Chapter Text
Scalding Spear is aptly named. Open to the sun, with enough structures to interrupt the natural windflow of the surrounding desert, it feels almost as though it captures the heat of the surrounds and concentrates it into a bubble. And sure, the furs and leathers she can never quite bring herself to replace are probably aggravating the issue, but the question remains of why the Tenakth would set up a city here, of all places. It’s a little beyond her comprehension.
The Carja, sure. They had enough love for the sun, and little enough sense otherwise, to perhaps try such a thing. But it’s an odd choice by the western clans.
She shakes her head. No matter. If they want to roast, then more power to them. Certainly explains why so many of them walk around wearing nothing but paint. And she doesn’t have to stay here, she isn’t able to linger anywhere long but in particular now, she has no real business here other than trade.
Something that wouldn’t be necessary at all, if she’d been paying attention. She could have passed by altogether if she hadn’t let herself get caught off-guards by a leap-lasher, and she’d managed to evade its attacks but her spear – the one Avad had given her, whose decorations and flourishes he pitched as appreciation for her saving his city but which she suspected may also have been a symbol of his truthfully unreciprocated affections – lay in pieces in her satchel. She needed to find a smith, someone who could either fix or replace it, and this was simply the nearest settlement likely to have one.
Not that she was finding one all too easily. Scalding Spear was hard to find her way around, a twisting nest of sandy paths that all looked the same to her eye, and multiple levels that made it difficult to understand what was where. It had taken her ages to first learn the streets of Meridian, and even now the only things she can consistently get to easily are the Hunter’s Lodge and the Royal Palace. Put her in the wilds and she could find her target with her eyes closed, but cities just don’t come to her so easily. They’re too much, too much noise and too much activity and definitely too many people.
“What are you searching for, outlander?”
She turned to face the speaker. An older Tenakth, face painted red and white, seated not far from her. No companions, nothing in front of him, just enjoying the beating desert sun apparently as he appears to be the very picture of serenity. Something in her face must speak to her confusion because the man continues unprompted.
“This is the fourth time you’ve wandered past my table. I do not think you came all this way just to take in our fair city, no?”
She thinks for a moment. Talking to strangers is hard; it doesn’t come naturally to her. Far less so than it does apparently for this man, who needed no prompting to bother her. What does it say about her that she can communicate more easily with the old world than with most of her contemporaries? The ability to read and write the language of the new world is preciously rare, and not something she ever bothered to learn because her childhood was filled with skills she might actually need to survive, but she can read a fair few of the old world texts she comes across. She’s even better at understanding their recordings. Sometimes it's like she’s a shadow of the past, rather than a figure in the present. Fitting, she supposes, for someone made only to fix their mistakes, not meant for the world that she actually inhabited.
“A smith,” she finally decides on, and opens her satchel. “Someone who can fix this.”
He nods sagely. “Come. I will show you.”
He gets up, wipes sand off his pants in an effort Aloy cannot help but think is immensely futile, and leads her off in a new direction. Up a level, across a bridge, and then around, a dizzying spell that she’d never manage except that she set her focus to record this part of the city so that she might not lose track of this. If she needs to come back, better not to rely on the unreliable generosity of strangers.
“Not many Carja who come here, outlander. Who are you, who has come into our lands?”
Aloy blinks.
“I’m not Carja?”
The man seems to raise his eyebrow at that. “You are from the east, are you not? You are not Tenakth, and you are clearly not Utaru. You come from where the Carja come from, and are not one of their Oseram. You do not look like the other Carja, but perhaps you are.”
“No, I’m...”
And then she trails off. Because what is she, really? Nora? Does she have right to lay claim to that? Yes, says the Proving, and all the people – scarce as they count – who truly put their trust in that tradition. Who flipped, overnight, from abhorring her to accepting her. She passed the test. She gets to be Nora. Varl accepts her as Nora. Vala did also. Rost did, despite her wishing he hadn’t, because even if he hadn’t died he would have cut himself off from her once she became one.
And yet – no, says a lifetime of rejection. A thousand people who gave her the dirty eye, or didn’t acknowledge her at all, or threw rocks at her and spit on her name, even after she won the Proving, even after she fought off foreigners who tried to kill an entire generation of Nora warriors and would have succeeded if not for her, even after she was named Seeker and sent out with some of the tribe’s highest blessings. Even after she came back and was given status no Nora prior to her had ever held, it only ever served to put walls between them and her. Whether they despised her or they worshipped her, they never accepted her.
The man, infuriatingly, does not seem to gleam her dilemma. He nods, as though sagely, and hums. “You see the truth of it now, Carja outlander. We are here.” He smiles at her.
Aloy cannot help but scowl at him. Helpful, sure, but still a presumptive ass. She slips by him without another word to him. The man seems to take it in stride, gives no reaction to her sudden cold shoulder, and slips off without another word.
Maybe the heat bothers the Tenakth too. Perhaps that’s the only cold thing he’s gotten all day. It’s no matter, in the end. She tries to put it out of mind as she begins the process of haggling for her spear.
She finds Varl west of the old world ruin they’ve claimed for their base. He’s well hidden, but he’s never been a match for her at tracking or sneaking about, and not just because she can fall back on the focus in a pinch. Excellence was demanded of her before she ever found the device, and while Rost allowed her to keep her old world tool he was also very firm that she must never allow it to become a crutch. Not when she didn’t know if it might break one day and leave her helpless, unless she was fully capable without it as well (and if it feels a little like he was wrong, given the bag she keeps with dozens of spares, she might also acknowledge he was at least a little right, considering this is now her sixth). Varl’s by no means bad at staying hidden from the typical machine or soldier, but she is not the typical huntress. She can still identify his passing in the underbrush, not least from the blue facepaint he somehow got onto a fern. Even if there’s not much, that’s just sloppy. Rost would have had her head if she’d been so clumsy.
She calls out with a traditional Nora greeting for hunters who don’t want to alert their quarry. A birdcall – though perhaps more suspicious in these distant lands than the Sacred ones, where so many of the birds are different and none of them sound quite right. Something for the two of them to look at revising for their stay in the west, perhaps. Still, he answers in kind, giving her a direction to find him in.
It’s another few minutes before she arrives in front of the tree he’s currently in. Nestled in the branches, staring out at a herd of longlegs, fingering his bow but not making any immediate move to engage. A few more moments and she’s slipped up a knot on the trunk into the branches alongside him, surveying them as well.
“You’re back.”
She glances at him. “Did you think I’d leave?”
His smile quirks. “You have made a habit of unceremoniously ditching everyone, now.”
“Once. It was one time.”
“By the All-Mother, it was not. You know only six people saw you actually leave Mother’s Watch after killing that machine in the beginning, all those months ago? And only three of them even realized you had been made a seeker and we might never see you again. You saw me at the gates of the Sacred Lands in a whirlwind, helped finish off a band of corrupted machines, and then almost before I could so much as thank you, you were gone from the entire Embrace. You ditched Meridian after winning a pitched battle against hundreds of machines and thousands of people, and I’m not sure you even said goodbye to any of your friends, much less share in the party afterwards, and it was two months of work to catch up to you for my having not gone immediately after you. I get it. You don’t stand on ceremony, and you like to keep to yourself. But it’s nice to see you actually stop by and not play at being a ghost.”
Aloy makes a humming noise, somewhere in the back of her throat. It’s nice. She wonders if this is what her life could have been like, this easy back and forth, had she been allowed to grow up in the tribe. It’s still nice to have found it now, twenty years onwards, but she could have had so much more.
Or maybe it would have just led to her not realizing how painful being an outcast was. Perhaps it was all for the best, since otherwise she wouldn’t push back so hard on the Nora. If she had grown up in the tribe and some other girl had taken her place, would she be just as guilty as them?
“Well, you can rest easy for now. All the components of Gaia are around here, right? So there’s no reason for me to go elsewhere just yet.”
“Well thank the All-Mother for that, then. What’d you stop by the base for?”
“Dropping off supplies. Yarra – uh, leader of the desert clan – gave me a lot of shards and equipment after I helped her. Didn’t really intend to, just...ended up in the heart of the Desert-Clan by accident and one thing led to another. Issues with their water supply, and then she had a challenger try to take over the clan and I helped her fight it off. So at least now we have an ally there? But I can’t really take all this junk with me so easily. How does she propose I haul around a thousand shards? What would I even do with a second bow? Figure I might as well drop it all off here instead of throwing it away. Maybe it’ll be useful later.”
Varl is quiet for a moment, then follows up with another question. “Then what are you doing up here with me? If it’s hard to hunt with all that stuff...”
Aloy elbows him in the side, gently enough to not cause him pain – that wouldn’t be great, just before a prospective fight with a herd of machines – but enough to let him know her thoughts. “Trying to get rid of me already? You just said you were happy to have me bug you.”
“You’re just always so mission-focused. It’s not like you to seek me out when you don’t need something.”
Has she become so easily read? Or perhaps Varl just knows her really well after all this time. He is, if she really stretches it out, the oldest of her current companions. Even if they never talked before the Proving, that’s equal to Erend, and longer than Talanah or Petra, much less Zo. And while she met Erend at the Proving, she spent much more time talking to Varl and Vala back then, overwhelmed by the prospect of Nora who accepted her exactly as she was. Not all of them, but any of them, and it was almost more than she knew how to handle. So she didn’t really properly meet Erend until Meridian.
“There was a man in Scalding Spear who helped me. He...” She trails off, not really sure how to explain her thoughts.
“Ah, has the mighty Aloy finally felt her heart stir?”
She elbows him again and doesn’t hold back so much. Varl squawks loud enough that one of the longlegs they’re spying on stirs, but frankly he deserves it. Jerk.
“He thought I was Carja? He seemed to bundle everyone into just Tenakth, Utaru, and Carja. And Oseram, but I’m not entirely sure he understood the Oseram weren’t just a type of Carja.”
“Sounds like an idiot, then.”
He isn’t getting it.
“I didn’t like it the way I’d imagined.” And her voice is a little wistful, lost in her mind, but she can’t bring herself to care right now. Not when this was something she’d dreamt of for years. Being so anonymous as to be lost, not someone remarkable – not outcast nor anointed nor savage nor savior. Just another person. The one thing the Nora would never give her.
Why did it feel like ash on her mouth then?
“You imagined being Carja? And wanted it?”
She shakes her head. “I imagined being nobody. They don’t know the Nora here, Varl. No idea who we are or what a matriarch is or the sacred mountain or a metal devil or any of it. I wasn't anything to him, just another outlander. He gave me what I imagined and I didn’t like it.”
“And you don’t understand why.”
“And I don’t understand why.”
He sighs, and takes a pause before answering. “The Nora treated you really badly, Aloy. And they – we, were wrong to. You’re allowed to be bitter about that. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to dispense of the whole tribe and move on with your life, even if I’d miss calling you my tribemate. I like being able to say that, but if you wanted to leave for good, you could.”
And then his voice softens, almost painfully so.
“But you don’t have to throw us all away if you don’t want to, either.”
“I don’t know what I want.” And there really is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? For so long now, she’s been driven by clear objectives. Find the pieces of Gaia, and put the AI back together. And prior to that it was find a backup, and before that to stop Hades, and if she goes far back enough it was to simply past the Proving and become a member of the tribe. Life goals stretching back to – what, eight years old? Seven?
What is she supposed to do with I don’t know what I want?
“Well, think on it. You’ve got time. There’s still a season or so until the world enters a death spiral, right?
“Right.” Her voice sounds far more confident than she feels, something for which she congratulates herself on the inside.
“Now come on, we’ve got machines to hunt, and you’ve got supplies to drop off.”
And then they’re off, engaging in a swirling dance of blades and arrows and machine weaponry, and if Aloy fights worse than normal, she’ll never admit it’s because she’s barely thinking about the fight at all.