A crisp breeze sliced the air, nudging the river water to the bank’s edges. The crashing of small ripples against rock and dirt would have been enough to lull any tired soul to sleep, the push and pull of it a mesmerizing thing. But it did nothing for Magic; he’d tossed and turned restlessly all night, unable to sleep peacefully without being disturbed by his dreams. Not even sitting beside the serene murmur of the water was enough to calm him back into slumber.

Instead, he devoted every forsaken waking hour into weaving cups out of extra mangleroot he found on his midnight stroll. He slaved away at the task for several long, tedious hours, his hands guided only by years of training and the neon light flickering from moss growing on nearby trees and logs. He rubbed his eyes from beneath his glasses, chin tucked into his hoodie to stifle a yawn. It was pitch black when he’d started and now, five cups in, it was well into the early makings of dawn. A soft pink blush crept along the edges of the horizon, a curious child tiptoeing down the hall before waking up its parent.

Magic wasn’t entirely sure how large the cups needed to be—they needed at least two drinking cups and one basket to carry water—but every iteration left him unsatisfied. Each one was significantly larger than the last and this attempt was large enough to store a picnic feast in. At least this new one would do the job if they needed to carry water from one place to the next.

About an hour or two after returning from her walk, Mira, in some attempt to smooth things over, rambled on about how they could use the river water to keep them hydrated by boiling it over a fire. In the heat of his aggravation, it sounded less like a discussion than it did a series of barked orders. He’d gotten the gist of her spiel—weave a basket, fetch water, return with it—and tuned out the rest but nonetheless acted on her request when sleep had failed him.

A gust of wind sent the river water splashing at his shoes, snagging him to the present. Magic oriented himself, blinking several times, only to find that the cup he’d been working on had a knot weaved into the same spot four times. And, unlike thread, mangleroot was thicker, harder to bend, and far more fickle. Which meant that undoing the knot wasn’t a reliable option. Frustrated, with himself and the cup, Magic tossed it over his shoulder, reached back into the pile of roots and began anew.

It wasn’t a shock that weaving cups out of thick roots and twigs would be hard; he expected this kind of struggle and was used to the repetitive motion of stitching things together. He tried to convince himself that it was nothing more than a project he’d work on at home with his mother. Magic tried to picture himself in the sewing room with her; tried to imagine the faint scent of lavender in the tiny, box-like room, the cadence of his mother’s voice as she hummed in time with the stitches.

He recalled one instance in his early teen years helping his mother with a two-part order: reattaching a plush cat’s leg and closing a hole in a child’s jeans. He’d taken up the plush toy under the impression that it was a simple task, but it had proven more difficult than anything Magic had offered to take from his mother before.

On his first try, the leg ended up being lopsided, so he removed the stitches and tried again, but that attempt was too close to the cat’s stomach. He removed the stitches a second time. The next attempt after that was too close to the other limbs. Magic had gotten so frustrated with the amputated plush leg’s refusal to be stitched in the right spot after numerous failed tries that he shoved both it and the cat to the far end of the table and placed his head on his arms.

And Amelia, intrigued by her son’s struggle, stared and held her tongue, waiting. Only when he vented his irritation by repeatedly kicking the leg of the table did she stop, too.

Fast fingers make errors, Magic, she’d said, leaning back on her old, wooden chair, the creaking infuriating to his ears. You can’t speed through a stitch. And you certainly shouldn’t be doing that when you can’t see the needle; you’ll poke your thumb that way.

Magic had said nothing, far too infuriated to even process his own thoughts.

It’s not a race, Ave.

I know it isn’t, he muttered.

Then don’t treat it like one. His mother had given him one of those soft, knowing smiles that baffled him so often growing up. Or you’ll end up losing.

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He felt something pull tight in his chest as he started on the new project, the string taut and plucked with every loop made, every knot weaved. The more Magic tried to imagine himself anywhere else that wasn’t a haunted forest in the middle of Circadia, the more he longed for that to be his reality. Suddenly the mundane running of errands or the silent stitching of torn up plush toys didn’t seem so boring. Even the pebbles that sounded like falling rain as they scattered against the windows of his house was something he found himself missing.

Which was odd; Chrome never cared for people like him and Magic never pinned himself as someone to be homesick for a town that treated its lowest ranking residents like the mud at the bottom of its shoe. A collective people who valued the materialistic and shunned the rest; people who bit their thumbs at coal miners walking home from work in the dead of night because they should’ve been grateful for doing the capital such an honor.

Honor. Magic could’ve laughed. There was no honor in risking your life for something that never loved you back. It was a dullard’s mantra. A blind devotion to the forces at play.

Because what no one knew—or, rather, wanted to know—was that men and women risked their lives every day to make a living wage. If, that is, a week’s worth of work was comparable to the backbreaking jobs they worked several feet below ground. Half of the revenue made by mine work went to the capital. A fourth of what remained went to infrastructure, taxes, government funding. The scraps leftover were barely enough for a loaf of bread or a new set of shoes.

Southerners barely had money to keep their homes in good conditions and received their embarrassing monikers by simply existing. Dusters were and always would be nothing more than a stain on the town like the smoke and soot that festered on the walls of their houses.

The worst feature of Chrome was never the intermittent poverty or the lack of green grass that made the dust storms so much worse during the summer. No, the worst part about it was the mines, buried in the depths of Jaggian Peaks and thought to be a prestigious mode of employment. But Magic knew them for what they truly were: a hellscape littered with the bodies of restless souls dragged away from one plane to the next well before their time. His father had been one of those, though the exact specifics had a way of escaping him.

The thought alone made Magic sick; he paused his work and shielded his face with his hands, pushing his thumbs into his temples to force everything back, calm the skipping of his heart.

For as long as Magic could recall, it had always been him and his mother since he was seven. He’d always felt like there was a gap in the folds of his brain and any details Amelia shared with him on the matter never registered. If they did, it was at the cost of discomfort, specific memories he longed to forget or the sensation that something was there but far removed or missing. A phantom limb of a life before.

His only family for the last thirteen years of his life had been his mother, Mira, and her father. Sure, the Arbesque family had no ties to his own through blood or marriage, but their families shared a kinship for as long as he could remember. By all accounts, they were his extended family, the people who invited him into their home when Amelia traveled to sell fabrics for money. The people who covered tabs when funds were short, who ran baskets to the house filled with sweets he indulged in as a child when he got sick despite Amelia’s requests for heartier food.

An owl hooted somewhere in the distance as the spires of the Western Curtain reached beyond the horizon like long, outstretched limbs, pulling him from his thoughts. Magic rubbed at his face, pushing up his glasses to rest atop his head. Stars, he needed to focus. Ruminating wasn’t going to get him anywhere and returning to camp empty handed wasn’t an option. But fatigue was making a fool of his muscle memory; eventually he set the unfinished project at his side and laid down on the grass, the blurred colors of approaching sunrise mingling with the dark of midnight.

He considered what it would be like to stay here the rest of the night despite the chill, count the stars that Ori left behind and hope that the small bird was supervising their journey in some way from the blinking beacons above. Would she answer if he called? Give them some kind of divine blessing in order to carry through the rest of this forsaken forest?

In his fatigued, sleep-deprived haze, Magic counted stars and connected dots, the sleeping aid of a hopeless child who could only pray there was something watching over them. Absently, he reached into his pocket for reassurance; it was followed by a brief surge of panic that he’d lost his switchblade until he remembered that it wasn’t lost, but it was back at the Maidenwood tree, discarded and abandoned in the chaos earlier. He wasn’t fond of being without a weapon and the lack of it was a disconcerting thought should the Beast change its mind and charge at them—or another animal brutish enough to give chase. Frustrated, he puffed out a breath, watching it cloud above him in a blurred mass, fingers grazing the shining caps of nearby mushrooms.

Magic sent one prayer after another in the direction of the fading stars, flicking his glasses back onto his face as he sat up. Judging by the slow creep of the sun, they’d need to start leaving soon, but he wasn’t keen on returning to the camp just yet.

So he stayed an extra moment by the river—eyes closed—pushing away the images from behind his eyelids with the melodies of waking birds.