Chapter 122: A Relaxing Squirt

Though the earth tree clearing was not far from when they started, Squirt led them in a merry race through the Wylds. In the wake of the inferno bear, there were no large feybeasts to worry about deciding on a redcap sized snack. It was late enough in the year they would not look twice at their steeds or at Squirt, but Qzi might still be of interest, so the freedom to just run without care was a rare treat.

So she enjoyed it. Raced through the Wylds, trading the lead back and forth with Qzi as they let off steam. No arrows. No stealth. Not even any words apart from the occasional goaded barbs between Squirt and Qzi as they took turns racing for various targets. To her surprise, Feldan had followed them quietly the whole way. He did not impose on the racing between Squirt and Qzi, but neither was he too far behind them. Instead, he faded from Squirt’s mind until he was little more than a footnote.

Exhilarated from their ride, Squirt’s stress had melted away by the time she led them back to the earth tree clearing. Within twenty minutes, Qzi and the pest were seated side by side preparing a simple soup for dinner, the pest growing and peeling potatoes while Qzi snickered at some joke between them. Squirt laid out the bedrolls, Pakos still tucked into the sling on her chest, as she waited for moonrise.

Qzi laughed, drawing her eyes over to the two fast friends. The pest, having finished dicing up an onion, crafting a pot, and filling it with water, slapped the ground next to where he sat, summoning a miniaturized lute. Strumming it, he hummed the song he’d written for her people while Qzi badly recounted a story about some booms and explosions. Badly, but animatedly, meaning there were fewer words and more sound effects as he set the pot over a fire to heat.

Squirt took a seat on her side of the clearing, centered between the bedrolls as her eyes drifted up to the painted sky in the wake of the setting sun.

The pest switched up his tune, adlibbing verses that seemed to be translations of whatever story Qzi was telling.

They were just both so stupid. They were stupid alone, yes, but together, their stupidity was…

Well.

They weren’t looking at her, so hopefully, they wouldn’t notice the slight upturn to her lips.

She untied the sling, shifting Pakos to her lap. He roused long enough to shift himself into a position of optimal comfort in her lap. With the chill of the evening autumn air, she tucked the blanket over him.

I’m not dying, mother.

She scowled down at him.

Thank you for the blanket, mother.

Her scowl softened, and she finished tucking in the blankets.

He chuffed before laying his head on her calf, tucked into the blankets and soaking in the warmth like she knew he would.

Her eyes drifted up as the two men continued cracking jokes with each other on the other side of the clearing, riffing off of each other in increasingly absurd lyrics about absolute nonsense.

And she got to thinking about her fall. How her wings couldn’t catch her. A problem she had tried to fix for years after her initial injury, only to always come up short on the pure, raw magic needed.

Her eyes fell on the pest.

He would, wouldn’t he? For no other reason than she asked.

And even if he wouldn’t, she had a sneaking suspicion that Zhadin would. Qzi, too, though it would be a toss up if he’d ask for something in return. Even his more reasonable amount of magic opened a lot of doors in terms of what she could actually accomplish.

If only Pakos could share his magic with her that way.

But… if she considered their assistance, what could she accomplish? What could she do?

Pixie wings were giant external mana lines that had the added benefit of making the user float. Generally flying for pixies was more or less a stagnant affair, their wings not flapping like a bird unless doing precise maneuvers in the air. Negating gravity like they did was theoretically possible, but much more difficult to pull off without the sheer maneuverability required for actual flight.

Which was fine. She didn’t need to actually fly. She just needed to control her fall.

***

She didn’t realize she’d been staring at the pest.

He did.

***

Her eyes refocused, seeing the world again and not just the problem. Once again, her attention fell on the pest. Which, in that moment, reminded her of a surge. A particular surge, carrying him on her back while racing through the deep Wylds. A spring surge.

Moss weasels.

Moss weasels didn’t fly like phoenixes or breezebirds. Instead, they threw themselves into the air and used flaps of skin to guide their glide down to their targets. It would be simple enough to craft something similar, wouldn’t it? If say, she had to jump from a crashing Skyian airship, or if Pakos were to shrink, could she craft something to glide with some sense of direction?

She pulled out her slate and chalk, writing out some calculations for her mass or larger.

It would be best as an external tool, rather than one she wore. If she wore it, it could get damaged in a crucial moment. No. It needed to be something she could store in her bag and throw or pull out and deploy.

That would be the trickiest part about this. She couldn’t just store an entire glider and deploy it at will.

But gliders were stiff, not flexible. Moss weasels had a flexible stretch of skin that stretched between their upper and lower limbs. Though she couldn’t add that stretch of skin to her arms and legs, did she really need to?

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Spinning the chalk in her hand, she thought about the problem. Resources, for once, weren’t going to be a problem. Instead, her restrictions were just reality itself. Gravity. Mass. Needing to deploy at will. Physics.

There were two problems. First, even if she considered a glider that she could somehow deploy from her pouch, what if she was injured? If she was holding Pakos, she could only hold on with one hand. She’d be fighting gravity twice over if she relied on being able to grab on with a single hand, first to direct the glider, and second to stay on.

She started sketching out what she thought this might look like. Flexible skin. Directable. She went through several iterations, repeatedly, considering different configurations. More structure. Less structure. A platform to stand on. A bar to grasp. A harness. Each had their own pros and cons, not only in isolation, but the combinations of them. More structure to the glider shape when combined with the platform to stand on was simply too clunky to be in any way collapsable. But not enough structure would greatly reduce the ability to steer.

Her mind then circled back to the theoretical gravitational magic. Rather than negating all of her weight, using it to just lighten the load and reduce the size of glider wings. Yes, sure, it was theoretical.

But still possible.

She’d certainly run those calculations enough in the year after her injuries to know that.

This design was trickier than any design she had done before. The level of precision necessary for an enchantment required an in-depth understanding of what you were trying to create, and this wasn’t just one enchantment. No. This would have to be a multi-layered device with several different enchantments crafted separately, but working together cohesively.

As she sketched, she considered the experimental gravitational magic she could try instead of just wind magic, saving the wind magic for directing it. Not all magic stacked as expected. Multiple inscriptions of a basic water glyph ended up like a hose nose, the output being locked but the pressure increasing. Multiple of the basic earth glyph did nothing to the output. Wind stacked exponentially, but so did its unpredictability, making multiple stackings extremely volatile.

What would gravity do?

Hm.

Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a thinly shaved board near the end of its usefulness, shaved down after every use until it was thinner than her finger. Setting it down, she pulled out her quill and the golden inkpot. Carefully, she drew the smallest, simplest of the anti-gravity circles first as her control. As soon as the last flourish was done with the quill, she returned both inkpot and quill to her pouch, then held her hand over the circle.

So distracted by the fascinating problem, she had forgotten the events of her fall.

The pain hit as soon as her wings appeared on her back, momentarily blinding her. The color drained from her face in an instant, her skin becoming cold and clammy, and her stomach twisting in deep seeded terror. It started out as a flash, burning brightly, but held still as it was, the pain faded to a dull, violent throb of anger on her back.

Her ears ringing, she remained frozen in place, her hand still held out over the top of the circle for her first test as if she was about to enchant, her cheeks ghostly white under her tan.

Then smooth, cool shadows embraced her wrists. Her ankles. Her cheek. Their voice whispered through the shadows into her ear. “Should I call for Jezalin?”

Squirt’s eyes opened, though she was unsure when she had closed them, to see both Qzi and the pest standing, their eyes fixed on her. Qzi looked ready to stab.

The pest looked…

Sad.

He’d known?

He’d known.

That shouldn’t have felt like relief.

If anything, he almost looked… resigned. Resigned to her decision, including if she told Zhadin no.

Wincing in preparation as she steadied herself, she retracted her wings, another bright burst of pain followed swiftly by a general ache that had no explicit source. Then, nothing.

Nothing.

That’s right, nothing. Feeling nothing meant they retreated. Feeling nothing meant they weren’t that badly injured.

She took a deep, steadying breath, and shook her head. “No. I will see her tomorrow in the lord’s office. There is no need to bother her now.”

Qzi burst out, “Bullshit. Pricklebear, you look like—”

“I said no,” she snapped.

When had it gotten so dark? The moon had already begun to rise in the distance, the soup was rich and fragrant in the air, and all of a sudden, a bone-deep weariness smothered itself over her.

It’d been a long day.

Wiping her hands down her face, she then carefully gathered up Pakos, setting him in a nest made of the blanket on the ground in full view of the moon. She’d positioned the bedrolls to catch the maximum amount of moonlight overnight. He roused long enough to pass her his gratefulness before passing back out.

Qzi was still frustrated, but both Zhadin and the pest seemed resigned to her choice. In a way, it hurt more than Qzi’s explicit frustrations.

The pest shifted, drawing her eyes over as he created a bowl, a ladle, and took out a generous portion of hearty soup filled with rich herbs and a healthy dose of magic. Then he approached her, carefully stepping around the bedrolls, and rather than handing it to her directly, he placed the bowl in front of her, stepped to the side, and summoned a glow plant behind her.

The calculations that she had begun to squint at were suddenly brightly lit.

Qzi sat in a huff next to the soup, grumbling under his breath about stabbing gravity if he could, and the pest served him next. Then Zhadin. And only then did he serve himself, sitting next to Qzi, tossing a few quiet jokes the redcap’s way that visibly eased the tension in Qzi.

Within ten minutes, the comfortable atmosphere of the camp had returned, and the soup waiting for her had cooled.

She finally moved to pick up the bowl when Zhadin sat down next to her. They didn’t say anything. She didn’t either. The both of them simply quietly listened to the two idiots on the other side of the fire trading jokes back and forth, the pest idly strumming on an instrument that made even the prism crane dance in the moonlight.

Drinking the soup, Squirt broke the silence between Zhadin and herself. “Want to learn a game?”

“Always.”

Shifting in her seat, she faced them, drawing lines in the dirt with her belt knife to make up a board. Quietly, she explained the rules to an old game that she grew up playing with the other greenlings, a simple game of strategy made with stones and lines in the dirt. It didn’t have the depths of the war strategy game that Lord Everwinter had played with her the night before, nor did it have the fanciful playset. Usually, they played with buttons, rocks, whatever little bits and pieces they could find to use with scratched out lines in the dirt. She used small feystones the size of her fingernails. Black ones for zhadin of shadow magic, and purple ones for her of earth.

She ignored why she might have picked those colors.

They played in comfortable silence. Squirt found her shoulders slowly losing their tension, the weight of the world lifting as everything narrowed to just the two of them, alone, playing a simple game with a simple ending and no other ramifications beyond that, and the burbling laughter of the other two adding a friendly, comfortable ambiance.

Prince Foliran of Skye studied the map of Fer’ich laid out before him. “And you’re certain?”

“As c-certain as I can be, m-milord.”

“Hm.” Everwinter was the closest territory to Skye from over the mountains. They’d had sightings all over Fer’ich of the elusive Athereon. So many had been brought forward for the bounty that games had been established to try and root out which was real.

None lived.

His father’s patience would not last much longer.

“My lord, if you please,” sneered the ratlike Advisor of the West, Joep, “I think we can, let’s say, smoke him out. If your spy is telling the truth and your brother is in Everwinter, anyway.”

Prince Foliran’s eyes hardened.

Swallowing thickly, Joep jumped to answer. “W-well, that is… if your brother is courting this Athereon, he’d want her fed, would he not?”

A boisterous laugh drew their eyes to Vance in his unusual uniform. The colors were dappled patterns meant to blend into cliffs and deserts and generally looked out of place in the war room. Almost as out of place as his rounded ears. “See, now you fey are learning.”

Joep’s eyes had mild revulsion to be praised in such a way by a human, but the look was gone in a flash with Prince Foliran’s eyes fixated on him. “Here’s what we’ll do.”

As he explained the plan, Prince Foliran’s stomach gained a now-familiar knot he’d begun to ignore.

The humans were right. Morality had no place in war.

His father demanded a victory. And a victory they would have.