“It’s only normal to worry about what might come in the future, doubly so when your future might extend to far beyond what you had expected it to encompass at first.” - Saying attributed to Aideen deVreys, the Silver Maiden.
“So that’s what you did in the end, huh? Not too bad I guess,” said Aideen as she helped Celia clean herself in the small stream they found a distance away from where the battle took place. Celia had told Aideen how she fought against the two men while Aideen helped her scrub her back clean, which the girl naturally had difficulty doing herself. “I’d say you would probably be better off waiting until they lost more patience and gave more openings though. Might save you some stabbing in the process.”
“Yeah, I thought of that as well… while being pinned down by a stinking corpse half again my weight,” admitted Celia with a frown. As the old saying went, hindsight was always better positioned to give a clear view of things. She most certainly had the sign to ponder her choices during those moments. “So you’re saying I fucked up, huh?”
“Everyone fucks up, so don’t worry about it too much,” replied Aideen as she helped untangle and remove the grime from Celia’s long hair. Celia wore her hair longer than Aideen’s own middle-length hair, over halfway down her back, which made them prone to getting entangled and messy in fights like the one she had just been through. “You’re learning from your mistakes, which is what matters. It’s our one big advantage as unliving, honestly. We always get to learn from our mistakes, something others don’t always get the chance to.”
“Oh…” mumbled Celia as she thought while Aideen poured a bucket of water over her head to rinse off the last of the grime and dirt from her hair. The stream they were bathing in was shallow, barely deep enough to submerge their knees at its deepest, and while the flow was relatively rapid, it was manageable enough even for Celia. “I see.”
“Can you help me with my back as well?” asked Aideen as she turned around. Even if they went and dipped their bodies into the stream, cleaning one’s back properly was difficult without the help of another person, so Celia had not thought strangely about it and did as Aideen asked. Besides, Aideen also helped her with cleaning her back anyway. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Celia as she momentarily paused as she took a look at Aideen’s back. The first thing that caught her eye was the older woman’s silvery-gray hair, which extended a bit past her shoulder. Aideen had clearly washed it already since her hair was dripping wet, and already cleaned off the dust from their days of travel.
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Then her eyes roved a bit lower to Aideen’s back and shoulders, and she only saw a solid build of healthy musculature under the skin, not too much unlike her own grandfather’s back, which she was all too familiar with. It was not until she laid hand on Aideen’s back to clean it that she noticed how the flesh she was touching was hard. At times it felt almost as if she was touching solid rock rather than a human body, with how Aideen’s muscles practically had no give under her hand.
“How… how do you even train to get this hard!?” asked Celia with obvious incredulity in her voice as she rubbed and touched Aideen’s back and shoulders. The solid musculature beneath her fingers moved slightly, but gave as little as before, namely none whatsoever. It was almost as if Celia was touching a moving marble statue, rather than a living person. “By the deities’ sake, your back felt harder than bloody rocks!”
“Oh, it’s something of an oddity caused by our constitutions as unliving,” said Aideen as she explained to the bewildered Celia with a smile. “Your body will roughly stay the same to how it was upon your death in general shape, but you could still train and grow physically stronger. Despite that, it would not necessarily reflect upon your body the way people who trained themselves hard did.”
“So you’re saying… I’ll basically never get fat no matter how much I eat?”
“It’s one of the benefits to our sort of unlife, yeah!” replied Aideen with a chuckle. “On the other hand, it would be much harder to slim down if you were already fat before you rose as an unliving, though. As for training, it mostly affects the muscles you already have. They would simply become… more solid, denser than what they normally could be, despite remaining the same size.”
“I haven’t neglected training myself in the two hundred years or so since I became an unliving myself,” she added to clarify and answer Celia’s obvious unvoiced question.
“So you’re saying… I could be like you, one day?” asked Celia as she marveled at Aideen’s physique.
Aideen had turned around to face the girl by then, and the differences between the two were obvious. Compared to Celia, she was a good half a head taller, and where Celia was dark-skinned with equally dark hair and eyes, Aideen was pale - an unhealthy pale hue, many would say - with silvery-gray hair and light gray eyes. Celia’s body was more womanly in shape, more of the obvious feminine curvatures on her form, compared to Aideen’s trained body which was mostly muscle and solid enough that she could easily have disguised herself as a man - a pretty man, that was - if she bound her breasts.
While Celia had the relatively fit body of someone who worked physically for a living, Aideen had slowly honed her physique to as close as it would get to perfection in her two centuries. While it was difficult for unliving to alter their bodies compared to how it was on their death, constant effort would slowly, but surely give results, if far slower and more subtle than how it would be on a living body.
Where a living body would show visible changes in muscle growth and shape, an unliving’s body mostly became denser and tougher instead. Aideen’s centuries of constant unrelenting training and conditioning made her look visibly fitter than when she was much younger, around the level one would have expected to see from seasoned warriors, yet her frame hid greater strength than expected within.
“Sure you can,” replied Aideen with a smile at the younger girl. Celia’s physique, while fit, was much softer compared to her own rock-hard musculature. “It will just take effort and perseverance. I can help you get started while we’re on the road if you like.