Food. That was what sat on Pallas’ plate, that was what she struggled to put into her mouth.

She looked up, her eyes briefly landing on Lauka, her lightning blue irises barely visible through her fringe as she shovelled spoonful after spoonful of rice into her mouth.

They were eating the same thing, right?

Her eyes jumped between their two plates, the only difference between the two piles of fragrant rice paired with chunks of lamb being the amount that remained uneaten.

Lauka’s was nearing completion.

Whereas Pallas had barely taken a bite after her first few spoonfuls.

Of course, there was nothing wrong with the meal. It tasted… alright. And judging by Lauka’s ferocity it by all means could’ve even been considered good.

But… it was not Rumi’s cooking.

Pallas sighing quietly to herself, hunching over a little more than she already was. The woollen sweater Lauka had given her to wear was comfortable, at least, and it hugged her skin in all the right spots to keep her warm.

She looked around in some vain attempt to procrastinate eating, her eyes landing on the warm interior of Lauka’s retreat. Through the glass panels surrounding the mini indoor garden she could see as her fireplace slowly crackled, and the warm orange hues that radiated off of it paired nicely with the soft lightning of the lanterns hung on the wall and above the dining table they sat at.

She put her spoon back into the rice, scooping out a measured amount of the yellowish-orange grains.

She had to finish it. That was the least she could do to repay her.

Though, when she went to lift the spoon to her hesitantly opening lips, she felt a few pin-pricks of pain on her knuckles. She paused, turning her hand over to see that thin white cracks had formed all over her hand, culminating in little red rifts that entirely split the skin to expose her blood to the outside air.

She put down the spoon, bringing her hands together to check them more closely.

Both of them were cracking, both of them were dry.

“Need lotion?” Lauka muffled through a mouthful of rice.

“Ah, mm, yeah,” Pallas rubbed her hands together. “Hands are a bit dry.”

“One moment,” she muffled again.

Lauka put a finger up, before rising from her seat to skip around to the storeroom.

“Oh, uh, you shouldn’t talk while chewing,” Pallas said. “It’s a bit dangerous.”

There was an audible swallowing sound, before Lauka emerged from the storeroom with a brown glass bottle in hand.

“Sorry,” she said clearly. “Habit of mine.”

“Thank you,” Pallas took the bottle.

She glanced at the label on it for a moment, the words for ‘castor oil’, ‘milk’ and ‘honey’ hastily written in horribly shoddy Saracenic scribbled onto it.

“Is the food alright?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah,” Pallas unscrewed the cap. “I’m just… a little inappetetic right now.”

Every time she didn’t feel like eating, she felt herself reminded of the plight writhing within her. The plight that struggled and wrestled with her body, that would not let up until it wrung her life out of her hands for good.

And it made everything even less appetising.

She pushed those thoughts aside as best as she could, tipping the bottle over to administer a few small drops of the ointment to the back of her hands.

“I don’t even remember my hands getting this dry,” she said, rubbing her hands together and bringing salvation to the agony that was her peeling skin.

“It's another symptom,” Lauka said, her eyes still focused on her food. “One of the… early ones, though.”

Pallas felt her heart sink a bit.

Another one?

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lauka waved her spoon about. “Dry skin usually sets in a week or two after infection in most people. The fact that it’s taken almost half a year to develop in you is a good sign you’re still a ways away.”

She did not feel reassured at all.

“...From dying,” Lauka added.

Now she just felt sick.

Lauka scratched her head.

“Ehm,” she hummed, her blue eyes awkwardly darting about. “Do you want to do something else, maybe? I can pack your dinner up for you to eat back at the infirmary.”

“Like… what?”

Lauka gave a brief look to her window, the lights of the outside lanterns just barely revealing the open lane of her shooting range.

The metal in the distance pinged, the sound of lead striking steel ringing throughout the slumbering forest and alerting the two girls that their shot had hit its target.

“Phew,” Pallas puffed. She lifted the flintlock rifle from its resting spot within her shoulder, and she pulled her neck back into a more comfortable position.

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The area in front of her had been almost entirely engulfed by black smoke, which was the unfortunate byproduct of the blackpowder charges Lauka– and the rest of Phia– used to fuel their guns and cannons.

“Alright, now pull back the hammer,” Lauka said, her arms crossed as she stood by.

“Half cock, right?” Pallas cranked it upright.

“Correct.”

She reached one of her hands into the pouch about her waist, fishing out a paper cartridge. Feeling as Lauka watched on keenly, her intensely earnest gaze almost palpable, she bit off one end of the cartridge, spitting the flake of paper out before moving to fill the flash pan with powder.

“Try shaking instead of just opening it,” Lauka said, reaching for the pistol on her hip.

“Shaking?”

“Like this, see?” Lauka presented the flintlock mechanism of her pistol to Pallas, keeping the muzzle facing away from the both of them, before pushing open the frizzen and exposing the flash pan.

She took the black powder horn– also from her hip–, bringing its mouth to the small priming system. There, she shook and tapped the thing gently, ushering out little bits of black powder at a time until she felt as though enough primer had been administered.

Pallas mumbled an, “Oh, okay,” before returning to her own rifle. There, she repeated to the best of her abilities what Lauka had done, and thankfully this time she was able to avoid spilling almost half of the cartridge out into the open.

She snapped shut the frizzen, before pouring the rest of the powder down the muzzle and forcing the bullet down the barrel. Though, she didn’t have to put much effort into it, and she half-felt that she might’ve overdone the ramming a little bit.

Either way, Lauka gestured for her to continue, and so she stowed the ramrod once more before preparing to fire.

“Second one now?” Pallas asked as she set her eyes down her rifle’s sights and pointed over to the target further back from the one she’d just shot.

“Second one.”

Smoke shot out from the gun’s barrel, and Pallas slammed shut her eyes before the bright flash of sparks that burst into being by the frizzen could get to her.

A second passed, and then came the ding.

“Phew,” she sighed. “So this is what’s letting you and the Sahlbarid beat back the beasts?”

“More or less,” Lauka poured a little bit of powder down the muzzle of her pistol. “They’ve got a few advantages over magic that make a lot of difference.”

She fished a round lead ball from a pouch on her belt, popping it into her pistol before seating it with a few pumps of her ramrod.

“First of all,” she pulled the rod from the barrel, sticking it back into place. “They have much better range than almost every Technique, barring some applications of Gravitas’ Forza.”

She and Pallas’ eyes glanced over to the targets in the distance, easily a few hundred metres separated from where they were.

“But what’s more important is that they don’t need to be handheld the whole way to their target,” she pulled the hammer into full cock before lifting her pistol into position, closing one eye to peer down its sights.

She pulled the trigger, and her wrist recoiled slightly as the bullet sprang forth. Her stance remained entirely focused on the target in the distance even after firing, up until the returning ding reached their ears.

“You only need to move one finger,” she said, bringing the pistol closer to her to bring the hammer to half cock. “Whereas one of Gravitas’ men would need to push a dart all the way using their magic.”

Pallas nodded along, humming.

“Then there’s the element of surprise too, since even the smallest of pistols manage to reach speeds far surpassing even the most advanced Forza users.”

Lauka began walking back to the house’s wall, towards a workbench stocked with ammo bags and cartridge kits and other guns she felt like testing that night that sat quietly under the light of an open window.

“And, of course, the power too…”

“Why haven’t other states gotten around to using guns like yours yet?” Pallas asked.

Lauka set her pistol down, arranging it nicely in place before picking up a much larger, more imposing gun.

“Because they don’t have me,” she smiled.

Pallas stared blankly at her as she picked up a few cartridges marked by a special red tie.

“I’m just kidding, of course. Though only partially,” she said, returning to the line-up. “Hand cannons haven’t quite picked up in the rest of the world because there hasn’t been much of a reason for others to develop it yet.”

Lauka began the process of loading her new gun, a somewhat short-barreled musket that had a visibly larger stock and looked discernibly heavier than normal.

“Most of them use some version of smoothbore matchlock muskets,” she said, struggling slightly to move the gun about with as much ease as she had with the pistol. “Those don’t fire as reliably, in both that they’re hard to ignite consistently and that when they are fired, they don’t hit their target too often.”

She huffed as she pointed the gun’s muzzle upwards, leaving Pallas wondering if she should offer her help or not.

“Usually, you’d need a large group of musketeers shooting all at once to actually have an effect on the battlefield,” she heaved, ramming the rod down her gun’s barrel. “But at that point, you might as well just tap into your people’s magical abilities for much greater effect.”

She lifted the gun back up, resting it on her shoulder as she worked on setting its flintlock.

“There just isn’t enough drive for them to go through the trial-and-error process that would lead them to developing actual good guns,” she said, snapping the frizzen shut. “I only got lucky and managed to skip the whole process thanks to my dreams.”

“That’s… because you’re a herald, right?”

“You know the term?”

“I remember my brother talking about it once.”

“Mmm,” Lauka hummed. “Yeah. The third and latest bestial herald.”

Pallas turned to look down the range as Lauka got ready for her shot.

There came the smoke, and then they waited.

After a second, came the ding.

And then another.

And another.

In fact, it was as if she had shot multiple bullets at once.

“What was that?”

“Birdshot,” Lauka lifted the butt of the gun off of her shoulder. “Trying out new things, you know?”

“Mm,” Pallas hummed. “So who are the other two?”

“The… heralds?”

Pallas nodded.

“Well, the second one’s the Serpent King, Herald of… I believe the ‘Human Form’, is what they called it,” she looked off in thought. “The first, though… eludes me. All I know is that he lived and died during the Bloodrain War, and that he was the Herald of Medicine.”

Pallas hummed, looking down at her musket as her arms went limp.

“Strangely enough a lot of the documentation around his specific period of operation is a little muddy, to say the least,” Lauka mumbled to herself.

“Anyway,” Lauka said, raising her volume a little. “Would you mind doing that bloodbeam you were talking about?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Pallas said, shuffling back to place her gun onto the workbench.

When she returned to the line-up, though, raising her hand before her and presenting a finger to the first target, there was a little flutter of green that danced briefly through her vision.

Whether that was a falling leaf or not, though, she was unsure.

But it never hurt to believe otherwise.