If she had to pick one thing she could take away from it all, it would probably be the wind.

“If I could give the gods above a piece of my fucking mind right now…”

Early winter, or perhaps late autumn, was not a particularly pleasant experience on a mountainside.  As the air cooled rapidly, high above the mainlands and well away from anything to retain even a little heat, the same winds that normally would be little more than a mild inconvenience now felt liable to stab into her as well as force her off the side. What was even worse were the completely erratic nature of the gusts, because instead of a constant stream of wind that one could adjust to, they instead came in bursts of force that were next to impossible to predict.

Because nothing could ever be fucking peachy.

Grinding her teeth, she nonetheless forged onwards, shielding the sharp features of her face with one heavily coated arm whilst the other kept steady on the sloped wall of soil, rock, and moss at her side. Not that she was retarded enough to be counting any blessings at this point, but she was definitely thankful for the fact that there seemed to be, at the very least, something that resembled a trail to follow.

That was a good sign. Trails meant people, and people meant information at the very worst. Although she’d be royally peeved if said information was “no, I have no idea who that could be, I’m just an old mountain hermit geezer”, it’d at least mean she could probably stop scouring every peak in this range if the search was in vain after all.

But it wouldn’t be.

It couldn’t be.

If it were…

No.

“Bullshit it will,” she growled, taking a moment to gulp in a big mouthful of the thin mountain air so her sore legs would get something resembling a reprieve. “It’s always the last thing you think of. I’ve got to be right.”

This is what the girl told herself, soldiering on with redoubled vigour and purpose. Rounding a bend, she was pleased to find her situation improving twofold— not only was the wind now blowing into her side, but the vegetation she had passed through on her way up had returned up ahead.

Amendment. Things could be peachy if it ended up being to spite her.

Acceptable, as long as she could get a piece of it. A spiteful payoff was still a payoff, and you’d have to be dense as a stone to turn the payoff down.

Gift horses and mouths, you daft retards. Besides, anyone trying to spite me is going to get ten times the spite back. That’s how she’d have done it, and that’s how I do it. No holds barred, no quarter given.

She must not be angered easily. Frank, yes. No-nonsense, absolutely. Uncompromising, without question.

But not easy to anger. To release her wrath was to be an event for the legends themselves. That was the ideal she was to hold herself to.

“Tch. Not that easy to get rid of, fuckstick.” she ground out to the void below, as it disappeared beneath the foliage without response. Satisfied in her small victory against nature, she showed teeth in a valiant attempt at a calm smile.

“Eat shit, mountain.”

Well, everyone starts somewhere.

Brushing what felt like a leaf out of her long, dark hair, she took a deep breath again, less laboriously this time, and idly fished a half-eaten piece of jerky from the pouch at her hip with the intent to finish. The smoked and cured beef tasted about as one would expect, but food was food, food was fuel, and fuel was energy. She had surmised herself to be roughly two-thirds of the way up to the summit. Maybe three-quarters, if she was lucky.

...And ever since I fucking started this journey, my luck’s been up shit creek. Two-thirds it is.

At least I’m starting to think like her now, too. Silver-goddamn-linings, right, Elder Galla? You’d better be proud, because I am.

Well, perhaps this was being a fair bit too on the nose with it, but according to the words of Galla the Crone, eldest surviving member of the Mindaro clan and probably the whole human race, a particular fondness for vulgarity was apparently going in the right direction, so…

So to hell with prim-and-proper, she resolved as she began her long trudge upwards once more. If it was useless to that woman, it’s certainly fucking useless to me.

An arrangement that in all seriousness was perfectly fine by her. Honestly, it felt a little liberating to drop out of a constant air of politeness she had to maintain within the cloistered clan halls, even if she wasn’t sure how removing that particular lid was supposed to mesh with the stoicism she had also resolved to refine.

But she would figure it out.

If her namesake could do it, then she could make it work for her too. It had to be possible, else Elder Galla would have never spoken of it. She was not the type to joke about her dear sister, not one bit.

That was why she was out here in the first place. It was thanks to that same faith in the Crone that she had made this journey, searching the landscape high and low, on a trail that had all but gone cold for the sake of a trail that had certainly gone cold.

It was a long shot, so she had avoided it. It was strange, so she had disregarded it. It was pretty much unreasonable, so she had pretty much treated it as a last resort.

And yet, here she was, exhausting that last resort after all else failed. When all else failed, she had only Galla the Crone, matriarch of the Mindaro clan and relic of an age long past, to look to for guidance.

She had run through every record, every informant, and every known Mindaro territory, current or former, but had found nothing. The lands beyond had similarly yielded nothing, or even worse, a fucking false lead that only terminated into nothing. Even worse than nothing, because she would actually begin to think she was getting somewhere.

But for a whole year, she never did.

One by one, every option on her quest had resulted in failure and left her at a loss, until she sought audience with the venerable elder. Driven nearly mad with frustration, she begged, pleaded, and swore she would heed any advice the ancient woman had to offer.

She could not, in the end, do it on her own.

This elicited a small smile from the Elder—

And, in words spoken as wispily as the winds of the mountain, her advice was thus.

“Seek out Schwarz.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

And so her quest took her to what must have been the rim of the earth itself. Far away from anything resembling civilization, deep within the crags that marked the border between the known civilized world and the wastes beyond.

Even the small fishing hamlet she had sailed into was long abandoned by most of the humble folk that once lived there, with only three families stubbornly remaining in the face of their community’s dispersal. And it was good on them, she thought, to keep their family’s ties to the land held so close, but it was also saddening in a way.

Their excitement at seeing a new and friendly face was something impossible to fake, and although she was willing and eager to repay their hospitality by definitively dealing with a small bandit problem of theirs, she knew full well that it wasn’t going to last. More men would come out here to escape justice, just as they had, and would be more than willing to harass and plunder a small, nearly defenseless town of two dozen.

The least Schwarz could fucking do was venture down from this shitty summit and help. It was a miracle that the library’s records had anything mentioning him at all— a mysterious young man with raven hair that featured a notably obstinate cowlick, perfectly in line with what Galla had told her to expect of someone bearing the name— had passed through twenty years ago.

Twenty fucking years ago. Not once had he been seen since.

So she was obviously on her way to meet some kind of crotchety hermetic middle-aged man who didn’t care for human contact at all. That boded fantastically for her, especially since she had come all this way not only to meet him, but to ask something of him. It was about as reasonable a task as not only convincing a fucking turtle out of its shell, but also teaching it to sprint.

Real fucking peachy.

That left her with an obvious conclusion straightaway— take that very same sharpness of tongue and acidity of diction that she’d found so liberating and, once again, put a lid on it. She certainly wasn’t very happy with the concept, especially after all the reasons she’d gained on this hike to truly let loose on the guy, but there was not a single Mindaro alive who didn’t understand the concepts of “time and place”.

She was no exception. After all, with her namesake’s legendary pragmatism and sangfroid, it would be hard to imagine that she would disregard those virtues when faced with the task of delicately handling the matter of her last chance at something.

Like an ascetic informant who could barely deal with those who earnestly and happily showed you hospitality, for example. Luckily for him, she needed something, and would need to be polite instead of blunt as she really, really wanted to. It would be so easy for her to vent every grievance she had accrued over the two four hour hikes from the town and up the mountain she was going through to get to the guy, really.

But her resolve was not so easily wavered as to yield to her own desires before the cause. She was firm and set as the steel of the blade at her hip, unbending and honed to a razor’s edge. Willing and able to cut through whatever trials stood in her way.

Which was a fat lot of good for her, when the resolutions consumed her thoughts so much that she utterly failed to notice the significance of the twig she snapped underfoot until an unexpected force pulled her boot to the sky. With all the grace of a drunken gazelle, the girl was sent crashing onto the back of her head and a burst of stars exploded into her vision. Growling and clutching her head in pain, she opened one onyx eye to identify the culprit…

“You misanthropic son of a bitch!”

A goddamn snare trap, after all that shit she had gone through?! You had to be fucking kidding! Forget asceticism, this asshole was outright diabolical when it came to his no-contact policy! If he was so dead set on not seeing another person, just leave the path full of those branches she’d seen shoved off quite deliberately to the side earlier on!

“Or better fucking yet--” she bit out while drawing the aforementioned sabre, “Why don’t you just jump off the fucking side of the whole fucking MOUNTAIN?!”

With an acceptable target for vented rage being her primary antagonist, the young woman’s arm blurred in a savage cut that would possibly have torn through the cord through force alone, even if her blade were dull and rusty. Thankfully though, it wasn’t, and she was quickly back on her feet even as she tried to earnestly chop through the whole treeline with her glare alone.

Deep breaths, now. Let it simmer down before you find Schwarz. Sour things with him and you fuck it all up for good… Just hold it in for a little longer. You’ve vented, get it out of the system now, before you have to put on your diplomacy face. You have to be in control at all times, or else he won’t listen.

“Uh—”

She whirled, instinctively swinging the sabre up between herself and the direction of the voice that belonged to whomever it was that had very much snuck up on her. Just one goddamn lapse after another, wasn’t it? What the shit next, a Demon was going to drop in?! How about a dragon?! Did her ears just stop working all of a sudden?!

“Tell me why the fuck you’ve been tailing me. Now.” she ordered, not quite managing to remove all of the raw, unfiltered venom from what was supposed to be a frigid and intense voice. Like the winds of the far north, the tales went...

“Well, for one, I live here, so I kind of haven’t— And to answer your other question, because that would hurt like all hell?”

Her eyes narrowed, not very keen on his answer but certainly keen on glaring through him.

“ ‘Kind of haven’t’? And the fuck’s with the answering a question with another question routine—”

Then she registered who exactly she was looking at. Her eyes widened fractionally and she stopped her sentence cold, realizing just who it was that she had turned her sword upon.

A young man rather than a geezer, yes, about her age with a slimmish build and utterly nonplussed expression—

But one who also had raven hair, of middling-nearing-long length.

Gray, granite-colored eyes, one nearly obscured by his bangs.

A vaguely golden hint to his skin.

And most importantly and tellingly of all—

That goddamn cowlick that looked like it had a mind of its’ own.

There was only one person that this kid, who held a pair of carcasses from some form of hare in one hand and clad in the most basic and spartan of rags could be, despite her expectations. The key points to look out for matched both the descriptions of Elder Galla's words and the fishing hamlet’s records. There was only one name this boy, whose neck was currently not even five inches away from the razor sharp edge of her sabre, could possibly answer to.

“...Schwarz.”

It wasn't a question.

I’ve gone and fucked that one up, then.

“Er… Y-yeah.” came his shaky reply.

Peachy.