Willow stumbled over a root and barely caught herself on the rough staff. She groaned, extricated her tingling foot, and continued on. She’d long ago learned that any pleas for Annabelle to slow or pause would be met with silent indifference at best.

She could just let the woman leave her behind. That was always an option, and one she considered multiple times per day. But flashes of memory would always assert themselves to remind her of why she was traveling roughshod through thick, wild forests with this woman she barely knew.

A broken gate, splinters of stone, silver and wood clogging the western staging area. Bodies, blood. Her own cracked and charred skin as she swept her fingers in a spell-form toward the rampaging warbeast. The lightning it unleashed at the same moment, twirling and mingling with her own spell.

Death and destruction, otherwise.

Willow grunted and vaulted over a hedge of brambles that Annabelle was working through, landing painfully and falling against the trunk of a tree. She might be able to throw her body around like a ragdoll when she psychokinetically controlled her staff, but the consequences of impacts were even more severe now than they’d been back in the walled city-state of Durum.

Annabelle pushed through the last of the brambles, covered in cuts and stickers, and cast a dirty look at Willow.

“Finished showing off,” Annabelle asked. Willow tried her best at a sneer, but the pain in her feet and shoulder turned it into a grimace. Annabelle looked around in consideration for a moment, sizing up factors of which Willow had no concept, then let out a breath.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” she declared, and shrugged off her pack—a woodsman’s pack she’d found on their way out of the city when she’d been carrying Willow over one shoulder, keeping a cloaking spell going with the other hand. How she’d done it, Willow had no idea, but they’d gotten far enough away from the carnage of the warbeast attack to pillage an abandoned woodsmen’s caravan and disappear into the thick forest.

Willow carried no such pack—Annabelle was at least considerate enough to shoulder that burden for her. Back in her hometown of Bridgewater Willow had been known as the doctor’s daughter. Everyone knew her because it was impossible not to notice the sickly-thin waif who accompanied her parents at their work. She’d always been wasted, ever since she was an infant. Her parents had told her she’d survived the Wasting.

What they didn’t know was was she was the only one who ever had.

Willow drove the tip of the staff into the ground with a thread of psychokinesis and began unloading Annabelle’s large pack. Small items she could handle, but larger ones required the assistance of what turned out to be the strangest thing about her: the fact that she’d survived the Wasting by intuitively casting psychokinesis on her own body as an infant. Until earlier that year every bone in her paralyzed body had moved psychokinetically. Willow hadn’t even known. Only when Annabelle began healing her spinal cord from the damage of the Wasting had she felt real sensation for the first time.

Willow grabbed the end of the central pole of their hastily constructed tent and it rose horizontal to the ground. Annabelle threw the large tarp of canvas over it and the rod didn’t budge an inch. She began hammering carved stakes into the ground while Willow kept the beam level.

Camp was raised in less than half an hour, with Annabelle laying out the meager cooking supplies they’d managed to scavenge from the woodsmen’s caravan. A metal pot, a flint and steel, a collapsible stand.

“Your turn,” Annabelle said, and Willow sighed. She was right; Annabelle had hunted the previous day and provided the main ingredient for their thin stew. It was Willow’s duty to go out and kill something for them to eat.

Willow rose with the staff Annabelle had roughed from a branch and scratched the right side of her head. The hair there was barely a stubble from when it had been burned off during the warbeast attack, and it itched terribly. The skin on her right arm, exposed now through the burned woodsman’s uniform, was slowly turning a normal color instead of the raw-pink it had been after Annabelle regrew it.

“It’ll grow back,” Annabelle said, and Willow lowered her hand self-consciously. The woman—who’d at first appeared to be one of the nurses at the Sisters of Mercy before revealing that she had vastly more training than even their best surgeons, and hailed from an entirely different city-state as well—was hard to gauge. Sometimes she seemed to loathe Willow from the very core of her being, no doubt because Willow was the reason they were going on this trek through the country. Other times it almost seemed like she pitied Willow. Even rarer, she almost seemed like a friend.

“Yeah,” Willow said, and trumped off into the woods. It wasn’t close to sunset yet but the forest was dark from the thick canopy overhead. Willow reached into her scarred woodsman’s uniform and retrieved a solid ball of light.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It was magelight, or at least nominally magelight. No other magelights took on solid form like this, but then again no other mages were able to pump several person-days of essence into their steadfastness layer. She threw the magelight forward and it lighted softly on the ground, hovering a few inches above the loam of the forest.

Willow sat on the trunk of a toppled tree and slid a knife from the sheath at her side. She worked the blade into the trunk and came up with a sizable splinter of wood which she began to whittle down. The kill was the worst part, and she wanted to keep her mind of it.

Unfortunately, keeping her mind off of the coming task let it wander back to the past.

To the beginning of her journey to Durum in the caravan. The deathworm attacked when they had nearly arrived and she’d killed it with a swing of her cane, destroying all of the flesh on her hands in the process. That should have been the first sign, but she’d ignored it. Class, where her very presence destabilized the professor’s spell. He’d noticed, but she hadn’t, that something was wrong with her.

Metrology, those bastards. Pushing and prodding, testing her with ever-more experimental setups until they’d nearly killed her, just to get a lock on her essential attributes. Well, they got them in the end, but something had happened. Something that only came to her in her dreams. When she woke on the forest floor, sometimes the silver pendant around her neck Carl had inscribed for her was uncomfortably warm, like it was doing something. She didn’t know what it did, but she wore it anyway. To remember her professor, who she’d killed.

The western staging area, with the home call blaring from the Arcanum above. That crawling thing forcing its way through the warded tunnel. The rubble and bodies. Leopold’s body, crushed under a block of stone. Lifeless.

Something stirred in the forest and Willow came back to herself. Completely still, she rolled the splinter of wood she’d carved between her fingers, getting a feel for it. The sensation of the splinter sank into her, and it became a part of her body. Or at least that’s how she perceived it anyway when her psychokinesis reached out and gripped something. With her arms and legs reconnected to her nervous system, she had plenty of essence to burn.

A small fox nosed out from in between two trees and she saw the telltale flicker of blue fire on its three tails. Foxfire. Her magelight had attracted a magical creature just as she’d hoped. Willow had always been a big eater, and it turned out there was a reason for that too. Her body was constantly building up unfathomable amounts of essence, and she needed a constant influx of calories to keep up the generation. But out here in the forest the calories were lacking, so she supplemented with the essence of magical creatures.

The foxfire nosed closer still to the magelight, hoping to take some of the essence for itself. Willow opened her hand and the splinter shot forward like an arrow, pinning the foxfire to the ground beside the magelight. It cried once, then grew still.

Willow retrieved the magelight and the dead foxfire and made her way back to the campsite. Annabelle had already conjured water into the pot and was boiling it with a dab of congealed fire-essence under it on the fold-out stand. Annabelle hadn’t gotten the hang of using the flint and steel, so she just cast spells to solve all her problems.

If only it was so simple for Willow.

Willow sat and skinned the small foxfire. Even dead, blue fire darted through its veins. The pelt would make an excellent fire-resistant leather gauntlet if she could sell it. But of course she couldn’t, there was no one to sell it to out here. She sliced muscles off the foxfire and dropped them one-by-one into the boiling pot. There had to be a better way to sustain themselves while trekking through the wilderness, but neither one of them really knew how to camp, so it was boiled meat stew every night.

By the time the foxfire was reduced to a pile of guts and bones, the pot was glowing a soft blue from within and the smells coming from it were enough to make Willow’s grip slip on her knife. She thrust the blade into the fire-essence below the pot to clean it, then resheathed it at her side. Annabelle lifted the pot and placed it on the forest floor, where they immediately went at it with spoons.

As she ate, Willow felt her essence artificially replenished by the cooked foxfire. Her body took in the blue fire-essence and converted it to neutral essence, refilling what her meager calorie budget couldn’t. She was still hungry all the time, but the extra infusion of essence from magical creatures helped. For Annabelle the extra essence would merely wash through her and be expelled. Even with her spellcasting she would be at almost full capacity. Willow on the other hand was still using psychokinesis to breathe and bend her spine—everything which occurred in her torso which hadn’t yet been reconnected to her brain.

They ate in silence as the twilight forest darkened to night. Willow cast her magelight sphere high into the air so as not to attract any other magical creatures looking for a quick meal and they ate by the yellow magical light.

Willow had just extracted a chewy tendon from her mouth when she dared to broach the subject which was constantly on her mind.

“I’m ready for the last operation,” she said. Annabelle didn’t look up at the statement, just continued sitting and chewing chunks of foxfire. Willow waited for a painfully long time, then she couldn’t wait any more.

“Did you hear me?”

“I did,” Annabelle said, and extracted a thin bone from her mouth and threw it over her shoulder. “We’d lose a day of progress.”

“It has to be done sometime,” Willow said.

“You’ll be slower afterward.”

“But I’ll get faster again eventually.”

Annabelle sighed and dropped her spoon in the empty pot. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll start tomorrow morning. Here’s as safe as anywhere I guess, once I get the wards in place.”

Willow pushed Annabelle’s spoon around in the pot, not believing that the other woman had given in with so little argument. “Thank you,” she said, not looking up. “You don’t know what this means to me.”

“It means you’ll be whole,” Annabelle said, and when Willow looked up she saw the other woman smile. “For the first time in your life.”

Willow nodded.