Olive felt his bleary mind stir from the sound of the morning winds. His mind wandered back to the edge of awareness in hazy paces of uncertain time, laying there beneath the pitch-black darkness before the sun could rise.

Without even opening his eyes, he felt a distinct lack of sunlit warmth. The chilly breeze brought little goose-prickles in sharp waves over his arms and face, where his skin laid exposed to the air.

His ears were what finally caught the first true sounds of motion stirring. Something swift was flowing high against the wind. The muted touch of clawed footsteps soon padded down against the sandy rock, moving closer to the center of the stone platform.

But when Ranya first began to speak, her words were so faint that Olive could barely even hear her. He wondered if he might have still been asleep himself, lost somewhere in the space between still conscious and unaware.

Olive nearly felt his mind drift back into slumber, but something about the next few sounds kept his thoughts from fully fading.

“Ami?” Ranya’s murmuring tone echoed closer in the space between them, so much softer than Olive had ever once heard from her before. “Are you okay? Sweetie... Please.”

Silence stretched into the dark, reaching further than the stir of distant wind. For a while, it seemed like Amiela would not wake. But then, just when Olive first felt himself slipping back beneath an early semblance of sleep, the sound of quiet movement rustling over fabric, like talons brushing and tugging carefully at something sleek, began to echo across the dusty ground.

Amiela’s voice rang even softer than Ranya’s. “Mmh. What is it?”

“Are you alright?” Ranya hesitated. “I know, I... I was gone a long time. Longer than I meant to. I lost track of things out there. I’m sorry.”

“No one saw you?” Amiela’s words were hazy, slurred from sleep. “Tell me nobody saw you, Ranya...”

Ranya silently yawned, though there was still an audible click of teeth when she relaxed her mouth and let it fall shut. “Mm. Not a soul. Well, I mean, except for the ones I caught. But they’re not exactly going to be telling anyone. Not like they could talk in the first place, anyway.”

Amiela’s words dropped to a near-breathless hush. “That isn’t funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke.” It sounded like Ranya sat herself down against the stone surface with a solid thump of muscle and bristling fur. “You’ve really got to lighten up though, sweetheart.”

Silence gripped the space between them. Only the noise of a quiet breath hissing over teeth could break the stillness.

“That is the wrong answer, Ranya.” The undercurrent of Amiela’s tone made it sound as if she was waking further, gaining a sharper clarity to her cadence. “You act like you don’t even realize how dangerous this all is-”

“No.” Ranya’s voice broke past her then, snapping forth with a sudden chord of straining ire. “You’re the one acting that way. You’re the person who keeps dragging us along, gallivanting right into this awful place on a whim, on a... On a fairytale, no less, when we could be anywhere else but here!”

Amiela breathed a humorless scoff. “You sound just like my aunt.”

They each seemed to hesitate then. Ranya drew a long, pointed breath to try and quiet herself before she spoke. Olive wondered, for a fleeting moment, if one or both of them might have been able to suspect that he was already somewhat awake beside them, or perhaps wondering if their words had been enough to do so, even while he was still half-dozing. He laid facing away from each of them, his eyes held shut and his breathing slow.

Ranya lowered her voice back to a rumbling whisper. “You listen to me, now. I will lie and bluff and weasel my wicked guts out to anyone else in this horrible pit of a world for your sake, Ami... But to you? No. We really have to start being honest with ourselves, here.”

“‘Honest.’” But as if out of nowhere, Amiela’s tone lilted, shifting away from ire into something that actually resembled amused. “For how many years did you hide the truth from me about your people?”

Ranya halted. Her next breath sounded choked. “Ami...”

Amiela sighed at that, but her voice became less hushed. “Why, Ranya?” The sounds of fabric being pushed aside brushed quietly beneath her words. “And don’t tell me it was to protect me. Ignorance never helps anyone.”

“Because-” Ranya still struggled to even articulate. “Because it... It doesn’t matter!”

Amiela’s voice snapped harder. “Of course it matters!”

They both came to another lingering standstill. The distant cricketing chirps of the prairie insects grew softer and more silent beneath the gathering swell of morning dark.

But Ranya, so much closer than before, finally snarled the quietest little tone into the air. “Because you, of all people, should know that some knowledge can be terribly dangerous. Because they are worlds away from us, now. And they always will be. And because... Because I can control myself.”

Amiela did not respond, not for a long, stifling moment. “Maybe now. With the way you are. But everything is going to change soon, Ranya.”

“Sure.” Ranya hummed her own sort of mirthless chuckle. “If everything doesn’t fall away to pieces before that. If there’s even still a path for us left after all this mess.”

“There has to be.” Amiela’s voice became softer again. It began to sound like she laid herself back down over the smooth fabric of her protective suit. “We can’t waste this chance. If it really does exist here, in the way it’s supposed to..?”

Olive felt the smallest of involuntary shivers grip down his spine.

He listened, even as his mind slipped further back into sleep, but it seemed like neither Ranya or Amiela had anything else to say.

Both of them settled through those moments, silencing themselves again. Before very long, it sounded like Ranya’s claws were scratching lightly against the rocks someplace further away from Amiela, as if she had not chosen to rejoin her in a shadowy form once more.

The sound of a sizable tail soon thumped down and brushed itself back and forth, dragging over the dusty earth when Ranya finally laid herself flat atop the tower stone.

Olive finally realized they truly would not speak with each other any longer, at least not that particular night. He wondered if what he’d just overheard had even been real, or merely the product of some hazy, exhausted dream. But somehow much, further down, on some base instinct he could not hope to name, he knew it was not just some bleary imagining.

He became lost to his own slumber before he even knew it.

And there, much deeper in his mind, there was the faintest note echoing through his thoughts, the quietest little rhythm. There was some faraway thing he could not quite grasp between his clever hands; as fast as silvered fish darting beneath the sudden crash of heavy waves, slipping away through his outstretched fingertips.

A faded ribbon stretched out far across his imaginings, pale and light as it flapped and spun beneath the breathless wind, almost just as tangible. But it was lost to him in the force of waking, as fleeting as the resonance of his dreams.

Short Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Short_Line_Breaker.png]

Past the earliest hours of daybreak, beneath the first weak glow of dawning sun, Olive dozed away in silence.

He would not know if he dreamed any more that night. His mind would not remember much of anything else of what his thoughts experienced, nothing except for that one curious little whisper, or the strange fluid motion that seemed to flutter endlessly in the gusts of coursing air.

What finally woke him was not a voice, or a color, or even some dreamlike tone he could not possibly describe in human words, but instead the smooth, more comforting whirls of the prairie wind rolling over the flat surface of stone.

Olive blinked, bleary from sleep. He stirred and slowly moved to curl himself tighter and move away from where he’d slept. For just the briefest moment, he wondered where in the world he even was, before his mind leapt right back to the raw memories of scaling the ancient stone pillar, just like the touch of a tender new bruise.

Despite that, it felt far more like triumph that battled back and won against the soreness gripping deep over his arms and shoulders.

“Oh.” Olive blinked a few more times. “We really did climb it...”

The wide stretch of the natural stone tower stood no more than fifty feet in each direction, just enough of a flat surface for their odd little group to camp over and rest for the time being.

A narrow rock wall stood along the western end of the upper pillar. It rose higher than the main surface, looming there above the space where they each rested. The ridge of weathered stone looked much steeper and narrower up there, Olive took note of, definitely unsuited for climbing or sleeping upon.

But there, just a glance away, enough to see the space further down, the world below the pillar seemed to stretch on forever. Olive’s breath caught at the mere sight.

It was the clearest view of the area he’d glimpsed in weeks. Olive swore he could truly see everything: how the prairie grasses reached on for miles, weaving between the lines of clear blue rivers nourishing them with newfound life, until the fields abruptly dropped off where the ground fell away sharply, eroding towards the more murky sinking lands.

Olive could see the very same abrupt mark of destruction on all sides, how the drifting sands seemed to go on without end, all except for the distant west and east. There was a stark area of flat rocky ground further off along the eastern horizon, past the boundless stretch of flooded sand.

With a quiet sigh, Olive began to hum an old morning radio tune to himself. The northward terrain must have been why Amiela was so intent on redirecting him there when they’d first met, he realized, even if the solid ground to the northeast looked like it perched several miles above the shifting dunes.

In the distant west, when he looked back over his shoulder, Olive could just catch a hint of untouched mountain ranges spanning far over the sands, a hazy sort of skyline mostly hidden behind the pillar wall.

But to the south? Olive slowly turned his gaze to look. Beyond the vast fields of grass stood a tangled labyrinth of ruddy rocks and weathered canyons, a realm of tall, windsmoothed chunks of eroded land.

A massive stone archway rose like a beckoning gate over the first rise of snarled ravines. Much further past that, Olive could glimpse even more sand, more than he’d ever once seen, an overwhelming world of dunes he could not possibly spot the end of, not even when he strained his eyes.

Was that really where they were going?

Olive felt a shiver shake through his limbs. He watched when a massive, crumbling chunk of landfall drifted off from the continental divide in the southwestern stretch, the point in which the last few wisps of dry grasses ended, giving way to where the flooded dunes began. Olive witnessed how the earth saw fit to devour itself in such slow, gradual stages, how the solid acre of rock was drawn apart to sink deeper into the merciless depths below.

For only an instant, Olive imagined having fallen asleep there instead, atop that particular platform of rock; that he was laying right in the middle of such unstoppable erosion, unable to do anything but watch the ground swell up around him.

“So! I hope you like grouse.” Ranya’s voice rang out into the brisk morning light. She then muttered her next words and massaged her claws against her face. “I mean, uh, you’d better, or this is going to be one awkward breakfast conversation.”

Olive finally tore his gaze away from the cracked platform being stolen away by the bubbling sands. He forced himself to look over at the lithe, crouching demon who regarded him instead. Ranya was fully visible again, and not very far away.

Lounging atop a boulder, her sleek body appeared feline once more, but Ranya’s face was mostly still melded with the narrowly clever weasel visage she’d worn the previous night, fluffy with fur yet keen all at once. Even then, she slouched larger than a leopard, like some haughtily poised wolverine who had somehow grown three times its usual size.

“Listen, though. I’ve got to admit...” Ranya sighed a mournful little note. “I am a bit out of practice.” She flexed her claws from where they rested beside her chin. “Those rabbits gave me a really fun run around, sure, but I only caught one. How pathetic is that?” Ranya pretended to groan her words louder and whine. “Oh, well. At least there were still plenty of grouse too stupid to fly off. It’s almost a shame, though. I thought they would be a much better chase.”

Olive finally peered aside to spot the nearby pile of wild game and gathered debris. A tentative little smile crossed his face at the sight, but then it took hold with a less feeble sort of certainty, blooming into something much more steady once he realized how just much his stomach was already trembling. He could mostly make out a vague mass of blood-speckled feathers along with a few wooden sticks in the messy collection, as well as one small patch of fur.

“That’s not pathetic.” Olive found he could not stop staring at the oddly nestlike arrangement of dead animals and branches Ranya had made. “You were busy.”

“Hmm. I guess you could put it like that. Yeah.” Ranya slowly pressed her other hand against her face (and it was a hand, Olive noticed, just halfway stretched between something catlike and a form most unsettlingly human) to try and clean off a bit of the dried blood from her whiskers and cheek. “But I’m still so rusty at this whole hunting thing. And that’s just no good.”

Olive tried not to shy away from the sight, turning his gaze to observe the visible dexterity of each curling, flexing digit.

Ranya’s next words blurred somewhere between a contented purr and an infinitely more concerned mumble. “Truth be told, kiddo, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had such a fun night. It does take its toll, though.” She slid her attention over towards Amiela. “Ah... She’d usually be awake by now.”

Over there, just beneath the tall wall of weathered rock, Amiela slept with her knees tucked close beside herself. Her expression, even unconscious, somehow looked pained.

Olive nearly stood up in shock from where he sat against the ground.

Amiela’s back was pressed tightly to the shelter of stone. At some point in the night, she must have shifted enough to have gotten herself completely out from the heavy fabric of her protective suit. It made her body look even slighter than it usually did.

She was small, Olive realized. Pale and slender, almost a bit gangly in a diminutive sort of way, given her short stature. Given that she was an adult, Amiela did stand a fair bit taller than Olive’s own height, but she wasn’t even all that much different in overall stature from him, he began to realize.

In some even more strange, indescribable sense, it made him feel less alone than it did when she chose not to drive him away from her.

Amiela, lost to the depths of sleep, looked so quietly delicate there, laying over the ground without the bulky suit hiding herself inside it. Her nose twitched softly. Her eyelids, even darkened by strain and fatigue, looked so much less weary than they ever did when she was awake.

But despite it all, delicate features or not, Amiela did not look fragile in the slightest. Wiry and thin in the way Olive could only equate to a fierce little terrier dog, as if whatever might choose to wake her would immediately snap her right out from looking quite as vulnerable as she did, to become all rigid and terse and hawkish again with those sharp, strange eyes of hers.

Even then, a cowl spun with verdant leaves and jade pendants would have suited her better, Olive thought, or a cloak of richest midnight blue, some wonderfully intricate something more befitting of such a restless witch. He looked over at Ranya, and wondered why it felt like she was thinking just the same.

Amiela’s hair was splayed behind herself in a dense tangle. A thin hair-tie kept only part of it under control. The snarled locks were longer than Olive might have guessed, given how Amiela usually kept them hidden in her suit. The length of it laid at least as long as the curve of her waist, thick and wild, somewhat coated beneath dried mud and grit.

“There’s a cost to everything.” Ranya leaned forward over the rock she perched upon. She rested her chin against her ‘hands’ and breathed a regretful hum. “We’re not supposed to be apart for this long. At least not with that much distance. Being nearer is...” Ranya’s pointy ears flicked low. “Well. It’s a whole lot better for her in pretty much every way.”

So many more questions, old and new, prickled to the forefront of Olive’s mind. He tried his best not to fidget beneath them. “I, um... Listen, I really wouldn’t want to ask something that’s not my business, but-”

“Well, you’re just a kid. Of course you’re curious.” Ranya’s ears laid back just a bit tighter for a moment, but then she yawned and allowed her muscles to relax, stretching her long, clawed limbs. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll tell you why things are like this. No harm in that.”

Olive wondered why it felt as if all of the air and the wind in the vast prairie sky seemed to fall hushed when Ranya lifted her chin with another prolonged exhale.

“A long, long time ago, she and I met each other under very different circumstances.” Ranya kept her voice low enough that she would not disturb Amiela from where she was sleeping. “And, well. An even longer story short... Ami is entirely convinced that I hate her now. Which I don’t.” Ranya scoffed. She flexed her hooked talons firmly against the pads of her palms. “And there’s nothing I can do to show her that I don’t. Because she’s got it lodged down deep enough in that stubborn little mind of hers that our pact is what makes me feel this way, but I know it isn’t.”

Olive moved to sit just a bit nearer. “Pact?”

“Yeah. Oh, right. You wouldn’t really know much about witchy stuff, now would you?” Ranya yawned yet again and continued. “Well. A binding pact is basically a promise. A very, very important promise.” She smiled and pointed a single claw towards her own chest. “The sacred kind. Not in a religious way, I mean, no. It’s just the sort of thing you can’t take lightly, not like promising not to go sneaking up for the cookie jar on the top shelf, even if you really, really want to, yeah?” Ranya quickly winked at him.

Olive sat in raptly nervous attention.

“And I promised, a very long time ago, back when I was little, and that girl was even littler, to be Ami’s demon.” Ranya paused to puff out her fluffy chest beneath the glowing air of morning, as if preening the mere fact of it. “I look after her, because she’s always been a bit of a headstrong dummy when it comes to taking care of herself, the silly thing.” She exhaled a sound of equal parts of mirth and melancholy. “Gods, what I wouldn’t give for things to be that simple again. She actually used to let me take care of her, you know.” Ranya’s brow furrowed, ego deflating somewhat visibly beneath the dawning sun. “But our pact means that I get to keep her from getting herself into too much trouble, most of the time. Whether she gets cranky with me over it or not.”

Olive was not quite sure why he didn’t fully believe the part about Amiela being so foolish.

Ranya gestured a clawed fingertip into the air. “And it means that I can’t hurt her; not that I’d want to! Or otherwise, you know, do her any harm. The pact means I’m compelled by human magics to keep her safe, keep any bad things away from her, etcetera, etcetera, all the fine print you never bother to go about reading with these kinds of things.” Her tone began to grow duller the longer she spoke, less enthused. Ranya huffed a scoffing mumble. “Not that there was anything for me to read or sign, mind you.”

Olive did not understand the last bit Ranya rambled on about, but he also did not think it would be very keen of him to ask her to clarify. “You... Can’t hurt her?”

Ranya’s tail flicked back and forth. “She doesn’t deserve to be hurt. So I wouldn’t even try. Not ever.” Her eyes slowly narrowed to become luminous slits of amber. “But... The pact would rip me to pieces if I did. Unless it was something like, bandaging Ami up, disinfecting a wound, setting a broken bone for her, that sort of thing.” Ranya shrugged with a sleek glimmer of fur. “It’s the intention of things that really matters, doesn’t it? I can ‘hurt’ her to heal her, if that makes sense.”

It did, but it also made Olive’s stomach churn with a sense of bitter, anxious confusion.

“I mean, with the pact the way it is, I’d bleed out long before I could even try to harm a single hair on her cute little head. Not that that’s ever happening.” The rumble of Ranya’s voice husked with just as much sharpness as her claws. “I’m not just protecting her because some stupid old spell tells me to, you know. I have my own reasons for keeping Ami safe.”

Olive thought it over in his mind. “And you... Can’t leave her?” With that last little tidbit of information settling into place, he could not help but frown. “You become her other shadow, too, whenever you aren’t here like this?”

“Well, not always. That mostly happens when I ‘possess’ her body.” Ranya rolled her shoulders and exhaled, letting her voice echo with a contented sort of chirr. “It’s more like we share it. Like roommates. Only Ami does most of the decorating.” She swished her long tail all around. “Pays the utility bills too, I guess. I’m more like the big, scary security guard at the door who brings groceries back sometimes and does whatever she wants me to. Not that she’s ever jumping at the chance.” Ranya rolled her eyes. “But that’s the gist of it. Yeah.”

Olive felt a much deeper twinge of dread swirl into his pulsing heartbeat. “Um, it just... It sounds like you’re a-”

“A servant? A slave?” But Ranya grinned for him then, revealing all too many of those languidly pointed teeth. “A fairy, trapped inside a bottle? A genie locked away in some dingy old lamp?” Her sleek muscles rippled. She crouched lower and crept forward over the smooth rock she’d chosen, grasping her claws against the dry, dusty surface. “Or maybe something even worse than all of those combined?” Her voice rang just as merrily as if she were telling Olive a fairytale herself. “Well.” Ranya’s vivid eyes flashed bright. “Just don’t go thinking any less of her for it.”

Olive blinked in total shock when Ranya abruptly leaned back to fully relax, sliding away from her more menacing, predatory posture.

Ranya tipped her head and sighed. “That girl did not know what she was getting herself into.” The glimmer of mirth faded off from her voice, deep and wistful and weary. “Neither did I, really.”

Silence enveloped them both for a while, unbroken and firm, at least until the full light of dawn finally washed the low horizon. Eventually, Olive mustered just enough courage to speak to her again. “Can she... Let you go?”

“It’s not that simple.” Ranya closed her eyes. “It never is, I suppose.” She moved to lay her face against the surface of the boulder, where the sun was just starting to warm, resting there with her cheek pressed close beside her hands. “It’s beyond an easy solution. These pacts weren’t ever designed to be unwoven.”

Olive glanced back to see Amiela, watching the way she breathed silently yet unsteadily in her sleep. “Would she do it if she could?”

“In a heartbeat.” Ranya laughed with a lower hum. “She’s been trying for years, now. Running herself goddamn ragged. I’ve told her to give it up already. She’s stuck with me.” A single one of Ranya’s eyelids slid open to fix her hawklike gaze directly on Olive’s face. “And I mean it: I do not want to catch you treating her any differently from what I told you. This mess is not her fault in the slightest.”

“Okay.” Olive leaned away from the full brunt of Ranya’s intensity, mulling over the deluge of new knowledge in the seclusion of his thoughts. “She... She doesn’t seem like she’s a bad person.”

“Of course she’s not. And you’d better not go thinking otherwise.” Ranya twirled one of her clawed fingertips at him and let that particular eyelid slip shut. “Or I’ll nip off that cute little nose of yours and keep it for myself.”

Just as casually as he could, Olive lifted himself and ambled away to inspect a rather boring pile of rocks. “There’s some really cool sediment in this place.”

“I’m sure there is.” Ranya stood up with a yawning huff. She moved to pad her way forward, stepping closer to Amiela, observing the way she had already started moving in her sleep. “Hey. You’re having a nightmare. You should wake up.” Ranya laid her feline body down close beside Amiela. She puffed a few softly humming breaths for her, whispering close against Amiela’s hair and face. “Wake up, now. Don’t make me come in and get you.”

Amiela exhaled a soft whine.

“That’s it.” Ranya kept moving nearer to her, breathing her way over the softest parts of Amiela’s neck, stirring the feathery little hairs that rested just below her ears. “Come on, Ami. You need to get up and have breakfast too.”

When Amiela’s eyes finally drifted open, she stared out in utter confusion at her surroundings for just a moment. Then she groaned and rolled away from Ranya. “...Your breath smells like shit.”

“Nope. It smells like grouse.” Ranya smiled for her with those pointed teeth. “Yummy, tender grouse, and one little rabbit that wasn’t quite clever enough.”

“Yeah, well. You can keep your rabbit.” Amiela mumbled again and cradled her head in her palms. Her voice was still high and reedy with sleep. “Feels like a hangover, you know...”

“If you’ve got any hooch hiding there in that suit of yours, you’d better pony up and share it with me, ma’am.” Ranya moved to rise on all fours again. She brushed her tail over the dusty ground between them. “Otherwise, we’ve got breakfast to cook. Or, more like ‘dinner in the morning’ for you two, but it is what it is.”

Amiela sighed under her breath. “Yeah, and ‘it’ won’t be happening without any firewood.”

A lopsided smirk curled over Ranya’s lips. She turned around and began to speak to Amiela in singsong, all while prancing away on her paws. “Then it’s a very good thing I happened to find some of that along with the food, now isn’t it?!”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re as annoying as a bad hangnail?” Amiela huffed. She slowly pushed her body forward on her knees, forcing herself into a sitting position.

“Well! Good morning to you too.” Ranya rolled her eyes skyward and sighed. She stalked a wandering, pacing path away. “You try and bring a girl breakfast in bed, and you get your face bitten off for it...”

Amiela’s steps wobbled slightly when she stood. With a muffled hiss, she reached out to steady herself against the pillar wall. “Olive.”

“Yeah?” He peered up at her from the pile of rocks he’d been pretending to sift through. “Can I help?”

“...Yes.” Amiela paused just long enough to make sure she was well-balanced on her feet. “Do you know how to make a campfire?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. I can do that.” Olive stood and stepped towards the pile of dead birds and rabbit, where a wide array of branches were still waiting. “But I don’t think there’s anything here to really light this stuff with, though.”

“That’s alright.” Amiela gingerly made her way over to the clearest area of the pillar, where she marked down an ‘X’ into the dust with the toe of her boot. “Get it started here, please. I just need to concentrate for a minute on feeling better.”

“Okay.” Olive reached out to gather some of the firewood. “I’m sorry you don’t feel good.”

Amiela only nodded at him. Olive watched her when she stepped away, noticing how strange it was to see her walk around without the formless, bulky suit concealing herself inside it.

With a slight bit of effort, Olive managed to disentangle some of the less weighty branches from the pile. He lifted them in his arms, carried them over to the place where Amiela had marked, then sat down.

Olive placed the smallest sticks and twigs in a pile directly over the ‘X’, to be used as initial fuel for the main structure. He then arranged a few of the slightly larger pieces on top of them, just like a younger child might make a square house with building blocks. Olive set two separate branches down in parallel lines around the main framework of kindling, before he made two more branches overlap the first to create a solid construct.

He kept building the shape until it began to look somewhat like a squat little wooden cabin, only without much of a roof on top. Olive smiled at the sight.

Amiela rested further off, by the farthest edge of the tower. She seemed to be basking there in the warmth of the early sunrise. When Olive finally looked up from his work to fully see her, he nearly dropped the branch he was holding.

She sat almost aglow in the radiant light. An ethereal air surrounded her, as if her soul itself was visible beneath the rays of serene morning sun.

Ranya gazed at Amiela as well, watching from where she rested across the pillar’s surface. Her keen eyes mirrored that same brightness, but there was something else, a different sort of glow burning just inside, something Olive did not quite recognize.

Amiela steadied her breathing to a more even pace. Her eyes were laid shut. Her expression looked mild, easing further towards slipping free from the sheer force of tension that gripped her so wildly before.

Olive realized, somewhere in that quiet little moment, that it actually looked like Amiela was meditating. He’d witnessed several travelers do the very same thing years ago while they prayed at the local guardian shrines, sitting alone in silence beneath the moss-covered idols and crumbling stone archways scattered around the outskirts of his home town.

Amiela’s tranquil voice nearly startled him. “Olive, could you bring one of those?”

With careful little footsteps, Olive tiptoed his way over to her, just close enough to stand beside the tower’s edge. He reached out to offer a piece of firewood, which Amiela accepted without comment.

She held the smooth branch in the grasp of both hands. Amiela placed one of her palms against the lower base, with the other end poised between her fingertips, braced just over the thinnest twig.

Ranya stood and ventured closer. She inhaled a deep breath of the morning breeze, flexing the vast strength of her lungs with an airy rumble.

In that same moment, the material of Ranya’s flesh rippled to become longer, gathering into a much richer, deeper pelt of fur, but the otherworldly texture flowed in a way that looked more like the rays of the sun itself beaming down than any sort of dusky, elusive shadow.

Ranya shimmered like she was not real, some stray, dauntless vision from realms afar, a peerless creature that somehow existed inside a space that was not her own.

Even so, Olive thought, Ranya looked like the tower itself belonged to her and her alone, the way she walked it, every pawstep placed over the stone twinged with a most lustrous flicker of gold. She did look far more solid in the open light somehow, as if weighted. Ranya wasn’t even floating at all any longer, like she’d always seemed so fond of.

Her breath reverberated in a deep, chuffing rumble. When Ranya padded her way over the ground, stalwart, steady, her thick pelt of fur fluttered in waves beneath the strong morning winds. The dark mane streaming down over her neck rolled like a banner in the air. Her face shifted likewise, becoming broader, far more like that of a massive lioness than any sly fisher cat, regal and strong.

Beneath the first hint of Ranya’s looming shadow, Amiela began slowly to trace her fingertips over the weathered wood. Her touch left some strange residue over the length of the branch, like glowing daylight trapped along the surface.

Once she had painted that same luster over the full width of the stick, Amiela tightened her grip ever so slightly. The branch came alight with a soft snap of sound.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Olive almost jumped back. “Woah.”

“Here.” Amiela held the torch by the unlit base. Her hands and wrists were faintly glowing as well, marked with an odd sort of branching pattern that rose from the tips of her fingers to her upper forearms. She placed the stick down for Olive to take. “It won’t make as much smoke now.”

He felt just a bit breathless then, peering deep into that otherworldly fire. Not just heat or light, Olive realized, no: Amiela’s command of her own energy went far beyond simple temperature manipulation.

The dancing flames weren’t even all that different from a normal fire, at least not in a way Olive could fully understand. They were just slower, somehow, curling with a seemingly purposeful rhythm rather than any random force beneath each ripple and wave.

Amiela’s fire was more graceful, though lacking a certain vibrant orange hue. Instead, Olive could just start to see how the flames held a grayish-green tone, a bit like seafoam or faded lichen. It almost looked as if Amiela had channeled the light of morning itself down into her own source of fire, but Olive began to feel sure that wasn’t true. No, no mere sunbeam could ever look quite so magical.

Olive slowly reached out his hands. There were other colors flashing inside the pale emerald light, he noticed, but they were each incredibly faint, so weak that even the barest hint of them was practically indiscernible beneath the harsh morning glare.

With a quiet shudder, Olive moved to take hold of the base of the branch, careful not to touch any part of his skin against the burning surface.

Amiela turned away once more to face the rising sun. “Protect it from the wind.”

Olive nodded while he hurried off. He held his other hand close before the gentle little flames, shielding them from being snuffed out by the morning breeze. He knelt down to let the flickering embers touch the branches, feeding them strength. The pallid fire slowly licked its way along the surface of the twigs, reaching out with subtle vigor for the much larger dry logs just above.

Ranya cleared her throat with a soft flick of her ears. She trotted over to sit close beside Amiela, nearer than before. Her tail curled to rest around the spot where her companion sat, encircling her there. “You’ve still got that camping kit you bought back in Werna, right?” Ranya pronounced the foreign word in a way that sounded more like: ‘Veair-nah’ when spoken aloud.

“Yes.” Amiela moved to rest her arms against her lap. The odd jagged patterns that lingered over her fingertips were already starting to fade. “But those roasting sticks were designed for little things, like marshmallows or hotdogs. Not wild game.”

“Hmm. We’ll make it work somehow.” Ranya waved one of her paws in a matter-of-fact fashion. “Still, I told you it would’ve been way more fun to splurge on the bigger set, with all of that nice cast iron. And I was right.”

“And just who is going to drag all of that around on their back..?” But Amiela’s voice did not have the same irritated edge as before. She even tilted her head and ‘hmmed’ back at Ranya with the slightest hint of fond derision. “And I seem to remember all of the marshmallows going missing the very first week we set out. What a mystery.”

“You don’t even like them.” Ranya pouted a bit. Then she hesitated. “...You don’t, right?”

Amiela smiled, but only just a little. “They’re okay. You like them a lot more than I do.”

“Ugh. Well!” Ranya pretended to scoff with a mildly coughing grimace. “Next time we find some sweets, I’ll have a little more self-control, I can tell you that much.” She stood up again, but she paused before her limbs could even fully rise. The outer edges of her physical shape began to unravel, as if Ranya’s body itself was gradually shattering into swirls of airborne dust. “Ah. I might have to sit this one out, though.”

Olive felt himself shiver at the most unsettling image. But neither of his companions looked even the least bit troubled by Ranya’s bodily dissolution, as if they expected such an odd spectacle to happen.

With a prickle of anticipation, Amiela braced herself. She peered directly into the fading light of Ranya’s eyes, the leonine body scattering away into shards of glistening darkness, before she gave the demonic shade that rose beside her only the slightest of nods.

And there they met, melding close, meeting one another somewhere between the primal state of physical matter and intangibly swirling darkness. Beneath a whirl of starry light and shadows, Ranya settled herself down easily into Amiela’s limbs, well-practiced and comfortable.

Amiela only waited there, resting for a dizzied moment or two, bracing her hands against the rocky ledge until it finally felt as if her innards weren’t all spinning around fiercely inside herself. She blinked a few times when Ranya’s secondary shadow stretched out to curl forward fluidly and rest beside her own. “We’ll leave some of this aside for you, Ranya.” Amiela stood up and stepped back towards the campfire. “I’m not exactly the biggest fan of rabbit meat.”

Ranya’s voice was still completely audible even when she was merely a shade of herself. “I don’t need any. I already ate, you know.” Even then, her words did sound a touch more echoey than before, as if she was speaking to them from some neighboring yet separate layer of existence. She reached out with a set of nebulous claws to point at the pile of dead animals. “You two should eat as much as you can. You need it a lot more than I do.”

“If you think I can stuff this many chickens in myself, I don’t know what to tell you.” Amiela lifted one of the limp grassland birds by the legs to examine it. “Or whatever these things are.”

“Like I mentioned, they’re grouse.” Ranya gave her a gentle snort. “Also known as capercaillie, Tetrao urogalloides, or ‘prairie chickens,’ funnily enough.” Her shadow twitched and rippled with each word she spoke. “They are related to the wild ancestors of chickens, though. Red junglefowl. Both are galliformes.”

“We really need to find you something more interesting to read than avian taxonomy.” Amiela looked at her pile of supply bags. She gathered an armful of the slain creatures and carried them over to the campfire, where she sat herself down across from Olive. “But I doubt we’re going to stumble across many books out here.”

Olive caught the chance to speak up. “I saw some a while ago.” He stopped tending the odd little campfire to watch how Amiela began to pluck the feathers from one of the colorful russet animals. The birds were not unlike some species of wild pheasant, only much squatter and less gracefully long. Olive peered back at Amiela and continued. “There were a whole lot of bookshelves there. It almost looked like a library. Sort of. But it was way back in the opposite direction from here. And everything out there is always sinking, so...”

“It can’t be helped.” Amiela settled into a methodical rhythm of plucking and separating the more fluffy tufted feathers from the coarser plumage of the grouse. “Olive, could you find one of those empty canvas bags in my stuff? We should save the down. It’s good insulation.”

“Sure!” Olive hopped right up and scampered over to do as she asked. A tiny thrill raced through his heart to be called upon for such help once more, just like with the campfire. Maybe she really wasn’t going to tell him to go his separate way from her after all. “Um, Ranya said there’s a cooking set in here..?”

“Inside the green bag, yes. The one with the weird moose logo on it. Grab some of those spare rag cloths too, please.” Amiela paused from her work to make sure Olive could find the things she’d asked of him. “It might be a little heavy for you.”

Olive moved to lift the case with both of his arms. Amiela definitely wasn’t wrong about that either, but he still managed it, even though it felt far heavier than any cooking set he’d ever once handled before.

He did have to admit, the logo on the bag looked much less like a moose and more like some vaguely ‘mooseish’ tree, a rather strange yet stately emblem complete with wide, leafy branches for antlers. Beneath the logo waited the phrase: Woodland&Wilding, printed in plain text of the common tongue.

Olive hefted the sizable bag over beside the fire, along with an empty drawstring pouch and a few pieces of worn terrycloth.

“You’re, um... You’re right. Yeah, it is heavy.” Olive forced himself to smile as much as he possibly could while he gingerly placed the cooking set down. “Oof.”

“Because it does have cast iron in it. Just not an excessive amount.” From the corner of her gaze, Amelia gave Olive’s weary face a slightly sterner expression. “Pace yourself. These won’t be ready for a while. Don’t rush.”

“I won’t. Don’t worry.” Olive sat himself down again. He unzipped the outer bag and tried to unlatch the hard metal case inside it. “Um, how do you even carry this much heavy stuff around with you? I mean, your packs look like you’ve got even more things...”

Amiela kept plucking the grouse birds without comment.

With no answers offered, Olive kept fiddling with the clasp of the cooking set. “And, uh... Why is your climbing pick so heavy?” When he finally found and pressed his fingertips over the center button of the steel latch, the case smoothly popped open. The hinges creaked with a well-oiled click. “Did someone make it that way on purpose, or..?”

Amiela shrugged to herself. “I made it.”

“What? Really?” Olive perked up and stared at her. “Something like that, I just... I thought a steelsmith must’ve-”

“It’s true.” Ranya’s shadow lifted between them to float higher in the air. “Ami’s pretty good with that sort of thing.”

“Only with a proper workshop.” Amiela sighed. “And it isn’t that heavy.”

Olive gave her a dubious look. “It’s really heavy.”

“I have to agree with kiddo on this one.” Ranya’s hazy form shrugged as well. “Not that it’d trouble me much either, lifting something like that. But you really don’t know your own strength, Ami.”

Amiela rolled her eyes and seemed to fight down her own sort of urge to fidget. She stared instead at the dead bird laid over her lap and tried not to mumble. “It’s sturdier that way, at least.”

Olive had to bite back a tiny laugh.

Wordless again, Amiela stripped even more feathers from the grouse with an adept sense of ease. The way she did so looked a bit different from the method Olive had learned growing up, though the fundamentals were still the same. He settled himself back to sit beside the campfire and join her, choosing his own bird from the pile to pluck.

Amiela peered sidelong to observe him, watching his progress from the furthest corner of her gaze. But when it became clear enough that Olive knew what he was doing in a similar fashion, she focused back on her own work.

“You’re really good at that.” Olive copied what Amiela did, sorting the fuzzy inner feathers out from the longer, firmer flight pinions. “You must’ve done this sort of thing before, right? Nobody’s that good their first try.”

Amiela kept plucking the bird she held. “It’s not your first, either.”

Ranya’s shadow drifted and twirled above the space between them. “Ami’s aunt insisted on wilderness survival courses. Among other things.”

Olive smiled and peered back at her. “Your aunt-?”

“Ranya.” Amiela’s expression went dark. “This isn’t something-”

But Ranya only shrugged at her with all the vague blurriness a shadow could muster. “Come on, Ami. She’s not some boogeyman where if you mention her, she gets summoned.”

“She might as well be.” Amiela’s grip minutely tightened over the grouse in her hands. “That’s not even where I learned it from. It was earlier.”

Ranya did not have very much else to say to that. Amiela became silent again as well. She just kept pulling feathers out from the bird she held, quick and efficient.

Before long, Olive and Amiela both began to find that the dead grouse were mostly all intact underneath their feathers. But their plucking did reveal a set of curved tooth-prints along the body of each and every one, placed over the vital softness of their feathery little throats.

The shallow red wounds looked a lot smaller than the marks on the eviscerated serpent the evening prior. Olive wondered if that was the reason Ranya had chosen to hunt with a mink’s face rather than a cat. With smaller teeth, there was certainly much less damage left in the meat of her quarry.

Olive kept plucking the speckled feathers. But when it began to feel like the silence had grown too stifling to endure, he finally broke the tension with a polite cough.

“Um. My mom used to let me help with pheasants like this before dinner, sometimes.” Olive reached over to push the pile of downy feathers deeper into the drawstring bag, pressing them in so they would not be lost to the gusting winds. “Sometimes she even bought quail from the market. But they were usually expensive, so we didn’t cook those as much.”

Amiela helped Olive gather the scattered fluff. She sneezed a quiet sound when a stray feather drifted through the air and brushed her nose. “Did she teach you how to clean them?” She waited for him to set the canvas bag down for her before she reached for it. “I imagine you were too young.”

Olive nodded. “I mean, I do know how. But she usually didn’t want me handling a really sharp knife like that. At least ‘til I was older.”

“Well, you can watch while I do these.” Amiela reached for her belt. Just beside her switchblade was a much smaller tool: a curved, all-purpose camping knife. It looked as if she must have moved them from the belt of her protective suit over to her regular jeans sometime in the night. She unclipped the utility blade and drew it from its slim leather sheath. The steel glinted beneath the morning sun. “They have to be extremely sharp to do the job right.”

Olive kept plucking the rest of the grouse, working steadily while he observed. Even though it was not nearly a new process for him to learn, he did feel a twinge of gratefulness to be able to watch how Amiela prepared the birds a bit differently from the times he’d seen back at home.

Amiela opened the main body first, slicing away from the grouse’s belly without even cutting off the head or feet, until she had gutted the bird from tail to chest. Olive recalled how he’d always seen the most skilled butchers in the market start by cutting the dead animals at the neck, then severing the feet and tail before they even bothered with any sort of internal cleaning.

He waited for her to do so, but she never even touched her knife to the ankles or throat of the gutted grouse. Olive blinked and stared. Perhaps things really were different in the north, he wondered, where he assumed someone like Amiela must have hailed.

She did, however, trim each of the wings with a decisive crunch of steel over cartilage. Olive did not so much as shiver, even if his skin prickled slightly with the memory of glimpsing the sunlight in the barn playing over a somewhat different blade.

“We can eat most of these organs.” Amiela wrinkled her nose at the sight of the revealed gizzard, fleshy and discolored. “Most. Some of them probably aren’t safe.”

Ranya spoke up again. “Just toss whatever you don’t want off the ledge. I’ll find it later.”

“That is disgusting.” Amiela did what Ranya asked anyway. “You are not eating sunbaked organ meat and hanging out around me again after.”

“I’ll just brush my teeth.” Ranya laughed as if it was some old joke between them. “I thought you already didn’t like my breath, anyway?”

“It did smell a bit more rank today.” Amiela sliced the connective tissue of a few more organs and tossed the wrinkled meat over the edge of the pillar. She treated the severed wingtips just the same, sending them each on a long, wayward drop down to the dry grasses beneath the tower. “You could go hunting with something other than your mouth, sometime.”

“It’s just not the same.” Ranya’s long shadow stretched further into a lithe, more lackadaisical posture. She rumbled and sighed. “Oh, if only you humans had longer teeth... Better, sharper ones. Then you’d know.”

Amiela sliced open the second grouse and gutted it faster than the first. Her fingers and palms had become almost entirely coated with dripping, viscous scarlet. “I think even if I had long teeth, I’d prefer something more sophisticated.”

“Oh, sure. But your little dinner knife there, that isn’t so different.” Ranya’s hazy visage gestured a finely poised set of claws towards the razor-keen blade. “It cuts. It separates.”

Amiela ignored her while she worked. After a moment or two, she reached forward to grab for one of the rag cloths from the ground, wiping the blood away from her hands. “Olive, could you pass me that smaller bag from the case?”

“Okay.” He wondered why she didn’t just lean over him to take it. “Here.”

“Thank you.” Amiela waited for him to set the bag down before she reached for it. “We’ll be able to eat before long.”

Short Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Short_Line_Breaker.png]

Soon enough, the wild birds were each ordered two by two into neatly prepared lines, pierced along a set of sturdy food skewers. Their dainty little heads were placed there almost too neatly, positioned with a simple curl of their necks to rest close against their bodies.

Olive thought it looked rather like the old photographs of even older paintings his mother once showed him from her bookshelves. He could still recall the faded image of historical banquets and kingly feasts, as if the exotic, beastly plates of roast dolphin and peafowl were each merely napping there across the grandly lavish table in their silver dishes, all too delicately arranged for the fate their souls were lucky enough not to witness.

The far more simple, yet still unwieldy meal before him did seem too large to be very well-balanced on such thin metal rods, especially when the grouse were lined two by two. Olive tilted his head to examine the plucked little birds. The skewers would prevent the meat from getting badly charred by the fire, at least.

Amiela counted the gutted animals. Since the birds were not jumbled in a pile any longer, she found there were six processed grouse in total, along with a single untouched rabbit. She grimaced a bit at the sight of the fluffy animal.

“Olive.” Amiela lifted one of the grouse skewers for him, holding it so Olive could grab the stick by the far handle. “Do you know how to do this?”

“Yeah.” Olive accepted the metal skewer. He positioned the set of meaty little birds just above the crackling flames. “They’re tiny, so they should cook fast.”

“Right.” Amiela placed the second skewer down on the cleanest patch of rock near the fire. She then ever so gingerly picked up the limp rabbit by the ears. Amiela moved to step off somewhere behind the area where Olive was sitting, wandering her way further from the campfire. She lowered her voice down to a murmur. “Sorry, bunny.”

Olive could still hear most of the process, even from slightly afar. His ears could especially catch the quick slide of Amiela’s knife working down through soft fur, not to mention the grisly squelch of a fluffy pelt being stripped away from solid flesh in one swift tug.

But he had already seen and heard it all before. Many times over, in fact. So Olive wasn’t quite sure why Amiela had even bothered to walk out of sight. Maybe to try and spare him from seeing that sort of thing? He listened to the soft crunch of bone, the wet glistening sounds of skillfully carved muscle, most likely that razor-sharp blade cutting down through the rabbit’s feet.

That very same thing was part of daily life back in his home village. Though more often than not, it was the rough metallic sound of a descaler scraping ceaselessly over the surface of freshly caught fish, or the rhythmic din of chop chop, scrape from prepared seafood in the dockside markets.

Amiela finally returned with a cleanly butchered rabbit in her grasp. The skinned animal’s head was still intact, but the ears, feet, and most of the guts were already fully removed. Olive assumed she must have tossed those away over the edge of the pillar like before.

They both settled back into a somewhat less awkward silence. Amiela skewered the gutted rabbit as well. But she claimed a portion of grouse for herself instead, preferring to cook the prairie birds first.

The two of them, unlikely companions as they were, each sat there with Ranya’s shadow resting close between them, like some half-seen guardian lioness, cooking their respective meals over the shimmering green fire while the wind picked up all around them.

Amiela’s magic was surprisingly resistant to such influence. Such a heavy breeze would have normally sent a regular campfire guttering and spewing hot sparks all around, but her much steadier flames took the abuse of the weather with little more than a soft crackle of protest.

Amiela herself simply narrowed her eyes and inhaled sharply a few times whenever the breeze grew stronger, but her demeanor settled just as fast when she saw hardly any smoke rise away from the fire licking over the branches.

In time, once the plucked skin of the grouse became crispy and dripping, when the flesh just beneath looked lightly pale and cooked-through, Olive lifted his skewer away from the fire. “I think we should check if it’s still raw inside.”

“Those ones are probably done by now.” Amiela had already wiped the grouse blood away from her utility knife. She nodded towards it for Olive to use. “But sure. Be careful.”

Olive gingerly picked up the sharp little blade. He tried not to look too unaccustomed to handling such a thing, but he still gripped his fingers over the polished hilt with as much caution as he could muster. Despite the slender tang of steel, the blade was so much less dainty than any fishing knife he’d ever used. Olive slowly maneuvered the knife to cut deep into the steaming meat of the grouse, checking to see if it might still look pink, but the flesh inside was fully cooked.

“They’re done, yeah.” Olive placed the knife back down on the ground with a careful touch, positioned in a way that no one would accidentally bump into it. “We should, um, share these ones, right?”

“No. It’s fine. You eat first.” Amiela turned her own skewer so both sides of the meat would cook evenly. “These won’t take long either.”

“Are you sure?” Olive waited for her to reply, but she did not. “Well, um... Thank you for cleaning them. And thank you Ranya, for catching them.”

Ranya’s shadow winked at him somehow.

Olive spoke a quick prayer of thanks to the grouse as well, in his own mind. He remembered the times his mother would always have both of them wait just a brief while before dinner, inclining their heads slightly for the precious natural life the land could give them.

When the temperature of the meat cooled enough for Olive to pull apart at it with his fingers, he did so at once. But then his eyes reflexively slipped shut when that very first taste hit his senses. The grouse flesh was tender, so incredibly light and crisp, even if the meat itself was mostly quite bland and tasteless. Even so, the more subtle, earthy flavors still graced his mouth like purest nectar.

Olive began to eat his share with just as much politeness as he could manage, but it was becoming more and more difficult not to tear right in and devour the entire thing without delay. He still remembered his manners, however, even if he could scarcely recall the last time he’d even so much as sniffed a hint of freshly cooked meat.

Only moments later, Amiela’s portion was finished cooking as well. She tucked in right away in a similar fashion, though she did not seem to mind the heat or steam rising away from the roasted bird flesh.

Olive blinked at the sight. The searing temperature did not harm Amiela’s mouth or hands at all, the same as when she’d cooked the crickets with her own fingers the previous night. It made Olive wonder if it was because the fire was her own, just like that sheen of sweltering magic.

They both ate whatever they could take from the grassland birds, making use of their meat without care for modern propriety. Olive quickly began to realize that it truly did not matter if it was impolite or unconventional: it was food.

The soft, tender brains of the grouse were easy enough to pry out from their fragile little skulls. The larger bones could likewise be cracked open and drawn at for marrow, nutrient-rich and savory. Olive watched Amiela do so. He slowly lifted one of the grouse femurs and copied the way Amiela drank the juices by lightly sipping at the broken bone.

His eyes never did catch her glancing back at him, the tiny flash of fondness when she looked away from watching him learn how to eat marrow as politely as one could, given the stubborn nature of the hidden treat.

Olive was soon taught as well, when Amiela made it a little more obvious how to dig one’s thumbs deep and cleverly into the carcass of the wild birds, how the crumbly, wet kidney meat hidden just beside the inner tailbone tasted just as good as the marrow did.

But when Amiela fingertip’s moved to tear out the juiciest, crispiest bit of actual birdflesh from one of her grouse and flick it with an idle turn of wrist, Olive felt himself jump slightly when the teeth of a demon snapped hard and devoured the little morsel tossed through the air towards her. But then they each seemed to pause.

Ranya’s shadow rippled and rose. “Ami.”

Amiela’s posture stiffened where she sat. “Sorry. It was... Reflex.”

“I know. That’s why I even ate it.” Ranya lifted herself further. Shadowy limbs curled and slowly braced themselves on either side of Amiela. “Reflex.” Glossy horns rose tall, the semblance of a face forming with a soft quiver from the darkness. But Ranya’s true physical self still only somewhat glimmered from beneath the liquid shadows that leaned up higher and began to hold fast. “But Ami. I told you I already ate, this morning. I brought these here for you.”

Amiela’s hand tightened where she just held the meat she’d offered. “I know that.”

Ranya tipped her head to one side. Beneath her antlers, she began to look more like some grandly towering cervid than any sort of wild goat. Her eyes blinked slowly. The golden softness of her ears shifted when she did so. “I’m not blaming you, sweetheart. And I’m not upset. I just want you to make sure you get enough for yourself.”

“Right. ‘Enough.’” Amiela refused to even look at her. “It won’t happen again.”

Ranya gradually slipped back to where she had rested before. But she still lingered there in branching patterns over the tower wall, watching as Amiela moved to eat the cooked meat with somewhat less apparent eagerness, though no less hunger than she ever started out with.

Olive turned his gaze back and forth between the two of them. He could not have been sure, but he thought it almost looked like Ranya began to regret speaking up in the first place, if the wither of her shoulders and limp curl of her tail could say anything concrete on the matter. Still, the demon waited, watching both of them as Olive slowly began to eat the cooked birds with Amiela again, starry guardian at their sides or otherwise.

Before very long, Olive found less and less to sink his teeth into. By the end of it all, the only bits left remaining were a tangled heap of inedible bone shards, thoroughly chewed-over cartilage, and gristle.

Not far away, the pile of salvaged organ meats remained uncooked, but Olive had a feeling that those too would likely be put to use before long, maybe prepared in the cast iron skillet from Amiela’s cooking set.

Olive stared down at the scant remnants of the meal between them. For just a brief instant, he felt rather alike the packs of feral dogs he’d seen roaming along the empty dunes and wild stretches of windswept trackways, long before he’d ever so much as glimpsed his two strange companions. But those wayward animals were utterly ruthless, more than ravenous enough to strip a corpse down into absolutely nothing in less than a half-hour’s time.

So when Olive peered back up at Amiela, gazing at the faint smear of grouse marrow still lingering over the edge of her mouth, he began to feel infinitely grateful, at the very least, that if he was a feral dog: so was she.

“Well. You can have the rabbit.” Amiela reached aside to slip her camping knife back down into its sheath, before she moved away to rest close beneath the shelter of the rock wall. “I’m done for now.”

“Are you sure?” To tell the truth, Olive realized he still felt just a little bit peckish. “We could share it?”

“No thank you.” Amiela’s tone became thin and clipped. “Tell me if you need help cooking it, though.”

“Okay.” Olive thought it over. He looked over at the lone rabbit and the pair of uncooked grouse. “I think... I’d rather save these for later.”

“Alright. Then you’ll want to cover them under one of those rags so the flies don’t get to them.” Amiela gestured towards where her satchel rested on the ground. “Or better yet, bag it all up and put them away with my things.” She settled herself atop the surface of her protective suit. Amiela looked down at her umbrella for a moment, as if she wanted to open it and set it over herself once more, but she reached for one of her smaller packs instead. “You should get some more sleep soon. We’ll be heading out again at dusk, or if another sandstorm comes through.”

Olive moved to do what she asked him, packing away the rest of the food. He found another empty canvas bag inside the camping set. He stashed away the uncooked skewers of grouse along with the skinned rabbit, not to mention the spare organ meats. After that, he looked over at Amiela again.

She was holding a small leather-bound book. Olive could not tell what the title said. When he squinted to try and see it more clearly, he realized the text there was printed in the same unusual foreign script as the t-shirt Amiela wore.

A warm gust of wind billowed across the pillar of rock. Wispy smoke rose from the fire, but it did not become anything more than a faint plume of translucent swirling energy.

Far above their odd little campsite, in the skies beyond the high tower, the cloudless atmosphere was approaching noon. The sun, ever shining, neared the utmost peak of the distant heavens.

Olive wondered if he should even bother trying to put the campfire out, given that it clearly did not consume wood at the rate of a normal, more ravenous flame. He somehow had a feeling Amiela wouldn’t like it very much either, or that it might not even feel pleasant for her if he tried to extinguish it, such a clear expression of her own innermost, innate magic. Not that wasting fresh drinking water to do so would have ever been a smart idea in the first place.

But Olive did not really feel like sleeping again either. Not so soon. He knew it was high time to find something else to keep himself occupied.

Ranya kept laying there just as quietly as a real shadow would. But occasionally she would reach over with a spindly limb and delicately drag a grouse bone or coil of gristle towards her nebulous form, as if lifting one single, dainty shrimp aloft from a seafood platter, pawing at it and munching it down with a jovial toss of her nebulous antlers.

Amiela would merely glance at her and purse her lips with mild distaste for doing so, but she did not so much as twitch a single muscle to stop Ranya from enjoying the pile of scraps.

Olive peered back at the book in Amiela’s grasp. He did not think she would very much appreciate being bothered by the sounds of talking either, not while she was trying to read.

So instead of the more boring piles of russet stones scattered across the flat surface of the pillar, it looked to Olive’s eyes like there might have been something a lot more interesting off to the west, where the tall, crumbly rock wall first started to form. Not to mention the fact that it stood far enough away from Amiela as to hopefully not disturb her.

With his mind decided, Olive wandered his way over there. He began in earnest to try and pass the time by digging his hands deep through the piles of strange stones. Several of them were banded with layers of rich red sediment or sparkly bits of crystalline quartz.

Every so often, as the minutes slipped by steadily into longer hours, Olive even dug out little chunks of raw agate, or sometimes powdery stabs of stone that held the occasional tiny leaf fossil inside them, or even less often the imprint of an unlucky prehistoric insect or two.

When Olive finally struggled to roll away a much larger boulder from the little dig-site he’d made, something just beneath it seemed to glimmer in the midday sun, catching his gaze. Olive reached in to grab at the little unearthed stone. He brought it up close to hold it before his eyes.

The rough tablet did not look unlike the much larger armored seapigs from back home along the beach. But the stone laying there in his grasp was even smaller than a sand dollar over his palm. Olive knew such a well-fossilized creature had likely been dead for millions of years by that point in time, replaced bit by bit over the centuries by solid minerals rather than sleek chitin or flesh.

A real, ancient trilobite laid there over his hand. Now that was something. Maybe Amiela might even think it was interesting? What had Ranya told him the day before, exactly, his thoughts began to scrabble for, that witches could simply not get enough of that sort of material, long-dead branches and petrified wood? Olive slowly felt his brow furrow. Could the same be said for the fossil of an animal?

Such a rare find might even be worth a bit of money or bartered supplies, if only they could find someone nearby to trade it with. Olive’s thoughts wandered off towards the little banded whelk shell tucked in his shirt pocket. It somehow felt just as precious.

He stood up and hurried off back to show her.

One of Amiela’s arms rested idly against her thigh. Her other hand still held her book close enough to read. She was leaning back against the rock wall in an easy sort of posture, far more relaxed and casual than Olive had ever once seen from her before.

The perfect time to surprise her with what he’d found, he reasoned. Maybe it might even make her smile to see it, Olive wondered, or even laugh, just a little, like she did that very first day they ever met. Could such a thing make Ranya happy as well?

Amiela’s attention was still entirely absorbed by the pages of her book, so much that she barely even reacted more than a slightly raised eyebrow when Olive sat close beside her. She did not take her eyes away from the text she was scanning. Olive quickly reached out to show her that little fossil he’d found, to put it down into her free hand so she could see it-

But then, there was only brightness, and a pale, quiet void.

Short Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Short_Line_Breaker.png]

Time passed without substance. Sound became only a faint buzzing whine in the depths of his ears. He could feel himself staring out into that strangely blank stretch of utter nothingness, somehow detached from his body entirely. But then Olive realized, no: that was not entirely true. He could feel the way his back was pressed flat against the hard, sunwashed surface of the rock, the firm press of pebbles lightly biting wherever the fabric of his shirt had thinned through the sandstorms and grown all too worryingly worn.

It felt like voices were suddenly ringing around beside the odd buzz inside his head, but they were as blurry and faint as they would have been as if he were floating dozens of feet underwater, all murky and uncertain, lost far beneath the swaying surface. His limbs laid limp, fingertips twitching, flexing only the slightest of degrees against the arid winds.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to come back to himself, drifting closer towards reality.

Those distorted tones gradually became more distinct in his ears as well, evening out until he could finally hear the heightened cadence of Amiela’s voice in half-audible clarity.

“Damn it, is he even breathing?!”

“Yep. Just stunned. Pulse is alright.” Ranya’s catlike visage slowly faded into sharper view. Melded between the angled lines of a lioness and the softer yet regal outline of an antlered stag, it made Olive wonder if he was merely hallucinating such a strange, uncanny face for her to have taken. “Hey, kiddo. Well. That wasn’t so smart, you know?”

“...What?” Olive’s voice practically croaked inside his throat. He felt as if he’d run a marathon without a single drop of water. His tongue was parched and dusty. But no, not dust, he realized: far more like crackling ozone, or even the strange, sharply sweet atmospheric pressure that always lingered in the air beneath a summer storm. “What... What happened..?”

Neither of them replied to him. Not at first. Olive slowly began to realize on his own, comprehending further through each prolonged moment of aching uncertainty, that he had never once touched Amiela in the way he just attempted, not even a single time. They’d both held the same objects as each other, of course, and they had each rested in the same places as one another, but Amiela had never once made direct skin contact with him before. Not until that very moment.

Olive began to remember what had just happened through each quiet wave of nausea, puzzling it out in so many tiny, drifting shards of aimless recollection. The feeling of how his fingertips had brushed just beside her skin, moving closer to try and actually place the little trilobite down on her palm, and then there, that most instantaneous sensation, the feeling as if a cobra had just lashed out at him at full force.

Amiela herself was kneeling partway over Olive’s fallen body. But he could not quite tell what expression she held, not when his vision was still so blurred and hazy. But her face was gripped by something he’d never seen from her, not once. Why was she so furiously wiping her eyes with her wrists?

“Don’t do that again.” Amiela’s voice cracked. She hissed her words at him between the fierce grit of her teeth, scolding Olive with a broken little snarl through the sounds of her muffled tears. “Gods, damn it. You’re going to get yourself killed-!”

“Well we didn’t exactly tell him, now did we?” Ranya slowly moved one of her hands in front of Olive’s face, attempting to see if he could manage to track the motion with his eyes. “Hey, now. Try and follow this here.” But when Olive’s gaze could barely even keep up with her gesturing fingers, Ranya frowned. Her other hand was still pressed close over the pulse of his throat. “Sorry about this, kiddo. We don’t really have people stick around with us for long, these days. Not like you have.”

Amiela glared down at Olive with worry swollen in her eyes. But then her voice grew utterly silent on a sharper inhale. She suddenly got up and stalked away, moving off so quickly that Olive did not even realize at first she had gone.

“Hey. It’s alright.” Ranya sighed. She stopped moving her hand in front of Olive’s face. Her fingers curled loosely against her palm. “She just needs a minute. She doesn’t mean to be like this.”

Olive tried in vain to sit up, but Ranya kept him down beneath the firm press of her catlike hand, half-phased between cloven hooves and blunted claws. He frowned at her for doing so, though he did not try to struggle. “What happened..?”

“Ah, well.” Ranya sighed through her teeth as she tried to think of how best to phrase it. “I did tell you she’s chock full of energy, right?” She offered him a wry little smile. “That energy, uh, ‘magic,’ the way humans describe it... In that form, at least, it needs a living conduit.” She tapped the soft pads of her fingers in a gentle pattern over Olive’s throat. “And Ami, well. Most of the time, she’s like... This burning little star, with nowhere else to put her light.” Ranya’s ears drooped slightly. “No thanks to me either, I guess. I don’t exactly help much with that particular issue when I’m always giving her mine as excess.”

“You... You give her extra magic?” Olive groaned when he reached up to cradle his forehead with his hands. The numbness of the fog blanketing over his mind was already fading, only for a dull, heavy ache to swell out and replace it. “Ugh, I, um... I really don’t feel so great.”

“You’ll be alright.” Ranya flicked her tufted tail at him. Her pointy ears perked. “Your heartbeat sounds fine. You might be a bit concussed, sure, but she just gave you a little jolt. That’s all. You only need some rest.”

Olive lifted his hands further, but his entire body startled at the sight of a most luminous sort of smudge clinging over his fingertips.

“That’ll fade in a minute.” Ranya reached out to help rub the remaining light away. “Won’t even scar. That’s just where her energy jumped over to you and fizzled out. Nothing bad.”

“So, wait, um... Magic has to go somewhere when we touch?” Olive felt his brow knit tight. He watched the way Ranya cleaned the rest of the glowing residue. It somehow looked much more like she was petting it, coaxing it bit by bit to glimmer away instead of scraping or pressing it off. Olive blinked several times at the way she did so. “But you’re touching me.”

“Well.” Ranya’s other hand still rested along Olive’s jugular to feel for his pulse. Her whiskers twitched with the wrinkle of a smile. She chuckled down at him and readjusted her touch. “I’m not Ami, am I?”

Olive spent a long moment or two just trying to massage the throbbing headache away from his forehead. It did not help at all. “You, um... You don’t work the same way?”

“Nope. No two people ever really work the same. With this, or most other things. But Ami is... She’s-” Ranya clicked her tongue and sighed. “She can’t help it, like I said. She’s just got so much of that stuff swirling around inside her, that this does tend to happen, really. Especially with her current state of mind.” Ranya sighed again. She finally lifted her hand away from Olive’s throat. “What I’m trying to describe here isn’t a law of energy. It’s not like electricity, where it always wants to travel through water, or the easiest path whenever it can but, ah-” Ranya tipped her head back with a low mutter of sound. “Sorry. It’s just really hard to explain this stuff in a human language.”

“Oh. It’s okay.” Olive realized it was true, what Ranya told him. “Um, you’re...” Indeed, Amiela’s sudden energy strike had not felt like a static shock at all.

It had been far more like some abrupt bursting blast, a rippling, concussive shockwave that had knocked Olive directly backwards over the ground. It might not have been a true lash of fire that pushed him away, but it certainly did feel as if he’d been rebuffed by a solid wall of roaring flame.

When the world around him began to swim apart inside his vision, unraveling in lazy little circles of dizzying perception, Olive decided it really would be better not to try and to move upright for a while.

“You’re...” Olive laid there in a deeper daze. He tried to find a way to compliment Ranya for her fluent manner of speaking, but the words floating around inside his mind just would not line up neatly with his tongue. “Um, you’re really good at saying things, already. So don’t worry.”

“Mm. I’d better be. I’ve had a very long time to practice.” Ranya smiled at him and took a moment to think it over. She then began to try and explain once more, but in a much softer murmur of voice. “Listen. Ami’s story isn’t something for me to share. Her history is her own, but, she... Well.” Ranya’s gaze slid sidelong and lingered there. “She hasn’t had a very easy time of it so far, out there in this world.”

Olive hazily blinked up at Ranya, waiting for her to continue.

Ranya peered back over her shoulder, gazing off towards the young woman who sat far away, perched at the opposite side of the tower. “What I’m saying is, someone who’s been hurt badly too many times is going to react a certain way whether they want to or not. And she doesn’t want to, but she can’t control that sort of reaction.”

“So wait, it... It’s like... A magic flinch?” The true concept of it only fully dawned over Olive in that moment. His thoughts flooded with understanding all at once. “Oh, no, then, I... I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“Shh. It’s alright.” Ranya moved to pat one of her hands over Olive’s forehead. She began to play with a few of the curling locks that rested over the crown of his brow, admiring the soft texture of his hair. “I’m sure she knows you didn’t mean it.”

Olive struggled for a moment to try and get up, but Ranya only held him back again with a gentle firm yet press of that strange, strange hand of clawed hooves over his chest. She barely even needed to exert much pressure at all.

He pleaded up at her with dizzy, blurry eyes. “But I made her upset-!”

“No you didn’t. The circumstances did.” Ranya clicked her tongue and shook her head at him. “Nope. You’re going to stay right there where you won’t fall down and bonk that cute little noggin of yours again, at least until we’re sure you’re alright. I’ll go and make sure she’s okay.”

Olive found he could not stop frowning. He wished his voice would not break the way it did. “Did it hurt her too, when that happened..?”

But Ranya looked almost bewildered at that. Her fluffy ears lifted. “Probably not, no? Because it’s already hers?” She gave the question a bit more thought. “And, well, I’d have felt it too, if it hurt her very much.” Something in her eyes softened slowly when she looked back at him, easing like rain over a distant skyline. Ranya rose up with a click of her hooves and patted one of her paws over Olive’s nearest shoulder. She gave him a more reassuring smile. When she turned away, the look faded. “It’s just a... Touchy subject to try and deal with.”

Amiela still sat at the furthest edge of the tower. She looked rather like a bird there, attempting to conceal itself fully under its own wings, all tightly bunched up and withdrawn.

“Hey.” Ranya approached her without hesitation. “Don’t cry.” She moved close, just near enough to puff a warm, steady breath over the back of Amiela’s neck, stirring up her softest locks. “He’s okay. He was only a little confused at first.”

“I... I shouldn’t be like this. It’s not fair to anyone.” Her voice was thin and short again, only tamped down towards a steadier murmur by sheer force of will. Amiela already had her face hidden behind both of her arms. Her knees were drawn up tighter against her chest. “I’m a goddamn tragedy waiting to happen-!”

“No you aren’t.” Ranya leaned in nearer. She wished she could do something, anything beyond just sitting there beside her, but she knew Amiela would not accept it. At least not in that current moment. Ranya tipped her head and sighed. “You’re going to get better at this. It won’t control your life forever.”

“There’s no control. There’s nothing.” Amiela’s voice cracked sharper when she said it. She finally lifted her head to let her hands stiffen before herself in the open sky, into the warm desert air sweeping over the prairie. The skin of her hand, that one small patch where Olive’s fingertips had brushed, still burned so fiercely alight. Amiela’s skin swirled with vivid patterns of branching fractals, untamed light that painted the surface of her flesh with potent whorls of inner energy. “I don’t even realize it’s happening until it already happens...”

“I know. So we’ll deal with it, just like always.” Ranya purred a gentler note beside her ear. She wanted nothing more than to press that soothing sound tight against Amiela’s shoulder instead. “But I think he’ll feel a lot better once he knows you’re okay, too.”

Amiela wiped her blurry eyes. She tried to steady her rate of breathing. “Give me a minute.”

“No problem.” Ranya laid down beside her there, relaxing her hind legs with a casual stretch. She breathed in deeply as well and peered up into the afternoon sky. “Good air today. Not as much sand in the wind. Makes it a lot safer on your lungs, you know.”

“Yeah. It... It’s easier to breathe from it, now.” Amiela sniffled and rubbed her eyes a bit more. “I almost hope we don’t get another sandstorm soon. They’re good visual cover, but at a cost.”

“It’d give you more time to rest up, too.” Ranya smiled at her for a while, grinning with a much easier look than before. “I’m glad you ate well today. Really, Ami. You did good. That’s a whole lot better for your health, too.”

Amiela did not say anything. She only moved to stand, slowly rising on shaky limbs. The flesh of her hand still tingled from where her energy had surged. The sensation made it difficult to even feel the breeze touch her skin wherever her colors flowed. She slowly curled her fingers over her palm, against that lingering pattern, and turned to walk back towards that wayward little boy again.

Olive laid over the ground, watching the fluffy white clouds roll out across the midday sky. His dizzied eyes looked up at Amiela when she approached. He tried his best to smile for her, to show her everything was all okay again.

“I’m... I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry I hurt you.” Amiela crouched down just a short distance away. It was difficult for her to even try and meet Olive’s gaze that time. She just kept glancing at herself, though more so towards the dust-coated ground whenever she spoke. “I wasn’t thinking. I told you before, that I was a witch. I said it because it’s true, but also to try and get you to go away from us, to run from Ranya and me both, for your own good. But you stayed. And I didn’t think you’d keep staying, or even try to get near someone like me, so I didn’t-”

“It’s alright.” Olive interrupted her in a gentle tone. “I’m okay. Really. It didn’t even hurt too much.” He hoped he lied to her better than before. It still felt like a mule had kicked the back of his head, then perhaps trotted back and knocked it around a few more times for good measure. “But, you, um... You might want to try and tell people sooner next time..?”

The sound of it brought the tiniest, most wry little smile to Amiela’s lips. “The general populace isn’t exactly clamoring to be around witches, you know.” She stared down at her boots and sighed. “But you’re right. I should have told you. Even if you should have run.”

Past the dizziness in his vision, Olive peered back towards where it had all happened in the first place. The little trilobite fossil still waited there on the ground, right where it had fallen, resting beneath a thick layer of sandy grit. He slowly reached out for it.

Olive traced his fingertips over the smooth ridges of weathered stone. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask before touching you.”

Amiela shook her head. “You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t even be reacting like that in the first place.”

Olive reached out again, but instead of trying to hand it to her, he moved to set the tiny piece of fossilized rock down on the ground between the two of them. The stone clicked quietly over the earth. “Ranya said it’s like a reflex... A flinch?”

Amiela let those words settle in place for a moment. “Yeah, I... I guess that would be a decent way of putting it.” She peered down at the little fossil, waiting for Olive to withdraw his hand. She then reached out to lift it and examine the ancient, delicate creature for herself. “I’m sorry I’m not a better person to look out for you. A kid like you shouldn’t be left all alone out here.”

But beneath the dull ache of soreness still thrumming deep in his own mind, even after Olive decided he should not say it aloud to her that time, not even a little, he knew Amiela was being too harsh on herself.

She was likely the only sort of person, he reasoned, that he’d ever be willing to follow into such a merciless wasteland below.