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There are murmurings around Slitherbough of strangers in the woods.
Strangers do not simply “come through” the Rak’tika Greatwood—this, Y’shtola has learned over the last year and a half. This wood is nigh-uninhabitable save for the beasts that call it home and the residents of Slitherbough who have done so for longer than Y’shtola has been alive. There are decidedly fewer sineaters in the area, which often makes it tempting for travelers to attempt to pass through on their way to the Crystarium, but there are more trodden paths that are guarded and, thus, safer, despite the presence of the white beasts that stalk and kill and turn. These paths do not pass through the Rak’tika Greatwood.
One of the patrols returns and alerts Master Matoya of a pair of Humes who have been lingering in the charred ruins of Fort Gohn for the past few cycles. They do not appear to be threats, she is told, but there are reasons her people are on edge about them.
“They wear nothing but white, my lady,” Ovelin says. “‘Tis not a threat in and of itself, and patrols in days before have let them be on assumption that they would continue on their way after a day of rest in the shelter of the ruins.”
“But you are still wary, regardless,” Y’shtola muses. Neither Crystarium guard nor Eulmoran army don themselves in white, though she thinks it would be fitting for the latter. She does her best to remain apprised of military movements while maintaining her vow of silence against the man who so unkindly wrenched her here, and there have been no signs of any scouting behavior—two Humes in all white would make for poor reconnaissance, indeed.
“There’s more,” Runar chimes from Y’shtola’s right. “Ovelin, what happened in your most recent patrol?”
Ovelin’s aether shifts. It is not quite uncomfortable, but there is something uneasy, as if recalling the details is a challenge. “There are just two of them, that’s been confirmed through the last few perimeter checks, but they have either never spotted us or never bothered to attempt contact.” Ovelin makes her way to sit down at the table opposite Y’shtola. The space between the three of them is narrowed—a space where Y’shtola thrives, the space made smaller to keep secrets from echoing where they need not be heard. “One of them approached us today. She can’t have seen more than fifteen winters, Master Matoya. She asked if we knew where to find someone named Y’shtola.”
And this, too, is where Y’shtola thrives.
She very carefully schools her ears, which threaten to twitch even slightly. The ever-stoic Master Matoya would surely be noticed for such a juvenile gesture. Lying Miqo’te children are always so easy to spot. She keeps her lips in the very same position they were in before she heard her true name because even the slightest quirk or grimace threatens to reveal her. Instead, she directs the curiosity outward, deflects it to keep any suspicion from falling onto her shoulders.
“Does the name mean anything to anyone here?” she asks, and Ovelin answers in the negative—she hasn’t told anyone else the strange name that she says isn’t traditional for any race she’s aware of.
It means so much to her, this name. This name that she can count on one hand the number of people on this star who know it, and two of them are on the outskirts of her settlement—no, that’s not quite right, is it, because one of the Humes has an identity she is certain of, but the young girl she is decidedly uncertain about.
“Do you think they could be Everlasting Dark?” Runar posits. “This Y’shtola, rather than our lingering neighbors.”
Her name from his mouth makes the very tip of her tail twitch. This, she cannot hide, but she highly doubts either Runar or Ovelin notice. She hopes.
“Did the girl speak of what she wanted from this stranger?” she asks Ovelin. “If we can identify their motive for being in the Greatwood, perhaps we can usher them on their way or help them find what they’re looking for.”
“The girl told us her companion was injured, and that he’d told her to find the stranger.” Y’shtola grits her teeth against Ovelin’s explanation. “I told her to stay put and that someone would return with help as soon as we were able.”
She nods firmly. It is a clever way to diffuse a situation and wait for further guidance, but she is not sure how badly injured Thancred—for she is sure it is Thancred—is. She has to play this right to avoid any suspicion of her knowing these outsiders. Traveling alone in the Greatwood is strongly discouraged and in some cases forbidden, but she may just have enough sway to make herself an exception. “Let me speak with them,” she offers, standing. “Fort Gohn is not far, and with a patrol so freshly returned, I do not anticipate any immediate danger that I cannot handle myself.”
“Alone—!” Runar exclaims, punctuating his sentiment with a rush to stand. The chair scrapes along the stone floor and she raises a tempering hand against it. “Master Matoya, even someone of your skill—“
“Will be perfectly capable of handling herself,” Y’shtola insists. She smiles and tilts her head to the side in an attempt to appear apologetic. “I will be fine, Runar. If my opponents are to be an injured man and a young girl seeking help, I am certain I will be able to hold my own.”
Runar and Ovelin are silent for a moment and Y’shtola briefly suspects that she will have to force her way out of the settlement. She would have hoped her performance at the fort had offered more sense of security than to keep her guarded, but Runar snuffs this newborn doubt, his heavy steps fading to the room’s entrance.
“Let me fetch your staff, then.”
Y’shtola nods. “Some herbs, as well, if you wouldn’t mind terribly.”
-
The path to the fort is one of their most common patrol routes. Y’shtola knows it well, and the silence she is afforded by having no companion is filled with the ambience of the Greatwood. There is no shortage of birdsong and rustle in the canopy, and she thinks of days spent in the Shroud with her sister. Her hand clenches on the bag strapped round her shoulders.
Runar and some of the residents more experienced in traditional healing sent her along with bandages made from tightly wound pixie cotton held together with sap and salves strengthened with tomatl extracts. Her staff is slung across her back, its customary place—the dark wood circles around the focus at its end, keeping the runic energy there contained until she is ready to summon it forth. The staff had been the only thing she requested from the Crystarium artisans before she absconded, the furthest reaches she would apply the Exarch’s good graces. She would acquire a weapon and disappear and work to decode this shard and get her friends back home before any more ills befell them.
She is afraid she is too late.
If Thancred—again, she is almost certain it is Thancred, who would be the Hyur who knows her name, unless the Exarch or Urianger let loose their lips and she is sure that is not the case for the latter—is injured and coming to her for aid after not having seen her in four years, she shudders to think of the state he must be in. The implications of being injured as they are are already worrisome. Thancred’s aether is frayed at best and without a physical body to anchor him the situation may be worse than she imagines.
She cannot think of these things. Her feet stamp against the packed forest soil until they do not, the ground of Fort Gohn turned over and soft with ash.
“Girl,” she calls, for lack of a better name to call out for, and her vision seeps into the muted shades of aether around her, the lingering reds of the fort where the echoes of devastation still smolder. Across the field, in one of the towers that threaten collapse, is a bright spot like a bonfire. Y’shtola is almost worried something has reignited here, but the spot moves and breathes and holds its position. A person. “My name is Matoya. I’ve come from Slitherbough to aid you and your companion.”
Silence is her answer. She can feel the human-shaped beacon of aether hum from even fulms away, and it only intensifies as the person she can only assume to be the girl in question approaches her. It is like looking at the sun, and Y’shtola is nearly tempted to sink back into her blindness at the girl’s brilliance. She has had few occasions to squint in recent years—the muscles in her face protest at the movement so different from her normal passivity.
“Matoya?” comes a small voice. Ovelin was right—the girl’s quiet voice betrays that she cannot have seen as many summers as, perhaps, Alisaie, who Y’shtola last heard in the throes of the poor girl’s desperation in the Rising Stones. This girl’s voice, from three syllables alone, tells Y’shtola that she is young, unsure. “M-my name is… no, I… my friend,” her voice wobbles, “needs help. He told me to find Y’shtola. Do you know her?”
Y’shtola sighs. Before she reveals her hand, she must be sure: “Is your friend a man named Thancred?”
The girl takes a step toward her, and Y’shtola feels her ears twitch. “You know him?” There is a new urgency in her voice, a new confidence that still roils with an undercurrent of fear. Her aether rumbles, and it inexplicably reminds Y’shtola of her time in the Lifestream. She blinks, and nods.
“I will take that as a yes. I am the one you seek, child; you told my associates that he was injured. Can you take me to him?”
“You are Y’shtola?” she asks. Y’shtola thinks this girl asks a lot of questions. A flare of impatience wells up in her, the plainness of the answer hanging over her and weighing down her bag of medical supplies.
“I keep my name close to my chest, but yes, I am she. Now, will you please take me to Thancred? If he is unwell enough to ask for a girl as young as you to communicate on his behalf, I worry about the state he is in.”
The girl’s aether only dims slightly. Urgency still thrums in the air. “R-right. Follow me, Miss Y’shtola.”
She does not correct her. If the two of them must be brought back to Slitherbough, she will have the conversation with them both. For now, Y’shtola is following the glowing girl to the tower she saw her in when she first arrived at the fort. It is difficult to see beyond her, despite her height and because of her presence, but Y’shtola can just make out another spot of aether in the tower from where she first emerged. It is impossible to parse now, but the girl leads her into the ramshackle shelter, and there, in the corner, is Thancred’s tangled mess.
Thancred, for his part, does not immediately react to seeing her. That bright spot of aether she espied on her way across the fort campus sits right at his side, and for a moment, she thinks it must be some sort of relic, perhaps something gifted from the Crystarium to aid him and this girl in their travels, whatever those might entail.
She efforts to move it—she needs a clear space if she is to properly examine him—but when her hand reaches where it should be, her palm only meets rough, warm, wet fabric, eerily reminiscent of the clean bandages she has stowed away in her things. Thancred groans.
“We ran out of wrappings,” the girl says. Y’shtola’s hand flinches back as if she’s been burned. This isn’t a coalescence of aether, or a relic kept close. This is a wound. “We were attacked in Lakeland and Il Mheg was too far—”
“How long has he been insensate?” she asks, clinical, her mind already racing. She digs in the bag to find a specific jar, their contents sorted by shape, but infection may not be her biggest concern with this amount of aether—light aether, Twelve—
Another groan beneath her hands. “‘Shtola,” comes the voiceless breath, so tired and empty that Y’shtola might have mistaken it for a fevered ramble if not for the distinct fricative, the rounded O. She fumbles for a moment in her search for Thancred’s shoulder to grip and squeezes when she finds it.
“Hello, old friend,” Y’shtola says just loud enough for him to hear. She is unable to keep her voice quite as measured as she hoped it would be. “It has been quite some time, hasn’t it?”
His response is meaningless, deluded words spilling from him as whispers, but Y’shtola just barely catches a clearer “hurts.” Just like that, she is snapped back to attention, her focus pouncing on the girl next to her who still has not answered her question.
“How long?” she repeats. The bonfire of a girl shrinks back from Y’shtola’s gale.
She replies obediently. “He was speaking with me just a few bells ago. We were resting, to try and wait for him to recover, but the wound kept getting worse, and—and he asked me to find you.”
Y’shtola nods as she works. She has spent the last year educating herself and studying with others the First’s black magic, a mimicry—no, not a mimicry, their own independent version—of the thaumaturgy taught in Ul’Dah. She is not a healer, but conjury still lives in her bones, hanging over her aether like ivy. She can see and manipulate the threads before her, untangling the Limsan knots that twine Thancred to the sin eater’s remains. The more she tugs, the more they come unwound, and the thin bearings that she has left Thancred with strain against her efforts and threaten to snap and she cannot allow that.
Y’shtola quickly realizes she cannot do this here.
She pulls her hands back from his form and recenters herself with a breath. Thancred needs a proper bed, and she a proper chair. They cannot risk being attacked out here in the fort while she works for who knows how long. Logistics fly through her mind. She will have to come up with—
A thought occurs to her. “Girl,” Y’shtola snaps her fingers somewhere to her right. The girl gasps. “What is your name?”
She hesitates. “Am I allowed to say?”
Y’shtola, choosing not to explore the implications of that question, answers, “Yes.”
She hesitates again. “Minfilia.”
Y’shtola, schooled and stoic as she has ever been, who was raised by stony Matoya and teased endlessly by the senseless man who lays in front of her for her cold and calculating nature—
Feels her ears pin back, her eyes widen, and her tail flick in a long arc.
-
It takes some time. She monitors Thancred’s thinning aether and heals what physical aspects she can while Minfilia—this Minfilia, this girl, this child—talks in a hurried hush to her. About the Oracle, about Eulmore, about her rescue. About the girls who have come before her and the folklore that has surrounded them and has cornered her. About the months she and Thancred have spent together constantly on the run.
Y’shtola idly plucks at one of the light-aspected threads and thinks of girls raised in caves.
She did not have the pleasure of knowing the Minfilia of the Source at the age the Minfilia before her is now. She knew the leader, the scholar, the miner, the woman who knew exactly the way she took her tea and would bring her a cup to share in silence while she conducted research. The woman who could sit in the Waking Sands and strategize with her for hours about the social implications of certain uprisings, the cultural moors sometimes lost in Y’shtola’s objectivity and perception. The woman who could drag her away from her books just as well as she could help her with them, always knowing somehow when Y’shtola was hitting a wall and simply needed to take a walk to get a cold drink or a sweet treat.
This Minfilia is not that. She is a scared girl. She has been tormented and, perhaps worse, elevated to a status that does not belong to her by a man who is a stranger. When Minfilia speaks in a whispered hush of Amh Araeng and the way he has shut her out, she is angry, but not surprised. Y’shtola is finding her footing in the situation but she is not so lost that the situation overwhelms her. This is a child, who is decidedly not the woman she or Thancred knew. She will have to give him a piece of her mind later, but first, she must make sure he lives through the next several bells.
She tells Minfilia the three of them cannot stay here.
“Thancred said,” the girl sighs. “He said the Night’s Blessed would be suspicious of us.”
“He was right. But with my blessing, no harm shall come to the two of you. Quite the opposite, in fact.” Of this, she is sure. Slitherbough is full of carers, something Y’shtola has been quite surprised by. They are kind people despite and because of their circumstances, and above all, they trust her. She is loath to use their trust as a tool like this, but she must. “If I am to take you into their fold, however, you must know: our true names are never shared. ‘Tis why I introduced myself as Matoya, and why no help came when you asked for Y’shtola.”
“We need fake names, then?”
“Different names, perhaps.” She packs away her supplies, her movements mechanic, measured. “Is there a name you are drawn to?”
The silence weighs heavy. Y’shtola lets the girl find her words. She has not had many chances to do so in her short life.
“I can’t think of any.”
That is alright. Y’shtola has ideas. “Is Minfilia your birth name?”
This pause is longer. She has hit a nerve, and Y’shtola thinks the girl will shut off, but she does speak again, with a sort of boldness that does not show in her aether.
“It is the only name I remember, so it is the only one that I have.”
Y’shtola cannot help herself. She smiles. Strong words from an unsung girl even if the both of them suspect they are perhaps not fully true. “I will grant you an alternative, then.”
-
She teleports herself back to Slitherbough after assuring Minfilia she will be back within the bell. The aetheryte there is warm and familiar and so is the man there waiting for her return - Runar puts his large hands on her shoulders and asks about her safety, but Y’shtola has urgent plans and explains that she will need his help to execute them.
“Travelers from Lakeland,” she tells him on their walk back to the Fort. “A father and daughter venturing to the Crystarium. They were attacked near the entrance to the Greatwood, and sought refuge here while their injuries healed, but the man faces infection and needs advanced care.”
“A sin eater attack?” Runar asks. His aether bristles when the words pass his lips. “If it was a sin eater—“
“It was.” There is no point in lying. Not about this part. Runar stops walking for a moment, the heavy pad of his feet in the packed soil abruptly ceasing. Y’shtola can only imagine his face. She turns to him, hardening her expression. “You must understand, however, Runar, that I would not bring anyone or anything into Slitherbough that I thought had even the slimmest chance of doing harm.”
He sighs, his aether wavering only slightly. Y’shtola needs him to trust her. She thinks, unbidden, of her friend laying sick, and quells an uninvited flare of impatience, the same she had felt when Minfilia had asked the questions of her at the Fort’s entrance. She needs to temper herself. The words bubbling up in her throat need not come to fruition, however—Runar’s aether settles and he hums. “I believe you, Matoya.” A weight lifts from her shoulders. “Come. Let us rescue your travelers, then.”
Minfilia rushes out to greet them when they step into the fort once again. She is jittery. She has not acted before, she said, save for silent parts she sometimes played in Thancred’s schemes moving them about the star, but Y’shtola stressed that it would not be acting—she is the same girl with a different name.
“Ascilia,” Y’shtola greets her and nods deliberately. “This is Runar. He’s going to help move your father to Slitherbough where I can best treat him.”
Runar shifts, his presence dropping, and can see him extend a large hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Ascilia. You have done well to earn Master Matoya’s trust. She is a skilled mage, and the rest of us will make sure you are safe.”
Minfilia hesitates, but shakes Runar’s hand with both of hers. Her voice wavers when she speaks, but the sentiment is genuine. “Thank you very much, Runar.”
Y’shtola looks at the two of them—two beacons of bright and expressive aether, so warm and alive. She imagines this is what the sky must look like past the Greatwood canopy.
Runar gathers Thancred into his much-broader arms, and Y’sthola takes her position to their right. If she reaches out and her hand brushes just slightly against Thancred’s dangling one, the pad of her thumb finding the leather of his palm, she is as certain as she can be that the others do not see it.
-
She wastes no time.
Y’shtola only registers the passage of the bells through the meals Runar brings her in her private quarters, where Thancred has been placed onto her bed, and it is a sign of his condition that he makes no crass comment about this. She works and works and Runar brings her a midday meal and then dinner and pokes in his head to check on her once more before retiring for the nebulous thing they call night. Runar is not her only visitor—Minfilia follows her like a shadow, but Y’shtola suspects it is not her she is following. The girl lingers in the corner of the room and watches Y’shtola work tirelessly to untangle Thancred from the wound in his side. The girl does not speak, but she hovers, and Y’shtola does not need her aethersight to feel the anxiety permeating the small room. She does not blame her. If she was less confident in her own abilities, she imagines she would be quite nervous as well.
She does not make conversation with Minfilia. She does not know what to speak with her about beyond the specifics of Thancred’s condition, which have already been discussed. Truthfully, after bells delicately unraveling the embroidery thread of her friend’s existence from the plague that lingers over this star, set to the backdrop of his shallow breathing and the muffled noise of the Night’s Blessed outside, she forgets the girl is there at all.
That is, until she speaks.
“Master Matoya?” Minfilia asks. Y’shtola turns one ear in her direction. Minfilia does not continue speaking. She has not grown up around Miqo’te. Instead, Y’shtola pauses, holding two threads between precise nails and making the decision to pause her sight. When she cranes her neck upwards—Twelve, she has been hunched over for far too long—she feels the throb in her head, the threat of a migraine looming over her like a predator confident in its next meal. She is not keen on getting caught. Or caring if she does.
“What is it?”
A breath’s pause. “How is he… how are you doing? How are… things?”
Y’shtola cannot help herself. She barks a laugh. It is not the reaction she expects Minfilia anticipated—it is not the reaction she herself anticipated.
“My apologies,” she says, shaking her head. “The last thing I expected was common chatter like two colleagues who have not seen each other in a summer.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—“
“Oh, no, not at all.” She’ll need to root that out as much as she can. She isn’t sure how much time or how many opportunities she’ll be granted, but Y’shtola has been thinking—as if she ever stops—and she has made it her secondary goal to get this child an ounce of confidence in herself where Thancred has clearly failed. “I could use some idle conversation, truthfully. To answer your questions, however, Thancred will be fine, and I am the same. This is tiring and delicate work, but I am quite good.”
“He said you would be.”
Y’shtola’s cheeks very defiantly do not redden. She has no need for flattery from an unconscious man. Back to business, she thinks, pricking her ears again, reactivating her sight and honing in. Idle conversation can continue while she works. “Minfilia,” she posits using the closest thing the girl has to a true name. They will not be disturbed here. “Can you tell me what you know of the situation on this star? The Flood of Light,” another snipped thread she shakes off into the ambient, “and the way you are connected to it?”
There is no response for two breaths, three. The girl is far too hesitant to speak on things she clearly is knowledgeable about. Another habit she will do her best in her limited time to break. “You are free to speak in my presence, Minfilia. I know I perhaps have not been the most,” she yanks on a thread, “amicable of hosts, given the situation. I know I may be difficult to trust, but you may do so.”
Minfilia takes a moment to consider this attempt at a peace offering. Y’shtola considers it a success when she does, finally, speak.
Rather than the curtailed version of things she received at Fort Gohn, the girl’s words muffled by Y’shtola’s thickly veiled concern and surprise at the situation at hand, she listens carefully to a more complete version of Minfilia’s past, composed of measured words. Y’shtola suspects she omits certain bits but cannot blame her for doing so. She recalls, again, growing up in Eulmore. The folklore surrounding the Oracle of Light, the Flood. The cell she spent her formative years in. The training she once received but stopped once Eulmore decided sin eaters were no longer to be fought. The night she was so violently—in Y’shtola’s opinion, not in Minfilia’s words—ripped from her sense of safety and thrust into a new world of danger. The world she is unfamiliar with, though dangerous, is also the world that contains the Crystarium, where the two of them go sometimes when Thancred communicates with the Exarch, and Minfilia gets to eat sugar cookies, which she enjoys, and Y’shtola feels her mouth water. It also contains the Bookman’s Shelves, an abandoned library in Il Mheg where Urianger has taken up residence among the pixies, where Minfilia can read any book she’d like, and she gets to play in the flower fields as much as she wants.
It is her ramblings that keep Y’shtola grounded and focused as she works through the closest thing they have to night. Bit by laborious bit, she untangles Thancred’s aether, listening as Minfilia chatters, her recollections interspersed with periodic apologies for doing so and Y’shtola’s urging to continue. She does not stop her ministrations for anything, save for maintaining a consistent, quiet healing spell active under her hands to make sure Thancred does not simply die beneath her, and by the time she is finished, the final stubborn Light thread pulled from its tangle, Y’shtola refocuses on the world around her and finds it quiet.
She takes a deep breath in, and lets it out slowly.
She performs one final check of Thancred’s aether. She smooths the untangled threads with her hands and feels the bandages under her palm. She confirms that her friend, with the help of a few days of rest, will live. She steps away from her aethersight, and she slumps into the chair, and she nearly falls asleep in that instance.
She breathes again. Her shoulders ache, but they feel lighter.
Y’shtola can only take a moment to relax. If she takes any more than just the one, she will fall asleep where she sits, and her spine may just up and leave her, with the way she has abused it today. She rises to her feet, stretching her arms above her head and feeling her bones crunch like gravel as she groans. The noise makes Minfilia stir from where she, too, has fallen asleep. “Miss Y’shtola…?” she murmurs, and there is a rustling from across the room, and Y’shtola can feel her presence come closer, settling itself next to her where she imagines Minfilia is examining her work. “Is it over? Will he be alright?”
It feels good to answer this question. “Yes, I suspect he will be.”
She fumbles for the blanket she knows is there and pulls it over Thancred’s waist. “He will likely be asleep for a few days while his body and aether recover, but yes, I suspect…” She yawns. She has not been so tired in quite a long time. She will have to find another bed to sleep in. “I suspect he will be.”
“Thank you, Miss Y’shtola,” Minfilia whispers, her tone too heavy and poignant for someone her age. Even without her sight, Y’shtola can feel the weight of the sentiment, and it is a downfeather comforter over her hazy mind. She is far too exhausted to bear the pressure of the girl’s gratitude right now. She needs a snack and perhaps a drink—but prior to anything, she needs to sleep. Both of them do.
Y’shtola makes to place a hand on the girl’s shoulder and only misses by a few inches, instead finding Minfilia’s shoulderblade. “Come,” she says. “We could both use some proper rest, I believe.”
Slitherbough is already waking up and preparing for the day ahead when the two of them emerge from Y’shtola’s quarters. She hears Runar’s voice from the center of the encampment, his sentence cutting in half with an exclamation of her name. She waves, and there is a haze in Y’shtola’s mind between one moment and the next, and the next, and the next, and before she has fully comprehended her actions, she finds herself sitting on one of the few spare beds they have. Either she explicitly requested this of Runar or she simply looked so exhausted that he took it upon himself to see her there.
Blinking fully back into awareness brings the sight of Minfilia, bright as the sun in the sky. She is hovering the bed across from her, unsure of what to do, and though it had previously seemed impossible to dim her spark, her aether is markedly dull. She is a child, and she needs rest. Y’shtola knows this about children.
Her body seemingly moves on its own: she stands, pulls the blankets back for her, and gestures for her to get in the bed. She is too drained to do much else, so she is relieved when Minfilia obeys with little resistance.
Minfilia settles down into the bed, stiff. When she speaks Y’shtola isn’t sure if she is meant to hear it. “I have always wondered what it must have been like to have a mother.”
Y’shtola has never wondered what it must be like to be one.
She tucks the blanket over the girl’s shoulders anyway.
-
Having Minfilia around is strange.
There are not many children in Slitherbough. The youngest, Y’shtola believes, is a boy of nineteen summers. He—and every resident, she supposes—is too young to remember a world’s light being snuffed with a sunset over the horizon, the quiet calm that comes with moonlight, Menphina kissing the land and wishing its inhabitants a good night’s sleep. Y’shtola misses that feeling.
None of the Blessed quite know what to do with Minfilia, and so she is unceremoniously assumed to be Y’shtola’s responsibility in the same way Y’shtola has made Thancred. The two of them arrived together and must be treated as a pair.
This does not mean the girl is neglected. Over the course of the next few days, Runar, Ovelin, and the others make extra portions of food. The hunters, unasked, return from their ventures with more kills to accommodate the extra mouths. Vondia asks her if she’d like to help prepare tea for Master Matoya. Alsa shows her how to prepare a ritual prayer circle. Ascilia, as she is, is eager to help in any way she can, and seems to enjoy doing things with her hands. From what little she has been told, Slitherbough is full of the most people Minfilia has ever seen at once in her short life. Y’shtola is silently pleased with the girl’s brief inoculation into a communal life. She would fit in well here save for her title as Oracle of Light.
She appreciates the time taken from her friends to help settle Ascilia in, so much care put forward to a child whose loved one is in dire straits—a situation many of them are familiar with—but she knows deep in her chest that the two of them cannot and will not stay. Else than that, she knows, deep in her bones, that whatever the Exarch’s machinations are, Minfilia will find a way to play a part. Her namesake always did the same.
It is for this reason, and for her selfish secondary goal that she still hopes to achieve in the dwindling time she has before Thancred wakes up, that she approaches Minfilia early one facsimile morning.
“Would you like to go out into the wood with me today?” she asks. She has taken enough time recovering her own aether stores and longs to feel useful again. “There is a spot in the nearby marshes where some fruit should be ready for harvest. I should enjoy some help.”
It is a testament to her security that Minfilia does not hesitate as much before she speaks. “I can help!”
“Good. Have you eaten breakfast yet?” She adjusts the bag on her shoulder, the strap sitting underneath where her staff is slung. “We shan’t be gone for more than a few bells, and I’ve no stomach for bellyaching.”
Minfilia hums an affirmative, her aether bobbing with a firm nod. “Ersabel warmed some bread with jam, and we had some of the meat left over from dinner. Let me grab my…”
Her aether recedes like a Limsan tide. Something has brought her pause; her attention, her aether, has been drawn to Y’shtola’s quarters, some small part of it pulled there as if tugged by a thin, fraying thread. The tip of Y’shtola’s tail flicks.
“He will be fine for the short amount of time we will be gone, Ascilia.” She is not wont to lie, so she doesn’t: “He may even be awake by the time we return.” This seems to settle her, and she bounds off to Y’shtola’s quarters to retrieve whatever it is she is so intent on bringing. Y’shtola shakes her head. She does not like to sit still.
“Master Matoya,” comes a voice from her right that she recognizes as Ovelin. Y’shtola’s ear turns to her before her eyes do, and she greets her friend with a small smile.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Oveline huffs a laugh. “Naught at all. I simply wished to remark on the clarity of the western trail.”
Y’shtola’s smile gets bigger. “Which certainly has nothing to do with my plans to take our guest for a walk.”
“Again, naught at all.” Ovelin laughs truly. Y’shtola can see Minfilia emerge from her quarters and start to jog toward the two of them, clearly ready to go. “She has come out of her shell quite a bit, hasn’t she?”
Y’shtola nods. “I do hope she stays that way when she and her father depart. We could use more bright young girls in this dark world, couldn’t we?”
-
It is not a far walk to the edge of the marsh, a half-malm or so. Along the way, Minfilia asks—quietly, shyly at first, but more confident as they go—questions as they come to mind. How did the trees get so big here? Why do the Night’s Blessed use different names? How did she and Thancred come to be here? Is it always light out where they are from, or always night?
She is hungry for knowledge in a childish way, and Y’shtola finds she is not the least bit irritated by it the way she is sometimes with younger children who wholly have the power to understand the world around them, but due to a stagnating developmental timeline or the willingness of adults around them to provide every easy answer, do not. Y’shtola answers the questions as best she can and makes genuine promises to learn more about the things she does not. The Night’s Blessed protect their names from the Light, keeping their value from being corrupted. She and Thancred arrived there through a complicated inter-dimensional summoning method she is still trying to understand. Light and dark alternate in equal measure.
She is not quite sure about the trees.
“Look through Urianger’s prestigious library next time you are there for me,” she says, “and if you find an answer, I would be more than happy to hear it.”
Minfilia’s aether beams at this.
They gather the fruit without incident. Y’shtola is not one to slow herself down for the sake of others, but if her hands move slower than Minfilia’s do, it is certainly because the plant’s aether is difficult to make out through her sight. Minfilia hands her two large handfuls that Y’shtola ties together and tucks away in her satchel. She, herself, has only collected one. A pity.
“What is this plant called?” Minfilia asks.
“Shadowsbreath grapes. The stems we grind into medicine, and the dried leaves make lovely tea.”
“And the fruit?”
“The very same jam you had for breakfast.”
The girl hums, focused. She is committing this to memory. Y’shtola quirks her lips, a small bloom of pride in her chest.
The two of them do not forage for long. The plants are not so abundant that it takes them longer than half a bell to gather all they need. “The day is quite young, for all intents,” she says, breathing in the forest air. “We could go back home, or continue our walk. It is quite nice out. I admit after our shared ordeal it is pleasant to be out of a stuffy cave, out and about again.”
Minfilia does not respond immediately, but she moves a few steps away from Slitherbough, out toward the marsh. “Can we go there? To the water?”
“Something there you’re interested in?”
A moment of pause. Y’shtola imagines she shakes her head, or perhaps she tilts it in thought. “Eulmore had a view of the ocean that I only got to see a few times. There is a beautiful lake in Il Mheg that I can swim in sometimes. The water is the same, but it’s different. I want to see this one.”
Y’shtola cannot fault her for that. She remembers the first time she saw Lominsan shores, or the sprawling Gridanian lakes. She raises a hand: go on, then.
Minfilia does not move. Y’shtola does not move.
“Where is the path? Do we need to—go back to the road?
Interesting. “The marsh is just a few fulms away, is it not?” Had they wandered farther than Y’shtola anticipated? “You can get as close as you’d like. The patrols confirmed that the forest has been quiet today. There shouldn’t be any rogue tomatls, and if there are, I assure you they’ll be dealt with.”
Minfilia hesitates. “Should we not stick to the path anyway? Isn’t that safer?”
Ah. She thinks inexplicably of a young Elezen boy, eager to color within the lines and adhere to every rule in an effort to get ahead in a colony not much older than he was. It took a great many years to break him from this habit, this compulsion—years Y’shtola does not have on this star.
So Y’shtola steps off of the path and into the reeds, the tall grasses sneaking up her layered skirt and the mud suctioning her boots to the group, until she feels the chill of the marsh water. She throws her arms out to the side and lets them drop unceremoniously against her hips.
“You wanted to go to the water. Well, here we are.”
Minfilia makes a decidedly unplanned noise that sounds almost like she has choked on a piece of her dinner, and then she bursts into laughter befitting a girl of her age. Y’shtola, as a rule for herself that she has adhered to doubly in maintaining the stoic Master Matoya persona mirroring the stony figure she looked up to as a child, attempts to school her laugh. She does not do this now.
Minfilia squeals and her slippers squelch in the unreliable ground. Y’shtola lets herself laugh, and though it is not quite as unrestrained as Minfilia’s, it lifts something in her nonetheless, something that has been burdening her shoulders for almost two years. Something free and childlike that Y’shtola has perhaps never experienced in her short life. For just a heartbeat, she allows herself this, and the only frogs she thinks of are the ones whose rest the two of them are most certainly disturbing.
They slog through the mud and the reeds until they cannot stand the feeling of the wetness in their shoes anymore, at which point they return to the road. The dust of the worn path sticks to them and Y’shtola knows she will ultimately take the responsibility of laundering these but she cannot bring herself to care in the moment. The promise of a later chore pales in comparison to the triumph she feels at seemingly having put a minuscule crack in the shell Minfilia has crafted around herself and that Thancred has repeatedly enforced.
“Thank you for bringing me with you today, Miss Y’shtola,” the girl says.
Y’shtola’s own shell has gotten her through some of the most difficult seasons of her life. Very few things, very few people have been able to worm their way beneath it.
“This is one of the things I do like about traveling. Being able to see so many different things that I wouldn’t have seen in Kholusia.”
Things that do get beneath it typically take moons, seasons. The people of Slitherbough have found a crack in her defenses. Minfilia has found the crack in a fraction of the time. Y’shtola wonders if she knew—if some part of her namesake’s spirit has endeared itself to her, has influenced her in a way Y’shtola cannot perceive.
“Miss Y’shtola?”
Her ears prick. She turns to look at Minfilia’s aether, which has stopped in its tracks and flutters anxiously. Y’shtola can imagine her eyes, wide with concern, her hands outstretched. Minfilia was always so tactile. Y’shtola is not. She reaches out with a firm hand and manages to find Minfilia’s smaller one, squeezing it before dropping it after only a moment. “I’m quite alright, little one. Simply lost in thought.” She takes a brief look around and finds her target: a spot where the marsh’s aetheric outline recedes perfectly into itself. A small dock the Blessed use for fishing on occasion, but has gone unused in recent months. “Come. Let us rest our feet for a spell before we make the journey back.”
The wood creaks beneath their feet as they trek to the end, where the dock ends and opens out to a wide expanse of water- and earth-aspected aether stretches for a malm, perhaps two. When the both of them sit down at the edge of it, Y’shtola can feel her shoes just kiss the water below. Minfilia does not reach.
They sit for a breath, two, three, in silence. Then four, and five. Their glee from before has solidified something tenuous and shy between them, something that feels like it can be molded rather than the rigid and straining thing that lives in the wide, wide space between her and Thancred.
“I know I said this already, before, but truly… thank you, Miss Y’shtola.”
Her tail swishes, content. The fur of it brushes against the worn wood of the dock and sends a prickle up her spine. She doesn’t mind. “You are truly welcome, Miss Minfilia,” she says, and means it. She has meant a lot of things in the last several days. “The marsh is to your liking, then?”
“It is. It’s like the lake in Il Mheg, but different. The water is still, but it’s so alive.”
“Quite right, and a skilled observation. Many mud-dwelling fish live here. They sit still until their prey swims by, at which point they ambush them.”
Minfilia huffs a small laugh, a pitiful thing compared to her uproarious cheer just a handful of minutes before. “You know so much,” she says, wistful, “I wonder if I will ever be able to know as much as you or Thancred.”
Y’shtola takes a deliberate breath. “And how is Thancred?” she asks, dropping her voice just slightly. Minfilia is smart. She answers the question Y’shtola is not asking first, after the moment it takes her to consider her response, as always.
“I don’t… think he cares for me.”
The way the words fall from Minfilia’s lips do not leave room for doubt. Y’shtola attempts to manifest some anyway, a fruitless effort though she knows it to be. Perhaps Thancred has treated her normally, a foolish, immature part of her wants to think. Perhaps he has been astronomically normal about this girl being the reincarnation of his departed sister.
“Is that so?”
“He resents me, I think,” she says, and Y’shtola pulls her lips back. She has nothing to say because the girl less than half her age, younger than Alphinaud was the first time she saw him strut into the Rising Stones, the confidence oozing from him so strongly that she did not need aethersight to perceive it, younger than Alisaie was when Y’shtola watched her bright red, frantic aether fade as she was yanked to a different plane of existence, is right about this. “He resents me because I am not who he wants me to be.”
She is right, and Y’shtola, for all her lauded knowledge, has nothing to say to it.
Y’shtola knows Thancred. Despite his ragged aether and her lack of true sight that she left the both of them with when she ripped them apart, she did not need her aethersight to feel the guilt and grief he carried for moons and moons. It is not surprising for him to feel the way Minfilia describes, even if Y’shtola’s understanding of his anger is being filtered through the perception of a young teenager who does not have a full understanding of the world she lives in.
“Don’t listen to ninety percent of what he says,” she finally settles on, a quiet anger bristling the fur along her tail. She is angry for this girl. She is angry with Thancred. She is angry with the Crystal Exarch. She is angry with Minfilia, the woman she knew, for leaving behind a legacy that several young girls have been forced to fill, but she would not have chosen this if she could have helped it. There is only one target available for her ire and she spent all of her energy knitting him back together just days ago. “He is wracked by grief and all the more senseless for it.”
Y’shtola sighs. She sighs because she does not know how else to feel.
“I should be more useful,” Minfilia eventually says, and suddenly, Y’shtola is twelve summers, scolded by Matoya, frustrated at her own ineptitude, wishing she possessed the skill of a woman seemingly a dozen times her age. The anger she felt fades to cinders: like to burn, still, but less destructive in the moment.
“Do me a favor, Minfilia,” she murmurs, closing her eyes and leaning back to lay on the dock, her back pressing against the cold, mossy wood. It will not break beneath her weight. It is well-loved, well-maintained, like everything the Night’s Blessed take responsibility for. She takes a deep breath in. She can feel the aura of uncertainty emanating in the space between them. Part of it belongs to Y’shtola. “Will you tell me about the canopy?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you see there? Or around us? Paint me a picture with your words.”
Minfilia hums. She is thinking. Much too hard, more than the task explicitly demands of her, but Y’shtola can appreciate words well chosen.
“It’s… green.”
Y’shtola huffs air through her nose. “Mm. Well done.”
“More yellow where the leaves are thinner, though. The trees don’t block out all of the Light.”
She doesn’t suspect anything could. “What of the marsh?”
Another pause while Minfilia examines her view. “The water is dark. Tree roots are poking up from under it. There’s lots of bugs, and when they land on the water, there’s ripples where their feet touch.” Each word she chooses is deliberate, careful, simple for the sake of being understood, for herself to understand. “I think there are more grapes at the base of one of the trees. Should we get more?”
A quirk of Y’shtola’s lips. “Very perceptive, but no. We’ll let those mature a bit longer before we harvest them. If we take them too early, we’ll stunt their growth.”
“Oh.”
They sit in silence then. Y’shtola does not prompt her further, and Minfilia is not wont to speak unless spoken to. There is a sadness in her that was never quite there in the original Minfilia. She is so young, too young for her aether to be so burdened, so quashed. Y’shtola assumes that is the nature of such things born and raised in this suffocated world, for their very being to be infused with cold and unforgiving Light, making them sordid, sad.
She never got a chance to look at the Minfilia of the Source’s aether close enough past her being used as a Vessel for the Mother. In that liminal mirage of a space, everything had been awash with aether that she had not been able to make anything out, barely able to hear the exchanges that were had above the roaring hum of the negative space. Minfilia is gone. The woman she knew and grew up with and blossomed with, together, into their roles as Scions of the Seventh Dawn, saving the realm from the threats of primals that seem so far away now - she is gone. There is a burning in her throat. She is gone, and that fact hits Y’shtola with a force unfounded as she feels her bare back press against the chilled wood of the dock buried in unfamiliar soil on an unfamiliar star. There was not a body for them to bury.
“Do you ever feel her?” she asks. She knows it is not the right question in this moment. The girl is already facing so much pressure from Thancred. She does not need more, but Y’shtola must know. If there is a sliver of the woman she knew in the body of a girl, she must know.
She doesn’t know what she hopes the answer is.
Minfilia pauses before she speaks. The question must be a difficult one. Y’shtola blinks open her eyes, her sight bringing her images of aether once more. Minfilia’s is quivering.
“I apologize. I did not mean to give rise to any doubt.” The words feel wrong in her mouth. She doesn’t know what she hopes the answer is. She doesn’t know.
“No, it’s.” Minfilia takes a breath. “I don’t. But I wish I did. She would—she would have more answers than I do, I think.”
Y’shtola sighs. Her eyes close again, and she lets her sight rest. This is wrong. She knew this was the truth. She has known it since the Antitower. She has had a year to accept it as reality, to push herself through the stages of grief that Thancred seems to live in. She has had a year to fancy herself better than he, more mature, more adult, more willing to accept Minfilia’s decision. Of course she would sacrifice herself to save a star. It wasn’t a surprise. It shouldn’t weigh on anyone this heavily—
But it weighs just enough to lay a pressure on Y’shtola’s throat. She is homesick.
“I’m sorry,” the young Minfilia says meekly, and Y’shtola is snapped from her daze. Not with pointed anger, not with the sadness she feels—but with pity.
“It is quite alright, little one.” It is not. Her friend is gone in a way that cannot be mended, in a way that will not allow her to be granted the right of a funeral. Y’shtola has, thankfully, not lost many people in her life. She has lost her father, a man who was partway to a ghost in the first place, flitting in and out of life as a specter. She has lost passing friends and colleagues in the way you do when you live on a continent wracked by war, when you work in a circle of people dedicated to settling political conflicts and battling phantasmal figures bent on your destruction.
She cannot afford to grieve. She will figure out a way to grieve when she is safely returned to the Source, where she can properly honor her friend’s life. Minfilia will not be put to rest on a star that does not know the person. Y’shtola takes a breath and wills away the traitorous pricking in her eyes. She will not cry.
“Thank you, Minfilia,” she says, and does not know to whom she is speaking.
“For being honest and open with me,” she continues, and finds her answer in this second clause.
Y’shtola’s voice does not waver. She sits up and rises to her feet, offering a hand for Minfilia to take. She does, and they stand together.
-
“Welcome back, Master Matoya!” comes Runar’s voice from the middle of camp when the two of them emerge from the stale, humid air of the cave entrance. She smiles and waves in the direction of his indigo aether. “Good to see you,” he says when she comes closer. “You have someone requesting your presence quite urgently.”
Minfilia’s aether twitches. “My—my father?”
Runar hums an affirmative. “One and the same. He tried to leave your quarters, asking after the both of you, but I told him where you were and managed to convince him to get back into bed for the time being.”
He has no idea how massive a feat he has managed to accomplish. Y’shtola nods. “Thank you, my friend. Come, Ascilia. Let’s check on our friend, shall we?”
It does not take the girl more encouragement than that. She rushes away to Y’shtola’s quarters, and the stoic and collected Master Matoya certainly does not follow her with an excited spring in her step or a fluttering in her heart.
She feels for the door handle leading to her room, which has been unceremoniously thrown open and shut in Minfilia’s childlike haste. What greets her when she steps in is this: Minfilia’s bonfire to Thancred’s cinders, both of them glowing, the way Y’shtola feels when she emerges from the canopy of the Shroud and the sun beams down on her cheeks. She smiles.
“Master Matoya,” comes a dear voice from across the room. She is happy to hear it. “Don’t you look stunning?”
The smile fades from her face. She rolls her eyes as she walks over.
“You’d not be choosing those words as your first to me in almost two summers if you knew the way I slaved over your decaying body, Warburton.”
Thancred looses a dry, one-note laugh. “Don’t even get me started on that one. You are a sick and twisted woman—one whom I have missed dearly, do not mistake me—but I will need to be filled in on that particular choice.”
“A simple matter of utility in an inconvenient scenario. More importantly, and more pressing,” Y’shtola grabs a chair from against the wall, the same chair she spent bells upon bells hunched over in just a few cycles ago, “how are you feeling?”
“Like I was ripped open by a sineater, but all that seems to be behind me, isn’t it?”
Y’shtola examines his threadbare aether once more. She could hold the entirety of his aether in one of her fists and she chooses not to think about this more than is strictly necessary. It is agitated, certainly, the strings buzzing with unwanted and unwelcome residual Light energy, but it is whole, and decidedly not at risk of becoming corrupted.
When she centers herself back into the room, Minfilia has moved to sit on the edge of the bed, her energy gesticulating around as she tells Thancred about the past few days she has spent in Slitherbough.
“They have taken such good care of us, Thancred,” she says, a smile evident in her voice. Y’shtola feels another bloom in her chest. Of course we have. Quieter, then: “I was so worried about you. You stopped talking to me, and I couldn’t find Miss Y’shtola—”
Thancred cuts in, his voice sharp to match, but his words are not. “I know. I—I’m sorry, Minfilia.”
He owes her a great deal more of apologies and platitudes. His hesitancy before the one apology he can manage to find in this moment betrays the way he is unsure of how to speak to her, and truthfully, Y’shtola cannot blame him—she did not know how to speak to her, either, but it only took a matter of days before she was able to compartmentalize her feelings about the girl’s namesake relative to the girl herself. Thancred is skilled in compartmentalizing. He should be more adept at this.
She sighs and shakes her head against these thoughts, instead choosing to rise to her feet and go to her shelves, feeling for a jar of salve. “This will help with the wound, to keep it from infecting or from scarring,” she says, handing it out for Thancred to take when she finds it. His hand lingers when he grabs it, and Y’shtola cannot help it. She is angry with him. She is disappointed in him. She understands him. She wants him gone—she wants him to stay.
She squeezes his hand, and he takes the medicine.
Y’shtola monitors him for one further day after he wakes up. Thancred is still sore, her lack of true healing magic betraying him, but the practical medicine of Slitherbough does him favors as he regains his strength and his aether stabilizes. Minfilia shows him around the bough, introduces him to Runar and Ovelin and Ersabel and Alsa and all of the residents who have welcomed her with open arms.
At dinnertime the night before the two of them are slated to leave the following morning, Thancred takes a seat next to Y’shtola, the first time the two of them have had a moment to themselves since he regained consciousness. Between Mifilia’s rapid-fire tour, regular duties for Master Matoya, and Thancred finding small tasks to help with in the settlement to stretch out his sore muscles, the thing that finally gets the two of them together is a bowl of warm soup that Minfilia has helped prepare and serve.
“She has certainly found a comfortable place here,” Thancred muses around his first bite of soup. Y’shtola follows after him. It is delicious and hearty, as it always is, full of fresh herbs and gamey prey. Her canines rip into the meat.
“Twelve knows she has not found a comfortable place anywhere else.”
A beat passes. Y’shtola feels him stiffen next to her. She takes another bite of her soup while he thinks of a way to respond, and Thancred, eloquently, lands on, “Excuse me?”
She knows she has hit a nerve. Another bite. “I don’t wish to argue with you, Thancred—” —she is not sure if this is the truth— “—not after I spent every onze of my energy stitching your spirit back together, but whatever thoughts and emotions you are feeding into that girl are—”
“That girl,” he bites back, loud, but his next words are quieter in a rare show of restraint. “Has a part of my sister in her. A part I never got to properly say goodbye to. A part that can live.”
“She is living, if you’ve forgotten that tidbit in your insistence to shut her out unless it is convenient for you.”
“Do you not grieve her, Y’shtola?”
It is Y’shtola’s turn to stiffen.
She all but drops her bowl of soup on the ground and it takes every modicum of her composure to stand up, grab Thancred by the arm, and lead him away in a manner that does not betray her true emotions. She is certain eyes landed on them and perhaps lingered there, crows searching for stray carrion. She is certain Minfilia has taken notice.
She keeps herself schooled until they are just outside of the settlement, tucked away into one of the snaking caves that lead out into the Greatwood, a liminal space between safety and savagery. She has half a mind to toss Thancred out to the latter.
“Have you lost your godsdamned mind?” she spits in his face, her voice more hiss than word. Her hand fists in his jacket where she can find it. She hates that she thinks to mind his wound. Soft, soft, soft. “It is one thing for you to doubt whether I grieve a woman whom I cherished just as much as you, but to come into the place where I have made my sole refuge and to speak my name—“
“Oh, the names. Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you chose to tell your people my name was. Do you think that was funny? Clever? A little nod to my dead sister and her dead father?”
“Oh, my sincerest apologies, I should have given you the chance to choose your own moniker, had you not been quite indisposed.”
“Forgive me for thinking a dear friend would have chosen something less tactless than the man whose death I was responsible for.”
Y’shtola releases her grip on him. “Please. I will not coddle you for something Minfilia never once faulted you for. Your guilt is your own.”
A rustle. A sigh. Thancred had a habit of running his hands over his face. She remembers nights spent in the Leveilleur manor, laying on the floor, their books spread out before them, aetheric theorems hanging in the air that explained earthly phenomena and told her that the spell she cast in the Ul’Dahn sewers was simply not a possibility. He had run his hands through his hair, over his face, as she and Urianger and Papalymo sat with him and explained it again and again until something clicked in his mind and his brain would, seemingly, decide he understood it sufficiently to continue living among high academia.
Y’shtola rubs her unseeing eyes with her forefinger and her thumb. She has a headache.
“Thancred,” she breathes. He does not respond, but she knows he is there. “Listen to me.”
“I’m listening, Shtola.”
The dropped consonant is a dagger in her chest. It rings with intention as it plunges into her ribs. The fire of her anger still blazes, as she expects Thancred’s is, but in the beats of silence it has smoldered to something more resembling the campfire they were sitting next to just moments ago. She will not coddle him, this is true. She will perhaps never forgive him for the way this teenaged girl views the world around her after spending moons in his near-exclusive presence. She cannot say she ever pegged him as an apt father figure.
All of this is true, but it does not change the reality of the situation, and the reality of the situation is thus: Thancred is her friend. One of the very few people she knows she can trust on this unknown star. She has watched him for seasons upon seasons bury himself underneath the weight of a grief that is both his and not, and she will not let him bury a young life under it with him and turn the grief into more and more guilt that may simply kill them both.
“If you have any more barbs to throw my way, I am still all ears,” Thancred’s voice is quiet and its echoes in the narrow tunnel are quieter. Y’shtola has lost herself in thought. “‘Tis impolite to leave a lady in the middle of a conversation.”
Y’shtola snorts. “As if propriety has ever stopped you.”
“It is one of my smaller obstacles, I will admit.”
She wants to tell him. She wants to look him in his mismatched eyes and tell him that he is killing this little girl who wants to love him so much. Y’shtola saw it in her aether in Fort Gohn, and again when he awoke days later. She wants to tell him… what?
“I don’t want to argue with you,” she says again, and she is sure it is the truth this time. “When the two of you leave Slitherbough, all I ask is that you keep yourself safe, you keep her safe, and you think damn well hard about how you feel about her.”
“Shtola…”
“Not Minfilia. Her. The girl you’ve made yourself in charge of.” She takes a breath. Thancred is threads before her, each of them buzzing with anticipation, a need to run, but true to his word, he listens. She works to keep her words even, quiet. “That’s all I ask. That you give it some serious, honest thought.”
The weight of their friendship hangs above them, Y’shtola swears. She is ready to hold it up, a great burden settled on her shoulders.
Thancred does not let her bear it alone.
“I will,” he says, and Y’shtola nods. A pact between them, signed and sealed in the silence of shadows. She will hold him to it, and she tells him as much.
“Even though,” she lets her lips quirk with this, her tail flicking playfully, “I am aware serious, honest thought has never been your strongest skill.”
Thancred pushes a huff of air through his nose. She feels a hand land on her shoulder and squeeze it. She cannot help it—she leans into the touch and is rewarded by being pulled into his side. “Bitch,” he mutters into her ear.
“Whore,” she mutters into his, jabbing a sharp finger into his ribs. He yelps and tries to pull away, but Y’shtola snags one of her arms around his waist, keeping him steady. Thancred’s other arm comes up around her shoulders, and she is encircled in a proper embrace, one that only lasts for a breath.
Before they pull away from each other, she hears Thancred murmur again: a quiet “I missed you.”
She hums and pats his back once, stepping back. “Come on, now. We’ve drawn enough attention to ourselves. You should rest up before your big departure tomorrow.”
“Kicking me out?”
“Hardly. You’ve been ready to leave since the moment you came to.”
“Am I that easy to read?”
“For me, Thancred,” she flicks her tail and lets the tip of it brush against his leg. “Yes. Indeed you are.”
-
She sees them off at the start of the next approximation of a day.
They have rested, they have been fed, they have been healed. Y’shtola has made sure of this as best she can. The Night’s Blessed have made sure of this the best they can, and she is eternally grateful to them for it.
“I suppose this will be goodbye, then, Master Matoya,” Thancred muses as they reach the mouth of the cave, the Greatwood open and willing before them.
She does not know where they will go. She does not know if they will see each other again. “Goodbye for now,” she emphasizes, extending a cordial hand for Thancred to shake. He does, and when he squeezes it, tighter than need be, Y’shtola mirrors the gesture. “Should you ever find yourselves back in the Greatwood—hopefully for better reasons than what brought you here—the Night’s Blessed will welcome you back.”
“We appreciate it.” His voice is stone. Sturdy and true. He means what he says. He lets go of her, and Y’shtola lets her hand fall.
She then takes a step to the side and kneels on the hard-packed path before Minfilia. There is so much she wants to say to her, so many questions she needs answered. So many things about this world that she needs to learn, but Minfilia must discover them, as well.
“Ascilia,” she says and reaches for her hand. Minfilia meets her and clasps her small, cold fingers around her gloves. So many things she needs to ask but she expects to find no answers this day. It is something she is learning to live with. “Remember my request, would you? The trees.”
Minfilia’s aether, as ever it has when something is requested of her, brightens. Again it is like looking into the sun. This close, Y’shtola cannot look at her directly and she is ashamed of this. She quiets her eyes. She squeezes the girl’s hand.
“I will, Master Matoya,” she says in that voice that is scared to be any louder than it is, and Y’shtola is taken by surprise when two thin arms take her around her shoulders. She is not granted the opportunity to relax her stiffened tail or remember what to do with her hands before the embrace comes to an end, and Y’shtola hears the scuff of her sandals against the dirt as she steps back. “Thank you very much for having us. For saving… for saving my father.”
“Aye,” Thancred chimes in again. “I find myself in your debt.”
Y’shtola pushes a laugh from her lungs, and herself to her feet. “T’would not be the first time,” she murmurs just loud enough for him to hear. She does not need to see him to sense an eyeroll. “You can repay your debt by keeping yourself and your daughter safe.”
“I will do my best.”
Y’shtola hums her acceptance. She stares at where she knows Thancred is. Do not make this the place where we die, she thinks. Do not let this be the last time I know your presence. Do not lose yourself on an unfamiliar star before I have had a chance to truly decode it.
She says none of this, and instead turns her back to them.
“Safe travels!” she blesses them and waves over her shoulder when she hears Minfilia’s echoing farewell.
Y’shtola hopes, somewhere, there is a Mother taking care of her.
She shakes off the thought, for she is not sure which is the better answer. She turns her sight back on—the ambient purple glow of the cave entrance into Slitherbough welcomes her back into its hold.
She has work to do.