Through Riizen’s gates wandered in the exhausted – and of mixed pride – team responsible for having run guerrilla strike tactics on the Dawr coming in from the East. Theirs was far from the only group attacking the found forces, however they were arguably one of the more successful groups. Only four other Dawr forces had been found with time enough to do any preliminary attacks, and now all of the various skirmishers were pulling back. Some few would be moving out to further engage with the enemies, but now a few larger attacks could be launched with the safety provided by the city itself as a fallback point.
That task would not fall to the Wyldwalkers though, which was something that Niko was glad for. They were exhausted after having repeatedly pushed themselves to the edge over and over to deal as much damage as possible. They’d been wildly successful, but not without many close calls. Near the end, the warlord of the Dawr tribe had intervened himself, and it was nothing short of miraculous that the worst of the damages were dismemberment.
Niko didn’t like that. There were several newly crippled allies in their midst, some of them were still in critical condition. He and the rest of the Wyldwalkers got out of the way as healers came in to take over, with Mithel and the few with real healing capabilities amongst their teams relaying what they’d already done, the cause of their wounds, and in a few rare cases, a well preserved limb that might yet be able to be reattached. Niko sincerely hoped they could be, he didn’t want to consider what his life would be like if he lost a limb.
“I’m beat,” Niko demurred after they’d finally been pardoned and told where they could catch some sleep and food - at the same time if Niko could manage it.
“You’re tellin’ me.” Dachna groaned, massaging his leg muscles that had been abused sorely in trying to stay atop of Sasha’s back, “I’m hurting in places nobody should be.”
“Please,” Sasha groaned, “I don’t want to hear that.”
Dachna griped, “If you didn’t always dodge around so fast, I wouldn’t have chafed so much to moan about it. Seriously, I’m tier three now, I shouldn’t be chafing like this.”
Niko saw Sasha roll her eyes, “And my shoulders are beyond sore. If you could hold on properly, I wouldn’t have had to put all my balance on my front paws all the time.”
“And I’m sure both of you have time to get better, considering this is the first time either of you have done this at all.” Ronald broke in before they had the chance to keep sniping at each other, his arms crossed as he walked with a slight limp, “You did damn good, right?” Niko noticed the emphasis on the last word with more than a little bit of heat. It was only then that they realized that literally the only pair that weren’t walking a little oddly were Skye and Niko. Stella, Ronald, Mithel, Thokk, and Charlotte were all staring at the pair, annoyed at them.
“Riiight,” Dachna dragged out the word, seemingly venting his frustrations with it and a follow up deep breath. He scratched the back of his head, before letting the breath go, “Right. Yeah, you’re right. Sorry, Sasha, I got grumpy, but that’s not on you, my bad.”
Sasha still looked slightly annoyed, but she simply let out a short huff of air before saying, “I’m sorry, too.” She said, before catching Niko’s gaze and raised eyebrow.
After giving Niko a half-hearted glare, she added, “We’ll have time to figure things out so we’re not so miserable. Hopefully before we break your hips.”
With a wince, Dachna grabbed onto his said hips, “Yeah. Definitely before that. I like my hips how they are.”
“Please don’t break them,” Mithel called blithely, “I need those to be functional.”
The others all gave Mithel a look at that, to which she only frowned, before realizing what she’d actually said. Still, she was too tired to correct herself properly, so she only shrugged while saying, “Also true, but not what I meant.”
Niko gave a scoff of a chuckle, but then they were at a series of buildings set up to allow for them to get some rest. They chatted and joked with one another, and with the other teams that followed them in, finding a slight bit of rejuvenation as they got a meal in them. Niko was certain he was going to pass out imminently, and found he wasn’t the only one. Even outside of his own team, several others had worked down to the wire, and looked to be sleep-walking through the process of stuffing their faces with something edible.
The Wyldwalkers were allocated a larger room to share, one big enough to house them all comfortably. They only just managed to rid themselves of the worst of the grime and blood, with Niko taking the time to scrub out his feathers and help the others with heating up water when it cooled too much. Thanks to Mithel’s new patterns, she was able to expedite the process of cleaning themselves up with a little added help from some augmented soaps. It wasn’t specifically for that, but they at least wanted to not have an abundance of Dawr blood on them.
When they’d staggered back into their rooms from the bathing areas, most of them had staggered atop padded bedding that had more or less just been left in a jumble in the middle of the floor. No one had enough energy to bother with anything more complicated than a few tugs at said bedding. Niko pulled a blanket over Skye as she lay down against his side, wing extending up and on top of Charlotte as she too curled up with a blanket hugged beneath her. Mithel was close by, covering up Dachna who seemed to have passed out mid-combing for Sasha, who Niko was pretty sure had just auto piloted the way back from the baths and flopped out.
Thokk took up the space behind Niko and the big bear’s breathing sent calming vibrations through the floor. Stella and Ronald lay spooned together, with the elven woman sleepily blinking and meeting Niko’s perusing eyes. She gave him what might have been a very soft good night, or just an especially long blink, before she too passed out.
Niko was out before his head even fully came to rest on Skye’s lap.
---------------------------------------
He knew he was asleep, though that in itself was odd. Niko knew he shouldn’t be consciously aware that he wasn’t conscious. That was odd. Wasn’t it odd? But for other reasons, he also couldn’t bring himself to be particularly concerned about the fact. It was almost as if the majority of his thinking self were trying to convince the rest of his bird-brain that there truly was nothing to be worried about. This was clearly just a dream, a hyper realistic one.
Specifically, one where Niko realized he was sitting atop of a nice, plush cushion that he thought might be made of clouds. In front of him a white and black marble table, the colors separated with sharp contrasts of gold veins, reflected the warm lights of a fireplace and several low-burning lanterns all around. He could smell the scent of a cappuccino wafting over from the table, though not from a small cup. Instead it was in a bowl, and it seemed to have some kind of latte-art in it that made it look like a feather. Niko blinked at that, his emotional response to it muted like he was feeling everything with an Olympic pool of water distancing himself from his inner voice.
A not insignificant amount of that water boiled off as his logical brain and hindbrain began to bicker. The “It’s fine” camp of his mind was rapidly being beaten down by the oppressed “It’s clearly not” camp, if for no other reason than he realized that his awareness was being manipulated.
Like a pane of glass exploding, the forced calm that Niko felt crumpled and died. In its place, Niko warily eyed the room, the simple yet comforting birch flooring, the dark brown wallpaper with wooden paneling halfway up the walls. Pictures of various scenes in nature stood out, not the least of which were pulled directly from Niko’s mind. He might have felt violated at that, if he didn’t feel a subconscious approval of them. In fact, as he looked around, everything felt somehow quite acceptable to him instead of problematic.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Or, he noted with some suspicion, this all felt like his rather than someone else’s.
Before he could explore that line of thought any further, he heard a soft but insistent knocking sound. Bewildered, Niko’s eyes swept the room for any sign of a door. There wasn’t one, and the knocking itself seemed to echo throughout the space, rather than from any specific wall. ‘More oddness… but okay,’ The Az-Phorus frowned, wondering how he was supposed to answer a knock with no door. That he’d thought of that rather than who could possibly be knocking didn’t escape his notice, but Niko was getting better at just rolling with the weirdness that came up in his life.
No sooner than the thought of a door having occurred to him did one appear. Seemingly from nowhere, a rich rustic red door appeared set into the wall. Leaf and vine patterns dominated it, with a significant portion of it dedicated to the scenery of five Red Hawks at rest, with a Phorus laying below, gazing serenely further off scene. The sight of the image struck him strongly, and he felt as if that simple image held a certain power to it.
Niko lifted himself up, half expecting every muscle to sneer at his efforts and revolt, but thankfully his current physical condition in the real world did not carry over. ‘Alright, that’s a start. Time to figure out what all of this is about, I guess.’
He had no illusions that he’d conjured all of this up on his own. Certainly, the space was intrinsically his in such a way that he couldn’t quite explain, but that didn’t mean he’d come here of his own intent. Niko reached out with one of his paws, unlatching the large, circular door and pulling inwards.
Two figures stood on his doorstep to an empty starry sky, a vast cosmos that swirled with distant color. The background demanded Niko’s attention first, literally a glimpse into eternity. Niko winced as a trace of a headache lanced into his awareness from the sight, and forced his eyes away and to the pair before him.
A man and a woman, both of whom struck him with a sense of wrongness, though not for insidious reasons. If Niko had to place it, he thought they looked almost like filthy rich people who were trying to pretend to be homeless – only all of their clothes were poorly fabricated to resemble the look, rather than actually be the look.
‘Not the best analogy, but still…’ Niko couldn’t look at these two and not feel that they weren’t just mortals. Both carried the faintest traces of something greater, both of which he could recognize. The woman felt like the seasons, with all their change and potential, mingling with the solidity of mountains and the oft-gentle touch of the wind. The crashing of torrential waves and the brewing of life-changing storms roiled in her barely present shadow, a mere fragment of what she could do. Yet, for all that, Niko saw her warm smile, a flicker of nervousness hidden behind green and blue heterochromatic eyes. She was a beautiful person, and Niko noticed that she was wearing what appeared to be a very comfortable sweater with a multi-layered skirt that looked a little like flower petals overlapping one another.
The man, on the other hand, didn’t feel so much like any specific thing as he did the possibility of anything. It was hard to put a talon on it, but his silver-grey eyes seemed to twinkle, like he had a secret that no one else knew. The space around him seemed to stretch and contort, and little things on his person seemed to change. Cufflinks of wolves morphed into bracelets of a snake biting its own tail, only to change into a watch the next time Niko’s eyes wandered over them. There was a sense of always-changing to it, but there was a pattern to the chaos, he thought, as if the change was somehow being constrained, rather than being allowed to run wild. More than any of that, though, Niko could almost see a sort of distance in the beings eyes like loss and pain. He couldn’t shake the feeling of trepidation that followed that.
But, that didn’t stop him from reeling his mind back in the presence of the two godly beings.
“This is the part where I’d typically act like this is all normal and invite you in,” Niko lifted an eyebrow critically, “Which one of you was responsible for that bit of mental cluckery?”
There must have been a lot of things the two expected, but that wasn’t one of them.
“It wasn’t me.” The woman immediately threw the other man under the bus, turning her gaze pointedly at the man.
The man shrugged unapologetically, “Would you believe me if I said it was a gift to get you thinking about the space you're in?”
With a flat look, Niko said, “Not really, no. But I’ll at least give you the chance to explain, considering that you’ve been helping me so far.”
“Well, you’ve been paranoid about mental influences ever since her damned forest nearly got its teeth in you,” The man smiled broadly while thumbing over to his companion, “So, I figured you’d feel validated if I gave you something to actually fuss over that also wasn’t a big deal if you didn’t notice it.”
Speechless, Niko looked between the two, the woman’s upper lip twitching discontentedly, but not refuting anything. While Niko was never a fan of mind-controlling adversaries, it wasn’t as if he completely wrote off the entire category off hand. He’d heavily used the sigils in his first nest for calmness, after all, so he’d be hypocritical to say that it couldn’t have positive effects.
Still, even beyond that, Niko didn’t particularly believe that he had anything to fear directly from these two. His gut told him they meant him no harm, and while they clearly didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye, they weren’t hostile to one another.
Which was weird, all things considered.
“Alright, let's put that aside for now then.” Niko said, before gesturing at the two of them, “Aren’t you two objectively enemies?”
“I haven’t decided that, yet.” Alterra said.
At the same time, Venris uttered, “Not necessarily, no.”
The two looked at each other, seemingly surprised, before the woman grew annoyed at the seeming triumph on the man's face, “He is one of them, it’s true, but he has been the most… behaved, at the least. Begrudgingly, he has been… I hesitate to say, helpful…”
“But I have been helpful.” The man grinned cockily, “If it would assuage your concerns at all, I’ve absolutely no love for my kin. And with my bond to Niko here, I’ve been able to reestablish a surprising amount of my lucidity,” At that, the confident image melted, a pressure larger than any of the titans Niko had ever met flaring out behind him and into the vast void. Niko could feel the genuine emotion, complex and overwhelming, coming from the man as he bowed to him.
Niko must have blanked out, because his mind took a few seconds to catch up as the deity looked embarrassed, with the will of the world looking at Niko with concern and then back to the man in annoyance.
“Regretfully, you deities are still clumsy with the minor details.” She said, fanning the man's chagrin, before turning to Niko, “Are you alright, Niko?”
“Uh… Yeah. Just a lot to experience?” He answered uncertainly, feeling a little humbled that even a deity's gratitude could feel so heavy. Finally, he shook it off, before stepping back and letting the door swing open the rest of the way, “Well, may as well come inside, I suppose. It looks cold out there.”
“Very, thank you.” The man said, before a coat appeared in his hands from out of nowhere as he passed the threshold and set it on the coat rack by the door that now also appeared with Niko’s will. The Az-Phorus was confused, though, since it wasn’t as if he’d been wearing a coat at all a moment ago.
“Thank you,” She spoke, likewise striding in and pausing at the coat rack with an expression that Niko couldn’t place. Without another word, she pulled a scarf from nowhere herself, and laid it across two of the racks bars, instead of his one, and then strode further into the room with a smug smile on her face.
Niko watched perplexedly, with a creeping sense of being far out of his depth, as she moved to the table and sat on a cushion, with Venris already there and shaking his head at her antics. Niko sat down himself, before leading with, “So, Alterra, Venris… Coffee, tea?”