“Sulia Fal'ren”

az found himself watching Navian before he realized he had stopped walking.

His brother lay where they had left him beneath the open sky, wrapped in cloaks against a chill that had already begun to lift from the grass. Nothing about him had changed. His face remained pale beneath the dark beard, his breathing shallow but steady, each rise of his chest so slight that Gaz caught himself waiting for the next before allowing his own breath to leave him.

Oesora knelt beside him with both hands resting over the center of his armor. A faint white radiance lingered beneath her palms, so thin against the daylight that Gaz might not have noticed it at all had he not spent the better part of their journey watching that same Light blaze through darkness.

“How is our stubborn paladin?” Gaz asked.

Oesora did not look up. Beneath her hands, the glow trembled. Once, twice, then weakened until it was scarcely more than a pale thread slipping between her fingers. Oesora drew a slow breath and the Light strengthened for a heartbeat, only to fade again almost at once.

“So yours is weak too.”

There were shadows beneath her eyes that had not been there the day before, and the weariness in her face seemed deeper than anything a night without sleep ought to have left behind.

Oesora lowered her hands from Navian’s chest. “I don’t know how to get back what the forest took.” The last traces of white disappeared from her fingertips as she slowly curled them into her palms.

The crystal at the head of his staff gave a faint violet pulse beside him, then another weaker one. He had noticed its dimness before, but exhaustion had offered an easy explanation, and there had always been some other danger demanding his attention. Now, in the quiet of morning, there was nowhere for the truth to hide.

A small stone rested in the grass near his boot. Gaz opened his hand toward it. The stone shivered. He frowned and tightened his fingers. Slowly, reluctantly, it lifted from the earth until a finger’s breadth of daylight showed beneath it. The effort should have been beneath notice, yet a cold bead of sweat traced his temple as the little rock trembled in the air.

Then it fell. Oesora picked it up and turned it, looking up at him.

The wizard kept his hand extended for another moment, his fingers still spread as though they belonged to someone else. The staff crystal flickered beside his knee, violet fading almost completely from its depths.

“That,” he said quietly, “is inconvenient.”

Gaz let his hand fall and turned back to Navian. Whatever unease his own weakness had stirred seemed suddenly small beside the sight of his brother lying between them. He reached down and took Navian’s hand, enclosing the cold fingers in his own, and tightened his grip.

“Come back, brother,” he murmured. “We need you.”

“WIZARD!”

Gaz’s head came up. Far across the meadow, Jaeshu stood near the rise with one arm raised above him. Lunara emerged through the grass beside the ranger and cupped her hands around her mouth.

“Gaz!”

He squinted against the morning light. Jaeshu waved again. He released Navian’s hand reluctantly and rose, using the staff more for balance than he would have admitted. Before leaving, he paused beside Oesora. She had already returned one hand to Navian’s chest, though no Light yet answered beneath it.

Gaz hesitated, then rested his hand briefly upon her shoulder. Oesora met his eyes. Neither of them spoke. He gave her shoulder a small squeeze, turned toward the distant figures, and began walking across the grass.

Near the edge of the meadow, the grass thinned into a strip of hard earth running south beneath the hills. Jaeshu stood with one boot planted in the road and his bow hanging loose at his side, while Lunara waited a few paces beyond him, studying the country ahead.

“What is it?” Gaz asked.

Jaeshu tipped his chin toward the road. “What do you see?”

The road wandered south for perhaps half a mile before bending around the shoulder of a low hill, pale against the darker grass. “Aha, wonderful. A road.”

“No, Gaz.” Lunara turned toward him, amusement already touching the corner of her mouth. “Not that.”

Something stood crooked beside the road farther south, little more than a dark stroke against the morning. “Is that a signpost? Perhaps it has directions. A fortuitous find.”

Jaeshu cleared his throat and kicked Gaz’s boot with his own. At Gaz’s feet, several deep impressions crossed the damp earth, broad crescents pressed one after another into the road. Some had softened at the edges beneath wind and dew, but others remained sharply cut, loose grains of soil still gathered where horse hooves had broken the ground.

“...Ah.”

Lunara laughed softly. "Good morning."

Jaeshu crouched and ran two fingers along the edge of the nearest print. “Three horses, maybe four. They kept south. These tracks are newer than the others.”

“How new?” Gaz asked.

“Recent enough to follow.”

Jaeshu rose. Beyond the hill, the road vanished from sight, though another faint track branched eastward farther in the distance. After a moment, he pointed south.

“If there are horses moving through here, there are people somewhere ahead. Farm, village, travelers, something. If I find whoever owns them, maybe I can convince them to part with one.”

“You’ll need coin,” Gaz said.

The ranger held out his palm. “That is why you were summoned.”

Gaz paused, regarded Jaeshu, then drew a pouch from his robes. “Your poor bet just bought my brother a ride.” He tossed it over.

Jaeshu caught it and nodded. “He cannot stay here forever, and we’re not carrying him across half the realm in armor.”

Behind them, Navian was little more than a pale armored shape among the cloaks, Oesora still kneeling beside him. "A wagon, if you could."

“If there’s one, I’ll find it.” Jaeshu pointed toward the eastern branch of the road. “I can scout that fork on the way back as well. See where it leads.”

Lunara turned toward him, slipping several bright white arrows she had carved that morning into her quiver. “And you’re not going alone.”

Jaeshu adjusted the strap across his shoulder and started checking the contents of his pack. “I travel lighter alone. If the tracks stay clean, I can cover twice the ground.”

“We don't travel alone anymore, Jaeshu.” She tightened the strap holding Aloy across her back. “Besides, we worked well together at the Silver Stag.”

Jaeshu opened his mouth, considered whatever objection had been waiting there, and let it die. “Fine. We follow the tracks south until we find something useful.” He looked to Gaz. “We’ll be back before sundown.”

Gaz nodded, though his attention had fallen again to the fingers resting loosely around his staff. There was another problem.

“There is... something else.”

Lunara’s smile vanished. It happened so quickly Gaz regretted the words almost before he had finished speaking. Her eyes moved past him toward the camp, toward the brother she had left lying beneath the morning sky and the priestess still kneeling at his side.

“What?”

The crystal above Gaz’s hand gave another feeble violet pulse. He hesitated.

“We’re running low on…” He searched the meadow for salvation. “Kindling.”

Lunara stared at him. “Wood.”

“Yes.”

Lunara’s brow furrowed, then slowly relaxed. “Gaz, there are trees all over the hills.”

Gaz turned toward the hills as though she had just revealed their existence. “So there are.”

“Have Beeps knock some down.” She laughed, shaking her head.

Jaeshu called her name and started south along the road, and whatever question she might have asked was lost. She stepped after him, then turned back. “Before sundown!”

Gaz lifted one hand. “Go.”

Lunara gave him a final look before following Jaeshu down the road. Gaz remained where he was, watching them grow smaller beneath the morning sun until the hill finally took them from sight.

Only then did he look down at the dying crystal in his staff.

Karneth had taken apart part of the bramblehorn’s harness and was working oil into the cracked hide with slow, patient strokes. Oesora remained where Gaz had left her beside Navian, though by midday, the Light beneath her hand had faded almost entirely.

“They found tracks,” Gaz said, boots pushing through the grass. “Three horses, perhaps four. Jaeshu thinks he can follow them south and find whoever passed through here. Lunara went with him.”

Karneth glanced toward the road. “How long?”

“Before sundown, they said.”

The dwarf grunted and returned to the leather. Gaz lowered himself into the grass nearby but made no move to leave.He turned the staff slightly between his fingers. The crystal gave a weak violet pulse, scarcely brighter than the afternoon around it.

“You are spent,” Oesora said.

“I can recover,” Gaz said at last, closing his fist and opening it again. “It will take time.”

“Aye, see, this is why I prefer an axe," the dwarf said, flipping the weapon into his hand. "Never need to recharge an axe.”

Gaz smiled. "But you do need to sharpen them from time to time, do you not?"

At that, Karneth lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “So how long? Four more moments?”

"A bit more the time, I'm afraid." Gaz smiled. “A few hours, if I’m fortunate.”

“A few hours of no one botherin' me about mud or crumbs or complainin' about bramblehorn gas? Take your time, wizard.”

"It is not always the bramblehorn, Karneth," muttered Oesora not looking away from Navian.

The dwarf chuckled.

Gaz continued. “I may not be aware of you, either, by the way.”

That brought Karneth fully upright. “You’ll be unconscious?” He knocked his knuckles against the crown of Beeps’s horns. Beeps continued grazing, unimpressed.

“Not quite. But close enough that the distinction will not help you.”

“So... I'm watchin' the lot of you.”

Gaz’s mouth moved faintly. “That was the hope.”

"Ha!" Karneth rose at once, all trace of boredom leaving him. He fastened the strap back onto Beeps’s harness, checked the axe at his belt, then the second at his back, as though the assignment had transformed the quiet meadow into a fortress requiring immediate inspection.

“No one comes near,” he said.

“Preferably.”

“Nothing touches the paladin.”

“Also preferable.” Gaz took a long breath and lowered himself into the grass a short distance from Navian, laying the oaken staff across his knees. He adjusted it once, then placed both hands loosely over the dark wood.

Karneth lingered nearby. “And I... wake you if there’s trouble?”

“If there is enough trouble,” Gaz closed his eyes. “I suspect I shall know.”

"Aye. The bramblehorn and I are more than enough for anything out here."

Gaz offered nothing more. His breathing slowed. The tension gradually left his shoulders, then his hands. Even the staff seemed to settle with him, its dim crystal giving one final, uncertain flicker before falling still.

Oesora watched from beside Navian. She had expected a spell.

None came. The wizard simply sat. The crystal across his knees remained dark, but then a faint indigo glow stirred somewhere deep within it. From the deepest recesses of the wizard’s being stirred a current like distant lightning, faint at first—and faint it would remain, as it tried to find its way home again.

Arcane did not return merely because danger had passed. What had been spent had to be gathered again with patience, with stillness, and with time. Gaz had been taught long ago that there were moments when reaching for magic only drove it farther away, and so he reached for nothing now. He let the world recede instead.

The indigo light strengthened with each slow breath. It crept from the crystal in a narrow thread and rose beside him, curving gradually overhead like the first stroke of some unfinished circle. There was no heat to it, no crackle of power, none of the violence Oesora had come to associate with Gaz’s magic. Even the grass beneath it barely stirred.

Without noticing, Karneth had stopped working. He sat with the half-mended harness forgotten across his knees as the thin arc continued its patient climb. Beeps grazed beside him with considerably less interest.

The violet aura surrounding the wizard carried a calming hum, though not to every ear. Karneth heard nothing. Oesora did. The emptiness in her own hands suddenly seemed different. She had spent the night reaching for what was no longer there, trying to force warmth into Navian by will alone, and only now did it occur to her that Gaz was doing precisely the opposite.

He had stopped asking.

Navian’s breathing had not changed. Nothing in his face suggested that he knew she was there, yet Oesora’s hand lingered upon his armor for another moment before she finally drew it away.

She moved quietly as her dress drifted across the grass and lowered herself beside Gaz. The young priestess had been raised to watch closely, to find meaning in the smallest change of breath or posture, for the disciplines of her order had taught her that what went unseen was often what proved most dangerous. Yet there was something gathering here for which all that training had given her no name. Gaz seemed less to be drawing power toward himself than descending in search of it, passing inward through doors no eye could follow, toward some hidden country known only to wizardry and those who had spent their lives learning how to find it.

She folded her hands loosely in her lap beneath the indigo light, trying to understand a thing he had never thought to explain. For most of her life, the Light had been an answer. She called and it came. Sometimes gently, sometimes with such force that it seemed to pass through her rather than from her, but always there had been an act of reaching between them. Even prayer was a kind of reaching.

So this time... she did nothing.

Oesora breathed, and for a moment the faint warmth within her palms seemed to answer. Then it thinned instead. Her fingers tightened. The instinct to reach for it came at once, old as prayer and twice as difficult to resist. She felt the Light retreat another fraction and nearly followed after it, nearly called it back by force before the last of it slipped beyond her grasp.

Beside her, Gaz opened one eye.

He watched her for a moment from within the stillness he had made around himself, then slowly loosened the hand resting over his staff. Her own fingers relaxed. The breath she had been holding left her, and with it went the urge to seize what remained. She let the Light sit where it was, however faint, however uncertain, and did nothing more.

The faintest smile touched the wizard's face as his eye closed again. Warmth in Oesora's palms steadied. Then, slowly, a pale gold shimmer appeared between her fingers.

Her Light did not flare. It gathered so slowly that Oesora might have mistaken it for sunlight had her eyes been open. A narrow strand rose beside her shoulder, answering Gaz’s indigo arc without touching it, and began to curve above them from the opposite side.

The two lights climbed until only a handspan of empty air remained between them. For a moment they held there, violet and gold trembling against the open sky, and then the space between them closed.

A soft hum passed through the meadow. The light spread outward from the joining point, thin as glass and almost as clear, until a faint sphere enclosed the two casters. Indigo moved along one side, pale gold along the other, neither swallowing the other where they met. Within it, Gaz and Oesora sat motionless.

Karneth rose and edged closer, his mouth half agape behind his beard. He reached toward the sphere, thought better of it, and slowly withdrew his hand.

“Well, damn.” he said, his fists on his hips. Beeps snorted into the grass. Karneth looked at him.

“Aye. Ya gotta admit, that's impressive.”

The dwarf picked up the axes this time, though his work proceeded considerably more slowly. Before long, the scrape of whetstone against steel joined its low hum, and the afternoon began its slow passage toward evening.

🛡️ ⚔️ 🛡️ ⚔️ 🛡️

By nightfall, Karneth’s great watch had suffered an undignified end.

The dwarf had fallen asleep against Beeps’s broad side with one arm hooked around the bramblehorn’s neck, his head tipped back and his mouth hanging slightly open. Beeps had done no better. The beast lay sprawled in the grass with his heavy muzzle resting across Karneth’s stomach, rising and falling with each breath while the dwarf’s forgotten whetstone sat half-hidden beneath one enormous foreleg. Whatever solemn covenant of vigilance the pair had entered into that afternoon had apparently included provisions for snoring.

The fire had nearly died without either noticing. A few red coals lingered beneath the ash, but their warmth was no longer the brightest thing in the meadow. Gaz and Oesora remained seated where the afternoon had left them, motionless within the transparent sphere that had strengthened by degrees as the hours passed. Indigo moved along one half of its curve and white gold along the other, their joined radiance washing softly over the nearby grass while a low, ceaseless hum breathed beneath the quiet.

Beyond that small island of light, the fields lay strangely peaceful. The silence no longer seemed empty so much as merciful, as though the world had drawn a careful boundary around the exhausted travelers and chosen, for a little while, to leave them alone.

Above, the moon kept what watch Karneth no longer could. Its pale light rested upon Navian where he slept beneath his cloaks, silvering the edges of his armor and the black hair fallen loose across his brow. His breathing remained slow and shallow, untouched by the fading fire, the humming sphere, or the dwarf who had sworn with great conviction that nothing would come near him.

A shadow began to gather beside the paladin.

It belonged to no cloud passing overhead, nor to anything standing within the meadow. It simply deepened among the folds of night until darkness took on shape, and from that shape an elf stepped through without sound.

Not Karneth’s breathing, nor Beeps’s far keener ears, betrayed any knowledge of her arrival. She crossed within arm’s reach of the sleeping bramblehorn and received no more acknowledgment than the grass beneath her boots. Even the hem of her black cloak seemed unwilling to disturb the dew.

Av'elyth came to a stop beside Navian.

For a time she remained standing over him, saying nothing. What had once burned cleanly had become tangled with too many other things she preferred not to examine.

She lowered herself beside him and pulled one glove free with her teeth. “You really are determined to make this everyone else’s problem, aren’t you?”

Navian slept on.

Av'elyth laid two fingers against the side of his throat. His pulse answered slowly beneath them, steady enough to ease something in her shoulders before she could stop it. Her expression hardened again almost at once.

Her hand slipped beneath her cloak and returned with a small stoppered vial. The liquid inside was dark and thick, clouded with whatever sweet remedies she had managed to find. She turned it once between her fingers, as though Navian had personally inconvenienced her by requiring it.

“This was not easy to find.”

She drew the stopper free and slid one hand carefully behind his head. For all the familiarity of knives in those hands, there was nothing careless in the way she lifted him. She touched the mouth of the vial to his lips and let only a little pass between them, waiting until his throat worked before giving him more.

“Easy, lion,” she whispered.

The last of the draught disappeared. Av'elyth lowered him again and kept her hand behind his head until it settled against the folded cloak beneath him. His breathing deepened slightly, no more than that, but she noticed. Of course she noticed. Her fingers lingered at the edge of his beard before drawing away.

There was one thing more. The rogue reached beneath her leathers and brought out the amulet. The metal caught the moonlight as she turned it over in her palm, revealing the emblem worked into its face—the same mark of the Lion she had seen borne upon Navian’s armor and shield. She had found no answer for why the paladin and the amulet should share it, only the stubborn certainty that leaving one without the other would be a mistake.

“Whatever you are,” she whispered to the thing, “keep him safe.”

She eased open the edge of Navian’s cloak and slipped the amulet into one of the inner pockets beneath it. Her fingers pressed the fabric once afterward, making certain it sat securely against him before she withdrew her hand.

Across the meadow, Gaz and Oesora remained lost within their dome of violet and holy white and gold. Karneth gave a low snore and shifted beneath Beeps’s head; the bramblehorn responded with an irritated breath but did not wake. The little sphere continued its patient hum, and for a moment Av'elyth seemed the only living thing beneath the moon.

There were a dozen things she might have said to him if he had been awake. Perhaps that was why she could say none of them now. Anger was easier when someone stood before you to receive it. Accusation needed an answer. Even stubbornness required something returned.

This silence gave her nothing to fight.

Av'elyth raised a hand and brushed the dark hair back from his forehead. The touch lasted longer than she intended. She seemed to realize it only after the fact, and something almost embarrassed passed across her face before she leaned closer.

Her lips touched his forehead.

Av'elyth remained close for a heartbeat longer, listening to him breathe. Then she stood.

“Stupid fool,” she whispered.

Shadow climbed the edges of her cloak. It folded around her without wind or sound, swallowing leather and hair and the pale shape of her face until the darkness beside Navian became whole again.

Then, beneath the moonlight, she was gone.