Soleiman sat atop the stool just outside the tent where Pallas was being tended to, his gaze averted as Rumi applied a few cool beads of aloe gel to the bruise on his face. In the periphery of his vision, he could make out Qingxi’s figure sat cross-legged at the base of a tree. And though he knew she was there, he couldn’t bear to look at her.

Rumi squirted the last bead of aloe onto his face, taking her two fingers and using it to gently rub the ointment all over the blotch of purple and blue upon his skin.

He flinched slightly, the tenderness of the injury still evident even through the cooling feeling the gel provided.

“Oop- Sorry!” Rumi whispered, pulling her fingers away from his face.

“It’s okay,” he winced.

As she got back to rubbing the gel, he could begin to hear the ongoings within the tent. The crinkling of the tarp under the feet of the villagers shuffling about, the ripping of cloth to break off bandages and the opening of jars containing Edenberry paste.

He didn’t know what would become of his sister, and he felt hopelessly powerless to help her. All he knew was that he and his failure were responsible for the condition she now found herself in, and that he would have to answer for it when she woke up. Whenever that would be.

If at all.

Rumi wiped her fingers against the skirt of her Thosmodene attire, something only she wore now- given that the others who had alternative cooler options preferred those in the Minervan climate. She then took the little patch placed atop his thigh, lightly placing it against his bruise- covering it and the gel around it entirely.

The guilt gobbled him up from the inside. As if it hungered for his flesh, gnawing and ripping and tearing away at his chest and bowels, an unknowable fathomless hole spawning upon his heart. All he wanted to do was curl up and hide behind a tree, though Rumi wouldn’t let him.

Having adjusted the patch on his face well enough, Rumi picked up a little tube filled with tar the villagers had told them would do as an adhesive, squeezing it as she traced around the edges of the patch. Once she’d done that, she moved back a bit to check that she’d done everything.

“Thank you, Rumi,” Soleiman said, placing his left hand lightly atop the patch to feel it for himself.

She nodded, smiling in turn.

A villager soon emerged from the tent.

“She’s okay now,” she said. “You can go in if you want.”

“Really?” Soleiman asked, perking up and seeing as Qingxi rose to her feet in his periphery.

“Yeah. Everything you need’ll be in the tent, and the lady inside’ll answer any of your questions.”

“Thank you!”

The villager nodded, and she hurried away back to the village.

The three of them rushed into the tent, the cool air of the outside suddenly replaced by a much warmer, perfumed scent that filled the entire interior.

Inside, Pallas lay motionless atop a cloth-covered table, several layers of bandages having been wrapped about her chest to just barely cover the gaping hole above her heart. Next to her, another villager stood in common day-to-day garb, arranging the jars of paste and whatever remained of their supply of bandages to the best of her abilities.

Immediately, Soleiman rushed forward and nearly threw himself onto the table, embracing his comatose sister.

“Thank goodness, Pallas,” he said, voice wavering.

“Thank you, Madame,” Qingxi said, addressing the villager.

“Yes, thank you,” Rumi repeated.

The villager nodded.

“Try and apply the paste twice a day,” she said. “We’ve more or less run out of paste now, but a shipment from the neighbouring villages is due to come sometime tomorrow morning. That should last her through to the day after.”

“How long will it take to heal?” Rumi asked.

“We’re… not sure,” she said. “We haven’t had an injury this serious not end in death.”

Soleiman looked up at her in dread.

“But!” she quickly added, continuing, “She’s an exception. The fact that she didn’t die immediately is evident enough for that. Just make sure she gets enough paste consistently, and… we’re sure she’ll be fine.”

“Any ideas how much paste we’ll need?”

“Erm…”

“Two hundred grams,” Qingxi said. “Around there, at least.”

Rumi’s eyes widened slightly.

“Two hundred?”

Qingxi nodded.

“Assuming she recovers completely over a month,” she said. “Though I don’t know how we’d get that two hundred.”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem if you spread it out over enough villages,” the villager said. “It’s not like she needs the two hundred all at once.”

“Mm, alright.”

“But try not to ask too much, though,” she said. “The Hashashiyyin have really harsh quotas and the amounts we’re able to give you are whatever bits and pieces we have left over. Any more and it could tip them off that something’s going on.”

“What would you say is a fair amount to request?” Qingxi asked.

The villager shrugged.

“That depends on the village’s situation. Some have the paste stockpiled and hidden away, others not so lucky have been wrung essentially dry.”

“I see.”

“So, yeah. I suggest that once the shipment arrives you start moving on to other villages, doubletime, lest there not be enough paste for her.”

“Okay.”

The incense sticks in the corner of the tent slowly smouldered away.

“We should go,” Qingxi said. “There’s not much day left.”

“Mmh, yeah,” Rumi agreed. “Come on Soleiman, Qingxi needs to carry Pallas.”

Slowly, he peeled himself away from the embrace. Seeing the tear blotches he’d left on the bandages about her chest, half-soaked with blood.

“Alright.”

Sometime later, Qingxi and Rumi had decided to pay a visit to a nearby stream as directed by the villagers, looking to wash themselves of all the dirt and grime and sweat they’d accumulated over the past few days, and especially during the course of the battle.

With the orange sky overhead slowly yielding to the inevitable encroachment of scarlet red and eventually abyssal black, Qingxi took to ladling scoops of cold stream water over Rumi’s bare back, slowly rubbing out every last remnant of filth with a handy luffa while they sat on a pair of rocks placed within the rushing waters.

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Rumi shivered slightly, clasping her left palm in her right hand and holding them to her chest, the evaporation of water all over her body providing a mighty cooling effect- doubly so whenever the occasional gust of wind came blowing through.

“The water’s so cold,” she said, trembling slightly as her teeth chattered.

“Just hang on a bit more,” Qingxi assured her, using her technique to stymy the breeze. “It won’t be long.”

Soleiman hadn’t come with them to bathe. Not because he was shy of getting naked alongside them- he could always just bathe a little upstream or downstream in that case. But rather because he ‘didn’t feel like it’, whatever that meant.

And it just didn’t feel the same to Rumi when he wasn’t there to break the silence with an out of pocket fact about post-Ruination Phian history, or with some unnecessary silly remark about something random.

That wasn’t to say that she didn’t appreciate Qingxi’s presence. With her, Rumi found that they would interact with actions more than words, the Chitite’s incomplete mastery of the Minervic language and her general stoic aura steering her away from petty small talk. Qingxi also felt that physically tangible actions like small acts of kindness or a sly squinting of her eyes often did the job of conveying her thoughts and feelings better than mere sentences ever could.

That being said, though, it was a little too quiet. A silence that really only emphasised the unique feeling of awkwardness that somehow hung in the magically still air. Egging Rumi on.

“Uhm, Qingxi?” she asked, still facing the other direction as the Chitite washed her back.

“Yes?”

Rumi thought about what she was going to say for a moment, staring unresponsively into the orange-red waters of the stream rushing over her feet.

“Rumi?”

“Oh? Oh, right,” she said, stirring herself from her silence. “Why… Why did you hit Soleiman?”

Qingxi’s rubbing seemed to slow down slightly, the luffa not quite pressing as hard against Rumi’s skin as it had been moments before.

“He…” she said, the energy she put into washing Rumi’s back seemingly being redirected to her head to formulate a response. “He shouldn’t have let the thing get away.”

“Why not?”

“Because now we’re even less able to defeat it,” she said. “If we couldn’t take it down with Pallas, how are we supposed to do it without her?”

“Mmh,” Rumi hummed, shuffling her legs about slightly, the water sloshing about beneath her. “But don’t you think it was a bit much to slap him over it?”

Qingxi stopped rubbing her back altogether, giving no response.

All that filled the air was the soft sound of water bubbling as it flowed over and against the rocks within the stream.

“Qingxi?”

“...Yeah,” she said, her hands falling away from her back. “Maybe it was.”

“Are you gonna apologise to him?” Rumi asked, rotating atop the rock to look at her, her golden eyes glistening in the light of the evening sky.

Qingxi gave no response, turning away from her and averting her gaze.

Rumi hummed slightly.

“Think about it, okay?” she said, taking the luffa and then the ladle from Qingxi’s hands. “Here, let me wash your back for you.”

And so Qingxi turned her back to Rumi, feeling the refreshing coolness of the stream’s waters wash over her before Rumi set the ladle down and got to rubbing.

Soleiman sat atop the tarp, back against the rough bark of a tree. He hugged his knees, staring into the thick cast that wrapped itself about his right arm.

He was so unbelievably sticky. The relentless humidity of the forest hadn’t done him any kindnesses, a fact further worsened by his disposition to sweat excessively at even the slight suggestion of heat. Now, even though the sky had ventured into its evening hues, he felt the residues of days’ worth of sweat cling to his skin- with the exception of his casted arm, whose sweat glands had been burnt dead by the encounter with the headless ataphoi.

He hung his head lazily. Not even wanting to look at the sight of his sister slumbering away just beside him atop a hammock. So utterly serene and tranquil she looked, that he wondered if that was what she would look like if ever she died.

He pushed the thought away. No, now was the time for silence. That was why he’d rejected going to bathe with Rumi and Qingxi. That was why he had dismissed whatever soldiers that still stuck around and reconvened about the battle camp without so much as a speech.

He didn’t want to look them in the face. He didn’t want to look anyone in the face.

He sunk a little further towards his knees, feeling as the patch on his face pressed up against a knee and ached slightly.

The forest was quiet. The camp was quiet. And his thoughts were quiet. Nothing, no noise. Just the lingering feeling of guilt slowly festering within him.

But soon, he heard as two pairs of footsteps approached the camp.

And before he knew it, stood by the camp’s edge were Chloe, her bow and quiver still attached to her back, and Alexandros.

“Soleiman, Sir,” Alexandros said. “We need to talk.”

“Oh, yeah,” he replied, not moving from his spot. Not lifting his head to face them.

“There’s three things on the agenda,” he continued, him and Chloe taking off their sandals to step atop the tarp, approaching him. “Would you like to hear the good news or the bad news first?”

He hummed slightly.

The two of them looked at each other briefly, and nodded.

“Look, Soleiman,” Chloe said. “We’re not upset with you.”

“What?” he said, looking up at her, fear in his eyes.

“Did you really think we wouldn’t have noticed the fact you didn’t even look us in the eye when you dismissed us?”

“Ah, crap…”

Chloe knelt down beside him and Alexandros took a nearby stool to sit on.

“Listen. You realise that we took not a single casualty, right?”

“What about the men who were flung?”

“Only one of them got seriously injured. And he was the one you checked on.”

“Pallas?”

“She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Yeah…” he said. “But they only survived because they fled, didn’t they?”

“Even if they did stay in their positions,” Chloe said. “The beast didn’t go their way, did it now?”

Soleiman hummed.

“Listen, what I’m trying to say is, we’re not mad at you. We were upset that we lost, sure, but we’ve taken minimal losses. Considering that we knew little about whatever it was we were even going up against, I’d say that’s pretty good!”

He didn’t respond.

“Now I don’t know what your next plan is,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “But know that we will be there to fight for you and Pallas when the time comes.”

“In the name of freedom. For both Minervan and Silenter.”

Soleiman looked into her eyes. Those fathomless black orbs.

And he saw himself in them. Broken. Bedraggled. And beaten down to the very core.

“Thank you, Chloe,” he said, letting his head drop again. “Thank you.”

“Mmh,” she responded, sitting back. “Mr Alexandros?”

“Okay, time for the bad news,” he said, leaning forward. “The shipment that was supposed to come tomorrow morning just came. And without the Edenberries.”

“What?”

“Turns out the Hashashiyyin have gone rabid and decided to start lashing out at the villages all the way up north. Assaulting and interrogating people at random. So far, nobody’s given in yet, but we can’t be certain that that will remain the case.”

Soleiman shook his head, mouthing a silent, weak ‘no’ under his breath.

“The reports have mostly come from those in the fringe regions nearer to Minlos, but we expect them to start spreading southwards soon,” he said. “And… there’s been reports that the Gravitas have made landfall in Kardia.”

Soleiman suddenly jerked from his defeated stupor, staring at Alexandros dumbfounded.

“The Gravitas? In Kardia?”

Alexandros nodded.

“Yeah. So you may want to hasten up with whatever it is you plan on doing.”

Soleiman felt as though the earth beneath him began to gyrate. Rotating about and wobbling hither and thither and throwing him around as though he were a plaything atop a child’s bed. Toying with him.

The Gravitas were in Kardia. Hadn’t they already came along once back when they first arrived? What were they doing here a second time, so long since the incident back at Porthopolis?

They didn’t have a lead, did they? Did Duke Thosmodene sell them out? Pontificus?

Chloe cleared her throat.

“Erm, yeah. But we’ll be by your side,” she said, reassuring him one last time. “So just worry about planning. And get some rest, too. You should be leaving early tomorrow morning, so your sister can get the berries she needs.”

“Of… Of course,” he said.

The two of them then left him, waving as they slipped on their sandals and returned to Naphthalia, leaving him alone once more.

And then, it was silent again. But it was not tranquil.

The forest was quiet. The camp was quiet. But the thoughts in his head roared in a cacophony that beat away at every last strand of sanity that held him and the raucous emotions that roiled and festered within him together.

He placed his left hand atop his head, his fingers seizing up as they grabbed at his hair, tearing them from their very follicles. He grit his teeth as his face tensed up, keeling over as his breathing grew heavy and arhythmic.

And he cried. Screaming his silent sorrows into the quiet, unresponsive forest.