One day.

One day of travel.

As soon as they were out of the city with a pack camel hauling the large leather travelling case that had the comatose Dia in it, Arne insisted they veer off the road and into the less travelled areas where civilisation equalled a small date palm and a surprise oasis six hours out.

They had camped in the desert, where hopefully nobody knew where they were, and the wind and sand obliterated their tracks. Dia had been quite calm and tired and suspiciously subdued, keeping herself in her own world by drawing the cat mask over her head. She hadn’t even kicked up much of a fuss when Toog offered to share a saddle that morning.

And now they were here, veered back to the road to find a town where they could get a saddle for the pack camel, something they had not thought of when leaving Arabesk with Dia in a box.

Dia still insisted on wearing the cat mask. From the temple. When they entered the small village.

He should have asked her why the ever-living fuck she would want to do a stupid damned thing like that. But then again, maybe someone in the rumour mill had send out a story about a dark-skinned woman with pointy elven ears bringing down a city block and unsettling a whole city quarter thoroughly. If the Family was willing to send a tentacle monster after them in broad daylight, then …why not? It seemed a too subtle kind of warfare, but you never knew.

So now a woman in a cat mask that covered her entire head was following them around and …arguing with the merchant Arne had been trying to buy another camel saddle from.

One day.

One day of travel was all they could manage without an incident.

“I won't sell anything to someone who won't show their face. Take the damned mask off, woman!” the merchant barked in a verbal conflict that had lasted a few minutes now and kept getting worse.

“What do you give a shit? I get a saddle and you get money, don’t push it! That’s how civilisation works!” Dia barked from behind the mask.

Arne knew exactly the look on her face already, even though he couldn’t see her, and was impressed at her being capable of showing such a very strong personality after such a short acquaintanceship. All of this he considered while he backed away a few paces down the street.

Toog was coming towards him from the small tavern. Quickly, he caught Toog by the arm. “Dia,” he just said, and together they hurried towards the edge of the village where their three camels stood tethered behind the weatherworn tavern.

Behind them, Dia's voice sounded in a sharp, growly scream, “Get your fat grubby maggot fingers off of me!”

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Arne and Toog began to sprint. Arne was vaguely aware of a few townspeople giving them strange looks, but happily sped past them, hoping to clear the blast radius.

… It was like a familiar refrain that seemed to invade his senses; the hideous sucking in of breath when Dia's unnerving power hit her victims, drawing out their life? Breath? Essence? Spirit? Whatever it was she did. He wasn’t sure if he actually felt anything or if it was just something he imagined as he fled, shoulder to shoulder with Toog, but it felt almost as if something had hit him, or rather tapped his soul on the shoulder. Nothing else happened. To them. And then the crash came from behind them as they cleared the edge of the village, and as per unspoken agreement, both Arne and Toog threw themselves to the ground, curling up, desperate to make themselves as small targets as possible.

A while later, the crashing, crushing sounds died down and all was deathly quiet around them. Arne risked opening an eye and looking at the destruction. Several buildings near the stable where Dia had been arguing with the camel driver were just heaps of dried timber, blasted into a wide, cone shaped path from where she had been standing. But surprisingly, the buildings behind her were intact. A few corpses lay in the street and, Arne supposed, in the houses too.

Dia, calm and cat-masked, came towards them and threw a camel saddle she had been hauling on the ground close to them. “Now we all have a saddle,” she said.

“Do we still have camels, though?” Toog asked and got up.

Arne got to his feet too. The anger was just under the surface, but on the other hand, brute force was nice to have. “Next time, it would be really nice if you would give us maybe a few minutes of warning? So we aren’t forced to flee like rabbits. Would that be doable?” he smiled.

Dia shrugged. Though she was unreadable under the mask, coarse-meshed fabric covered the eye sockets so she could look out, but nobody could look in, he knew she was rolling her eyes at him. “What are you sour about? You were being tardy with the saddle; I fixed the problem. And now we can loot the town since we got out of the city with pretty much zero supplies because of you. You are welcome.”

“Tardy. With the saddle…” Arne said and took a deep breath.

“Look, I’ll just go see if there’s alcohol somewhere and pack a bag while you get that thing out of your system, alright?” Toog stated and left to do exactly that, flipping the corpse of a young man over on the way and checking his belt bags.

“Dia, I’m going to guess you never paid for anything and don’t actually know how it works,” Arne smiled sharply, ignoring Toog. “But what you observed and considered tardy and then stuck your nose into is called haggling and is an expected activity which merchant and potential buyer engage in prior to a purchase being made. This is the norm in almost all the Nine Cities. It’s not worth murdering an entire town over!”

“Now we have saddles aplenty, supplies and whatever. We should get going.” Dia shrugged.

“No…” Arne sighed. “No. You levelled a chunk of Arabesk and now you do the same to this place? It’s an obvious, screamingly loud signature. If the creature that followed me in Arabesk didn’t die–“

“Oh, it died alright!” Dia snapped. “Nothing lives after having a house dropped on top of–“

“Or if the fucking Family have more invisible tentacle monsters where it came from, we obviously went this way! So we are now taking a nice large detour around Arabesk without being seen and then we go on to Estrin instead of Rasheed.”

“You’re welcome. Good thing I made that diversion, huh? You should have thought of that, Arne!” Dia pushed the cat mask off her face so Arne could see her roll her eyes.

Arne took a deep breath. It was fine. She was just trying to annoy him for random Dia reasons. She probably didn’t get out among people much and he guessed she hadn’t had a lot of contact with others except to brutally murder them.

Well… since they were here and the citizens of the village were beyond want and need, they might as well loot what they could before disappearing into the desert.