist of unease to her gut. “But while your integrity is beyond reproach, Healer, I must take precautions for your apprentice. He will be blindfolded on his way to our destination.”

Cairon blinked once at this and didn’t object, apparently entirely unbothered. It still stuck in Sarli’s craw. “I do expect that you mean to allow him the use of his eyes for the treatment, Lord Viren.” She said, dryly, showing none of her unease at all. “He would be of considerably lesser use, otherwise.”

He smiled thinly. “If you are so convinced that he is trustworthy, I suppose I must.”

The response bothered her, too. Perhaps it was in that all signs of his frustration seemed to be slipping away, as if he had never been annoyed at all. She had not spent so many years in service to Mercy without developing a fine sense of people, and that sense was ringing alarum now. Nonetheless, she held fast, and stood by impassively while her apprentice presented himself for blindfolding, and the two of them were led down the secret passages with a two-guard escort. Sarli noted, very carefully, the faces of those guards. Soldiers, after all, were as beholden to the Accords as the Lord Protector himself, and their participation in this travesty meant that she must surely report their conduct as well. She would need to remember their faces.

She kept a hand at Cairon’s elbow to guide him all the way, but found that he didn’t especially need it. He was very sure-footed, and seemed to orient himself in the direction of the footsteps ahead of him with ease. Not even on the stairs did he stumble, but even so, she held his arm all the way down.

At last they came to that Mercy-forsaken dungeon, which at least smelled less repellent this time. The patient had been moved; the cell she was led to was a different one to the day before, and was clean and well-lit. She noted this with a bare flicker of attention as she levelled all of her focus upon the elf she was to treat. He did not look well. He hadn’t looked well before, but he was worse today. Though his eyes were open and turned her way, there was something entirely too vague and unfocused about them, and there was an unhealthy waxy pallor to his skin. Her expression tightened at the sight of him, but she allowed no further reaction upon her.

“The blindfold, Lord Protector.” She said, as Lord Viren filtered into the room with his escort, and settled himself in a chair nearby to observe. How repellent.

“You may remove it.” He allowed, and she carefully did not sneer.

Instead, she turned, and pulled the cover from her apprentice’s eyes. She watched as he blinked, pupils contracting in the firelight, and then-

The moment he saw the elf was very obvious. There was a sharp inhalation, a widening of the eyes. A brief tremble, quickly-suppressed, at his fingertips. Other than that, he did not react. “An elf, master.” He said, levelly, because according to Lord Viren’s misapprehensions, he was not supposed to know about the elf. She spared an approving thought for his acting skills.

“Yes. I assume it will not be a problem.”

He closed his eyes for a second, and she could not tell whether it was part of the act, or something more genuine. “No, master.” He answered, and his eyes opened. He fixed them seriously upon their patient, gaze analytic and tightly controlled. The patient himself opened his eyes a little further, though they grew no less hazy. There seemed a lesser luminosity to them, now.

She nodded, and strode forwards. She knelt before the elf, though it hurt her knees. She said, “I do not know your name, but you are my patient, and I am your Healer Sarli. With me is my apprentice, Cairon, whose hands are mine. Let it be known that your health is now within my care.” The elf watched her, almost lucid, but did not respond. His attention was perfectly evident, though. “Your arm must be amputated today. You will be administered a painkiller for the procedure. Will you take it of your own will?” She waited, very calmly, for long enough to make it plain that she expected an answer.

His eyes lowered, just for a moment. Then he looked up, and spoke the first words she had heard from him. They rasped. Something ill rattled in his lungs. “I will not.” He said, in that terrible voice, and Sarli rapidly reassessed the likelihood of his ultimate survival. She tilted her head sharply, and watched as the elf’s words were followed by a distinct wet cough.

“Then it will be administered to you via a needle.” She said. “Cairon. Make the preparation. And pass me the stethoscope.”

He obeyed with silent efficiency, setting to work with the lilium and the needle reservoir even as she took the long tube of the stethoscope, pressing one end to the patient’s chest and the other to her left ear. She leaned into it and listened as the elf breathed, then moved it over to the other side. She had the fortune to still be listening when he coughed again, which was very illuminating. She receded and put the stethoscope aside.

“Cairon, take note. Beginnings of respiratory infection observed. Both lungs affected, with the state of the right lung more advanced.” She waited for his murmur of assent before she rose to inspect the elf more thoroughly. Infection wasn’t surprising, given the conditions he’d been kept in, but she’d have expected blood or wound infections first. Unless…

She leaned over and inspected the broken horn, frowning at what was very plainly an open cavity, with living tissue inside. Not only bone and marrow, either, but what had evidently once been pink pneumatised space. The look of it was very familiar from her studies, though she’d never seen a sinus so large. She had never guessed that elves might have respiratory cavities within their horns. But it made the aetiology of the infection very clear, and indeed, seemed visibly inflamed to the naked eye. No wonder the elf had developed such a sickness, with that open channel into his system.

“Infected sinus in the broken horn.” She observed aloud. “It will need to be carefully irrigated and then bandaged as part of treatment today.” She would need to be careful to avoid allowing water further into the sinus cavities. But irrigation of the infected tissue – and perhaps even debridement – only seemed sensible. She stayed by the sinus for a few moments, listening, and discerned from the lack of hissing air that the internal pathways to the rest of the skull cavities had likely all closed, or otherwise been blocked. Yes, then; debridement would be warranted. It wasn’t as though this sinus would ever function properly again.

“The needle is ready, master.” Cairon reported, quietly, and she glanced sidelong at him.

“Good.” She said, and knelt by the elf again. “You will be administered a high dose of the drug known as lilium. Due to its pronounced soporific properties, you are likely to fall unconscious during the procedure. It takes effect very rapidly once introduced to the bloodstream; I expect you will feel it within the minute. You will likely experience residual euphoria and feelings of wellness as a side effect for up to eighteen hours following the dosage.” She paused, watching his eyes to be sure that he was listening, and added “When you awake, your arm will be gone. If you haven’t already, I advise you to make your peace with that now.”

For a moment, just for a moment, the elf’s eyes moved sideways to behold his doomed arm. He let out the quietest, faintest exhalation. He didn’t speak, but there was something about the minute movement of his head as he looked at her that felt like a nod.

“Cairon.” She said, and her apprentice moved up to find a vein in the healthy arm. He administered the lilium with practiced skill, and the effect was nearly instant; the awful tension in the elf’s body fled him, he went lax, he went placid. She could see the Lord Viren shifting out of the corner of her eye, for whatever reason interested by what he saw.

The elf’s eyes slipped closed within the minute. She monitored his breathing through the process, two fingers resting at his pulse, and found that it slowed to well within normal parameters. When she was relatively sure there was no bad reaction to the lilium, she sighed and leaned back.

“Come now, boy.” She said to her apprentice, finding that he was already laying out the necessary tools. “It’s time we began.”

---

It was weird to sit around awake while the others fell asleep. Not as weird as it could have been, but still pretty weird.

Back home, it was relatively familiar. Callum and Ezran shared adjoining rooms, after all, and Ezran’s bedtime was earlier than his. He was perfectly used to his brother falling asleep in his own bedchamber while he did something (relatively) quiet and inconspicuous, such as reading or drawing. But…well. A pseudo-cave whose accommodations were limited to a campfire and a huddle of tent-layers was decidedly not ‘back home’, and there wasn’t the benefit of walls and doors here. Rayla and Ezran were right there, close by the fire, and all he had to do to see them was glance a little to the side.

So, it was weird. He felt self-conscious every time he poked the fire with one of Rayla’s swords, or fed another branch or disc of wood to the flames. He felt weird seeing Rayla twitch, and sigh, and shift, and know full well that she wasn’t actually asleep yet. He wondered if she usually took this long to fall asleep, or if her bruising and pain was just…aggravating everything. Ordinarily, he’d ask, but…well, she was trying to fall asleep. He couldn’t disturb her. It was just weird.

Ezran took longer than usual falling asleep himself, brows furrowing as the dragon-light flickered out from the shell in his arms. But his breathing did ease off eventually, and after that, Callum breathed a little easier. His brother could generally be relied upon to be a heavy sleeper. He could draw, and talk to himself while drawing, and move about, and clatter his art supplies all without waking him.

Rayla, of course, was another matter entirely. His self-consciousness over stoking the fire turned out to be entirely warranted, because when he watched, he could see her twitch at every sound he made – the spitting of the fire as it crackled around new wood, the small shifts and sounds of him moving the wood, everything. He couldn’t help but wonder how she ever managed to get to sleep, if she was that sensitive to the sounds around her.

He thought, guiltily, of his alleged tendency to shift about and occasionally talk in his sleep, and understood a little better her tired eyes on some of their mornings.

Callum kept as quiet as he could, and watched the fire, and listened to the wind howl, and waited. He didn’t dare do anything noisier, while she was still trying to fall asleep. He looked out past the cliff to the storm, and just…stared, silently, for what felt like hours. It wasn’t, of course. The light was still fading, so it couldn’t be that long. But it felt like it, watching the endless flurry of the blizzard. It was hypnotic, in a way. Disorientating, in another. Every now and then lightning flashed, thunder following some time after, and there was nothing he could do to control that sound. Rayla twitched at it every time.

It seemed like it had been at least an hour by the time Rayla finally managed to fall asleep, but it was honestly probably longer than that. He watched out of the corner of his eyes as the Rayla-shaped lump in the tent covers slumped into something more relaxed, as some of the tension eased from her face, and felt quietly relieved. She really did need her rest, and he wasn’t looking forward to having to wake her up again in a few hours. She’d probably be so tired.

Still. If it came down to it, they could probably all take turns napping during the day. As long as the storm was still going, it wasn’t like they had anywhere else to go.

After a while, very carefully, he dared to get out his sketchbook and start quietly on a new drawing. The storm looked different in the dark; the white of it wasn’t nearly so pronounced, and the layers of the blizzard fluttering off into the night were full of subtle gradations of pink-grey light. He did his best to render the effect in charcoal, all soft smudges and greys, and startled occasionally in the shock of a thunder-clap. Every one of those, of course, woke Rayla up. She’d jolt and grumble quietly and then, evidently, do her best to fall back asleep again. Generally, she seemed to manage it pretty fast.

Again, Callum wondered how much he tended to wake her, on a typical night. He’d never met anyone who slept so ridiculously lightly.

Though, he wasn’t certain he’d fare much better with the thunderclaps. They were loud, even muffled through the snow-clouds. Loud enough that they disturbed Ezran too, who shifted and murmured, the lights of egg and Bait shifting with him.

It was hard to judge the time passing. Weirdly enough, though, drawing helped. He was used to hours disappearing when he sat down to draw, and had developed something of a sense of roughly how much time he lost between one art-trance and the next. When a crack of snow-muffled thunder drew him out of a span of time that felt vaguely like it had been forty minutes, he considered the state of the dark. He considered how tired he felt. He decided, eventually, that it had probably been around four hours since the others went to bed. Maybe longer.

Still, he hesitated, watching Rayla’s sleeping form. It felt wrong to disturb her, after all she’d been through lately, and after how long it had taken her to get to sleep. For a moment, he very seriously considered leaving her to sleep, and taking over her watch. But…

She woke up often enough throughout the night that she’d probably eventually question why he’d not handed off watch to her. And then she would not be pleased with him.

Finally, reluctantly, he put his sketchbook away and went to nudge her quietly by the shoulder. She woke at once, eyes flying open, focusing blearily on him. She looked terribly groggy, and despite everything, it made guilt clench at his throat.

Her eyes were really, really bright in the dark. He’d noticed it before, but…

He didn’t speak. Keeping hushed and quiet for so long alone made the thought of talking seem weird, especially with Ezran still asleep. But she understood the situation easily enough, and peeled herself silently from the tent covers, rubbing grit out of her eyes. She made a few quiet murmuring noises of what sounded like pain, wincing as she rolled stiff shoulders.

Looking half as though she were sleepwalking, she reached out and tapped on his arm in a strange, purposeful rhythm for a few seconds, before she stopped short and frowned and shook her head. “Ugh.” She muttered, barely louder than a breath. Then she said something weird that sounded like ‘ick tuss’, in a barely-audible mutter, and pushed herself out of bed. Eventually, she leaned over, and murmured quite close to his ear “Thanks. I’ll take over now. Get some sleep.”

He opened his mouth to question her about what the weird tapping had been about, then closed it, looking at Ezran. Instead, he tapped questioningly on his own arm, plastering an exaggerated confused expression over his face.

She stared back, a little sourly, and murmured the same thing she had earlier, except this time it sounded more like ‘ictus’. Her breath was warm on his ear. Then she said “’s not important. Sleep.” And dragged herself staggering over to the fireside.

He hesitated. He hesitated for long enough that she turned back to him and started making aggressive pointing motions at the tent-covers, as plain and uncompromising a ‘go to sleep’ as he’d ever seen. He relented, albeit reluctantly, and went.

The spot she’d vacated was still warm. He eased himself in, sparing a few lingering glances for Rayla arranging herself at the campfire. In the end, though, he was so tired that he didn’t even remember closing his eyes, and was asleep in seconds.

---

As far as watches went, the only unremarkable thing about this one was that she was a fair bit more injured than typical for someone standing watch. And also perhaps that her ‘squadmates’ were directly beside her rather than ensconced in separate tents. And that there was a frankly intimidating storm raging close enough that she periodically had to shift her position to defend the campfire from winds. And – well, alright, maybe it was a pretty unusual watch, after all.

It wasn’t a problem, though. A three-part watch certainly made for longer shifts than a six-part watch did. But, for the most part, the whole thing was comfortingly standard. Rayla settled into silent vigil by the fire, fed it wood occasionally, and that was all. Easy.

She did, after a furtive glance at Callum’s sleeping form, take a few moments to inspect her bad hand. She’d not wanted to investigate it in front of him, given how much and how conspicuously he’d been fretting lately, but it still felt…off. She poked along her skin, and squeezed her fingers gently, and shifted uneasily at having her suspicions confirmed. The pins-and-needles hadn’t completely gone, it seemed. Or, at least, some hint of it remained. The skin on the back of her hand, particularly on the thumb side, was a little more numb than it ought to be. In places it prickled strangely when she touched it. The hand itself, of course, remained irritatingly stiff. She hoped that would go away, with frequent enough loosening of the binding.

She spared a moment to wonder exactly how long they were going to keep this up for. It would have to be until Xadia at the very least, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t as though they were likely to find some way of removing the binding outside of Xadia. It seemed she’d be dependent on Ezran and Azymondias for the continued life of her hand for a good long while.

Rayla pursed her lips at the thought, troubled, and spared a glance to the cyclical glow of the egg in Ezran’s arms.

Her watch passed uneventfully, except for the periodic fright of the thunder-claps resounding through the sky and waking everyone up. Ezran seemed to be waking unusually easily at those – almost more at the lightning-flash than the thunder. Callum was being his customary self and barely waking for a second, but Ez…

She had her suspicions. They were confirmed the instant she went to wake him for his watch, and he blinked awake and into alertness so quickly that he couldn’t have been firmly asleep. Rayla spared a glance for Callum, and drew him out of bed towards the fire to murmur to him. He took the egg with him. “Have you been awake the whole night?” She asked, very lowly, and considered the look of him. He did have the customary exhausted stare of someone who’d been up most of the night, but…

Maybe it was only her imagination. But his eyes looked a little too bright for a human’s. “…Not really.” He answered, after a moment, keeping his voice as quiet as hers. “I just…haven’t really been all-the-way asleep.” His fingers stroked absently over the shell, eyes distant. She’d have dismissed it for sleepiness, if not for how strange his countenance was. Something about the sight of him sent a shiver of unease down her spine.

She watched him for a moment. “…The storm?” She guessed, quiet. “Azymondias?”

He closed his eyes and shuddered strangely as the lightning flashed. It lit the storm-haze, and cast a brief pallor on his dark skin. “Yeah.” His voice was barely a whisper. He didn’t elaborate.

Unease twisted in her gut again, this time with a healthy accompaniment of concern. “Are you alright?” She asked, brows creasing, because – because he didn’t really seem alright. He seemed…off. Distant. Hazy, in a way he oughtn’t be.

“Mm.” He said, a little vaguely. “It’ll be better now I’m awake. When I was sleeping….I was in Zym’s head a lot. And he’s really feeling the storm.” He shook his head. “It’s fine, Rayla. You can go to sleep.”

She didn’t, not right away. She didn’t like how he was acting. But over the minutes she stayed beside him, he did seem to get more lucid, so…eventually, when he started nudging her again, she went. A little reluctantly, she took herself and her full-body exhaustion into the tent layers, wincing as she settled onto the hard ground. Her bruises were absolute murder for sleeping on the floor. She thought wistfully of actual beds, and soft pillows, and duvets, and eventually shuffled into the warm spot that still vaguely remained from Ezran.

With the breadth of her tiredness, it didn’t take all that long for her to start drowsing. And then, naturally, she was startled awake again by Calum rolling over with a murmur and pressing himself against her side. Because of course.

She sighed at him, but for once, didn’t even contemplate pushing him away. In the cold of the storm, it was…sensible. Sensible, to stick close to each other, and share body heat. That was all it was. Nothing more, nothing less.

She’d almost managed to convince herself of that by the time she fell asleep again.

---

When Callum woke, it was to the steady numbing feeling of cold. His fingers and toes were so frigid they nearly ached, and a chill was seeping steadily into his skin. He murmured, still half asleep, and turned over, mindlessly searching for…something. Something warm? That seemed right, but…there wasn’t anything. He made a plaintive sound and shuffled further. He located something small that croaked at him when he touched it.

That woke him in a hurry. He opened his eyes, and found himself staring blearily at Bait. Bait stared back, unimpressed. “Morning, Bait.” Callum said to him, voice rough and croaking from sleep, and blinked a few more times to get his bearings. He was in something dark and leathery, like…a blanket fort? No, that was right – they’d not been able to put the tent up, because of the storm…

The storm. Callum sat bolt-upright and had to flail a few times to disentangle his face from the tent-layers. Light abruptly assailed him, and he winced, rubbing his eyes. For a moment the whole spectacle was just blurs of variably-coloured light – but then it resolved into a flickering campfire, a glowing egg by the fireside, the shining white of a sunlit blizzard…

Ezran was sitting by the fire, and had looked over at him. He offered a smile that looked tired and forced. “Morning, Callum.” He said, and his voice – he sounded exhausted. Callum straightened, staring at him more closely, and remembered the fire-watch, remembered that Ezran had had the last shift-

“Are you okay?” He asked at once, instantly worried. It took some tripping over himself, but he extricated himself from the tent and crawled over to the fire to inspect his brother. He looked a little paler than normal, and there were heavy bags under his eyes. Guilt churned in Callum’s gut. “We should have taken your watch.” He muttered, still not entirely awake, as he glanced around on reflex to look for Rayla. Where was she?

“It’s fine, Callum.” Ez said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t really sleeping anyway, so…”

Callum half-registered the words, but had already found something else to worry about: Rayla wasn’t here. He looked around a little more frantically, as if he’d find her hiding behind a backpack or something if he looked closely enough-

“Rayla went out to get more wood. Actually, this is the second time – she already went on another firewood run earlier.” His brother told him, and Callum’s movement stalled. He looked over at the wood pile, and indeed found it looking more well-supplied than he remembered, even from his own shift of the watch. “This time, well...” He pursed his lips. “She’s getting food, too. I pointed her towards a few different places where animals were hiding, so…I guess we’ll have a lot to eat, soon.”

“…Oh.” Callum said, mind gone blank. He searched the campsite, a little anxiously, and noted by the absence of several articles some small sources of comfort. Rayla had taken her cloak, apparently dried out by now. The rope-harness was gone, too. And Callum’s one-shoulder bag had been emptied out and taken away. “…Why didn’t you wake me?”

“We decided to let you sleep in. It’s not like we’re in a hurry to go anywhere, after all.” Ezran shrugged, and after a moment, Callum finally shuffled over to sit beside him. The heat of the fire made his hands and feet ache uncomfortably as they warmed. “Besides, the last few days have been kind of tiring. If you can sleep…well, I think you should.”

‘Kind of tiring’. “Sort of an understatement there, Ez.” He said, wryly, and tried not to squirm too conspicuously as he looked out over the ledge. The howl of the wind was vicious, even with them out of the worst of it. The scattered gusts that managed to reach him were uncomfortably chilly, even sitting directly beside the fire. Outside, in the blizzard itself…how much colder must it be? “…How long ago did she leave?”

“Not long.” He shrugged. “Maybe fifteen minutes. We were up for a while before that. Made some hot water.” He nodded to the pot, which was no longer on the fire, but still had some gently steaming liquid in it. “I don’t actually think it’s warm anymore, so if you want it, you should probably put it on the fire for a while first.”

He considered it. “I’ll just make some tea, I think.” He decided, and stood to go off and collect snow. He grimaced uncomfortably at the state of his bladder as he moved, which was decidedly unhappy with him after having gone the majority of a day unanswered. He wondered, with a frown, exactly how Ezran had been managing that, given the current situation.

On the first day of their travel, Ezran had broached the question of how exactly people were to manage certain bathroom functions without the use of the luxuries of civilisation, such as buckets of water and toilet paper. Rayla had stared at him with a particular expression of dawning weariness, as if she were only now realising the sheer helplessness of her princely companions, and had taken a moment to rub at her temples before she took them aside.

Then she'd said "You'd better listen up, because I'm only saying this once." And she’d given them a short primer on improvised wilderness cleaning options. These largely boiled down to 'leaves' and 'snow', and while she'd been very brief at the time, she’d taken particular care to point out any poisonous or irritant plants in the following days as they travelled.

He and Ezran had put this instruction to daily use, obviously, but that didn't really help much in a situation where they couldn't go off behind a tree or rock to answer the call of nature. And this was, unfortunately, one of those situations. There was absolutely nowhere in their pseudo-cave that was appropriate, and the way out was, well. A narrow and precipitous ledge covered in ice.

And so: “Don’t you need to go to the bathroom?” Callum asked his brother, when he returned with snow. “We’ve been cooped up here for probably most of a day by now.”

“I just asked Rayla to take me past the ledge for a bit, earlier.” Ez informed him, making a face as Callum dropped pine leaves into the snow in the pot. “I guess you’ll have to wait till she gets back. Unless you want to try the ledge alone.”

Callum eyed the ledge in question. It looked…precipitous. He could hardly imagine the embarrassment of having to ask Rayla to escort him over it for a potty break, but…he also did not particularly enjoy the idea of slipping and falling to his death. He grimaced. “Ugh.” He expressed, and set the pot on the fire.

In the end, he didn’t need to figure out a way to awkwardly fumble through the request. Rayla returned with a harness full of firewood not all that much later, spotted Callum sitting upright with his tea, and sighed with obvious relief. “Callum. You’re awake. Good.” She headed over, peeling herself out of the now one-shouldered harness and setting the wood down. Ezran shuffled over, murmuring greetings, and set to work stacking her haul. “I got a lot of meat, and I need your help processing it.”

He blinked, startled, and looked up at her. “Oh. Um. Okay?” He offered, giving her a quick look-over to appraise her state of health. She seemed perfectly alert and graceful, in sharp contrast to how she’d returned from the second firewood trip yesterday. She was shivering, maybe, but…she seemed fine. “Now?” He asked, a little dubiously, as he set his jar of tea down to rise to his feet and inspect her more closely. As before, she was so thoroughly wrapped up in layers that the only skin visible was the strip on level with her eyes.

She hesitated. “No, I should probably warm up a bit first.” She admitted, a little reluctantly, and carefully sat herself down. After a moment, he followed suit. “I left all the meat out past the ledge. Normally I’d be worried about scavengers finding it, but…” She shrugged. “I don’t suppose much is travelling in this storm.”

“There’s not, no.” Ezran said, almost absent-mindedly. “There’s a fox sort of that-way-ish,” He gestured with an idle flick of his hand, then went back to stacking wood. “But she’s staying put in a sort of snow-hole she dug.”

Callum eyed his brother cautiously. “…The storm weirdness is still going, huh?”

There was something wrong with the look in his brother’s eyes. Too distant. Too vague. He didn’t seem entirely present, somehow, even though he was talking to them perfectly fine. “Worse.” He said, shortly. “The sky-magic, it’s…” He shook his head. “It’s so much thicker now. Zym is really – awake. Alert?” He looked side-ways at the egg he’d positioned beside the fire, hand twitching up briefly like he wanted to reach out and pull it closer. In the end, though, he stayed where he was, and sighed. “…Something like that.”

Rayla pursed her lips, and exchanged a worried glance with Callum before she spoke. “Well, if it’s any comfort, the storm’s probably going to have started moving past us by the end of the day.” She said, looking briefly out to the blinding-white blizzard. “…It’ll get closer first, though. Actually, judging by the thunder, it’s going to be really, really close in a couple of hours. We’ll have to put all the metal over by the ledge again.”

He paused, abruptly remembering his and Ezran’s conversation from the day before. “We’re under shelter, though.” He pointed out. “Lightning can’t strike through rock, right?”

She snorted. “Yes it can.” She informed him, and seemed to take some grim amusement from how both of them did a double-take as they stared at her. “If lightning hits the ground above us, it’ll zap through this empty air space on its way further down. And if we’re in its way, we get hit. So.” She gestured expressively to the partially-complete pile of metallics in the tent-pack. “I suppose the bright side is that lightning isn’t likely to be attracted to the metal – if it’s attracted to anything, it’ll be…trees, or something, further up the mountain. But it’s not worth the risk.”

“….yeah, I’d really prefer to avoid getting hit by lightning.” Callum decided, and spared a wary glance for the pot on the fire. He handled it perhaps more gingerly than necessary as he took it away from its re-heating to get Rayla some tea, and for a while they just sat around drinking while she restored some warmth to her body.

She didn’t take all that long to warm up. Ordinarily, he’d have fretted about it, but he really needed to get over that ledge. She grabbed her spare sword from the iron pot, passed it to him, and then tied herself to him with rope for the trip out into the blizzard.

Somehow, in the time since they’d reached shelter, he’d managed to forget how awful it was out there. Or maybe it was worse, now. That seemed likely, with the storm getting closer, but-

“How have you been going out to collect firewood in this?” He demanded, practically having to shout to hear his voice over the howl of the frigid wind in his ears. He pulled his hat down and his scarf up, and while Rayla was similarly smothered in layers, he could practically see the sardonic humour in the way she looked at him.

“Mainly because it was this or freezing to death.” She informed him, and pulled him by the rope over the final stretch. Callum looked around wild-eyed. The snow definitely hadn’t been this thick yesterday. Rayla’s footsteps from her firewood trip were plainly visible in it, though the blizzard was already starting to fill them in. The visibility was so poor that he could only see a few metres of the deep footprints, disappearing out into blinding white. “It’s worse right now, though. The storm’s getting closer.” With excellent dramatic timing, lightning flashed and made the whole storm painfully bright; less than two seconds later, the snow-muffled whomp of thunder sounded.

“No kidding.” Callum said, numbly, and tried to assess how deep the snow was. It was coming most of the way up his shins, for Mercy’s sake.

She tugged on the rope. “Come on. We shouldn’t stay out in this longer than we need to.”

“Er.” He said, suddenly remembering why he’d been eager to get over the ledge in the first place, and shuffled awkwardly. “I mean, could I take a couple minutes first? Just to…” He cleared his throat, and looked away.

She rolled her eyes at him and untied the rope around his waist. “Don’t be long.” She ordered, and tucked her ungloved hands into her sleeves.

He hastily stumbled off, nearly falling over into the snow, and felt his way along a rock wall until the suddenly-convenient snow haze had obscured any hint of Rayla’s silhouette. Then, because he knew her eyes were better, he went a little further and tucked himself behind a rock. An extremely cold minute later, he was staggering back with his hands red and numb and aching from grasping snow. He understood why she’d told him to leave his gloves behind, but…

For a moment, he couldn’t find Rayla where he’d left her, and panicked. But then he realised that the fresh footprints in the snow were actually good for something, and followed them through the vicious winds to find her.

The first thing he saw was the red. It was so bright, and there was so much of it, and – and he froze solid, dread and horror hitting him so hard he swayed in place, remembering that awful dream where she’d bled and bled and bled until the tide was fit to drown them-

And then he breathed, and pulled himself shakily from that terrible moment, recognising the bodies of animals in the snow beside her. She wasn’t the source of it. She was safe. She wasn’t bleeding.

No matter his attempts to reassure himself, he was faltering and shaky when he finally stumbled over beside her. When she looked over at him she seemed perfectly fine, and entirely lucid. There was no sign of new pain, no sign of new blood…

…except on her hands. Her hands, holding a dead rabbit, its fur ruffled and wet from snow, and her sword cutting through its belly. His gut heaved, and his shakiness finally got the better of him. He fell backwards and collapsed heavily into the snow, feeling so terribly disorientated that for a bewildered second he wasn’t even sure what was happening. Was she bleeding? Was it the animals bleeding? What was even going on?

“Callum?” her voice sounded worried, even half-stolen by the shriek of the winds. She turned and peered at him, and the shock of the snow’s cold numbed some of the reflexive panic out of his system. It was enough, just enough, to let him think.

“…Sorry.” He croaked, and raised a cold hand shakily to his face. “I, er. I guess I just found you surrounded by blood and panicked a little, and-“ He looked to the rabbit in her hand, and swallowed. “And also that there’s kind of gross.”

Rayla looked taken-aback for a moment, and then glanced around her as if only now noticing the macabre spectacle she made. “…Right. Sorry.” She said, chagrined. “Should’ve warned you. I just didn’t want to waste time out here.” She eyed him, sympathetic but assessing. “Are you alright to help?”

“Yes.” He said, determinedly, though he wasn’t at all certain. It was very early in the morning for this amount of gore, and his gag reflex was already feeling rebellious.

She looked at him dubiously, which was probably fair. “Alright.” She conceded, and gestured at the bloody pile beside her. “We’ve got a small deer and three rabbits, including this one. And they all need to be skinned and gutted. And in the deer’s case, cut up into smaller pieces.” She flexed the fingers of her left hand, carefully. It looked stiff, but whether that was from cold or infirmity was decidedly unclear. “My hand’s being a little easier to deal with, so I can demonstrate the rabbits. But the deer…” She hesitated. “I can probably gut it. But I don’t know about the skinning. It’ll probably be fine, but….”

“…Can you walk me through it?” he asked, tentative, and she nodded quickly.

“Of course.” She said instantly. “And we’re not planning on keeping the hide for anything, so you can be as messy as you like.” She grimaced at her sword. “This isn’t exactly a skinning knife, anyway.”

“Alright.” He wasn’t sure what else to say. He really didn’t want to be messing around in animal guts, or skinning things. But he didn’t want to be shivering in the middle of a blizzard, either, or on the run from his own people, or worrying about his brother not having enough to eat. And…he wasn’t going to make Rayla do this alone. How selfish would it be, to depend on her for everything to do with feeding them, and not even try to help? “What should I do?”

“Just watch.” She said, and pulled the rabbit over to show him. She’d not actually been gutting it, he realised. Just…cutting a line up its belly to the truncated neck. She’d cut its feet off, too, and there were lines cut on the underside of the limbs inwards to that line down the body.

She finished the cut on the rabbit’s belly, and put her sword down. It was then that Callum discovered, much to his horror, that skinning animals apparently involved just pulling the skin off. He heaved and gagged several times, watching her, watching the pale pink flesh of the rabbit’s muscle and sinew exposed, but managed to choke down the taste of acid and keep watching.

“This is easiest when the kill’s fresh.” She explained, shooting him an apologetic glance as he gagged again. “The deer’s going to be hardest, because it was dead for at least an hour before I found it. It’s part frozen. But the rabbits should skin easily enough.”

“Great.” He managed, and held onto the contents of his stomach all through the demonstration. Soon, she’d set aside a disturbingly neat-looking rabbit pelt that had been pulled off of the flesh like a gory sock. And then, a little questioningly, she passed the second rabbit and a sword to him. He stared at it. It was…very intact. “…Do I cut the head and feet off?” He asked, and she shrugged awkwardly at him.

“If you can.” She agreed, and watched him with a vaguely conflicted expression. He wondered if she was reconsidering the wisdom of having him help her. That thought was enough to bring him some reserve of courage, and he took a long breath of the icy air. It was so cold it made his lungs burn. With some prescient inkling that his control over his stomach wouldn’t hold forever, he pulled his scarf down from his face before he began.

He braced the rabbit against the icy ground beneath the snow, and pushed down with the sword. There was a gentle crunch, and the foot came off. He swallowed, and repeated the process for the other three, getting a little better with the leverage of the blade each time. The head gave him a little more trouble – in more than one sense. It was harder to cut off, and more disturbing. He breathed past the taste of acid and quietly called to mind the knife-sharp memory of the incisions Rayla had made in the first rabbit.

She reached out and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder as he hesitated. “You’re doing fine.” She murmured to him, and he could hardly hear it over the wind in his ears. His hands were numb and aching now, and all the colder for the slippery blood on his fingers.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them. It was…too easy, to make the cuts. The sword seemed unnaturally sharp. Drawing the blade-tip through the rabbit’s skin seemed as easy as stroking charcoal over paper.

Rayla said something encouraging to him, but this time the storm was entirely too loud for him to hear it properly. He appreciated it, anyway. And then, reluctantly, he set the sword down to mimic the next thing she’d shown him.

There was some resistance, to pulling the rabbit’s pelt off. He had to adjust his grip to pull a little harder. But he pulled, and it went, and his head swam as the pelt inverted and the pink flesh of the inside of the skin peeled off where he tugged-

Nearly falling over in the process, Callum turned to the side and vomited a mouthful of acid into the snow. His fingers were slick with blood, and the too-smooth texture of skinned flesh. He wanted to wipe his face, but he also didn’t want to get the blood on himself. He hunched there, trembling, so shaky that it had to be from more than just the cold…

Rayla drew near, visible as a looming shape in his peripheral vision. She hesitated there for long enough that he almost looked up to see what she was doing, but then – her hand moved into his field of view, cupping snow. He made a small, startled noise as she wiped it over the lower part of his face, gentle and careful and sympathetic as she watched him. She discarded the handful of snow to the side while the cold was still stinging at his skin. “Can you finish?” She asked him, without any sort of judgement, as he stared at her and shook.

He swallowed. It still tasted of acid. “Y-yeah.” He stumbled over the word, hazily determined not to disappoint her. He wouldn’t make her finish his work. He wouldn’t. He turned back to his grisly work and pulled the rabbit’s skin off with shaking hands. It was at least less nauseating, now that he’d already thrown up.

“Well done.” She murmured to him, when he was done, and had set the pelt aside with the other one. When he looked up at her, she looked almost guilty. “…I’ll finish the rest of this, I think.” She said, finally, and his gut lurched with the sickening certainty that he’d disappointed her, that he’d not been good enough-

“No, I can still help.“ he insisted, hands still slick and bloody. His voice felt as wobbly as his fingers. “I won’t throw up the next time. I just – have to get used to it.”

She shook her head, firmly. Her eyes on his were gently understanding. “Callum, you did a good job. It’s okay. It…wasn’t really fair of me to ask you to do this much on your first try. You can help again next time.”

“But, your hand – your arm.” He scrambled to say, staring with a strange sense of loss as Rayla tugged the skinned rabbit from his hands. “You – shouldn’t be doing it, it’ll hurt.”

“My hand’s doing better than I expected today.” She said determinedly, which wasn’t especially convincing, given he was quite certain she’d lie about how well she was doing under circumstances like these. “I’ll be fine.” She hesitated for a moment. “If it makes you feel better, you’ll have to stay here ‘till I’m done anyway. I can show you how the gutting works.”

He paused, uncertain.

She took his silence as agreement. “Wash your hands.” She instructed. “And just watch. I’ll try to be quick, and then we can both go back to camp and warm up.”

…It was getting really cold. Sitting still in the middle of a blizzard…well. It shouldn’t be surprising. A little sluggishly, he finally nodded, and she sighed as though relieved.

“Good.” She said, and then proceeded to skin the third rabbit with clean, ruthless efficiency. Her left hand didn’t seem to be gripping very strongly, so she periodically lost her hold and had to pick it up again, but even that was quick and efficient. She set that third pelt aside with the others, and then moved onto the deer. Apparently she wanted everything skinned before she gutted anything.

Watching the deer’s head get cut off was horrible. Watching something that big get skinned was horrible. Seeing the bright red of its flesh exposed – so much darker than the rabbits – and the paler lines of tendons and sinew…he gagged a couple of times, even with nothing in his stomach to bring up. What little there’d been for dinner was long since gone, and the tea had probably gone up with the acid earlier.

She seemed to have a harder time with the deer’s skin, as she’d predicted, and needed to apply the tip of her sword to the situation a few times. He was horribly, guiltily glad that he’d not had to do that, and that made him feel even worse. He eyed her bloody fingers and wondered how much her hand was hurting. He watched miserably as she set the deer back and moved onto, presumably, the disembowelling stage of this whole ordeal.

Rayla did the deer first. She positioned the deer with its head and forelimbs back, and asked him to hold it in place. Wordlessly, he obliged, and then moved one hand over to hold one of the back legs up when she requested that too. She cut a line up its middle, deeper by far than she’d done to skin it. The outer muscle gaped open and put all of the organs into full view, the white of bone bloody-yellow compared to the white of the snow, and as Callum watched it his mind went weirdly blank. It was as though he’d gone so far past nauseated and shaken that his head had decided it was too much effort to bother with, and had just shut off the feelings entirely. He kept watching, oddly numb.

She broke the ribcage open at the sternum, with a sickening crack of snapping bone. She cut some weird connective tissue, and some sort of fleshy tube he didn’t know the name for, then grabbed said tube and pulled what seemed like all of the deer’s organs out at once. They all seemed….attached. That broke through his strange haze enough for him to gag again, watching with morbid horror as she dropped the innards into the snow.

Then, after some consideration, she reached into the mess and severed some pieces loose. “Some organs are good to eat.” She explained, awkwardly, as she set aside what he was pretty sure was a heart. “And they have…nutrients, or something. We probably need that, right now.” She cut out some sort of big pale thing too, and two smaller dark-red things of the same shape and size. “Heart, liver, and kidneys.” She explained, when she saw him staring wordlessly at the items in question, which she’d tucked back into the deer’s body cavity.

He knew, intellectually, about hearts and livers and kidneys, and what they were for, and…in as much as he’d seen medical diagrams, he knew approximately what they looked like. It was decidedly different to see them bloody and freshly-severed and steaming gently in the frigid air. “Oh.” He said, faintly, and helped her turn the deer over to – ostensibly – drain excess blood out into the snow.

After the deer, the rabbits really weren’t that shocking. He watched with distant, morbid curiosity as Rayla pulled the innards out of them one-by-one, piling them in a gory heap with the rest. She set the choicest offal out from those, too. They seemed almost comically tiny compared to the deer’s.

She didn’t take any particular care with butchering the deer. She seemed increasingly impatient as she grew increasingly cold-looking, and just outright hacked slabs of meat off of the carcass, piling them in packed snow. She eyed the legs begrudgingly, admitting eventually “We’ll need to make some sort of spit or stake for those. Getting all of the meat off would take too long, and it’s not like they’ll fit in the pot.”

“And we need to have the pot with the other metal stuff soon, anyway.” Callum said, with a weird calm. She eyed him with plain concern, and then kept shooting worried glances at him all the way through the rest of her butchery. When at last she had a stack of bloody red meat and three clean rabbit corpses, she…apparently decided to use the two halves of the deer’s ribcage and also its skin as carrying baskets, and piled it all in. It sort of overflowed. It was astonishingly macabre. She tied it all together with an extra piece of rope, in a giant parcel of meat, and then ushered him to his feet.

“Come on, you.” She said, a little gruffly. “Time to get you to the fire. You’re looking all…shocky. The warmth will do you good.”

“Uhuh.” He said, faintly, and wished there was a way to warn Ezran about the bloody spectacle of what they were bringing with them.

By some sort of mutual unspoken agreement, he and Rayla contrived to make sure the meat wasn’t visible as they finally turned the corner of the ledge back into shelter, hiding it between them until they could pile it furtively behind all the metallics, where it might not be so terribly visible. This turned out to be a wise decision, because even the couple of deer legs that Rayla brought to the fireside were enough to make Ezran gag with a single glance.

“Sorry, Ez.” Rayla said, apologetically, as she set the meat on a rag beside the fire. Her next priority seemed to be tugging Callum down until he fell clumsily on his backside beside Ezran, whereupon she inspected him for a moment and ordered “You, sit. Warm up. Think happy, non-gory thoughts.”

This apparently got his brother’s attention off of the grisly freshly-skinned and dismembered deer legs, and he turned to blink at Callum with dawning suspicion. “Are you okay?” He demanded. “You don’t feel okay.” He reached out and snatched his hand, his hand which had very recently been covered with rabbit blood, and his face scrunched up. “You’re all shocky.” He said, almost accusatively.

“That’s what I said.” Rayla contributed, from where she had started clattering about in the firewood pile. Ez shot her a frown, possibly for disrupting his lovingly-arranged stack.

“I’m fine, Ez.” Callum said, automatically, finally finding his voice. His brother ignored him entirely, and instead levelled an unimpressed look at Rayla.

“What did you do to him?” He demanded, albeit not with any true ire, fingers still gripping around Callum’s.

Rayla shrugged, looking uncomfortable. After a moment, she retreated from the firewood stack with what seemed like a highly specific selection of items, and said “Accidentally threw him in the meat-preparation deep end. Should’ve let him get used to what raw prepared meat looks like first, I suppose.”

He managed to pick himself up out of his bizarre blankness at that. “’He’ is right here.”

Ez pursed his lips, and glanced up at him. “…I guess it was worse than cut-up goose?” He ventured, and Callum thought blankly of pulling skin and fur off of flesh like a layer of sticky clothing. The disembowelling had been grisly, but somehow…he’d not been expecting skinning to work like that. It had been kind of shocking.

“Yeah.” He agreed, after a moment, and finally gathered the presence of mind to look at Rayla and ask “what are you doing?”

She looked up from where she was poking the tip of her blade into a disc of tree-trunk, right in the middle. “Trying to improvise a cooking spit.” She answered, and twirled the sword around until it had made a hold in the middle of the thick circle of wood. She repeated this process for the other disc, and then started stripping bark off of the branches she’d taken. Callum watched with quiet fascination as she cut the branches’ ends until she had two sticks of roughly similar size, clean of bark and leaves, with a sort of V-shape in wood at their ends.

It took her a fair bit of looking between her constructions and the campfire, and making faces, and grabbing longer branches, but eventually she seemed satisfied. She stuck two branches in the holes in the discs, V-end up, and put one on either side of the fire. The final, longest branch sat tidily between them.

“Won’t be too strong, so we’ll have to cook one thing at a time.” She said, with plain satisfaction. “But it’ll do. And this will taste better than boiling things, too.”

“Huh.” Ez said, having been watching just as avidly as Callum. “Does that mean we should put the pot over by the ledge now?”

Rayla considered it, and shook her head. “We should melt enough snow to fill our waterskins first.” She decided, and so they did precisely that. Callum attempted to help with the snow-gathering, but both of the others heckled him down again, evidently very determined to keep him resting and recovering by the fireside. He sulked, stayed put beside the brightly-glowing egg, and wondered if this was how Rayla felt when they cossetted her too much.

Filling the waterskins didn’t take too long, since Rayla didn’t seem interested in bringing the water to the boil. The snow melted very fast, and before long they were pausing between each delivery of it to pour water messily into the waterskins. This accomplished, the pot was relegated to the confines of the weighed-down tent-pack at the edge of the campsite, and Rayla began the process of trying to spear a deer leg on the spit. After a great deal of muttering and cursing and trying very hard not to break the spit, she managed it, and set it cautiously over the fire.

“We have to be careful with that.” She said, as she leaned back to inspect the arrangement. “It’s wood, after all, so it could catch fire if we let it too close to the flames. But for now, I’m…cautiously optimistic. In an hour or so, we’ll probably have food.”

“Roasting meat for breakfast.” Callum said, wryly. “That’s a new one.”

Her lips quirked, and she shrugged. “Well, we’re going to be living on a protein-only diet for the next however-long, so we only have so many options.” Before he could ask what protein was, she planted herself beside him and patted him hesitantly on the arm. “Thanks for helping.” She told him, and his mind went blank. He looked down at her hand.

“With what?” he wondered, stupidly.

“The meat.” She elaborated. “Didn’t realise how much of a shock it would be for you. So…thanks.”

He stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat and looked away. “I guess the two of us are pretty sheltered.” He shrugged, uncertain how he felt about being thanked for half-doing a job and then leaving his heavily injured friend to do everything.

“Extremely sheltered.” She corrected dryly, seeming more amused than anything. “But that’s alright. You’re learning.” She patted his arm again, and he found himself weirdly encouraged by that small motion. His chin lifted, cautiously, and he watched her half out of the corners of his eyes as she receded and went to attend to the food.

“We really have learned a lot since we left.” Ezran remarked, observing with interest as Rayla twisted the spit, the meat rotating with it. “It’s kinda cool. I never knew how to make a campfire before. Or put up a tent.”

Or be a field-healer’s assistant, Callum thought to himself, with a touch of gallows humour. “Didn’t know how to talk to dragons with your mind, either.” He said, reaching over to ruffle his brother’s hair. “But look at you now.”

Ez giggled, and spared a glance to the egg. His expression went a little strange, and his eyes rested on the shell for a few heartbeats where he couldn’t seem to look away. “In fairness, it’s kind of harder not to talk to Zym than it is to talk to him.” He said, after a moment, and moved his eyes away with an odd sluggishness. “It’s like my mind is wide-open to him. I don’t think I could block him out if I tried.”

Callum eyed him with interest. Rayla, beside the fire, looked up from her work with an eyebrow raised. “Have you tried?” She asked, and he blinked at her.

“…Well, yeah.” He admitted. “During the night, when I couldn’t sleep, because he was being too awake in my head. Most people and animals I can shut out when I stop touching them, but…”

“But not the extra special baby dragon, huh.” Callum mused, uncertain whether or not to be worried. He should be worried, right? He was definitely worried. His brother rolled his eyes at him, apparently close enough to catch that wisp of concern.

“I’m fine, Callum.” He said, apparently exasperated, and nodded in the direction of their pile of things. “Just sit and draw for a bit or something, and stop worrying.”

“Er.” He said, because he had somehow managed to forget about the existence of his sketchbook. That was not something he had ever realised could happen, and was probably excellent evidence for how muddled all of their various problems had rendered him. His brow furrowed for a second, and then he did shuffle over to retrieve the book. As he leafed through it, even the most recent drawings…it felt weirdly like he’d drawn them months ago, instead of merely days. There was a sense of separation from them that was hard to put into words.

“Something wrong?” Rayla asked idly from over by the fire, and abruptly he realised he’d gone still with a page half-turned, eyes fixed on the drawing of Rayla’s bound hand. He jerked, turning the page away, and breaking from the strange disorientation of looking at objectively recent art.

“…I guess it just feels like I drew all of this a really long time ago.” He admitted, looking down at the sketches of Verdorn. He turned the page onto what he’d been drawing during his watch – the only thing that didn’t feel absurdly distant. The storm. He flipped back again, looking through Verdorn, Rayla’s weapons, Rayla’s hand, the primal stone… “Normally a week doesn’t feel all that long, but…” He shook his head. “Stuff that was just days ago feels like months ago.”

She appeared to consider that for a moment, perusing him from over the fire. “Well, that’s perilous life-changing quests for you.” She said eventually.

“Stress does weird things to people.” Was Ezran’s contribution, which wasn’t exactly wrong.

“Mmhm.” Callum agreed, only half paying attention, as he flipped back further, and further, until all of the drawings were from the time before any of this had started, before he and his brother had fled home with an elf assassin, before he’d ever cast a spell, just – before. He looked over the sketches of Katolis with an extremely strange feeling, half-homesickness and half-regret, twisting around in his belly. He remembered all of these drawings, of course he did, he didn’t put anything in this book that wasn’t carefully thought-out, but…

It felt like they were almost from another world, now. Or another time.

“I remember that cliff.” Rayla said offhandedly, and he blinked to realise that he had the page open at a drawing of the Katolis castle from the forest below, looming far above the treetops upon its rocky perch. He looked between the sketchbook and her, vaguely impressed that she’d managed to both see and identify the drawing from her current viewpoint. Then he processed what she’d actually said.

“What do you mean, ‘I remember that cliff’?” He asked, suspicious, and she shrugged.

“Climbed it.” She claimed, cheerfully nonchalant.

Both he and Ezran turned and stared. “What do you mean, ‘I climbed it’?” Callum demanded, a little strident, looking between her and the drawing which very clearly showed how ridiculously sheer the cliff face was, and how high up the castle was, and-

“I climbed it.” She repeated, with a very small smirk twitching at the edge of her lips. He suspected she was starting to enjoy their reactions to her admitting to particularly impressive deeds. “To break into your castle. Couldn’t exactly go in through the front gate, you know.”

They goggled at her, momentarily flabbergasted. “…Did you stop at the bottom of the castle?” Ezran asked, after a moment, reluctantly fascinated. “I mean, I’m pretty sure they built it so you can’t get around the bottom parts easily?”

“They definitely did.” Callum confirmed, who had been subjected to numerous lessons on the history and facility of Katolis castle over the years.

“Nah, I just climbed the castle, too.” Rayla asserted, and still with that smirk, slunk around the fireside to point her finger to a particular part of the drawing. “All the way up to the battlements.”

Callum stared at her fingertip, hovering over his drawing of the crenelated walls. “….How?” Was all he could ask, stunned yet again by the breadth of her strength and skill.

“With difficulty.” She shrugged again. “And also my hook-blades.”

It took him several moments to speak again. “You mean you chased me through the castle right after you climbed the castle?” A small part of his brain shrieked that’s not even human, and then the rest of him realised, that, well. Yeah, it wasn’t. It very much wasn’t. It was, however, extremely impressive.

His brother blinked. “She chased you through the castle?”

He turned and squinted. “Yeah? Of course – oh, you weren’t there for that part.” He remembered, suddenly. Yeah, that was right – Ezran had been in the secret passages at the time. “Didn’t I say anything about it?”

“Maybe? I’m not sure.”

Rayla rolled her eyes, and leaned back from the sketchbook. “Well, I did take a few minutes to collapse on the battlements breathing heavily first,” She said, dryly. “But yes. Not sure I’d have managed it if it wasn’t so close to Full Moon, honestly.”

“That’s crazy.” Callum said, admiringly. “I’d have fallen off the cliff about ten feet up.”

Her face scrunched up for a second. “Ten feet.” She said, pensive. “That’s not much, right? So I suppose if you fell you probably wouldn’t hurt yourself all that much, at least.” He was blinking at her, contemplating asking about typical elf metric systems, when she tilted her head sideways to peer at his sketchbook and said “Do you have any others of the castle?”

He paused. “Er, yeah, a few.” He said, hesitantly, and…suddenly remembered that he’d offered to show her through the sketchbook, sometime. It was still a little uncomfortably personal, but…maybe not in a bad way? And it seemed as good a time as any…so, after a moment, he cleared his throat and slowly offered “If you want, you could have a look through the whole book?”

She paused, looking momentarily startled, and lifted her eyes to blink at him. “…Well, it’s a good time for it, I suppose.” She said, with a brief glance out at the storm stranding them in place. A small, genuine smile lifted the corners of her lips. “Sounds good.”

He stared at that smile for longer than was strictly necessary, and wasn’t certain why. In the end, a little awkwardly, he cleared his throat, and carefully handed the sketchbook over. “My step-dad gave it to me.” He explained, and her hands faltered for a second as they settled around the thick-bound tome. “When I was pretty small. So the earliest drawings are kind of…not amazing. But…” he shrugged.

“They’re cute.” Ezran claimed, shuffling in closer to Rayla to watch. “I like them. Especially that one of Bait.”

“No, yeah, that one is a masterpiece.” Callum agreed, lips twitching, and watched Rayla stare at the cover of the sketchbook with an odd, pensive expression. He was about to ask her if anything was wrong when she shook her head, a minute motion, and opened the book.

The first pages, predictably, were full of childish scrawl he’d been very proud of at the time. The odd expression on Rayla’s face was almost instantly replaced with a lopsided smile, as if she found the old drawings of Ez and Bait and Mom and Harrow particularly charming. The earliest portrait of Bait was just a grumpy looking circle with eyes, and despite everything, it still perfectly captured the spirit of him. “Looks just like him.” She said, lips twitching, as she inspected it.

“I know, right?” He grinned, and shuffled a little closer so as to see better. Her eyes glanced his way for a quick moment, then returned to the book. She turned the page to an amateurish rendering of Pip.

“I have to say, this is still lots better than anything I can draw.” She commented, and turned the page on again.

Page by page, she flipped through the book, lingering each time to inspect whatever was drawn there. For all that he’d made the offer, it still made him feel somewhat exposed, watching her uncover page after page of his life. It was his personal sketchbook, after all, with years of memories and emotion immortalised within it. He didn’t draw anything in that book that he didn’t put heart and soul into, and that meant it was…well. Important. And personal. Enough so that watching her leaf through it left him feeling strangely timid, as though he were worried she wouldn’t approve.

She commented, here and there, because lots of the pictures were noteworthy and many had an explanation or story behind them that she wasn’t privy to. He quietly identified his mother for her, on the first sketch skilled enough that she was recognisable, and repeated the process for Harrow, and Aunt Amaya, and Gren, and then-

“That’s the girl that attacked us in the castle dungeons.” Rayla said, eyes sharp on a drawing of Claudia. “The dark mage.”

He coughed, abruptly uncomfortable, and as he stared at the face drawn on the page, realised that he hadn’t really thought about Claudia very much recently. “Yeah, that’s Claudia.” He explained, awkwardly, and wondered at the bizarre twist of emotion in his gut. He was guilty for attacking her, and stealing her primal stone, sure…but… “She’s one of the only friends I really had at the castle.”

It was a little strange to think of her. The days since they’d left the castle had been so hectic, and so increasingly stressful, that he’d just…not really had a chance to sit down and wonder how she was doing. Whether she’d got in trouble for losing the egg. Whether she was mad at him or not. He hoped not. He hadn’t really had much of a chance to miss her, maybe, but he did still like her, and it would be a bit of a punch in the gut to have her angry at him. Even if that liking felt vaguer and more distant than he remembered. Like almost everything from before the start of this journey…she felt almost like she belonged to another world, now.

Rayla glanced to the side to inspect his face for a moment, and while her expression didn’t change, her ears twitched down a little. “Hmm.” She offered, noncommittally, and returned to the book.

There was a lot in the book. A lot of stories, and a lot of memories. When she was around half-through, she started to send periodic glances towards the cooking meat, as though to ensure it hadn’t burned while she wasn’t looking. Ezran had helpfully taken it upon himself to twist the spit occasionally while she was looking at the book, but it had to be getting close to done, now. The smell of it was ridiculously appetising, and if it hadn’t been for the distraction of his sketchbook, Callum might have had a hard time focusing on anything else but the hideous hunger twisting in his belly.

Still, it apparently wasn’t done yet, so she returned her attention to the book.

“You’ve got a lot of variety in here.” She commented, after carefully turning the page again, this time onto a lovingly-rendered sketch of Harrow with Pip on his shoulder, offering the bird a treat. It was by far the most detailed and skilled drawing of the man she’d seen yet; one he’d been very proud of. She was far enough into the book now that most of it was at least vaguely approaching his current skill level.

Her expression went strange and a little tight at the sight of it, which…he tried not to dwell on too much. Of course it would be awkward to see a drawing of the King you’d been sent to assassinate, particularly when that King was the father of your newest friends. That was all there was to it.

She swallowed, and turned the page over onto something more innocuous: the capital city of Katolis as seen from atop one of its towers. “…How do you decide what to draw?” She asked, after a moment, eyes lingering on the sprawl of the city. He wondered how much she’d seen of it, before they’d fled the place.

He thought for a second. “I guess I just see stuff and want to draw it, mostly.” He said, honestly. “It can be anything, and I’ll just look at it, and..” He waved to his head, then made a sort of mime of a drawing motion with his hand. “…I start thinking about how I’d draw it. The lines I’d use, the parts I’d shade…that sort of thing.”

“Is that what you’re always spacing out about when you’re walking?” She questioned, dryly, giving the city-drawing one last look before turning the page. This featured a drawing of Fort Viatori, which she must surely recognise from experience. “How you want to draw random rocks and trees you see?”

Callum laughed, a little abashed. “Well. Not only.”

“Sometimes if you look at his hands when he’s daydreaming, you can see his fingers twitching.” Ezran said, helpfully, and they both glanced at him. “Like he’s imagining drawing something. It’s funny.” He put his first two fingers and thumb together as if holding a stick of charcoal, then made a deliberate twitching motion of said fingers. “Like this.”

Rayla snorted, a smile slipping onto her lips, and she glanced at him side-long as if to slot that new detail in with the rest of what she knew about him. He felt his cheeks heat, just a little, and he ducked his head. “Do I really do that?” He asked, nonplussed, and received a very matter-of-fact nod from his brother.

“All the time.” He claimed.

“I’ll keep an eye out, then.” Rayla said, lips twitching, and inspected the drawing of the Fort for a moment of consideration, before she pointed out one section of the far end. “This is where my team climbed up the walls.” Her finger shifted along a path. “We sort of…snuck along the battlements here, and in the shadow of this tower here…and then dropped down along this wall here until we got to the bridge. And then we waited for the guards to challenge someone and slipped across.”

To Callum’s memory, Viatori had been positively bristling with soldiers, easily the most well-guarded and well-defended checkpoint in the kingdom. They checked every trader, every caravan, every traveller…and given their fort occupied the only easy way through the mountains, not to mention a junction with the great Rhodane river, well. That was a lot of people. “That’s…impressive.” He said, at last, because it was. “And no one saw you?”

“Nope. Full Moon’s good for that.” She answered, with a trace of a smile, and turned the page again. She blinked at the drawing on this one; a hand holding a knife, but neither of them typical. The knife was ornamented, and oddly curved, almost a crescent-shape. The hand was elaborately tattooed, with dark intricate designs rendered in careful lines on the charcoal of the dark skin. “…Who’s this?”

He peered closer, although he remembered perfectly well. “Evenerian Priestess of Mercy.” He said, recalling the strange woman, and the fierceness of that knife held beneath the outward calm and solemnity. “I met her at Greatport, coming off the ships. I’d never seen someone with tattoos like that before, so I kind of accidentally stared a bit.”

“I remember that.” Ezran reminisced, smiling. “She asked you what you were staring at.” He paused, and added “I asked to see her knife.”

“Priests of Mercy in Katolis don’t really have the knives so much these days, so I’d never seen one outside of old paintings or history books.” Callum elaborated, looking down at the sharp curve of the blade and the marks on the hand that wielded it. That had been an interesting, and memorable, meeting. “It was interesting.”

“…You have priestesses that carry knives?” Rayla asked, a little dubiously, and in a rush of disorientation that felt oddly like vertigo, Callum realised that…that, well, Rayla probably didn’t know anything about Mercy. Or…or Justice, or Valor, or Fortitude, or any of the Paragons. That was…so weird. “What for? Fighting?” She squinted at the shape of the knife and suggested, cautiously, “Ritual bloodletting?”

He mulled over the revelation for a few seconds, nonplussed, before he answered. A little haltingly, perhaps, freshly aware that he was speaking to someone who didn’t know anything about Mercy. It was weirdly daunting, to be the voice representing the faith of most of an entire race. “Er, I mean, no? Not that I know of, unless there’s some weird Evenerian thing I’ve not heard about, but…no.” He cleared his throat, and considered how to answer. “Well…Mercy is about…uh, mercy, right? The stories say that she carried a knife like that, because…” He hesitated. “Because sometimes there’s only one mercy left to give people.”

He saw the moment she understood, her brow furrowing. “That’s kind of dark.” She said, eventually. “And, what, the priestesses carry them for the same reason?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s just ceremonial at this point. No one uses knives for Mercy-killing anymore.” He explained, awkwardly, feeling keenly that he was not representing one of the great Paragons very well.

“It’s some sort of flower now, right?” Ezran mused, a little pensively, as he stared at the page. “I mean, I never paid that much attention to the religion classes, but that’s what Mercy’s always holding in the pictures, isn’t it?”

“The lotus of Evenere?” Callum ventured, thinking. A white lotus held in Mercy’s hands, the clusters of pollen at its centre a deep, bloody red…and there was something familiar about that… “I know the symbolism is all about…peace, and falling asleep, and…” he frowned. “…painlessness.” He groaned, as finally his thoughts clicked into place. “I can’t believe I never realised that.”

“What?” Ezran asked, interested.

Rayla seemed curious too, although a little nonplussed by the topic. “Figure something out?”

“The lotus of Mercy.” He explained, a little distractedly, pulling his bag over to go rummaging through it… “The lotus of Evenere, the marsh kingdom.” He found what he was looking for, and pulled it out: a little bottle full of sanguine fluid: lilium, a drug made from the pollen of a potent and dangerous flower.... “It’s the marsh-lotus. I can’t believe I never made that connection before!”

Rayla stared. “So…what you’re saying…is that I’ve been taking a pain drug that humans use for mercy-killing.” She said, flatly, the fingers of her good hand settling over her opposite wrist. “That’s…disturbing.”

“…Well, the Healer did say that overdose is dangerous.” Ez pointed out, and despite how lightly he said it, he looked a little disturbed too.

“Mercy from pain.” Callum said, trying not to think about it too hard, and shrugged. “That’s part of her thing. It’s not just for death. But I guess the people in Evenere remember that more than most of us.” He saw Rayla’s eyes glancing curiously at him, and he added “I’ve always heard they lead pretty hard lives there.”

“…Mm.” She said, noncommittally, looking down at the page again. “Well, I guess it was nice of her to show you the knife.” She sounded dubious, even as she tilted her head. “…I didn’t know humans put markings on their skin like that. ‘Tattoos’, you said?”

Callum looked up at her, curious at the implications. “Yeah.” He confirmed, eyes settling with interest on the markings beneath her eyes, which…he’d sort of unthinkingly assumed to be much the same thing. “So…um…” He fidgeted until she looked over at him, expectant, and finally said “Those marks on your face. They’re not tattoos? What are they?”

Rayla blinked, startled, and her fingers rose to one of them out of reflex. “They’re…pigment?” She offered, evidently confused by the question, and side-eyed him strangely.

“Like ink?” He pressed, and saw Ezran was looking interested too.

“Pretty much.” She agreed, looking down at the drawing. “So, what, these…’tattoos’…what are those supposed to be if they’re not pigment?”

“Er. Well. They’re ink too, but…” He hesitated, uncertain on how to proceed. Ezran, evidently, had no such difficulty.

“People put the ink under their skin with needles.” He said, cheerfully, and Rayla recoiled. “The priestess lady said it takes a long time and hurts a lot.”

“That was the day I learned about tattoos, and also the day I decided I didn’t want one.” Callum reflected, and looked at the obvious astonishment on Rayla’s face. “…I’m guessing that’s not how elves do it?”

“No.” She said, stridently, then paused. “Well, I don’t know about all elves. Maybe some of them do it like that. But…” She shook her head, stroking a finger down under her eye. “I got mine painted on with a brush, like a sane person.”

Callum perked up with interest. “And, what, it stays on?” He inspected her markings with a little more scrutiny than he’d dared before. They’d been travelling together for over a week now, and he didn’t think the colour had faded at all… “It doesn’t wash out, or wear off?”

Rayla eyed him, as if uncertain whether he was serious. “…They wear off eventually, but it takes a long time.” She said, finally. “A few months for the lighter colours, but you can get a good six to eight months out of dark pigments like mine. You just touch them up when you need to.”

“Huh.” Callum expressed, fascinated, and stared at her pigment until she started shifting uncomfortably and he realised he should probably maybe avert his eyes now.

“What happens if you mess up when you’re painting it on?” Ezran asked, just as interested. “Do you have to go around for months with like, a squiggle on your face where your hand slipped?”

Rayla snorted, surprised, then snickered. “No, there’s this pigment remover stuff you can use.” She said, lips twitching. “It stinks, though, so no one likes to use it.” She smiled for a few moments, quiet, with a sort of reminiscent cast to her eyes that made Callum think she was recalling something both pleasant and relevant. After a few seconds, a little haltingly, she said “One time when I was little, I snuck a bottle of pigment and a brush and snuck up on…“ She hesitated, then went on. “…on Runaan and Ethari, while they were sleeping, and painted over their faces.” Her smile went a little wider, but…sadder, too. “Ethari sleeps pretty heavily, so he was fine. Runaan, though…” She shook her head. “Woke up right away. I got caught and didn’t even care, I thought it was so funny.”

Runaan…hadn’t that been the assassin on the castle roof? The one who’d pointed the bow at them? The one who Rayla had stayed behind to fight? Callum looked at her, torn between amusement at the story and concern for the almost bittersweet cast to her lips, and wasn’t sure what to say.

Ezran looked at her a little too-thoughtfully as well, and Callum wondered what he was picking up on. In the end though, what he asked was “Did you get in trouble?”

She smiled. “Not much, actually. Runaan thought it was a good enough show of stealth to let me off most of the punishment. Not all of it, though. I was doing extra chores for a week.” Her eyes went distant and wistful, and Callum wondered if, maybe, it would be okay to ask…

In the end, he didn’t have to. She looked back at him, and a flicker of understanding passed across her face as she saw him. She exhaled, very slightly.

“…Runaan and Ethari took me in after my parents left for the Dragonguard.” She explained, after a moment, not looking at them. “They’re…sort of my second set of parents, pretty much.”

Callum shifted, cautious, aware that this was a difficult subject. “…Runaan was that elf back at the castle, wasn’t he?” He guessed, and Rayla’s expression twisted into a light grimace.

“Leader of the mission. Yeah.” She said, quietly. She hesitated, then closed the sketchbook, and held it out to him. “I’ll finish looking through it later.” Her voice was…very normal, but in a somewhat forced way. Like she was having to work at it. “For now, I think our weird breakfast is about done.”

“Oh, um.” His hands closed automatically around the edges of the book as she proffered it. “Yeah, sure. Good?” He tried to inspect her face for any signs of that quiet, sad wistfulness…but she’d replaced it with a carefully neutral expression instead.

Her fingers brushed his as they receded from the book. “Thanks for showing me.” She said, and his eyes flicked up automatically from her hands to her eyes. They were really very purple. He felt a little flustered, and didn’t know why.

“No problem?” He squeaked, and watched her as she flashed him a smile and retreated around the campfire. Ezran looked sideways at him and sighed, but Callum was still somewhat too distracted to ask him about it.

Rayla inspected the meat for a few seconds before, carefully, removing the spit from over the fire. “Might still be kind of bloody in the middle, but it’ll probably taste better that way anyway.” She commented, and for a second, Callum remembered his erroneous impressions of elves as blood-drinkers and giggled to himself. She raised an eyebrow at him, but continued with her business of un-spearing the deer leg from the spit and bracing the end of it atop one of their rags to cut. She sheared off several large chunks of meat with effortless motions of her blade, proving that it was indeed still pretty bloody inside.

Callum might have assumed that being exposed to the animal in its extremely bloody skinned-and-gutted state would have made the sight of it less appealing. It didn’t. He was so overwhelmingly hungry that in that moment it became nigh unbearable, and his eyes seemed fixed on the pile of food in a way that wouldn’t be moved. He could feel the near-instant salivation in his mouth, hear the abrupt and beseeching rumble of his stomach…

Rayla sat down beside him, moving the food over by dragging the edges of the rag, until it was sat on the ground in front of them. She was still holding the leg bone, which retained a fair amount of meat. “Will Bait be able to eat from the bone?” She asked Ezran, with a glance at it. “It’s good eating for any of us, if he can’t.”

Ezran blinked, and turned to the side, where Bait had emerged from the tent-layers at once at the sound of his name. The glow-toad had started glowing very brightly indeed, apparently fully aware that food was imminent. “Well, he’ll give it his best try.” He said, lips twitching, and Rayla obligingly laid the bone out. This, incidentally, was how Callum came by the somewhat disturbing knowledge that glow-toad tongues were a little bit barbed, and entirely capable of stripping meat from bones when applied to the task properly.

Fortunately, there was an extremely absorbing distraction at hand. He stared at the food, not wanting to fling himself at it like some sort of savage, but also entirely aware that this was probably the hungriest he’d ever been in his life.

Apparently entirely aware of his conundrum, Rayla rolled her eyes at him, grabbed a chunk of meat, and leaned back. She gestured expansively at the pile. “Dig in.” She said, and neither of them needed any more prompting whatsoever.

The next ten or so minutes disappeared in a blissful haze of more-than-slightly frenzied eating, which of course they did with their hands, for lack of any actual cutlery or plates or bowls of any kind. Callum was aware of little more than the urgency of eating, of allaying that awful hunger, of the delicious taste of roasted meat still hot enough to sizzle and spit when he bit into it – he ate, and ate, and when he was done he stared at the empty rag with a strange sense of betrayal.

It was, he reflected, probably a good thing they still had so much meat left to cook. And plenty of time to cook it in. Because he was still hungry, somehow, even after gorging himself like a ravenous beast. A little self-consciously, he leaned back and reached for a separate rag to wipe his face and hands with, because the whole affair had been distinctly messy. He eyed it after he was done, wondering if they’d have to try to do more laundry soon. If nothing else, they had a steady supply of bandages getting dirty, and probably a lot of the various rags and socks were getting pretty nasty.

His stomach rumbled, a little plaintively, as if disappointed he’d stopped eating. He made a face, caught between the conflicting sensations of satiation and hunger, feeling paradoxically as if he’d eaten too much and not nearly enough at the same time. He’d eaten too quickly, maybe? But he was definitely still hungry. “I think that was the most satisfying thing I ever ate.” He concluded, after a moment, and Ezran made fervent sounds of agreement over his last remaining mouthful.

Rayla solicited the rag from him with a wordless gesture, and wiped her own face before she spoke. “It gets like that when you’ve not found good food for a while.” She agreed, letting out a small and satisfied sigh. “We’ll want to cook some more soon, though. We should honestly be stuffing ourselves with as much food as we can manage while we’re here.”

Ez swallowed his last bit of food, and thoughtfully, asked “Why?”

She shrugged. “Got to fatten ourselves up.” She claimed, passing over the rag when Ez reached for it. We’ve been on short rations for a while, will probably be on short rations at some other point on this journey, and to top it off…being cold makes you hungrier. So.”

Callum blinked. He hadn’t known that last part, but… “Also, red meat’s supposed to be good when you’ve been injured and bleeding a lot recently.” He added, and her lips twitched.

“That, too.” She agreed, her hand moving momentarily in the direction of her mangled arm. He recalled he hadn’t had a chance to check it yet today, and twitched all-over in discomfort, suppressing the urge to immediately demand a check-up. She inspected the fire and the spit pensively for a few moments, then said “I think I’ll put another leg on. Then I should probably go on another firewood run before the storm gets too close.” Her eyes moved to the side, focused on him. “Think you can handle the cooking while I’m gone?”

“Sure.” He said, automatically, before he’d really thought about it. Fortunately, when he’d actually thought about it, his conclusions weren’t any different. Turning the spit didn’t seem like a particularly intensive task. But… “Er. If the storm’s that close, is it safe to go out?”

“For now, probably. But if I wait, no.” Rayla said succinctly, and stood. “Which is why I should go soon.”

He turned to watch her, which also gave him the right angle to see that Bait was still thoroughly assailing his breakfast. He watched for a few seconds in somewhat horrified fascination, remembering the many, many times he’d let Bait tongue-tether some treat or other from his hand, when it could apparently strip flesh from bone just like that. It was…imposing. “Did you know he could do that?” he asked Ezran, in an undertone, and received a sunny smile in return.

“’Course.” He answered, shrugging. “He prefers it when he can eat stuff that’s small enough to just swallow, since he can’t chew anything, but…” ‘But’, evidently, it was far from a necessity.

There was a sudden brightening of the storm out side the cave, all at once, in a very evident lightning-flash. What felt like barely a second or two later, the thunder rumbled its softened edges across the sky. Rayla looked at it and grimaced, then hurried for their food pile. She piked the second venison leg without ceremony, handing it to Callum to deal with, and set about pulling up her scarf and pulling down her hat with an impatience that heralded her swift departure.

“I’d best be going soon.” She said to them, picking up her rope harness and one blade. “That lightning was too close.”

Ezran made a sound of glum agreement, and glanced back at the egg still sat beside the fire. “I can almost actually tell when there’s about to be lightning, now.” He said, eyes still fixed on the glowing eggshell. “Zym gets this…anticipation, right before?”

Rayla visibly considered that for a second, while Callum tried to come to terms with yet another facet of the growing trend of his brother’s dragon-connected empathy deal. “…Well, that would probably be super handy if we were travelling through the storm.” She said, dryly. “As it is…not so much.”

“…Well, we’ve probably got plenty of weeks ahead of us to get caught in another storm.” Callum commented, sounding a fair bit more fatalistic to his own ears than he was used to. “So.”

She sighed, a light grimace passing around what little remained visible of her face. “You’re not wrong.” She admitted, hefting the rope harness into place. She glanced towards the ledge, and squared her shoulders. “Well, that’s enough lollygagging. I don’t want to spend any more time out there than I have to. I’m off.”

Callum’s gut clenched. She might have already been out several times this morning, but… “Come back soon” was all he said in the end, with an anxious glance out into the storm. The winds were awfully, viciously strong now, and the snow…

She glanced his way, and if there was anything to be read from her expression, the scarf had covered it. “That is the objective.” She said, dryly, and waved in brief farewell as she departed along the ledge again.

Ezran patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry. She’s just gonna hack up a tree and then come back. She won’t be long.”

He made a vague hum of agreement, and when he finally managed to tear his eyes from the ledge, shuffled over to the cooking spit to supervise it with single-minded intensity. Maybe, if he focused enough on that, he could avoid worrying so much.

It didn’t quite work. But it worked enough that it took him a good ten minutes to notice that Ezran had picked up Zym’s egg, only turning to see when he noticed the rhythmic ebb and flow of the blue light over the stone floor. He found his brother sat quietly with the dragon egg in his lap, eyes closed, fingers splayed over the shell. He was entirely still and silent but for the steady rise and fall of his shoulders, in time with the cyclical shine of the egg. A shiver of unease prickled at Callum’s skin at the sight of that stillness.

“You okay there, Ez?” He prompted, after a moment, and suppressed another curl of anxiety at the strangely sluggish way his brother opened his eyes.

“…Fine.” He said, after a moment, but his voice was strange. Callum sat up straighter, and looked at his brother more sharply.

He’d been fine ten minutes ago, talking with Callum and Rayla. He’d been fine for a while before that, too. But this? Did not seem ‘fine’. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to be holding the egg like that right now?” He asked, and watched Ezran’s brow furrow uncomprehendingly. “With the storm….maybe it’s a little too much dragon-empathy-magic.”

Ezran blinked, very slowly, and looked down at the egg with a strangely sluggish motion. He looked almost as if he were moving through water instead of air. “…What, you’re worried I’m gonna overdo it on my weird empathy powers?” He asked, and…while it should have sounded joking, it didn’t. There was a distance to his tone and expression that was profoundly unsettling.

“Honestly? Yeah, kinda.” Callum admitted, and abandoned the spit to shuffle closer, reaching out to turn his brother’s chin up. He inspected his face. Was it just his imagination, or did the colour of his eyes seem brighter somehow? “It’s not like you’ve been empathy-connected to a baby storm dragon in the middle of a storm before, you know. And you weren’t acting like this before you picked the egg up.”

“Acting like what?” Ezran wondered, voice still far-away and distant, his eyes staring in the direction of Callum without quite focusing on him.

He suppressed the urge to snatch the egg away. “Like you’re sleepwalking.” He said, tightly, more and more concerned by the second. Mercy, but he’d been talking and reacting completely normally just ten minutes ago, and now… “Like you’re not even really here. Ez, please – give me the egg, or put it down, or something. I don’t think you should be touching it right now.”

His brother looked slowly down at the gleaming eggshell again. “I can still feel him when I’m not touching him.” He pointed out, vaguely.

“Maybe. But you keep saying how your empathy deal always works better when you’re touching things.” He held out his hands. “Please, Ezran.”

His brother watched the egg, brow furrowed, as if he were having trouble thinking his way through what Callum had said. Then, eventually, in a hesitant and halting motion, he drew his hands back from the shell. It seemed to be an effort. “…Take it, if you like.” He said, still distant, and Callum only hesitated a second.

He’d not exactly had much contact with the egg. But his sudden urgent desire to get the thing away from his brother easily superseded any hesitance he’d have had on the matter. He closed his hands around the sides of the eggshell, skin tingling with static as he took it. He hefted it up and carefully away, watching his brother all the while.

It wasn’t a pronounced shift. But it was noticeable, even so, how a touch of lucidity returned to Ezran’s eyes. “Oh.” He said, softly, blinking a few times in a bleary sort of way, as if he were waking up. “That…does feel different. I…didn’t realise.”

Callum held the egg carefully close, tense with anxiety. “I think,” He said, slowly, “you shouldn’t hold him unless you have to, until the storm’s gone.”

Ez opened his mouth as if to object, then hesitated. He looked at the egg, brow furrowed, and his shoulders slumped. “…Yeah, maybe.” He admitted, and Callum thought it was starting to dawn on him, how unsettling it was for him to have…gone blank, like that. “I…maybe that’s why I had so much trouble sleeping. Because I was holding him? So it made the connection so strong…” He raised his hands and rubbed them slowly over his face. “I feel so weird. Like my head is full of wool.”

“Someone else can hold him tonight.” Callum said firmly, fingers feeling a little jittery on the eggshell. “And for now we can put him next to the fire, or something, so he’s still warm. And you can just…absolutely not touch him until the weird storm-magic-overflow thing isn’t a problem anymore.” He forced his breath to stay even, and closed his eyes for a second, just a second, to try to grasp at calm. This was far too much anxiety for a single morning.

Ezran hesitated for a long moment, looking at the egg. His fingers twitched towards it, and then he pulled his hands forcefully down to his sides. “…Yeah. Okay.” He said, and his voice was very quiet.

So Callum made a little nest out of rumpled clothing a short distance from the fire, and carefully set the egg there. All the while Ezran watched and shuffled and became a little more fidgety with every minute of lucidity. When they returned cautiously to just watching the cooking meat, and twisting the spit occasionally, Callum couldn’t help but notice how often Ezran’s eyes returned to the egg. It was like he couldn’t look away. Like he was drawn to it, again and again and again, even with that distance imposed between them.

He didn’t need to point it out to him. Ezran seemed perfectly aware of it, forcing his eyes away every time as though it were a physical effort. His shoulders hunched with discomfort, and he huddled beside Callum with Bait held tightly in his arms. By the time Rayla returned, it was to a spectacle of uneasy silence, with the egg exiled to the other side of the fire and both Callum and Ezran so obviously tense that she stopped short to stare at them when she stepped past the ledge.

“Okay, what’s happened now?” She demanded, with some asperity, stalking forwards and shrugging off her latest haul of wood. It made a noisome clatter on the stone floor, and both of them flinched. “I was only gone for twenty minutes.”

Callum exchanged an unhappy glance with his brother. Eventually, Ez spoke. “…Turns out Zym is kind of messing with my head more than I thought.” He admitted, unhappily. “I just…picked him up, and then Callum noticed I’d gone all weird, and I didn’t even notice how much I couldn’t think until I put him down again, and-“ He shook his head, frustrated and anxious at once. “-and it’s. I don’t know. Weird.”

Rayla looked between them, brow furrowing, and crept over to kneel beside them. “You alright, Ez?” She asked, inspecting him seriously. She reached out and lifted his chin to look at him, just like Callum had earlier, and there was something almost comical about that. In a sort of horrible way.

Ez hesitated, looking up at her with such an expression of open vulnerability that Callum instantly wanted to pull him close and smother him in hugs until he felt better. He couldn’t stand it. “Mostly.” He said, in a small voice. “But – we’re still connected, even if we’re not touching, and I just – it’s really – I don’t know.” He sounded miserable. “I keep thinking that I want to pick him up, or go over to him, and he’s still in my head, and I dunno what to think…”

She watched him, quiet, then said “It’s the storm, right? Making it like this. This wasn’t happening before.”

“I – yeah. I guess.” Ezran looked over at the shining dragon egg again and flinched. “He’s just – it – it feels like he’s absorbing it? The storm-magic. It’s all around us and he’s…taking it in, but I’m connected to him so…”

“…It’s spilling over, maybe?” Callum ventured, setting a steadying arm around his brother’s middle. Ez shivered, and then pressed closer into his side.

“Kinda.” He agreed. “And then I guess…I don’t know. I think it’s the magic that’s letting me feel so far out like this. I could never feel anything I wasn’t touching, before, but now…” he shook his head. “It’s so much. And Zym – he’s feeling the magic and the storm so much and I can’t-“ he broke off, frustrated, and fell silent.

Rayla’s hand receded, and she stared at him quietly for a few short moments. “I didn’t know if I was imagining it, before.” She said, after a pause. “But I’m pretty sure now. Your eyes are too bright, Ez. More than human-normal.”

Ez blinked, startled out of his anxiety, and his brow furrowed. “They are?” He questioned, baffled.

Callum shifted uneasily. “I noticed that too.” He said, turning to Rayla. “What does that even mean?”

She shrugged minutely, and leaned back. “No idea.” She admitted. “My eyes glow when it’s dark, but that’s just a Moonshadow elf thing. I think – I’ve heard other elves’ eyes glow when they’re in their primal magic states, or when there’s a lot of magic around, but…”

Ezran stilled, shoulders hunching inwards. “This is weird.” He said, in a very small voice. “And kind of scary.”

Callum’s arm tightened around him. He’d try to appear less worried, but considering he was currently in close contact with his empath brother, that was probably a lost cause.

Rayla reached out and laid a hand on Ezran’s shoulder, trying for a reassuring smile. “If it’s the storm making it like this, it should get better soon.” She said, voice gentle. “The storm’s almost as close as it’s going to get. In an hour or so, it’ll start heading past us.”

He shivered. “Yeah.” His voice was quiet. “I know. The middle of it is sort of…” He nodded in a specific direction. “That way. And moving that way.” He jerked his chin to the side, as if to indicate the travel path of the storm.

“We’re not going to be quite in the middle of it.” She agreed. “Probably a good thing, considering.”

“Yeah.” Ezran turned and pressed his face into Callum’s shoulder, and said nothing more.

Callum pulled him close and sat there quietly, heart aching with worry, and hurting from the force of the protectiveness he had no way to act on. He wanted to do something – to protect Ezran from this, somehow. But what was there to be done, except wait?

Ezran stayed curled into his side, Bait half-squashed in his lap, as Rayla quietly went about stacking the wood and turning the spit. Callum felt it when Ez flinched, at nothing he could identify – and then, the very next second, lightning burned the sky white. The thunder followed, accompanied by searing blue light quivering over the camp from the intensity of the egg’s glow.

“Close,” Rayla noted, looking at the sky. Her brows were furrowed. “I got back just in time, I think. That was less than a kilometre away.”

“I can tell.” Ezran muttered, the words muffled by the fur of Callum’s cloak. Rayla still seemed to hear it well enough, though, and glanced his way with a light frown.

After a moment of hesitation, she came over and knelt beside them, resting a careful hand on Ezran’s shoulder. When he lifted his face up to peer out at her, her face was…gentle. Warm, and plainly caring, and Callum throat went half-choked with gratitude and gladness to see it. He was just so thankful that she was here, that she cared about Ezran too, that she was helping… “The next batch of food’s about ready,” She told his brother, offering him a small smile. “Might do you some good, to eat a little more.”

Ezran exhaled, the slow sound of it more than close enough for Callum to hear, even despite the whistle and shriek of the winds at such close remove. “…I guess I am still pretty hungry.” He admitted, and slowly peeled himself from Callum’s side, sitting up and unfurling from the tight ball-shape he’d squashed himself into.

Their second meal of the day was a good sight less enthusiastic than the first. Rayla sliced the meat off the bone and passed it around, and they ate, but it was in a subdued silence. Even Bait wasn’t as enthusiastic as usual, sticking close by Ezran’s feet and picking half-heartedly at his portion. Callum found himself shooting worried looks at his brother what felt like every minute, and all the more once the storm and its lightning drew perilously near.

The first time lightning flashed, perfectly in time with the thunder, Ezran paled and dropped his food, eyes moving unwillingly to the near-blinding light of the egg. The second time, he started trembling, and couldn’t seem to stop, his arm shaking as he lifted his meal piece-by-piece to his mouth. The third time, he seemed to give up on the meal entirely, pushing it away and shuffling back to curl into Callum’s side. “Sorry.” He whispered, huddling into a tiny and miserable-looking shape beside him. “I don’t think I can eat any more, right now.” Bait, beside him, looked up and croaked worriedly.

Callum swallowed, then set his own food aside to turn and pull him into his chest. “That’s okay, Ez.” He murmured, arms tightening around his brother’s back. “You just…rest. Until the storm passes a little.” His heart thudded heavy and sick with worry, and he shared a helpless look with Rayla over Ezran’s head.

After a moment, Rayla abandoned her meal as well, shifting around the campfire until she was beside them. “Anything we can do to help?” She asked, quietly.

Ez shifted in Callum’s arms. “’ready doing it.” He mumbled, indistinct, but lifted his head just enough to peer out at her with half an eye. “…I can’t block him out.” He explained, haltingly, and the half-visible shine of his pale blue eye blinked. “But – it kind of helps. To have you guys in my head, too. I’m trying to…” He struggled for the right words. “…distract myself? I guess.”

Callum considered it, fingers tightening at his brother’s back. So…if he couldn’t shut off the too-intense draconian input, he could at least try to focus on whatever he got from them, instead? “…Rayla?” He asked, a moment later, looking at her with open entreaty. Thankfully, she didn’t hesitate, and moved over at once to settle herself at Ezran’s side.

She extended a hand, and slowly, Ez reached out to take it. He shivered, and his visible eye slipped closed. “…Thanks.” He mumbled, still muffled in Callum’s clothing, and tugged her by the fingers until she was flush by their sides, all of them braced together in the middle of the storm. The wind howled outside their meagre shelter, eddies of it pulling at their hair, and the only thing louder was the thunder.

It wasn’t the most intense thunderstorm Callum had ever seen, maybe. That honour went to a storm that had woken him up in the night a couple of years back, lightning shrieking through the sky almost every other second for what had seemed like an hour straight. Here, the lightning only seemed to flash once every minute or so…but it was more than bad enough, what with how Ezran shuddered in his arms each and every time it happened, and the light of the Dragon Prince flared blue enough to colour the entire cave. He didn’t know how long they sat there, how long Ezran trembled, before-

Light flared – and, even muffled by the snow-clouds, the crash of the thunder was so loud it hurt, a sound almost as potent as an explosion, right above them-

“That was close,” Rayla uttered, in the ringing, howling strangeness of the moment after the thunderclap, where nothing sounded quite right- “That was too close, I think that was-“

Ezran stiffened, abruptly, and cast a wild-eyed stare over to the egg, face pale and washed-out in the blue, and- “Guys,” he said, with a note of rising panic in his voice, “It’s gonna – I think – get back!”

There was a second of frantic scrambling, a second of confusion, a second of following the frantic movements of his brother-

Then the world went white with light and noise.

Callum didn’t quite see it directly. But the searing white of the lightning, the detonation of sound – there could be no missing it. The smell of ozone was thick and stinking in the air, his ears were ringing and hurting, and he fell over into a tangle of limbs and scrambling bodies, half-insensate with shock-

When the world finally resolved enough for him to find sense in it again, it was too bright. Lightning had speared through the mountain, through their shelter of earth and stone, and hit the egg straight-on, and the shine of it-

In the seconds following that great shock of light and noise, the silence rang with a strange droning, like all the winds of the storm had collapsed their voices into a single awful note. Callum stared ahead, stunned wordless, at the incandescent spectacle of the dragon egg, shining in a thousand blinding blues, so bright that it hurt to look at it. He couldn’t think what to say. He could barely do anything more than scramble up onto his hands from where he’d fallen, and stare.

“He’s a lightning-rod.” Rayla said, shocked, into that painful silence. “A lightning-rod. We’re in the middle of a storm and he’s a lightning-rod-“

It was then, slowly, that Callum noticed Ezran. He’d fallen back too, was pushing himself up just the same, but…

Something was wrong. Something was worse, worse than before, worse than the quiet and trembling, worse than the fear-

“Ez?” He asked, tentative, and Rayla’s words cut off. She whirled around to follow his gaze, following it to Ezran, who was staring at the egg, whose distress was alive on his too-pale face. He was shaking terribly, skin pasty and washed queerly blue in the shining light, and his breath was coming in short, awful gasps.

He didn’t answer. Instead, slowly, he curled up, knees to his chest, hands clamping up over his ears as though they could block out whatever he was feeling. His gaze ebbed into something distant and senseless, as though all the thoughts were going blank behind his eyes.

“Ezran.” he said again, more sharply, throat going tight with anxiety as he scrambled over to his brother, fixing a hand on his shoulder. He shook him, but Ez just…moved with the motion, limp, like a ragdoll. He didn’t even look at him. “Ez, what’s wrong?”

Slowly, slowly, as if he had to force it, Ezran looked away from the egg. He looked away from the egg, and towards Callum, and – Callum flinched, because- “He wants to hatch,” Ezran whispered, face too pale, eyes too bright-

It was on some strange reflex, but he instantly moved, situating himself between the egg and his brother, taking him by both shoulders this time. Bizarrely, it seemed to help, and a little coherence returned to his brother’s too-bright eyes.

“He wants to hatch,” Ezran repeated, face crumpling, half-way between pain and desperation-

He started crying before the next words even passed his lips-

“But he can’t.”

---

End chapter.

Notes:

So actually I wrote the vast majority of this in the two weeks after posting ch17, after which my spoons vacated my body with a vengeance and didn’t start to return until late last week. I’ve been making quota with like, editing, and worldbuilding, for half the month. Low inspiration is so much easier to work through than low spoons, my god.

Also I made a last minute decision to move a second Cairon and Sarli scene from the end of this chapter to next chapter, for pacing and tension build reasons. It made the chapter 2k shorter, which I’m pleased about.

Worldbuilding:

Ictusian code

Rayla makes mention of something called ‘ictus’ this chapter. This is to be elaborated on in the next chapter or two. I wonder if any of you can guess what it is.

Skinning animals

It is indeed possible to skin animals by basically making a few cuts and pulling the skin off. It can be done before the animal is gutted, and is often preferred when you want an intact pelt out of the animal. In the absence of proper skinning knives and tools, it’s also probably the easiest method open to the kids. The rabbit skins could have been used later – but fleshing and tanning the skin on the pelts is decidedly beyond what the kids could manage on the move. The best they could do is to make sure the pelts stayed frozen solid until they had a chance to process them, which none of them reasonably expects would happen any time soon, so alas. Wasted fur.

Callum’s sketchbook

If future canon shows us any significant old sketches in the book that I feel warrant mention, I might edit the relevant part of this chapter to include them. Examples from the actual book ‘Callum’s Sketchbook’ not included, because while that thing is full of cute character fluff and some fun context, I can in no way imagine it being a genuine in-universe thing.

On that note: I still don’t have access to a copy of the s1 novelisation, but you can guarantee that I’ll include some new canon details and dismiss others. For instance, I’m absolutely going to rename the Great Bay the Weeping Bay at some point, but I have no intention of making my elves vegetarian.

Glow toads

I didn’t plan the whole barbed-tongue thing, it just sort of happened, so I figure I’m just gonna roll with it. Honestly making Bait’s biology a bit weirder is probably the only way I could actually develop interest in him, so why not.

Some notes on strength

Callum thinks of Rayla’s past demonstrations of strength as ‘inhuman’ in this chapter. I’d like to note that well-trained and well-prepared humans are fully capable of climbing a sheer cliff and sheer walls, but like. Without the right equipment, that shit is downright exceptional, and far from human norms. It’s not something Callum expects from members of his species.

Zym as a lightningrod

Azymondias is canonically a more potent lightningrod than an actual lightningrod, and I’ve applied that property to his egg too. This was foreshadowed earlier in the story when Callum casts lightning-magic and the egg seems to attract it. Chapter 5, maybe? Something like that.

Dragon hatching conditions

Dragons as I’ve worldbuilt them have somewhat differing hatching requirements depending on whether they’re a lesser dragon (aka wyvern) or an archdragon. Lesser dragons have a hatching condition, such as Sky dragons needing the eye of a storm to hatch. Archdragons have this hatching condition, but also a magical activation threshold that they need to reach before they can be born; basically, they need to absorb a lot of magic before they’re ready to hatch. They’re born already obscenely magically powerful, whereas their lesser relatives are born quite weak, and only become terrifying forces of primal might as they mature.

Azymondias has been exposed to a great deal of Sky magic already from his years in his parents’ care, and wasn’t all that far from his activation threshold. Being in the middle of this storm, and then getting hit by lightning a couple of times, was plenty enough to bring him to that edge. He is now technically ready to hatch…but he still needs his specific hatching condition met, i.e. a storm’s eye-structure. If he doesn’t have that, he’s shit out of luck.

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