It was a hectic day. Sophia had floated the idea of visiting some of the former slaves they freed, since they'd be staying. One thing led to another, and now they were playing games. Well, Nash and Riley were.

"Hey, not fair! You're faster than me!"

"Oh, come on, that's the whole point of the game!"

"Don't touch my tail! That's cheating!"

"Cheating shmeating!"

Blake and Sophia were sitting back and watching.

"I'm too old for that stuff," Blake said.

He wondered why Riley was playing with such younger kids, but, seeing her smile like that, he let it slip his mind. She looked the part, anyway, since her growth was stunted.

"I think you'd probably hurt someone by mistake," Sophia said.

"Yeah, probably."

They just kept running in circles, making up new rules as they went along. It was hard to keep track of.

"Ouch!"

Nash tripped. Blake got up to take a look, but Sophia stopped him.

It'd been a while since he had to use any healing magic, so it took a second to remember. But he did.

"Uh... What was it again? Painkiller!" Nash said, pointing his palm at his own knee. And with that, the pain was gone. He got up and did a couple kicks at the ground just be sure. Yep.

"Wait, Nash, that's not good enough. There could be germs in the wound, even if it's just a scrape," Blake said, from his seat.

"Germs?"

"Plague sprites," Riley said, stopping.

"Oh. Uh, which one was it... Heal!"

The scrape was covered in a white glow, which disappeared shortly. Once it was gone, the scrape was gone, too, and his knee was truly as good as new.

"So that's how you do it, huh?" Blake said.

Nash nodded. "Yeah, it's like... It just makes sense. It's better to let stuff heal naturally, if it's big, though." Nash went back to playing.

"That's right," Sophia said. "Normal magic isn't perfect. You can heal, heal, heal away at a broken bone to make it one again, but you're likely to break it again if you haven't given it enough time to rest. And if you do that, if you put everything back together all at once, the natural healing process might stop prematurely. The right thing to do is stabilize it with magic, then give the natural healing process a boost once or twice a day until it finishes. Scrapes and small cuts are just small enough that the difference isn't noticeable. Some of the Heroes in the past could regenerate to perfect form quickly, but only a few of them. If all of them could, not as many would've died young."

"So it's like, healing magic gets the right idea but it doesn't put stuff together a hundred percent right at a molecular level," Blake said.

"I don't know that 'molecular' word, but something to that effect."

"Oh, molecular is like... Uh... Tiny, but not too tiny? Too small for microscopes to see. Light microscopes, at least. But not much smaller than that. I think. Depends on the molecule?"

"There are other kinds of microscopes?"

Before Blake could respond, the kids interrupted them.

"Hey, it's Rosa and the foxes!" one of the freed slaves said.

"Wow, really?" another said.

A red-haired catling girl walked out into the yard with two foxes, not leashed.

Huh? You can domesticate foxes...? Blake thought.

"Rosa?" Nash said.

"One of the people we freed from that first group of bandits. The group we gambled with," Riley said.

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"Oh. Oh..."

Nash started blushing. Embarrassing memories were coming back.

One of the foxes started yapping at The Pack.

"Oh, come on, I know you don't recognize them, but they're good people! They saved my life!" Rosa said.

The fox made a weird sound and stopped yapping.

Riley stepped forward and tried to pet it. It tilted its head away, as though to say 'no thanks'.

"Oh, don't be like that. We're similar enough," she said.

The fox yipped a bit. Not like a bark or a growl. More like it was trying to say something.

Blake understood the fox. You're too old. I can smell it. Not like these kids at all. Twice the age, almost.

"Oh... I see," Riley said, turning and getting back to playing with the kids. She did well to suppress the negative reaction she usually has to this sort of thing.

Nash was standing still and staring at the fox with a curious look on his face.

"That's not good manners, you know," he said.

The fox yipped some more and turned its head away again. Don't tell me that. You don't even have a tail.

"Hey, I was born this way!" he said.

Blake sat there and watched. What the hell was going on? What was the fox doing? Why could he understand it? Why could Nash understand it?

"Uh... Sophia?" he said.

"Wondering why he can understand animals?" she said.

"Me too."

"What?"

"I could understand that fox too."

"That's strange."

"Maybe it's because we were connected to Riley through contract magic for a while?"

"Not likely. I haven't heard of such a thing happening to any of the countless owners of demihuman slaves."

"Okay, fine. So you think you know what's up with Nash?"

"I don't think I know, I know I know. There's a whole story to it. Are you interested?"

"Sure, I guess."

----------------------------------------

Half a day's walk outside the village of Pale Brook there was a hermitage home to twelve people. Two parents, a grandmother, eight children, and the children's uncle. There, each day, the first born son and daughter practiced esoteric magic, the likes of which were not widely known to city-dwellers or adventurers.

The father was a druid, the mother was a geomancer, the first-born son was a whisperer, and the first-born daughter was a druid like the father was. The grandmother was a Sage, and the uncle was a Savant.

The other six children were mostly ignored by the parents. Really, they were raised by their grandmother and one another, and then, later, by their uncle, whenever he was around. It was a strange family arrangement.

Sophia was the first-born daughter. Nash was the last-born son.

The story began one evening after a raid struck Pale Brook. Whose raid, the family did not know, for they were too distant. But the village went up in flames, and fire spread across the forest, all the way to the family's hermitage.

"Nashie! Oh, Nash! Where are you!"

Sophia screamed at the top of her lungs out into the forest. Nash was missing. He was only four years old. If he was out there somewhere, he was as good as dead. She had to find him, even if she didn't find anyone else.

Trail after trail she ran, searching for even a sliver of his presence. The heat of the fire the chill of the wind both pained her, but it was nothing. She steeled herself thus. If it was for Nash, she would walk through hell for a hundred years.

Aside from their uncle, who was away at another town this week, Sophia and Nash were the only ones to survive the fire. The rest of the family was asleep at home when the fire struck, and they were burned live. Nash kept having nightmares, so he'd gone out to watch the stars. Sophia was out training. It was midnight by the time she noticed the smoke in the air, and by the time she'd gotten home, her family's corpses were burnt to char. But she could not find Nash's. She knew, somehow, that he must have escaped, for one reason or another.

So she went looking.

"Nash! Please, answer me, wherever you are!"

And looking. And looking. Through the fire and flame.

Sophia eventually came upon a short dirt cliff, ripped into the landscape by a monster a few years prior, where Nash was sat motionless next to a tree. He was covered in soot, and as she grew close, she was anxious that he might have burned to death, too. But it was just a coating. His vitals were still working.

She held him in her arms.

"Oh, Nash...! Oh... Oh...!"

She cried. It was such a joy that he was still alive. Her one last true family member. They were twelve years apart, yes, but they were all they had left.

"Sis..."

"Nash..."

Nash was hardly conscious. She held her hand to his head. He had a fever. Why?

"Don't worry. This place is safe from the fire. You did good, finding your way here. I'm proud of you. Now sleep. I'll still be with you in the morning," she said.

He nodded.

Sophia wrapped the two of them up in her cloak and they slept through the night.

That morning they returned home. It was, as Sophia saw the night before, burned to the ground, and all that was left of their family was char and ash. She explained the situation to Nash. He cried. She cried, too. It was a tragic day.

They left for the village. The attack was devastating, but there were still those who were left alive, and buildings that were spared. They sought shelter, and they found it. They could sleep on the floor of an abandoned home and sate themselves on porridge made from the seed corn of a fallen farmer. So they did.

"Sophie. I had that bad dream again."

"The one with the bears and deer?"

"They chase me into a blizzard. It's so cold. I fall down and they laugh at me. It hurts so much."

She held him. He still had a fever. She didn't know what to do.