Beam POV: Day 44

Current Wealth: 10 silver 0 copper

It would cost money to hire a carriage, a full silver for the trip. We weighed the prospect. A carriage could get us there in one day, rather than two. It would get us there warmer, drier, healthier. And that was to say nothing of the pure luxury that travelling on a vehicle would afford us.

On the flip side, of course, we only had ten silvers to our name- all that Corvan had let us keep at the tavern. It was no small thing to hand over a tenth of our total funds. Particularly when they’d already been depleted by another dozen copper on food, rest and drink the morning earlier.

In the end, it was the fear of the cold that made our decision for us. We were halfway through winter, which apparently meant that we were also at its coldest point, and at the longest nights of the year. That was no small thing to be moving through for days on end. This one piece of silver might well save our lives, and it would definitely save our health.

We knew that we’d need all the strength we could spare in Wolney.

For five more coppers we could get thin blankets of woollen weave, and we bought two to share between us. They kept us warm enough on the ride.

It was funny, really. Two months ago I’d have been shivering in agony at the temperatures we faced beneath that fabric, even with Solitaire and Xangô contributing their body heat to combating them. But we’d all adjusted since coming here.

Walking through this snow was a regular occurrence for us, now, and we’d never had blankets or constant spots to warm up around us while we did. Compared to our days of trekking in the past, our journey was a damned vacation. It was fun while it lasted.

Of course, we didn’t let ourselves relax. A day wasted was a day closer to the grave, and all of us had things to keep busy with.

Xangô kept scanning things with his Appraisal, looking to glean any more information. Testing the limits of his eyes, and seeing if he could extend them. I did something different.

When I’d used my power- Beloved, it was called- I’d done so by feeling a weird sort of pull to a corpse. There weren’t any corpses nearby, not animal, and definitely not human. Which meant my ability to experiment was limited. What there was, though, was my head. And so I thought, directing my focus inwards and seeing if I could catch the attention of whatever it was that had spoken to me.

I’d heard a voice when I used Beloved, I knew that for sure, and I was starting to suspect that some of the thoughts in my head during our mugging in the alley hadn’t been my own either. Whatever the presence I’d felt was, it was connected to my power.

So I needed to see whether that connection went two ways, and would let me use my magic at will.

Hours of sitting around and thinking wasn’t my forte, I have to admit. Give me hours of boxing, squats, torturous weight lifting- hours of anything else at all, really, over that. I persevered, though. If I could forcibly rewire every strand of muscle in my body before sixteen, I could sit still and focus. Probably.

There weren’t any returns, which frustrated me. And there kept being no returns well into the day. The sun was already setting when I started considering giving up, my annoyance burning hot enough that I barely even felt the cold anymore, sweat actually beading on my skin.

Fucking hell, another waste of time after all. Well I’d gotten used to that at least, it was no more difficult to deal with than the cold.

Rare to find a human willing to focus on something with no reward for so long.

The voice came just as I was an instant away from stopping entirely, and it froze me like a puddle in the night’s chill. I had to resist the urge to answer it aloud, figuring that our driver might not understand- or worse, would- and took a moment to consider how best I could think out a response.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the very thoughts about what to think were conveyed without my even meaning them to be. The voice rang out again, knowing now.

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Your mind becomes scattered so easily. I suppose a human is still a human, fickle, fleeting.

The immediate reaction I felt to that, of course, was irritation. And the voice was ringing out before I could even congeal that into an actual answer.

Don’t be petulant, you wanted my audience, now you have it. You ought to be grateful for this much.

It was fascinatingly tedious to speak with something in these circumstances. Having the voice react to my thoughts, with no distinction made between conscious ones and unconscious. It was like I was trying to shout over my own id just to be heard- and apparently I was losing the contest of volume.

But I could adjust. I would adjust, had to, because there was no way I’d be getting useful information like this. And there was no option at all not to learn from this…Thing, whatever it was. Not with what we had at stake.

What are you? I asked, repeating the thought in my head until it drowned everything else out.

Apparently that was the way to communicate, because I got an answer quite quickly.

That question is an irrelevance, ask me a more intelligent one.

A prick, then, was what it was. Well that was fine, I was friends with Solitaire of all people. I could deal with pricks.

Are you the one responsible for that power I used? I tried again, almost feeling stupid as the question echoed in my head. It was still the only way I had of asking directly, though. No helping that, so I didn’t.

There came a fairly long pause before I received another answer, and this one somehow left me feeling on edge. Like some great guillotine was hanging over my head.

I am, and I am not. Your power is more than even myself.

Well that was about the sort of answer I’d expect to get from some mysterious, ethereal presence. Which is to say, fucking useless. Frustrated, I buried my irritation and pressed on.

Does that mean that you can teach me how to use it at will?

A pause, a long one, and then the answer came.

No, but I can…Help you. Quicken your progress in learning yourself. You must understand that yours is not a power over death, but a power over nature. The winds become your scythe, the snow your shield, the wood your arms. Know this, truly know it, and you will never be without a weapon.

I tried to figure out whether that was useful or not. It was certainly poetic, and I’d be annoyed if a description like that was all I had to go on for figuring out a power in an actual RPG. But…No, it was pretty clear, too. I’d made a sort of phantom weapon from that corpse, and now I was being told that I could always have a weapon, wherever I was.

So, my power was creating clubs? I could work with that, the one I’d used in the alley had hit as hard as a sledgehammer and weighed almost nothing. If nothing else it’d give me a safeguard for when I was disarmed.

Thank you. I thought, and this time no answer came.

I took a moment to compile everything I’d learned, then I was turning to my friends with the information. They seemed delighted to have finally gotten a hint regarding our magic, and the emotion infected me.

Not least because it was my magic. I’d not imagined, two months earlier, that I’d be as miserable, cold or scared as I’d spent the last few weeks being. But I’d never have guessed I’d have actual magic to use, either. Knowing that I did was…

Magical.

We still had a good quarter of our journey left, but that would be for the next day. It was already turning to night by then, and so we made camp by the side of the road. We began piling great logs up from storage in the carriage and creating what would best be described as a smaller bonfire. The driver wasn’t a very talkative type, so we mostly kept to ourselves. Except to ask him about the occasional vital piece of intel regarding our destination.

It was a learning experience, and not a particularly reassuring one. Wolney was an old city, run by an ageing Governor who refused to pass his leadership down to his heir. It was rumoured he was going mad with age. Each year seemed to increase the hostility of the place, crime running rampant in its streets, and some even thought that the guards were preparing to unilaterally dispose of undesirables from the gutter-rats to the mercenaries.

That wouldn’t be good for us, in any case. But it was also a damned big city. Easily half a million people lived there, almost as many as in a smaller modern city. That was good, it meant plenty of people to recruit for our unformed company.

One benefit to travelling by carriage was not running out of wood. We kept our fire nice and big, blasting ourselves with heat all through the night. Come day, we continued our travels with a newfound tension.

Awaiting us ahead was the next step of our journey. Or its end.