warning for animal death and mild gore. its nothing more extreme than you'll find in a high school anatomy dissection, though.

Rhen shivered in her academy uniform as the ferry docked at the northern continent. There were a few houses around the harbor and that was it.

"Well, they aren't really known for their bustling port towns," Lars had said. He was shivering too, although not as much as Rhen was. "I was expecting it to be cold, but I never imagined that this level of coldness could exist."

"I'm not cold," Rhen said quickly.

"Your lips are blue."

"I'm fine," she said.

As she looked at the—well, it couldn't really be called a village, since there were only three houses—the settlement, she was glad Lars had forced her to buy real shoes. She couldn't imagine walking through all this snow in her crappy old sandals. She wasn't about to tell him that, though.

"Do you think they sell coats here?"

Lars gave her a sideways glance; "I thought you weren't cold."

"I- I was asking for your sake." She gestured towards him, "I mean, you look like a walking icicle."

He rolled his eyes. "Well, they might."

They didn't.

"What kind of frozen-ass northern town doesn't sell coats?" Rhen complained as they left the settlement, "I mean it's freezing up here, you'd think that would be the one thing they do sell."

"They probably don't expect anybody to come up here in the middle of their fucking winter season, so they only make enough coats for themselves," Lars said, "if you had just bought warm clothes in Veldarah like I suggested…"

"Shut up." Besides, it's not like his 'warm clothes' were doing him any good, either. After all, it didn't really get cold in Veldarah, where seasons were divided into 'disgustingly hot' and 'still kinda hot.' Rhen was pretty sure that people in Veldarah didn't even know what cold was. Granted, this place was cold by anyone's standards. Even the earth was cold, and it shivered beneath their feet, knocking them unsteady for a while. How did people live with this? Rhen looked up, and the sky was just as white and bland as the ground beneath her.

She spotted a large animal in the distance. "Lars," she said, poking him in the arm, "Lars, look." She pointed to the creature. "If we kill that, we can wear its skin."

"That's the best idea I've heard all day," he said.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

It was so bloody. Rhen nudged the dead ox with her foot. "Do you know how to skin an animal?"

Lars shrugged. "I thought you would know. I mean, you're from some hokey farm town, right?"

"Yeah but my pa always did that stuff," she said, "I guess I could try." She knelt down by the carcass and stared at it for a while, determined to remember something about how her father would prepare an animal for Mama to cook. Nothing came up. She looked back up at Lars. "Actually, I have no idea what to do. You try."

Lars knelt on the other side of the carcass. "I'm too cold to think."

"I didn't know you could think."

Lars rolled his eyes.

They eventually cut a slit down its middle, which seemed like a step in the right direction. Lars poked at an intestine. "Whatever we do, I'm pretty sure we don't want to cut these open right now. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea."

"Well no shit."

Lars cracked a smile and pointed in her direction; "Seems like a good rule of thumb."

Rhen rolled her eyes but smiled despite herself.

Lars stared back at the creature's innards, unsure of what to do. "Wait, wait. Wait."

"What."

"Wait a minute."

"What?" she repeated.

"It would—It might be a better idea to skin it before we start moving the organs around."

"Oh," said Rhen.

They stared at each other for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

Lars was the first to speak; "How…. do we, um… how do you skin an animal?"

"You, uhh, take the skin off."

Lars nodded. By now, all they had managed to do was cut a jagged slit down the animal's belly and turn it onto its side. With nothing to hold them in, the abdominal organs slumped out onto the red-stained snow.

He tentatively grabbed one side of the cut and began trying to separate the animal's skin from its muscles, which probably would have been an easier task had the muscles still been intact. Oops. As it was, Lars struggled to get the knife between the ox's hide and the relatively thin abdominal muscles. Instead, he ended up cutting straight through both of them. He tried again, and managed to separate the skin a little bit, but not cleanly. He tried again and again and again while Rhen watched silently and tried to conserve body heat.

A part of her felt like she should try to help him, but come on, it wasn't often she got to see Lars fail this badly. It was kind of funny how his face had twisted into this stupidly frustrated expression, how his hands were stained with blood and whatever other filth was oozing out of the dead ox, how his shivering caused his hands to shake as he tried vainly to skin the animal, and how when the occasional tremor hit he would try to remain as still as possible to avoid injuring himself with the knife. In all her time as a slave to his family, she had never seen him look so pathetic, so out of his element, so she felt she had every reason to revel in this moment. She was going to commit this moment to memory, every single detail, and she was going to make sure he never forgot about it either. She smiled to herself. That would keep him quiet. Granted, she could just as easily be in his place right now since she didn't really know how to skin an animal either, but that was besides the point, really.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Lars asked, his eyes narrowed.

"Quality control."

Lars rolled his eyes and went back to work mutilating the dead animal.

They didn't really notice when the sky started getting darker, both of them much more used to weather where the sun was actually visible, but Rhen did notice that there was slightly more chill in the air. She guessed that Lars felt it too, as his shaking had gotten so bad that he had nearly cut himself a few times. It was honestly pretty amazing that he hadn't cut himself yet, given the crappy job he was doing. Hopefully he kept it that way, because as much as Rhen didn't care for him, she didn't particularly want to see him injured, either.

The ground shook again, this time catching Lars off-guard and finally causing him to slip up and slice a nasty gash into his hand.

"Shit!" he said, dropping the knife and covering the injury with his other hand, "Okay, okay," he paused and took a deep breath, looking at Rhen; "why aren't you doing this? I mean, you're the sl– the person who handles sharp things. Wouldn't you be better suited to do this?"

Rhen didn't miss the implications of what Lars had almost said. She narrowed her eyes, all possible concern she may have had for his injury fading away into her usual sarcasm; "Yes, because they totally taught us how to gut and skin an animal in Swordsinger Basics."

"Really?" Lars spat back, momentarily forgetting his pain but still tightly clutching his hand, "I was under the impression that the Swordsinging Department just dawdled around and wasted the school's funds."

"At least we learned how to fight with actual weapons! Versus what, exactly? Waving a stick around and saying a bunch of nonsense magic words—"

"They're incantations and they're in an ancient language, Rhen!"

"Oooooh!" Rhen waved her hands mockingly. "Magical!"

"And unlike you, we learned practical spells, like making plants grow, or how to…" Lars abruptly cut off.

"How to what?"

He looked down at his hands, speaking quietly; "How to… conjure fire."

Rhen's jaw dropped; "So you're telling me-"

"Shut up."

"We could've just started a fucking fire-"

"Shut up shut up shut up."

"Instead of-" she gestured vaguely at the ox carcass, "this?"

"You didn't think of it either, Rhen!" Lars shouted.

"I'm a swordsinger! I use swords! Which, as you know, does not include being able to start fires whenever and wherever I want!"

"Can we just drop it? Okay? Can we? Or are we just gonna sit around a dead animal all night and yell about how I could've made a fire?"

"Well, what do you suppose we do?"

"We could, I dunno, actually start a fucking fire, we could clean and patch up my hand, we could try to find a decent place to camp for the night. Anything! Anything is better than sitting here and freezing to death next to a dead ox!"

He had a point. "Alright then."

They got up and made their way northward, Lars still clutching his bleeding hand. Apparently, low-level healing spells do little more than numb the pain, he told her, and he wasn't about to waste his magic on something 'trivial' like that.

It took them less than an hour to get to Thornkeep. If they had just kept going earlier instead of trying to skin that ox, then they would have been warm and safe hours ago. Rhen pushed that thought out of her mind, it wasn't healthy to dwell on the past. What mattered right now was warming up and getting a good night's rest. Maybe tomorrow they could ask one of the locals to teach them how to properly skin and clean an animal, so that this would never happen again.

Oh yeah, and they should probably do something about Lars' hand.

at this point im just uploading my fanfictions to ff dot net bc i want like, a coherent library of all of them together. this was also posted to ao3