--- AYMIAE, THE YEAR 774 ---
Aymi smiled at the shop owner, taking the dress and folding it into her arms, “Do you have any travel bags? It seems like I have money left.”
The man nodded easily and led her past the clothing displays, “We get our leather straight from Genso’s, he’s got the highest quality stuff as far as Ceruleia.”
Aymi nodded, but she’d never heard of this guy before. After hesitantly asking what day it was earlier, she’d been slightly relieved to find it had only been three years since the fire. She’d only known that because it was a leap year now and she recognized things too much for it to have been the leap year after this one. Netun hadn’t exactly been counting the passage of time so it had seemed possible.
She browsed through the bags, eventually finding one that suited her needs. It was big enough to carry the money box and it had plenty of pockets. It also came with a basic alchemy set, which Aymi felt she would need quite a bit in the weeks to come. With her remaining money she bought a silver necklace that met the requirements for a basic permanent illusion.
She hadn’t trusted herself to make one before, she was waiting on testing out her illusions. But…well there was something distinctly wrong with the instinctive part of her affinities. It seemed like it wasn’t even there.
Aymiae walked through the streets until the night started to get late, finding an open shop had been difficult, and people had started giving her more strange looks the later in the night it got, perhaps because her body glowed slightly in the dark, she hadn’t figured out how to turn that off yet and Netun has simply shrugged and said it took practice.
She hummed and picked through a pile of garbage, even finding a whole sack of rotting vegetables that would be perfect to feed her mushrooms.
Truly the world was looking up.
That was when she felt something hard smack into the back of her head.
According to everything that Netun said, it was at this point when Aymi should have fled her body and cut her losses, but she hadn’t journeyed around the world for ten years just to fall flat when things took a turn for the worse.
Aymi let herself go limp, her body didn’t really do unconsciousness, but she felt something important break. Thinking as fast as her body would let her, Aymi decided she needed more information first.
She felt someone peek into her bag, evidently finding the alchemy kit and the bundle of clothing. She heard a hissed whisper, “You said she was loaded!”
Someone roughly pulled the bag toward them, and Aymi let her body flop in that direction, “She was! She got the thickest clothing and the most expensive bag!”
They pulled a large object from the bag and froze, Aymi heard something strike the ground nearby as it was tossed, “Ew! I think I got some on me!”
There was a slapping sound and the other assailant shuddered, “Rotting vegetables?” Someone pulled at the bag at Aymi’s side again, finally finding the box of coins, as evidenced by their sharp intake of breath and a quiet cheer.
Aymiae waited a moment longer and then pulled herself to her feet, but she couldn’t quite prop her head up like it should, she ended up growing a quick line of harder fungus to hold it up, but her mobility was limited. Sparks, she hoped her neck wasn’t broken, that would be a pain to fix. She saw the two assailants standing a few paces away, staring at her with wide eyes.
Aymi examined them for a moment and turned to examine the bag of vegetables, “If you wanted the money so bad, you could have just asked.” She felt at her neck, deciding that it was, in fact, broken. It felt odd, and Aymi was distinctly glad that she’d never broken her neck before. Good thing she’d been testing out different ways to wire the nerves. “Sparks, that’s not pleasant. Are you going to apologize or what?”
One of the assailants, a tall human man with an unfortunate nose, bolted at that point. He had the box.
The other assailant stuttered to herself, she looked around maybe fifteen, and she was also human. “I-I sorry!”
Aymi shrugged, “I think it’s mostly just annoying. Do you need like…help or something? Why did you turn to mugging people in back alleys?”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
She stuttered a little bit more and then bolted.
Aymi sighed, glancing down at her skin but already knowing that she’d been glowing pretty strongly as she worked to repair the damage. Sparks, that was annoying. She picked up the bag of vegetables and the rest of her things, glad that the only thing they’d taken was the box.
It reminded her of all the things she’d lost during that fire.
I wonder how Reiaran is doing…
The pain from that thought was unexpected, and it only reminded Aymi of how strange it was to be in a city again, even if it was a small one. She’d gotten used to the sands, the networks of fungus, and the souls that spent all their time simply thinking.
But she’d been a tuvei before that, a proud descendant of the alanerea, a retired adventurer who’d had an entire life, and an entire web of people. She’d been trying so hard to get Harrel to slow down and notice her for once, but then it had all ended in a moment.
Aymi felt as if she finally completely understood why Fari had tried so hard to live both lives. But that effort had only ended badly, and Aymi didn’t want to die again. Don’t go back to Reiaran then, go other places, tie up loose ends, discover the world, help people, you only stopped because someone needed to look after the Ayfel…
She liked that idea, perhaps in a couple of months, after she got a greater hold on her abilities.
--
As the weeks passed by, Aymi formed new bodies, grew her mass, and gained greater ability in the nuances of shaping herself. It got to the point where she didn’t even have to follow the outline in every aspect anymore, she knew how to make lungs, she knew how to make a tongue, she knew how eyes worked and she knew how to modify the strength of each of her senses. She could smell things from miles away if she concentrated and she could purge all impurities from herself with a mere thought.
Occasionally she would check up on Turste, but he still wasn’t talking. Salven theorized that he was deliberately curtailing his mass regeneration, though if that was the case he had to have a reason. They had ideas for what that reason might be, but they couldn’t confirm it until Turste stopped doing it.
Several times Aymi thought of maybe bringing him a new body to possess, but she had no way of knowing if that would work. “Is there any way for us to get a hold of a dead ferien?” Aymi asked Netun one day, “He would probably love to be one of those again.”
Netun shook his head, his eyes distant, “We can’t find Aleene, it’s been blocked from our view forever. Feriens only live there.”
Aymi nodded slowly, “Is there a reason he can possess things and no one else can?”
Netun grew solemn, looking down at his hands, which had balled into fists. “…yes I think so. There was something very very different in Turste than the rest of us. A desire to simply be something other than himself. Some say that he had the soul of a ferien and the body of an alanerea, but that wasn’t quite it. He did everything he could think of just to become a ferien. We’d all long since left behind the powers of our god, but Turste? He knew that those powers would give him what he needed.”
Aymi frowned, “So he did something no one else would and it changed his soul significantly enough that it carried over when he was cursed?”
“Possibly.” Netun sighed, a deliberate action since they didn’t need to breathe except to talk. “If that’s the reason, then the curse changed the seed of this ability in all of us, but Turste is the only one who had it unlocked.”
Aymi nodded slowly, “So you think the inactive version is in me too?”
Netun shook his head, “No, I think yours is active. I believe this is the same ability you and I use to change our forms since that’s closer to the original effect than what’s happening to Turste. The difference between us and Turste is that we aren’t holding onto the curse.”
Aymi leaned back with a frown, “But I feel like after the alanerea moved here, their children wouldn’t have been born with the inactive ability.”
Netun paused, remembering those days, “That’s true, you shouldn’t have it at all… Well we’ll have to get someone with soul sight to look at you, and we would have to describe what to look for… hmm…”
Aymi tilted her head, “Alright, I can put that on the to-do list.”
He blinked, “You have a to-do list?”
She grinned, pulling out the notebook she’d gotten during her last trip to that small town. “Yup.” She held it out to him and he took it with a curious expression.
“This is…interesting. ‘Settle issues in Yera,’ ‘find Harrel,’ ‘look into reports of odd patches of sandfrost,’ what’s this part here? ‘Settle issues with the Society of the Mis-born Dragon.’”
Aymi felt her grin fall, “…just a shady group that kept threatening me after I discovered their secret base a while ago. It’s not super urgent, I just want to let them know I’m still watching them, I’ll…probably have to shut down their orphan trafficking again too.”
She remembered the thin children starving in cages and shuddered, it hit far too close to home. Had things been different, it could have easily been herself in those cages, Aneles too, even Fari and the other girls she’d known in the Ayfel. Netun could sense that this was a more sensitive topic, probably because Aymi had lost her hold on her spores and they were flying about, projecting her sorrow onto the world.
Netun placed a hand on her shoulder, “If you need help with that one…if you need help with any of these, just ask, okay?”
Aymi smiled, “Thank you.”