Chapter Text
“Pleased to meet you! Aloth Corfiser, at your service.”
Vailond swayed on her feet. Beside her, the gray wolf Tyrhos whined quiet concern.
“And you are…?” said the fellow elf before her.
“Wondering why exactly you told that man to fuck his sister,” said Vailond, forcing focus through fatigue. She touched Tyrhos’s neck for support. She looked past the elf to the three retreating drunkards whom she had scared away from a fight with a few chosen words. Okay, a few chosen words and the sight of an intelligent, growling wolf. The street was muddy and the wind was chill and so far the village of Gilded Vale had shown her nothing but stinking flesh. “Honestly, I wasn’t going to get involved, I just wanted them to understand what they were getting into. Which, apparently, is a crazy person.”
Aloth had a high pale forehead that was a little crinkled just at that moment. “Ah, a misunderstanding. The Aedyran accent can be trying.”
“Pretty sure that wasn’t it,” she said in her Aedyran accent. Still, one man’s choice of taunts was not her problem, and she was tired. “Listen, do you know where the inn here is?”
“About ten feet to your right,” Aloth said calmly. “You’re a traveler, then. Bound for some place more welcoming than this, I hope?”
“Probably not,” she said. Having made herself a bandit in her homeland of Aedyr, she was here to make herself a bandit in the green lands promised by one Lord Raedric. Not a highwayman, nothing of the sort; poaching was her specialty, and the countryside she’d come through to get here promised a rich lifestyle. “I’ll be out of the way soon enough.”
“There’s safety in traveling in numbers,” he suggested hopefully.
She looked him over. His boots were smeared with mud, his gloves stiff with grime, but they were fitted, well-made, and embroidered. Here was a man that civilization favored. This was the kind of man whose lands she illegally lived off of. “And what can you do, then? Walk six leagues a day? Draw a bow? Build traps, set snares, avoid predators, gut prey, move silently?”
He looked worried. “Well, in point of fact…”
No mercy. “Yes?”
“No,” he said weakly. “Of course. I’ll be on my way at once.”
He turned to the inn. She turned to the inn. They bumped into one another walking.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. Vailond just moved forward, Tyrhos at her side. For a while she sat at a little table and watched the sullen soaking of the locals, all of whom were drinking even more than she – and she was doing her level best at drinking.
A man stumbled past, bumped into her table, and spent some effort stabilizing himself. She felt something purple and sparkling from him. Unable to put a name to it, she leaned in…
…and was suddenly somewhere else. The world was drenched in purple, somewhat like sandpaper in the mind. The man was traveling down a road, regretting something bitterly. He had dropped one box in the road, and she knew it had contained the trappings of an old obligation, one as dear as life. Whatever that was, it wasn’t coming with him, and never would.
The vision scraped away and she recoiled. As she struggled to right her chair and sit properly the man lurched off as though he hadn’t felt a thing.
She stayed up late. She drank. But she was very tired, and maybe some rest would stop the visions. She paid for the cheapest room, and Tyrhos settled beside her cot while she tried to sleep.
The bîaŵac whistled in Vailond’s ears as she dreamed. She saw pillars of adra, that weird green substance that grew from the ground like teeth. She saw ghosts like the purple waking visions of the past day, struggling, crying out to her, though she did not know their names. She had felt wrong since witnessing the ritual of the Engwithan machine in the height of the bîaŵac. Now that wrongness came to nestle in her heart, the touch of the dead, the echo of souls.
She was used to being alone. In her little room she fought her demons by herself until she awoke with Tyrhos’ muzzle on her stomach. The wolf looked at her with big dark-rimmed blue eyes and whined.
She scritched his ears and tried not to think. “I’m up,” she said softly, and went downstairs.