Corvis Vritra
The rough-hewn wood of my makeshift cane felt like a splintered bone in my grip, a stark reminder of how swiftly our circumstances could deteriorate.
My new cane... not even half an hour old, and it was already webbed with hairline fractures from channeling the violent resonance of Accaron against the millipede's armor.
I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Caera at the precipice of the chasm the monstrous insect had torn into the world, a gaping maw exhaling air that was cold, damp and heavy like loam and rust.
"Can you make some light?" I asked, my voice echoing faintly in the unsettling quiet of the tunnel entrance.
Caera nodded, her expression set in lines of fierce concentration. She extended a hand, palm up. For a moment, nothing. Then, a spark.
A flame blossomed above her palm a perfect, stylized teardrop of fire, its edges clean and steady, hovering silently. It cast a warm, golden glow that pushed back the absolute black, illuminating the terrifying scale of the tunnel—easily large enough to accommodate three carriages abreast, its walls scarred with deep, parallel grooves from the millipede's passage.
"Here," she said, her voice hushed with something between trepidation and awe. She stared at the floating flame, her crimson eyes reflecting its perfect, unwavering light. "I... am making progress. It's... genuinely frightening."
"Let's just hope the Relictombs don't suddenly decide to increase the difficulty now that we're voluntarily walking into the beast's larder," I muttered.
Pessimism was my armor, my strategic default. Assuming the worst-case scenario was the only way to be prepared for it.
"You are really a ray of sunshine, man," Leon whined, his spectral form materializing cross-legged on the tunnel floor just ahead. He shook his head, the gesture exaggerated. "What does it cost to be a little optimistic? A smile? A cheerful whistle?"
Everything, I shot back, the thought a dark, cold bullet. Optimism is a distraction. It wasn't that I enjoyed the gloom; it was that the weight of Caera's life, the fate of two continents, the ghost of a brother I'd failed and even the ghost of a Dad I knew only an imitation of felt too heavy to carry with anything but brutal, unvarnished realism.
I needed to see every pitfall, every trap, every variable, if I had any hope of getting her out alive and finding my way back to the ashes I called home.
The tunnel was a monument to the millipede's raw, earth-shattering power. It stretched into a profound darkness that Caera's perfect flame could only partially pierce. The path was labyrinthine, branching and twisting, a subterranean nightmare carved by a mindless, or perhaps not so mindless, instinct.
The air grew thicker, harder to breathe, not with dust, but with something else. A pressure. A resonance.
It must have been aether. I could feel it, a humming presence deep in the stone, a current running beneath the world of mana.
It was a sensation like a phantom limb—I knew it was there, could almost sense its shape and flow, but I couldn't see it, couldn't grasp it.
The choice came suddenly: a fork in the tunnel, two identical, gaping black mouths leading into deeper darkness.
"A bifurcation," Caera murmured, her flame bobbing slightly as she turned to me. "Where to?" Her expectant look was underscored by a attempt to lighten the crushing tension. "Is there some grand secret waiting down one of these?"
"Apart from the lair of a regenerating, intelligent, and rightfully pissed-off millipede? Nothing of note," I said, the lie tasting bitter.
I consciously omitted the other possibility, the one that curdled my blood: the potential of finding a discarded white dagger, a few scraps of cloth, the sad, final remnants of Sevren Denoir.
"I wouldn't like to find ourselves in a deadly situation because you chose to keep a 'nothing of note' to yourself," Caera said, her voice losing its lightness, becoming serious, intent.
"The Legacy frightens me, Corvis. A lot. It feels like... like a tidal wave inside my chest, and I'm just a sandcastle on the shore. If it's the same for your Meta-awareness... just know that you can trust me."
The question struck a chord so deep it vibrated in my bones. Did Meta-awareness frighten me? It wasn't the power itself of course, but it was what it fueled it. The knowledge. The unbearable weight of knowing paths taken and not taken, of lives lost in narratives that were now unraveling.
It was the terrifying responsibility of being the Thwart, the aspect of Fate meant to "manually assist" a Grand Design I couldn't fully perceive.
It was the constant, chilling fear that I was still that weak, pathetic and useless Corvis Eralith, just wearing a mask of competence woven from stolen memories and desperate lies. Yes. I have always been afraid.
"It's hard to lie to the people you care about, isn't it, Corvis?" Leon's voice was uncharacteristically quiet, devoid of mocking judgment. So different from dearest brother Romulos' cold, analytical assessments. "Or maybe you're just an honest person at heart. Being a Vritra doesn't really suit—"
Don't question who I am anymore, lesser, I retorted, the thought a whip-crack of cold fury. I am a Vritra. The denial was instant, visceral. I shook my head, as if to dislodge the thought.
This wasn't about lineage. This was about me, about my own pathetic inability to face the truth, to divert my own thoughts with cheap deflection. Pathetic.
"The nest," I forced out, my voice tighter than I intended. "The millipede has been here for centuries, maybe millennia. It collects things from its prey. Weapons, artifacts... remains."
I reached inward, activating Beyond the Meta. The world dissolved into the familiar greyscale panorama of mana flow. I could see the currents of energy in the air, the latent power in the stone, the brilliant, controlled furnace of Caera's core, the swirling, infinite potential of the Legacy around her.
It was like observing someone with an inheritance greater than the world itself.
"Caera," I said, an idea forming, born of desperation and theoretical magic. "I need you to try something. Gather the ambient mana around us. As much as you can, without pulling it into your core."
Through Beyond the Meta, I watched as motes of mana, previously drifting lazily, were drawn inward as if by a powerful tide. They coalesced around us, forming a thick, shimmering cloud of potential energy, dense and brilliant.
Mana, at its fundamental level, was like a manifestation of aether, a secondary energy. It was attracted to it, shaped by it. And with such a dense concentration acting like a sensor net...
There. A flicker. Almost imperceptible. A subtle, directional lean in the gathered mana cloud, a slight distortion in the greyscale currents, pulling towards the left-hand tunnel. It was like seeing the wake of an invisible ship. The aether was stronger down that path.
"Follow me," I said, my voice firm with newfound certainty. "I know the way."
"How?" Caera asked, letting the gathered mana dissipate, her flame bobbing as we moved into the left tunnel.
I explained the principle quickly, the interaction between mana and aether, using the Legacy as a catalyst to make the invisible current visible to my unique sight.
"Sevren would have loved to hear about this," Caera said softly, and the mix of nostalgia and acute worry in her voice was a knife to my gut. Please, I begged any power that might be listening, let him be alive.
But the cold, logical part of me, the part that had read the story, whispered the grim statistics. How long could anyone, even someone as resourceful or experienced as Sevren was said to be, survive alone in the Relictombs?
We delved deeper, the silence broken only by our footsteps and the quiet hum of Caera's flame. Then, the tunnel began to change. Crystalline structures, faintly luminescent, began to stud the walls, pulsing with a soft, internal light.
They started as small nodules, but grew larger and more frequent the further we went, until the walls themselves seemed woven from geometric, glowing honeycombs.
"Are these... crystals?" Caera asked, reaching out but not touching one.
"Yes. They're... aetheric condensate, more or less. Waste products from the millipede's digestion," I explained.
My morbid train of thought was severed by a sound that ripped through the subterranean silence—a shrill, piercing shriek of pure rage and pain. It was the millipede.
"We've found it!" Caera hissed, her body tensing. We broke into a run, our senses screaming. Caera extinguished her flame; the crystalline walls now provided enough of their own eerie, pulsating glow to see by.
The tunnel opened into a vast, cavernous space—the nest.
It was a grotesque gallery. The walls were encrusted with the glowing aether crystals, illuminating a hoard of nightmarish proportions. Shattered weapons from a dozen eras of Ascenders, scraps of armor, bones picked clean, and the unrecognizable remnants of countless victims were piled high.
And in the center of this charnel house, coiled upon itself, was the millipede. The wound on its flank was still visible, a blackened, smoldering crater weeping clear fluid, but even as we watched, the edges of the chitin seemed to be knitting back together with terrifying speed, aided by the dense aether saturating the chamber.
It saw us. Those lamp-like eyes fixed on us, and they held not just animal rage, but a chilling, calculating intelligence. It reared its head and slammed its tail against the cavern wall with terrifying force.
CRACK-BOOM.
The ceiling above the tunnel entrance we'd just emerged from shuddered. A rain of debris and dust cascaded down.
"Caera! Use earth magic! Copy me!" I shouted, the plan forming in a split second. Thank Fate I was a tri-elemental mage.
I stomped my foot, sending a pulse of vibration through the ground, sensing its structure, its weaknesses. Then, I poured my mana into the earth, visualizing a shield, a dome. The ground in front of us erupted, a thick wall of stone and soil curving over our heads just as a massive slab of the ceiling crashed down onto it with a sound of finality.
"This thing is intelligent?!" Caera gasped, her voice echoing in the sudden, dusty darkness, our only light now the faint glow from the crystals in the walls. "It's trying to bury us alive!"
Yes. The realization was a cold shock. Arthur had fought a beast, a mindless force of nature. The Relictombs had adapted. For him, a physical challenge.
For us, a party consisting of a knowledge-hoarder with a new white core and the Legacy herself? It was challenging our minds, our adaptability.
"More intelligent than expected," I confirmed, my mind racing. "Simple force won't work. It won't fall for the same trick twice."
"What are you thinking?" Caera asked, her voice steady despite the circumstances.
"It's still injured," I said, thinking aloud. "The wound is its vulnerability. We need to exploit it, but we can't reach it. It controls the battlefield." Then, the idea came, absurd and brilliant. "We do the millipede's own game. We become burrowers."
"Huh?" Caera's confusion was palpable.
"In Dicathen," I explained, the words coming in a rush, "earth mages are used for more than battle. Mining tunnels, infrastructure... even the foundations for the mana-rail galleries—" I cut myself off before mentioning the projects I'd spearheaded as Prince Corvis what felt a lifetime ago.
"The principle is the same. We don't go over or around the debris. We go through it. A surgical strike, straight to its injured flank."
I could almost feel the gears turning in Caera's head in the darkness. There was a moment of silence, then a sharp, decisive breath. "Got it."
And without another word, we got to work. I took the lead, using Accaron to precisely fracture the compacted debris, turning solid rock into manageable rubble. Caera watched for a moment, then her hands came up.
Stone flowed like water around her, parting to create a narrow, perfectly round tunnel boring straight through the collapse towards where I calculated the millipede's wounded side would be. It was inefficient compared to a trained earth mage's techniques, wasting immense amounts of mana, but it was staggeringly fast.
We moved through the stone, a pair of moles armed with terrible purpose. The only sounds were the grind of rock, our ragged breaths, and the occasional enraged shriek of the millipede from the other side of the debris, followed by another impact as it tried to crush our makeshift tomb further.
It knew we were coming. It was trying to adjust, to counter our move: like playing whack-a-mole, only that me and Caera were the moles.
I pressed my palm flat against the cold, vibrating wall of our earthen prison, closing my eyes. Earth magic wasn't my strongest affinity, but a white core provided raw power, and Meta-awareness provided the finesse.
I extended my senses outwards, feeling the minute tremors through the stone, reading the symphony of shifting rock. The millipede was probing, testing, searching for weaknesses. Its movements were calculated, efficient.
"Caera, to your right!" I barked, the words muffled by the dust. "Three meters out, it's shifting its weight for another strike!"
Without hesitation, Caera mirrored my pose, her hand slamming against the indicated spot. The earth there flowed, opening a perfect, circular viewing port just as the millipede's colossal, bladed pincer scythed out of the dust cloud outside.
It scraped against our dome with a sound that set my teeth on edge, sparks flying where chitin met hardened stone. The impact shuddered through the structure, raining more dirt on our heads.
"Corvis, this isn't working!" Caera's voice was strained, a rare edge of desperation cutting through her usual composure. "It's playing with us! We're rats in a barrel!"
Whack-a-mole was a losing strategy. My mind raced, sifting through the archives of knowledge, both mine and Romulos'. Arthur had won with Destruction, a power born of aether itself, the fundamental force of unraveling.
I had a white core. I had intricate spellforms. I had knowledge that could rewrite magical theory. But against this… it felt academic. Useless.
Not even an Asuran mind is enough. You are still just Corvis Eralith, pretending.
"I have an idea," Caera said suddenly, her voice cutting through my spiraling thoughts. She'd been watching me, seen the paralysis born of over-analysis.
"I'll fight it melee. It's still my specialty." Her crimson eyes gleamed in the dim light, not with recklessness, but with a sharp, rediscovered certainty.
I'd been so fixated on the Legacy's limitless potential, on grand, arcane solutions, that I'd forgotten the core of who Caera Denoir was: an Ascender, a Striker by Alacryan standards, a warrior who moved like lightning and struck with lethal precision.
You could say that the Legacy was a new instrument, but the musician remained the same.
"But the sword I made—" I began, the protest dying in my throat.
Caera cut me off. Her hand extended, fingers curling as if around a familiar hilt. From her palm, darkness coalesced. A longsword of pure, absolute blackness, wreathed in the faint, light-devouring aura of Soulfire, materialized in her grip.
"You're not the only one with surprises, Mr. Vritra," she said, a fierce, wild smirk gracing her lips. It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I'd ever seen.
The air in our dome suddenly quaked, a deep, visceral tremor that came from beneath us. Through Beyond the Meta, my Foresight screamed a warning a split second before the feeling registered.
"Caera, shatter the dome! Now!" I roared, abandoning all subtlety. I slammed my right fist into the wall, channeling a raw, unfocused burst of Accaron.
Cracks spiderwebbed across our ceiling. Caera didn't need telling twice. She reversed her grip on the Soulfire blade and drove it point-first into the ground at her feet.
The dome disintegrated into fine, grey ash.
We exploded from the crumbling shelter. I kicked off with a surge of mana, propelling myself upwards into the cavern's vaulted ceiling, hovering precariously.
Caera dropped into a low, ready crouch on the now-exposed ground. Below her, the floor bulged, then erupted.
The millipede's head surged upwards, its circular maw, lined with ring upon ring of razor-sharp teeth, gaping wide enough to swallow a carriage. Acidic drool sizzled on the stone. Its lamp-like eyes fixed on me, the easier, hovering target.
I played the bait, staying still, shielding my face from the acidic spray, feeling the heat of its breath, the sheer, monstrous presence of it. The stench was overwhelming—acid, burnt chitin, and a foul, organic rot.
For a heart-stopping second, I was a child again, small and helpless before an impossible threat.
It was the opening Caera needed.
She moved. The Soulfire sword in her hands was a tool of absolute severance.
As the millipede's head lunged for me, she brought the black blade down in a perfect, vertical arc on the smoldering, still-knitting wound we'd created earlier.
There was no shriek of pain, only a deep, subsonic thrum of severance as the Soulfire edge met the dense aetheric flesh.
The millipede's forward momentum continued for a horrifying second, its head surging past me, its body following… but now cleanly divided into two separate, twitching halves.
The two sections crashed to the ground with a impact that shook the entire cavern, sending new showers of dust and crystal fragments raining down.
I landed softly beside Caera, my boots crunching on the debris. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the final, spasmodic twitches of the colossal creature.
"This… wasn't my plan at all," Caera breathed, the Soulfire sword dissipating from her hand like smoke. "I didn't think… I didn't even know it was right below us."
"We managed to get out of this anyway," I said, the adrenaline still singing in my veins. A strange, buoyant feeling rose in my chest, pushing back the ever-present dread.
"We are a good team, don't you think?" I said. Such a feeling of synergy... it's one I felt only with the most important person in my life—Tessia—and with my best friend, the person I was meant to exist for—Grey—and my dearest, my other self—Romulos.
A genuine, relieved smile touched her lips, the first unguarded one I'd seen. She met my fist with her own, a solid, affirming knock. "We are."
"What a beautiful thing love is," Leon sighed, his spectral form materializing, dabbing theatrically at a non-existent tear under his eye. "The trust! The synergy! It gets me right here."
You can cry? I asked, utterly dumbfounded by the display.
"Did my—our—previous iteration never cry while with you?" Leon asked, his tone shifting, becoming oddly serious.
What? Romulos crying? No, never. The denial was instant, defensive. He wasn't weak, unlike me. Romulos was a monolith. A bastion of cold, unwavering strength.
Tears were a foreign concept, a human frailty he'd long since transcended. Leon fell silent, but I felt his disapproval, a silent judgment I chose to ignore. I would not have his memory tarnished.
"You said the millipede kept items, no?" Caera said, her voice pulling me back. She was brushing dust from her clothes, her gaze already scanning the cavern, the Ascender's instinct for loot reasserting itself. "It's time for our well-earned reward."
"You sound rather happy about it," I pointed out, a wry note in my voice.
"I am still an Ascender," she said, and the pride in her voice was a solid, tangible thing.
"While everything we find is technically property of the High Sovereign," she added with a dismissive wave, the title of Da—Agrona carrying no heat, just a simple statement of a corrupt fact, "I still like the act of looting."
"Let's go," I said, pushing the grim possibility of Sevren's final remains from the forefront of my mind. Perhaps Fate would grant her this one mercy.
We picked our way through the aftermath of the battle, the scale of the nest now fully visible in the eerie crystal light. It was a vast, round chamber, the floor dipping into a massive, basin-like depression lined with smooth, worn stone—the millipede's bed.
And there, nestled within it, were four large, pulsating spheres, each the size of a small hut, with shells of a deep, bloody crimson.
"What are those?" Caera asked, her curiosity piqued as we descended the sloping side of the basin.
"Eggs," I said, the word flat and final. Without ceremony, I raised my cracked cane.
I focused a narrow, intense beam of Accaron, not on the shell, but on the fluid within. The vibrations traveled through the tough exterior and churned the contents into a lethal froth. One by one, the crimson spheres stilled, their internal light dying.
While I worked, Caera explored the periphery, her eyes scanning the grotesque displays.
"I guess these crystals are really… the millipede's excrements," Caera murmured, her nose wrinkling in disgust as she examined a crystal-encrusted helmet.
Then she stopped. Her entire body went rigid. Her breath hitched.
Oh, no. The memory I'd suppressed slammed back into me with the force of a physical blow. Sevren.
I moved to her side, my own heart hammering against my ribs. She was staring, unblinking, at a specific man-sized crystal. Inside, preserved with macabre perfection, was a teal cloak, its fabric still vibrant, trimmed with white fur that looked impossibly soft.
And beside it, a dagger. The bone was pale, expertly carved, its hilt wrapped in dark leather.
"Caera?" I ventured, my voice barely a whisper.
She didn't seem to hear me. Her hand came up, trembling slightly. She touched the crystal's surface, and where her fingers met the glowing mineral, it turned grey and crumbled to dust without a sound.
She reached into the cavity she'd created and carefully, reverently, lifted out the cloak and the dagger. She held them as if they were made of glass, her knuckles white.
"Caera?" I asked again, feeling utterly, completely useless. What could I possibly say? What comfort could I offer that wouldn't sound hollow? She had just been handed the incontrovertible evidence of her brother's death, found in the belly of a monster. "Do you… do you need some time alone?"
She didn't speak. She just gave a single, sharp nod, her gaze still locked on the items in her hands. Her expression was a devastating tapestry of conflicting emotions I could read all too well.
Guilt—for surviving, for not being here sooner? Fear—of what this meant, of returning to a world without him. And beneath it all, a terrible, heartbreaking flicker of relief. The agony of not knowing was over. She had an answer. She had a part of him to bring home.
I gave her space, turning away to pretend interest in other crystals, my mind a whirlwind of my own projected agony.
"Sevren Denoir…" Leon's voice was somber, respectful. "I knew of him only as the brother of Seris's protégé, a brilliant, obsessed Ascender. But…"
What are you trying to do? I asked, the question more defensive than curious.
"Just… saying a few words for the dead," he replied softly. "It's a sign of respect."
The simplicity of it, the basic humanity, struck me. It was something Romulos would have dismissed as sentimentality. But Leon, in his strange way, was right. Sevren Denoir wasn't a plot point, a piece of loot for Arthur. He was a person. A brother. He deserved remembrance.
I waited in the oppressive silence, the faint hum of the crystals the only sound. The weight of my own failures pressed down, each one a stone added to the crushing load. I had betrayed Dicathen. I had betrayed the idea of a father, following a ghost painted in Agrona's image.
I had saved Caera, yes, but at what cost? While I was playing rebel in the bowels of the world, Elenoir could be burning. Dicathen could be falling.
The Council, captured. Mother and Father… executed. The images were vivid, seared into my mind from a hundred different nightmare permutations. Even if Grandfather had escaped with the core of the elven forces to the Sanctuary, even if Lord Mordain offered some aid… it might not be enough.
And Lady Dawn… what if I'd doomed her? What if the Wraiths I'd warned her about had been lying in wait? What if Kezess had intercepted her? I hadn't saved her from Taegrin Caelum; I might have just delivered Chul's mother to a different, equally final end.
The rationalization came, cold and familiar: A warrior like her would prefer to die fighting than live as a prisoner. But it felt like a thin, pathetic lie I told myself to sand the sharp edges off my own culpability.
It was the excuse of a coward, of someone who couldn't face the full, devastating consequences of his actions.
Pathetic. The word echoed in the hollow of my skull, a verdict. Pathetic Corvis. Pathetic like always.
"Corvis."
The voice cut through the thick, suffocating silence of my self-recrimination. I looked up, my vision refocusing from the middle distance where my failures played out in grim tableaux.
Caera stood before me, her expression composed, though the redness around her eyes and the tightness at the corners of her mouth spoke volumes of the storm she'd just weathered alone. In her hands, she held the teal cloak with its soft white fur trim and the pale bone dagger—Sevren's final relics.
She extended them towards me. "These belonged to my brother," she said, her voice remarkably steady, though it held a soft, bruised quality. "You are unarmed. Please, take them."
The offer struck me with a physical force, stealing my breath. I knew the custom. In Alacrya, among Ascenders, looting the fallen wasn't graverobbing; it was a form of remembrance, a practical honoring of a life lost in the eternal struggle against the Relictombs.
The weapon of a fallen comrade lived on, their story continuing in the hands of another. But this… this felt different. This was profoundly, achingly personal.
"Caera, I…" The protest died on my lips. To refuse would be to reject her offering of trust, to invalidate the custom she was using to steady herself. I saw the strength it took for her to do this, to transform her grief into something practical, something that could protect a… friend.
"Thank you," I said instead, the words feeling inadequate but sincere.
I reached out, my fingers first brushing against the incredibly soft fur of the cloak. Then, I closed my hand around the hilt of the bone dagger.
The moment my skin made contact, the world shifted.
A jolt, like a static shock amplified a thousand times, raced up my arm. The pale bone of the dagger transformed. It deepened, darkened, becoming a black so absolute it seemed to swallow the faint light of the surrounding crystals. It was a shade I knew intimately, a void I had spent years cultivating in the palm of my hand.
A resonant hum vibrated through the weapon and up into my very bones, a frequency that sang in perfect harmony with the core blazing in my chest.
Dagonet.
My heart hammered against my ribs. My Acclorite dagger.
How was it here? The answer came not as a thought, but as a feeling, an intuitive understanding that bypassed logic—pure Meta-awareness. Acclorite was bound to the essence of its wielder.
I hadn't tried to summon it from Taegrin Caelum, fearing its unique mana signature would be a beacon for Dad. But it had never truly left me.
And now, it had found a way back.
Sevren's dagger was a relic steeped in aether and it had been offered in a moment charged with profound emotion—Caera's shadow of pain, her grief, her desperate need to find meaning in loss. Dagonet's power had always been linked to shadows.
I had thought it literal—the manipulation of darkness. But now I understood it was deeper. It was the shadow on the heart, the hidden pain, the unspoken bonds. My care for Caera, my desire to shield her from that pain, had become a bridge.
Dagonet's essence had flowed across that bridge of shared feeling, using the aether-conductive bone as a vessel, tethering itself to the very reason for its return.
"It's… my Acclorite dagger," I finally managed to say, my voice hushed with awe. I held up the now-jet-black blade, its surface seeming to drink the light.
"Its power, its essence… it transferred. Your brother's weapon is still here, its form unchanged, but now… empowered."
"Acclorite?" Caera asked, her crimson eyes wide, confusion and shock warring on her features. "What is that?"
"An Asuran mineral," I explained, my thumb tracing the now-familiar contours of the hilt, which felt both like Sevren's and utterly like my own. "Incredibly rare. Weapons forged from it become bound to the user's soul, reflecting their personality, their… inner selves."
"Asuran?" she breathed, the word heavy with new meaning. "That's… impressive. Though I suppose I should redefine 'impressive' in my vocabulary."
Her strength was breathtaking. She had just confirmed her brother's death, gifted me his possessions, and witnessed a minor miracle of soul-bound magic, yet she could still grasp for a moment of lightness. She refused to be broken.
I swung the cloak around my shoulders, fastening it. The fabric was surprisingly light, yet impossibly warm, the white fur soft against my neck.
Then, unexpectedly, Caera stepped forward. She didn't say a word. She simply closed the small distance between us and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in the soft fur of the cloak at my shoulder.
The embrace was sudden, but not unwelcome. I could feel the slight tremor that ran through her.
"Sorry for doing this," she murmured, her voice muffled by the fur, laced with embarrassment. "It's just… all this humidity, the cold of the cave… it's a bit too much..."
It was a flimsy excuse, a cover for a need for simple, human comfort, for the solid presence of another living being in this place of death.
I didn't pull away. I brought my arms up, carefully returning the hug, one hand still holding the transformed dagger.
"I agree," I said softly, my voice low. "Let's rest here for a while. We've earned it."
"We have plenty of materials to make a proper fire," I added, thinking of the dry, shredded wood from our tunnel. "And we can finally plan our next move properly with Ji-Ae."