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Abelas sat before the fire, watching the shadows dance with his left eye and Vir with his right. She lay on the emerald green grass, tracing the remnants of ancient star charts with lithe fingers before rolling onto her back, to test the words of his ancestors against the face of reality. Up above, the night sky shone dimly with the light of a thousand unexplored, unreachable worlds.
They only knew the names of two, and they belong to the moons. Luna, the largest, the eldest, was – by Vir’s estimates – ten times larger than Satina, the second, smaller sister. When Abelas suggested that they might be mother and daughter, as expressed in the primordial poetry written by Mythal’s (first) worshipers, he shied away from her tear stricken smile. The waves of emotion she radiated were a tangible force, slamming straight against his skeleton, threatening to swallow his soul whole.
She slept with a dagger up her sleeve, this time the left, and he woke her as dawn broke across the horizon. Luna lingered in the distance, but Satina’s light was brighter and Vir rubbed her heart at the sight of the hole in the child’s chest. A book she bartered for, from a passing caravaner, claimed that the face Satina bared was a great volcanic mare. It would be near two seasons – five months, to be exact – before Vir would look upon such a nostalgic sight again.
He kicked ash onto the dying embers of the fire, and readjusted his weapons, thinking how best to phrase his question. Ultimately, Abelas remained silent in his sorrow as they pushed onward, walking through a foreign forest, eyes searching for a signpost or a path less travelled. Vir followed him down a discarded game trail, fingers dancing through the hair and over the skin of the ageless, stone sentinels.
---
According to Luna, they had been travelling for a fortnight, and only now have they found the river’s shore. Leaning against a nearby tree, face cast in the sun’s shadow, Abelas closed his eyes and listened, breathing in Vir’s laughter. It drew a smile across his skull, and she returned – barely decent, content to let her hair and body dry naturally – with her own.
Ringlets of water scrolled down her skin as she extended her arms for his pack, and he obliged her, fingers skittering over flesh to tuck a strand of gold thread behind her long, pointed ears. They twitched instinctively, and a blush crept across her cheeks. He was unaware it had nothing to do with the summer sun’s heat.
“Be careful,” she whispered, her voice a breath of fresh air, and he paused, freezing in place, desperate to hear. “The fish will nibble your toes.”
He said nothing. Back straight and head held high, Abelas took to the stream, fighting off a second smile. The instant he submerged his toes, the fish – little scrawling things – nipped and pricked and scratched at the flesh coating his feet. It tickled terribly, and he bit back his laughter, huffing heavy breaths, needling his tongue with pointed teeth to listen to Vir sing. He did not recognise the song.
---
Vir salvaged a journal from some wayward explorer's corpse and, in their endless travels, she filled the pages with clippings of wild fauna, citing its uses in several separate languages. Abelas could not read, not the Common Tongue, not his own Tongue, and her offer to learn left him speechless. She did not raise the topic again, not until – in their haste to find a suitable camp by nightfall – they invaded a wolf’s lair.
He stooped before a fallen sign, eyeing the Dalish symbols critically, but it was the necklace, fashioned from wolf's teeth, that made his heart clenched. Abelas heard the howl before he rose; Vir had continued onward, trailing footsteps in the dirt. Before they disappeared, engulfed by the world’s lengthening shadows, Abelas ran, heaving air into his lungs even when his ribs threatened to crack.
He found her surrounded, a cliff ridge too sheer to scale at her back, and eleven wolves closing in for the kill. One, already dead, lay forgotten, but the blood leading from its body to Vir did not belong to the beast. Her leg was red, the leather half shredded, and it refused to carry any weight, though the barrier she conjured, a glimmering pearl blue, warded off the pups’ impatient attacks.
His gut, twisting and squirming out of shape, urged him to fight, but Abelas waited, studying his prey, picking his predator. White and grey, black and brown. At last, he rose from the bush and, raising his bow high, he shot a single arrow into the sky. Felassan. She lunged forward, dodging a particularly large wolf’s charge, forced to roll straight into the fray.
It was as he anticipated. Lurking at the back was a black wolf, small and slender and nondescript. When it pounced, yellow fangs bared for the feast, Abelas’ arrow impaled its skull, the head embedded in the beast’s jaw. It fell but an inch from her face, pale and plastered with sweat. He ran to her without a second thought, the wolves scattering. A third collapsed from injuries self-inflicted, its coat charcoal grey, its eyes like frozen embers scattered with ash. They burned a hole in Vir’s heart.
---
They scolded themselves, but not each other, both equally impatient and stubborn as they were. The lay of the land and the beasts of the wilds, while familiar, had to be read differently, and Vir was accustomed to the old, ancient ways. It was this knowledge Abelas secretly craved, and they easily struck a deal: knowledge for knowledge, a lesson per lesson. Vir could not yet stand, so Abelas indulged her curiosity first on the wings of the following dawn.
When she revealed her books, the wolves gathered round to hear her stories. Risa, the youngest male, fur like freshly fallen snow, always lingered just out of reach, his howls but mere whispers in their ears, sharing unintelligible secrets. Sahlin, with the burning eyes and blackened armour, lay by Vir’s side as she slept, eyeing Abelas knowingly. He would not have sacrificed mana to save a feral beast but, with her soft songs and strange stories, Vir tamed his spirit and, especially at night, Abelas was grateful for his company.
A rival pack, sensing their weakness, invaded their sheltered grove on the cusp of twilight. These dogs fell fast and furiously, by bow, blade and blasts of magic, no thought or strategy required. Vir mourned their loss gravely and when Abelas asked why, between the crackling flames of their roaring campfire, she declared that there was no magic in them. Inside him, something curled in upon itself, withering, and died in the heat.
---
Sahlin found the shack just as the sun began to set. He lay on the porch, muzzle resting on his paws and ears folded back in a fitting expression of sorrow. The hearth was stone cold but smoke still lingered in the air. An overturned table, chairs broken beyond repair, moth-eaten curtains hanging limply in the shallow sunlight.
There was nothing and no one, no evidence of life in the dust. Still, it offered shelter from the elements, and the wood – well preserved for its age – served better than the frozen earth. It was built by many hands, added to over the years to withstand all forces and forms of weather, but the scarce furnishing, the large, single bed – the mouldering straw mattress still dipped unevenly in four separate locations – told Abelas nothing and everything.
Chased by shadows, they made camp in their new den, fashioning a fort from the salvageable sheets. In his rummaging, Risa returned with a wicker doll and, in the morning, Vir sat her before the remains of a broken iron blade she planted in the hearth. There was an inscription on the handle, beseeching the wielder to ‘Rise and Rise Again’, written, repeatedly, in a vast combination of scripts.
Sleep alluded Abelas, as it did most every night, so he sat contemplating the inscription, why it resonated so deeply within him, exercising tense muscles as he counted Vir’s steady breaths. As dawn broke and Vir placated their travelling companions, Abelas stole towards the dying fire and recovered the guarded hilt, leaving behind the broken blade and burning wicker doll.
---
With only the briefest of glimpses through the trees, even now, a season gone, Abelas recognised the caravaner or, rather, he recognised what was left him. Bruised and burnt flesh, broken bones, his wound befitted a warrior of renown strength, but the angle of the attacks, both magical and mundane, suggested several battles over a suspended period of time.
The cane he walked with, the pack on his back, his horse and the cart it pulled, all of it – everything the man ever owned but the crusted clothes on his bones – was missing. They had to take great care where they walked, for the grass and ground were waterlogged with blood. Sahlin offered them a hand, sliced clean from the shoulder, clothed in the sleeve of a tattered robe, a golden ring roped around one finger of five clutched in a fist, bearing the symbol for the Circle of Magi.
As Vir cut the ring free, Risa dropped a second hand by Abelas’ feet; this one, fastened in broken Silverite chains with miniscule red crystals, was erratically severed at the wrist, the blows delivered by the opposite hand, one clearly not well-versed in wielding a blade.
“Drop it, Abelas,” Vir commanded, hand on the hilt of her dagger.
Reluctantly, he complied and, immediately, felt weak with relief. He staggered aside, Vir catching him mid stride and lowering him to the ground as she set the offending limb ablaze. The Old Songs, songs Vir hummed when she bathed or just before she fell asleep, without reason, meaning or language, waded into his mind through the palm of that accursed hand.
“It’s the Prismere, the red crystals.”
Abelas could not look at her, absorbed as she was with inspecting Risa’s jaws. His hands shook, his stomached ached, and his head threatened to split in two, all from an insatiable hunger.
“You rose above the corruption, Abelas. That is more than most have ever done.”
At looked at her then, begging to ask how, why, when and where.
“There is no peace without war, and wars are not won without loss of life.”
He does not know who she is trying to persuade, but he is quick to accept her hand, feeding off the strength she offers willingly, freely, as they disappear into the trees, ignoring the hissing and spitting behind them.
---
They followed the caravaner’s attackers, difficultly at first. A minimum of four souls, walking in formation, feet heavy, heading west towards the valleys. Shards of crystals were beginning to take root in the dead soil. Vir burned every sprout, waiting to watch them wither, before carrying on.
Their trail intersected with others, some uniformly regimented, others the careless meanderings of wild drunkards cleaving through trees with swords. They reached a wide, shallow river as the setting sun beckoned Luna out from behind the storming clouds. The smell of fresh meat roasting over a dozen campfires had Sahlin and Risa scurrying up the hill to watch and admire, their eyes all aglow with a different hunger.
Abelas pointed out the dead fish in the river, the broken remnants of the bridge spanning the rocky waters, and Vir counted ten tents, each capable of housing two souls. They were fitted and fixed with degrading precision; one looked almost new, another hastily scaled to the bear specifications, and a third was threateningly close to collapse.
Time served its purpose, seeing every man – they were all men, human – remove their helms before they retired, summoning those still abed to take watch. A dozen soldiers, three archers, four warriors bearing towering shields, and the lone leader wielding an enchanted war-hammer. There was a symbol behind the encrusting red crystals, a downward-pointing sword set aflame.
Abelas unsheathed his bow and knocked an arrow, gliding his eyes aside to see Vir smile. Then he blinked, and she was gone. Someone screamed and he let his arrow fly, the howls of hungry wolves echoing in his ears and parading across the night sky.