Travelling Northwards

	Kyria lay down on her side and started unrolling her blankets.  “I didn’t know they had names.”

	“We all did.  Ryaire gave me mine.  My birth name was to be…” Cavria hesitated.  “I only remembered partway through my training.  I shouldn’t speak it aloud.”

	“Names have power, I know,” Kyria said uncomfortably.  She finished unrolling her things and started climbing in.  She shucked her shirt and curled up under the blankets, then propped her head up on one arm and looked at her friend.  “So… you’re sleeping better?”

	“Much.  Thanks.  I feel like a new woman,” Cavria said.  She tapped her horns.  “I mean, now people are giving me a bit of shit for these, but I’ll be fine.  How’re you doing?  You feeling better?”

	“Yeah.  Good as new.”  Kyria closed her eyes and settled her head down on blanket.  “Sleep tight.”


	Axio had finally learned how to sleep with his wings.  He could flex them to cross in front of his body, moreso than a bird could, or fold them tight across his back, but those ways made him cramp.  If he slept on his side, with something supporting his head, however, he could fold his upper wing over himself like a blanket, and then tuck a real blanket under his arm, and he would be perfectly comfortable.  The light didn’t bother him – indeed, he seemed to be able to tune it out.  Others reported seeing it, even when he wasn’t consciously aware of it, though, and so he had taken to sleeping by himself, far from the rest of the convoy.

	That was alright, though.  Vivid dreams of disaster still troubled his mind.  More than once, he had woken up sweating and shaking, as visions of explosions, collapses, murders, and more had filled his mind’s eye.  Other times, he had seen visions, sometimes quite detailed, of Ryaire and her angels, giving him advice, or even the endless fields of holy-water-dewed grass at the foot of Mount Celestia.  That was quite alright.

	He could still will her to bring his conscious mind to her Arbor in his sleep, but he knew not to unless it was an emergency.  As it was, he tolerated the nightmares.  He knew they could be prophetic, and he wanted to face them head-on.

	He never dreamed of his own death.  That was foretold already.  The Oracular Cleric he had consulted before the campaign against the Baneites had made it very clear how he would die, and none of his visions resembled that death.

	As Kyria and Cavria were holding their own discussion of devils and sleep, Axio was sitting back against the bole of a tree, listening to others in the camp going about their business.  He couldn’t sleep.  For some reason, he was in that twilight realm of being too tired to rest.  With a sigh, he hauled himself to his feet.  He walked off into the woods, noting the location of the camp and the moon, in case he had to navigate himself back.

	His golden glow faded from the edge of the camp as he wandered.  He had simple travel boots on, not his armored plate boots, and the pads from his armor on his chest.  His traveling trousers blended in with the brown and grey trunks of the trees around him, cast in shades of glorious gold from his divine wings.

	As he walked, passing life stilled.  Squirrels and birds looked down at him from branches.  A deer raised its head and stared.  They couldn’t make heads or tails of him, which seemed to be a fairly common thing amongst normal people, too.

	Axio felt irritation tug at his sleepy mind.  People had always been intimidated by his size, his obvious divinity, and his strength.  Now they were intimidated by his divine aura, his wings… it seemed every step he took towards his status as an Exarch was accompanied by another step away from the normal people he wanted to be with.

	It wasn’t fair.  He stopped and ground his hands into his eyes.  It simply wasn’t fair.  He loved Ryaire, and he would sacrifice his soul in an instant to spare the innocents in her charge from further suffering… but that sacrifice was supposed to be a blade in the heart, a magic spell to the head, a battle.  Not day-to-day fear.  He had always had empathy for people, a big heart as Cavria put it.  It HURT, every day, when people who didn’t know him were scared away by his appearance.  If he had been as such since birth, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but like this…

	“Hey, angel,” a voice said from behind him.  Axio jumped a handspan.  Kyria was standing there, looking at him with worry on her youthful face.

	“Oh!  Kyria, you scared the hells out of me,” Axio said, putting a hand over his heart.  “What are you doing here?”

	“I could ask you the same thing,” the dark elf said.  She crossed her arms and looked up at him, concerned.  “Are you okay?  You just stormed off.  I came out here because I thought you were sick or something.”

	“I… I don’t know,” Axio muttered.  He had known Kyria for years, but he wasn’t as close to her as he was to Luanea and Verashon.  “I’m sick of scaring people.  The wings, you know.  People in the camp are scared of me.  The bandits, too, they ran.”  He kicked a pebble off into the darkness.  “I like stopping fights, but I… I don’t like the TERROR in their eyes.”  He looked down.  “I don’t like how people think I’ve come for their souls when they see me angry.”

	Kyria was quiet.  When he looked back up, she was slowly rubbing her hands together.  “I mean… you don’t have to feel bad over it,” she said awkwardly, as if she was sizing up the words.  “We love you.”

	He crossed the gap and spread his wings wide, embracing her with them.  She flinched, and he pointed down at her with one finger.  “Right there.  You were genuinely scared,” he said.  “You thought I was going to hurt you.”

	Kyria looked up at him, shaken.  She stepped back.  “I see your point,” she said.  “Can I help?”

	Axio stepped back and closed his wings again.  The glow in the woods faded a bit.  “No.  Thanks.  I just need to get used to it,” he said reluctantly.  “I’ll get stranger as it goes on.  Worse.”

	“I mean… I’m not the most sensitive person in the world, but… my bedside’s open, if you’re tired of being alone,” Kyria said.

	Axio made a face.  Kyria was certainly very pretty, but she knew he didn’t think much of her sleeping around.  “Thanks,” he said instead.  “I think I just need to be by myself for a while.”

	Kyria shrugged.  “Up to you.”  She turned away.  “I’ll see you in camp.”


	The road dragged on, on, on.  As the convoy marched, picking up carts and riders as they approached civilization, the days grew longer and longer.  They were in the start of hot summer now, and if they had been farther south, closer to the equator, it would have been unbearable.  As it was, the weather just manifested as bright, long, sunny days, and breezes that ruffled hair and feathers.

	Axio’s nightmares and Cavria’s lack thereof continued, which made for a strange contrast between them, though Axio managed to keep his temper from flaring up again.  The rest of the party looked on in concern, but knew he would come to face it as he always did: by himself, or with Ryaire.


	One quiet night, Cavria slumped back against the bole of the handy maple tree at the back of their campsite.  “Well... I said I wanted to talk, I guess,” she said wearily.

	Luanea sat across from her with legs crossed, dressed in a more reserved version of her usual priestess' garb, which Cavria appreciated.  “Then let us do so,” she said.

	Cavria blew out a breath.  “So, have I actually told you the full story of my unfortunate creation?”

	“No.”

	“Then you should know,” Cavria began.  For the next ten minutes, the moon crept by overhead, and the smell of the smoke and food from the main camp faded away.

	When she was done, she hung her head.  “Now this horn mutation,” she muttered.  “I feel like I’m slipping away.”

	Luanea nodded slowly.  “I admire you, Cavria.”

	“Why?”

	“Because within your drive to survive, which all creatures have, you found a further drive to become more than you were, and to triumph over a needlessly hard life,” she said.

	“Three years in heaven was pretty much the opposite of a needlessly hard life,” Cavria said modestly, but Luanea shook her head.

	“No, not quite,” the priestess said.  “After all, you knew you would have to leave eventually.”

	Cavria winced.  “Well… no, technically, I didn’t.  I could have stayed forever, if I wanted to.  Ryaire didn’t really push me into leaving.”

	“But you did it by choice.  It took effort.  You made the effort.  That makes it more meaningful.”

	Cavria nodded.  “Thank you.”

	Luanea sat up against the tree’s side.  “As for your concerns about yourself, I respect that you’re worried, but I think you’re selling yourself short.  Lady Eilistraee has shown us that the body is not a tool to which we are tasked and chained.”

	“I’m not a mortal, though.”

	“Neither were we, once,” Lueanea said.  “And you have already shown the willpower needed to resist the pull of your flesh.”

	Cavria blew out a frustrated breath.  “I just… it wells up sometimes.  When we’re fighting.  When I think about sex.  When I get really angry or scared.”

	“That’s perfectly normal, Cavria.  That’s not a High Succubus thing, that’s an everybody thing,” Luanea said.  “But you have an advantage most don’t.  You can call on Ryaire for aid, and your own training.”

	“Yeah.”  Cavria rubbed her eyes.  “But… like in the bathhouse, sometimes it’s all I can see.  It’s all I can think about.”

	Luanea waited for her to re-compose herself.  “That is the way some people feel after a great trauma, it’s true.  There’s no magic spell.  For what it’s worth, I think I can help you control the pain, but only time can heal your mental scarring.”

	Cavria drew her knees up to her chest.  “I guess so.”

	Luanea shifted tack.  “What exactly do you see in these visions?”