After what felt a long absence of awareness, the first thing I perceived was warmth.

Heat, in fact, building on my bare skin.

There was a roaring too, and a distant, dangerous rumble, felt as much as heard.

My chest throbbed as I recalled the magma lakes, and the dreadful Kajatora that dwelt within. Creeping heat and approaching vibrations were dangerous things in the world into which I’d fallen.

But this heat was gentle and diffuse, spreading evenly over my front and side, and the sounds were soft, almost flowing at times.

Stirring, I felt strange shapes under me, like meshes or nets, and what could almost be feathers against my skin.

Opening my eyes, I was dazzled; yellow light flooded everything, rich and vibrant, a sea of lustrous green all around, and a ceiling of deep, sparkling blue.

Vertigo struck, and my hand moved to grip the rock under me, but it was only earth there. Earth and a small bed of branches, thick with leaves.

Blinking, I looked around with a clearer head.

I was laying snuggled up with Berenike, my other arm still around her waist, the two of us bathed in the morning sun, as magnificent geysers vented some distance off.

Laughter came to me, at the absurd disconnect. I’d been trapped down there for so long… yet now the Underworld felt very far away.

I knew that time was limited. I had to get to civilization, to find out what had been happening in my absence, to convey a warning and to ensure Echo, Gastores, Ivaldi and all the rest were safe… but for the moment the relief was too great. Berenike was also still sleeping on my arm, and after all she’d been though I didn’t want to wake her until we were ready to set off.

Laying back on the impromptu bed, I stretched out, and just enjoyed the warm, comforting rays for a little while, my eyes cherishing the all those wonderful little details of the vibrant and welcoming mountains, and the spectacular pillars and rainbow sprays of water that rose up to challenge them.

Naturally none of the trees were ones I knew from earth, but there were some familiar shapes among them, from my time in the Bloodsucking Forest or parts of the Great Basin. Others were totally novel to me, high-altitude species perhaps. Regardless of the types, they all moved with the gentle winds, in a soothing, coordinated dance.

Even crashing waters and gushing streams couldn’t disturb the peace of it all.

A little way off I could see the shapes of Lyanna, Dolm and Reynard, who appeared to have been awake for some time. They were cooking dubious-looking hunks of meat on a small fire.

Low bar as it was, I felt mildly grateful that they hadn’t tried to interfere with us as we slept.

In the capture or attack sense – embarrassingly exposed as I was, I doubted any of them were really interested in me like that.

Hopefully once Berenike and I rose, the five of us could improvise me some sort of clothing.

I smiled as I recalled that last time I’d had to resort to that. It felt like years ago that I’d first met, or rather concussed Ael in the forest. The fight also seemed very distant, yet I could remember her face and her voice as she teased me over my attire as if she were with me now. I could almost feel her hands around me, or her plumage on my skin.

Of course I really did have someone’s plumage on me. I leant my cheek against Berenike’s wing, and breathed the scent of her feathers.

It wasn’t the same.

Ael had a scent all of her own.

There was a stirring in my tummy at that thought, and I felt suddenly more aware of myself… of the blood pumping through my veins, and the shape of my body. My curves and my chest, my generous rear and wide hips… and the tender place between them. All were lit up in the morning sun, and looking down at myself it was startling how beautiful I felt. My form wasn’t just comfortable, but elegant and attractive too – a bizarre sensation after so many years of it’s being vaguely distasteful and discomforting.

With a new life to adjust to and whole new world to explore, full of so much happening, and so much to discover, I had yet to really explore myself. Even just to really look and understand why my body was now.

Much as I suddenly yearned to change that, it was easier than ever to conclude that this was not the time. The point was inarguable really. Berenike was right there. Just as the threat of intruding handmaidens or deadly formorians had been in past mornings.

I pushed those feelings aside, and returned my eyes to the rolling hills and peaks of the landscape instead.

They too were beautiful, stunningly so.

It brought a tear to my eye to just lose myself in the shapes of the land and the gorgeous displays of thriving life.

In the distance I even noticed a bloodfruit tree.

That woke a feeling entirely distinct from morning arousal; an insistent rumble of hunger.

Gently, I eased my arm out from under my friend. She moaned in her sleep, but I brushed her bedraggled feathers, and she settled again. Berenike needed rest after the travails of the last few days.

Lyanna and Dolm noticed me as I rose, and I could feel the blush that came over my cheeks as their eyes looked over the rest of me, but as I had many times now, I pushed past the humiliating sensation.

They returned my wave uncertainly, as I walked off towards the trees on the far side of the great geyser field.

Scars of the battle lingered there, in gouged out and shattered chunks of rock, melted stone and scorch-marks, and even scattered ice, yet to fully melt.

I felt a pang of guilt for the damage, but I could hardly have wasted my energies protecting the place when there were lives at stake. Hopefully a few years of rain and wind – and eruptions – would blend the marks into the rest. If not, maybe I would clean up somehow. I wanted the place to look nice, if I was ever to bring my friends here.

Who ‘my friends’ would end up referring to still remained to be seen, but at least in my fantasies I had the largest hot pool – a small lake to one side – picked out for Ael and Arawn.

And me.

For the moment, however, I was focusing on food.

Berry, cute as her nickname was, didn’t seem like she would be too impressed with a meal of only foraged fruits. The Valkyrie needed nutrition at that moment, and I had seen her gusto for meatier dishes when we ate together.

It wasn’t just a walk to find food, however. Moving alone through the trees on that glorious sunny morning was a wonderful moment of calm and simplicity, before things grew tumultuous and complex again.

~~~

Tending to the crackling fire and spitting lumps of oily greankap meat was a simple task, leaving ample time for thought.

Or, in Reynard’s case, worry.

Lyanna had spotted the bird, cocooned in its home tree, and Dolm had brought it down with an arrow and butchered it, but all Reynard could offer them was his services in rotating the chunks as they were roasting.

Despite his resolution to help Lyanna, to go with her and repay her for all her kindness, after seeing how she and Dolm fought the previous day it was hard to imagine what use they could actually have for him, beyond baggage hauler or camp cook… whereas he couldn’t even hope to make it home alive without their aid.

Their other new companion threw his own limitations into especially sharp focus.

“She is coming back, right?” Dolm asked.

It had been perhaps half an hour ago that Safkhet had risen, and disappeared without a word into the forest.

Reynard had been alarmed at that – she was naked and totally unarmed after all – but Dolm had reminded him of how absurd the concern was.

“I can’t imagine her leaving her friend,” said Lyanna, peering over his shoulder at the figure of ‘Berenike’, the sleeping harpy. “But she has gone a long way.”

“Surprised she’d trust us with Berenike at all after yesterday.”

“She’s a… naturally trusting person,” Lyanna pointed out.

“Seems so. Guess you have to be to have a fight like that and not hold a grudge. Not the weirdest part about her.”

“She can’t be human, right?” Reynard asked.

“Not a chance. I can’t imagine what else she could be though,” Lyanna said.

None of them liked to posit the possibility which lingered in all three minds. Reynard wasn’t even sure what god would have a servant so frightful… save The Stalker himself. But no servant of Arva could be so gentle in spirit.

“She ain’t no enemy, whatever she is,” spoke the vulpine.

“No… she isn’t,” Lyanna agreed quietly, “or at least… she doesn’t want to be. I think she really does mean to help us too.”

In the far distance, Reynard heard a faint boom, like the falling of a rock.

Lyanna looked around too, although Dolm seemed not to have noticed it.

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A tiny object was flying through the air, soaring up from a distant hillside.

It was miles away, but even at that distance the dot of green shone clearly against the blue skies.

It was coming closer, fast, and with it was returning the sensation of that overwhelming, intense energy that surrounded Safkhet.

Following the confused stare of Lyanna, Dolm grabbed his bow at the sight of the surreal projectile, inbound towards their camp, but relaxed as he too noticed the pressure it was exuding.

The flying thing seemed about to plunge down, to strike somewhere close by, when Reynard caught sight of a leg underneath it. The object stopped there, floating in the sky, standing on nothing. Then it dropped down. A series of light hops off nothing at all slowed the descent, and finally it touched down a few yards away.

Bundled up giant leaves and vines were shed, and the source of the intense weight bearing on their bodies emerged. It was a humanoid figure; the bare form of their beautiful yet frightening new friend.

She pulled something red and squiggly from her mouth with a satisfied bite, chewed it, and swallowed.

“Good morning,” she said.

Safkhet blushed as Dolm and Lyanna continued staring, but while Reynard sympathized with the naked girl, he couldn’t blame the others either. They had seen her impossible aerial maneuvers in the battle just the previous day, but it was one thing to perform such ridiculous acrobatics and leaps off thin air while fighting, and another to take a morning stroll through the sky.

“You want some bloodfruit?”

It was only as she shook the unpleasantly-waving tentacled fruit at them that Reynard realized what it was that she was eating. He was about to cry out a warning, when she took another big chomp, and sighed happily as she slurped up the juices. More were tied to a length of vine over her shoulder, resting against her bare skin without leaving as much as a mark.

“You… you know what those are? Don’t you?” Lyanna said slowly, her voice faint.

Saf swallowed a chunk and giggled.

“Yeah, but it was funny seeing the look on your faces.”

“You’re eating bloodfruit,” Dolm observed, looking unsure whether he should be worried.

“They’re actually delicious if you don’t mind the curse. I wouldn’t actually recommend you folks try them though. Apparently they’re pretty indigestible for most people.”

The two gold-rankers shared a bewildered look.

With no-one speaking, the newcomer stepped forward, holding out a crude spear in her other hand.

“I uh… I know you already had some meat, but I thought that I should help out a bit too, and I know that I’m the only one who can eat these, so I caught something.”

Reynard didn’t recognize the species, but the three long, green-scaled fish were each enough to feed two or three people.

“Where’d you get the spear?” Reynard asked, more confused than ever. “You ain’t even got a knife or nothin’.”

“Oh, that part was easy,” she said airily.

Saf turned the stick over, holding out the fat end, where it appeared to have been sheared through.

Pressing her nails down into the tip, Safkhet sank her fingers through the sold, fresh wood as though it was dead and rotten, using pure force to carve against the grain and shape it into a crude point.

Dolm in particular looked uneasy, as the woman sharpened the stick bare-handed.

“Just what are you made of?” he muttered under his breath.

“Ordinary flesh and bone,” Saf replied, with an unimpressed glance his way. “And I’m not sure that’s a very polite question.”

“No wonder I broke my arm on your throat,” Lyanna said, shaking her head. “My sword too.”

“Forgive me if I don’t have much sympathy for you there,” Safkhet answered, with a dry tone.

Reynard was silent, not daring to make any further comment about their inhuman companion. It was all too easy to imagine what those hands could have done to them had the fight gone differently. As desperate as their battle had been, Safkhet hadn’t taken them seriously at all.

“So making a spear bare-handed was the easy part?” Lyanna asked.

“Well, yeah, after that I had to catch the fish. I’m pretty quick in the water, but so are they. I chased the big one halfway back to the geysers.”

Lyanna looked like her head was spinning.

“You… dove in, and swam after them?”

“What else was I supposed to do? If I used magic to freeze or zap the river it would have killed all the other creatures and plants that live there.”

Safkhet looked back at her catch, with a surprisingly somber expression.

“I didn’t even like to kill these three – poor things were just minding their own business in their home river until I came along…. And just look at how beautiful they were.”

It was true; each of the creatures had striking patterns to their scales, and elegant, fast shapes. Reynard couldn’t even imagine overtaking them in the water.

Saf went on. “But Berry needs nutrition right now… and I figure the rest of us probably do as well.”

Silently, Reynard took back his earlier thought.

Saf had fought them seriously, but it had been while hewing to a set of restraints that they had never even considered.

The woman even felt guilty about just killing her breakfast.

Reynard had never thought to empathize with a fish before, but somehow, she made him feel for her catch.

Not so much so that he couldn’t handle gutting and cleaning them of course. With so much fresh water flowing all around it was an easy process, and it made him feel a little more useful to take care of the task for her.

~~~

I was relieved when Reynard took over preparing my catch. I understood that they needed to be processed somehow, but I knew next to nothing about what parts needed to be removed or how to go about doing it.

While he was occupied I made a quick check on Berenike. She was still sound asleep after her exertions and injuries, and I didn’t like to wake her until breakfast was ready.

That left my other purpose in the trip into the jungle; the pile of broad leaves, branches and vines I’d collected.

“Anyone want to help me try to turn all of this into something vaguely approximating clothing?”

Reynard looked relieved that he was already occupied with the fish.

Dolm and Lyanna had no such excuse, and after a short hesitation they rose to inspect my collection.

“Are you sure this will work?” she asked as she glanced dubiously over the assortment.

“Well, I did something similar after the last time you attacked me.”

Seeing her cringe I thought that might have been a little cruel – like poking a wound – but I reasoned that the wounds had mostly been my own.

“We can give it a shot,” Dolm said, trying to sound positive. “Just… don’t start jumping about and fighting, this stuff’ll never hold up to that.”

“Don’t worry, I just want to preserve my modesty until we can find some real clothing.”

Lyanna’s face seemed to ask what modesty that might be, but I ignored her, as I was steadfastly ignoring the eyes examining my exposed body. I couldn’t very well ask them to help me clothe myself without looking at me.

The three of us ended up making a better job of the task than Ael and I had done, all that time ago – Dolm in particular was good with his hands, while Lyanna had some creative ideas for how to combine vines, bark and flexible branches. We made no attempt at anything as advanced as underwear, but in a short time we managed to create a cloak of sorts, flexible enough for me to stick out my arms and move around, with long leaves hanging down front and back to help cover me whether walking or sitting.

“Ahhh, thank you for this,” I said, running my hands down the smooth front of the ‘garment’. “I really do feel a lot better to be, well, dressed again.”

“It’s the least we could do,” Lyanna said.

That was certainly true, but I still felt that growing sense of good-will that cooperation brought. As rough a start was we’d gotten off to, these people weren’t so bad.

Even Aellope had almost killed me when we first met.

While we’d played arts and crafts Reynard had gotten the fish cooking, and now they were sizzling away pleasantly on sticks by the fire, emitting a considerably more alluring scent than the other meat my companions had acquired.

“What is that?” I asked, gesturing at the grey pieces, as we returned to sit around the blaze.

“Would have liked to bag a ram,” Dolm said, with an apologetic look, “but seems like they don’t come down into these parts. Best we found close by was a greankap.”

Seeing my blank expression he went on.

“Type of hunting bird from around the mountains and forest. Mostly feed on trunkworm, so the taste’s not great. Safe to eat though.”

“Do you want to try it?” Lyanna asked.

“Er… maybe? What’s a trunkworm?”

Lyanna and Dolm exchanged a cryptic look.

“The worms that come out of old, rotting trees?” she said after a pause, “you know, the black, greasy ones?”

“Ohh, those,” I said, failing to recall ever seeing such a creature.

I felt like I was giving myself away as a non-native, but to pretend too much familiarity with local wildlife seemed sure to do the same.

As a distraction, I elected to sample ‘greankap’.

The smell of the chunk I was passed was vaguely earthy, and as I bit into the flesh it released oily juices that coated my tongue. The flavor was bitter and nutty, but peculiar as that was for meat, it wasn’t so far from some fermented sauces and preparations I’d tasted on Earth. I chewed for a while, and found the texture to be tender, even pleasant, despite the odor.

The others had been watching me anxiously, as though afraid that if the taste displeased me I might try to eat them next. They looked relieved as I took another bite.

“It’s not bad,” I said, after swallowing. “Different, and a little sour for me, but some people would probably call it a delicacy for how unusual the flavors are.”

Lyanna’s eyes flicked to the small pile of bloodfruit by my legs, and I could hear what she must be thinking.

‘You eat actual poison, but this perfectly safe game bird is questionable to you?’

I bit into another bloodfruit with relish, and grinned at the scandalized expression she made.

“It really is a shame you can’t eat these,” I said, “they’re probably my favorite fruit. Not as good as a really well cooked fish or ram, but they’ve just got so much flavor….”

Sucking up the tentacles of the thing, I chewed for a few moments, savoring the rush of juices.

“I did hear that the draughts the alchemists make with them have a surprisingly pleasant taste,” Lyanna said, looking thoughtful.

“Oh? Alchemists use these? For magic potions or something?”

“Well it’s not magic,” she replied, looking confused, “it’s alchemy.”

I tried to look like I obviously knew the difference there.

“They purify bloodfruit to create medicines, but with how dangerous they are to handle and transport I don’t think they’re widely used. It’s not easy to just make a curse disappear. My teacher warned me about how dangerous they are. The best that you can do if you’re exposed to a curse is to leech it off into some other medium, like transferring it to an animal.”

I frowned at that, wondering if I was somehow giving myself gradual poisoning by eating all these bloodfruit. It certainly didn’t feel that way, but I was aware of my own luck, or lack thereof.

Holding a whole fruit up in my hand, I tried to feel it with my other senses – not just the physical, but the ethereal; to perceive how my mana flowed around and into it, and to feel how the energies in the fruit reacted.

After a few seconds I felt something, very faint yet vaguely familiar.

It wasn’t energy, but more a form of resistance, pushing my mana back from the fruit’s flesh.

Pushing back, I guided my recalcitrant power to flow with more force.

The resistance gave in an instant, and I felt my essence wash through the fruit. Nigh invisible black wisps wafted from the skin, until they too were consumed by my rising mana.

Dolm and Reynard just seemed confused, the latter wincing at my increased output, but Lyanna looked like she had some inkling of my purpose.

“Looks like I don’t have anything to worry about eating these, at least. I can’t test it or anything, but I think my mana purified it.”

“I’d hope so, given how much you just used up,” Lyanna answered, shaking her head in disbelief.

“You want to try some?” I asked, holding it out.

“Thank you, but I won’t take the risk. Even a small amount left in the fruit would be dangerous to eat for a hu- for a normal person.”

I gave her an unimpressed glance, but ‘abnormal’ wasn’t really a designation I could argue with.

“All the more for me I guess.”

I said that, but with the fish sizzling away so appetizingly, fruit felt underwhelming. Even deliciously forbidden fruit.

One was saved for Berry, who would certainly need the nourishment when she awoke, so we split the other two into halves, served to each of us on spare leaves.

This meat too was oily, but in the fresh and rich sense of a great cut of salmon rather than the more questionable ‘greankap’. Pharyes food was good, but it was hard to compete with fresh-caught river fish.

Leaning back against a tree-trunk in the glorious morning sunshine, I sighed as I licked the last traces from my fingers.

I might not be back ‘home’ yet – and it still scared me to imagine what sort of greeting might await me at the Eyrie – but the sense of well-being at finally being fed, clothed, uninjured and (relatively) safe was powerful.

“Looks like you ain’t had a good meal in weeks,” Reynard observed.

“That’s true, with some intermittent exceptions. The last time I had fish was just after I broke out of a Formorian hive. I was on the run and I had no idea how to properly cook or clean it.”

Lyanna and Dolm exchanged doubtful glances.

“Formorians got hives? Like razorflies do?”

“Oh yeah, they’re gigantic though, they house hundreds, even thousands, and they’re pretty sophisticated. The structure itself seems to be alive somehow, and it’s full of chambers that process their… food supply and their water.”

Reynard paled at the thought of thousands of formorians all in one place, and glanced over at the geyser field at his back, as if afraid they might start popping out of the vents and tunnels.

“Formorians don’t come to the surface,” Dolm reminded him. “Never heard of them living in hives though.”

“Apparently not many people ever get to see them, and even the Mycoth can’t go inside.”

Grim as the memory was, the details were fascinating now, with the benefit of distance and the warm light of surface day.

I’d seen a great deal in the Underworld, including things no living eyes had looked upon in millennia… and other things that I alone had ever come to know.

My experiences might even be worth putting into some sort of journal some day.

“My Koth?” Lyanna asked.

“Oh, Mycoth. They’re way nicer. Really friendly people actually, once you get to know them. I loved the suit they gave me….”

I saw the blank expressions of my audience.

“Ah, they’re sentient fungi who travel the caves and tunnels, trading between the other species. I met them when I left the rainforest behind and tried to cross a huge desert lit by a supernatural star. That was before I got lost trying to pass through the Dweomer cities.”

The three listeners were staring at me.

“That’s incredible,” Lyanna said eventually. “I mean… literally incredible… every single thing you just said. It’s all completely impossible.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“Arcadia is an incredible place. Terrible and fearsome at times, but full of wonders I could never have imagined. I’ve not even told you half of what I saw down there. You really wouldn’t believe it even if I did.”

“We already don’t,” Dolm pointed out with a laugh.

“Well it’s all true, seriously. I’m even going back down there once the fighting on the surface is over. I have to negotiate with the Mycoth to establish trade routes through Formorian lands to the Pharyes kingdom. I guess you’ve never heard of Pharyes though, no-one had on the Surface until all this started.”

Lyanna and the others seemed to have given up on trying to follow my reminiscences.

“So why did you go down there in the first place?” she asked.

I felt a twinge of familiar shame at the question, and looked away.

“Ah… that was… a mistake on my part. I got cocky and tried to take on an army alone. Got beaten really badly.”

The look on their faces suggested that they didn’t want to meet the army that had defeated me.

“What were you doing in the Bloodsucking Forest to begin with? You seriously get lost?” Dolm asked.

“Yup.”

“How?”

“Well I’d never been here before at that point. And before you ask, no, I don’t remember how I got there.”

“Where you from before that then?” Reynard asked, ears twitching with his piquing curiosity.

“I’d… rather not get into that. At least not yet. But what about all of you? Dolm’s from Bosquerime, and I think you said, ‘Areas’, Reynard? How’d you all end up here?”

“Arelat,” the vulpine corrected.

Dolm swallowed a mouthful of fish and spoke up.

“That’s the adventurer life. Not really so different from mercenaries, just we fight monsters not soldiers. Go where the coin takes us.”

“And where the angry locals chase us,” Lyanna reminded him, with a small smile.

“Yeah, we all got things we’d rather not get into,” he replied, smirking back at her.

After that we talked about more trivial things for a while. Food. Bathing. The wonderful hot springs and the beautiful mountains. Even the weather.

We also debated possible plans for how we might proceed once Berenike was awake and ready to travel, but the latter hinged rather heavily on the harpy having some suggestions for how to get to nearby settlements.

It was after she’d finished her breakfast that Lyanna changed the subject to something more unusual.

“Did you feel anything while you were underground, Safkhet?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“I don’t think you could have missed it. There was a shockwave, an incredibly powerful one, that seemed to come from somewhere in the Underworld. It terrified people on the surface, but nothing happened after that… then our camp was attacked that night, so no-one was thinking about it after that.”

“Huh. What makes you ask me about it?”

I was trying to act innocent, but Lyanna shook her head with a wry, weary smile.

“I knew it. That was your doing, wasn’t it?”

“Well… I don’t know if the days would line up, but… I did create a pretty powerful sort of explosion in the Underworld at one point. I’m amazed you could feel it all the way up on the surface, though!”

Dolm snorted. “They’d have felt it in Bosquerime!”

He chuckled, seeing my self-conscious blush.

“Let me guess, you’d rather not get into it?”

I nodded.

My own feast of a breakfast was finished, so I took Berry’s fish and excused myself, to go check on my friend.

I was still stunned to think that my intervention with the Golden Sepulchre had reached all the way up to the surface, through so many miles of rock, and it was a little alarming to think that it could have even been detected in the surrounding countries.

But I took comfort in the surety that even if it might have been sensed in Bosquerime, wherever exactly that was, it would surely have been no more than a faint, anomalous blip.

I wouldn’t learn just how wrong I was until some time later.