They walk until the sun starts to set. The dry scorch of the desert immediately gives way to incredibly dense, boiling humid forest after they exit the mountain tunnel, which - when prompted by Callum, who majorly hopes it's the only cave system they have to traverse - is apparently the only way to cross from the sun deserts to the mist mountains without taking a two weeks climbing detour, according to Rayla. "It has all sorts of runes and spells carved into the stone from past travelers to keep it safe and make the journey faster," she explains, between mouthfuls of juice and dried fruit. "If we'd taken any other route, we'd still be dodging Sol."
They end up following what looks like a once well-travelled path, now faded and overrun by the twisting raised roots of moss-covered trees and wild flower vines that glow when approached. Rayla will occasionally point out different magical plants and explain their properties to Callum, who on his end tries his best to commit them to memory. Xadia, he finds, apparently has way more poisonous plants when compared to the human kingdoms - not that he'd ever paid much attention to plants in the past. That was more of an Ezran and Harrow thing.
The reminder of his missing family inevitably makes him clench and bite his nails, and he doubles down on memorizing every shape and fact about the plants he can, if only to record them in his sketchbook and pass them onto to Ezran later.
The sky is soft pinks and lavenders when Rayla finally points out a copse of trees arranged in a rough semicircle. "We'll break here," she says, dropping her cloak and pack to the ground before fishing out a small netcloth and waterskin. "I'll be back with water and food - there's a small stream about fifteen minutes from here, and last time I passed through there were some good forage spots. Can you set up a fire?"
"Won't that give us away?" He starts digging through his own satchel for flint anyway, one eye on Zym, who has busied himself with wreaking terror on Rayla's cloak.
"Normally, yes, but most people don't pass through here if they can help it. Too many…" she waves a bandaged hand around, literally grasping for words. "Bad...vibes."
"Uh...okay?"
"I can't explain it. It's a dark magic thing. King Thunder fell and, like, echoes? Of the dark spells that took him still linger. Like, the spells themselves only lasted for a day, but the after-effects are still noticeable. It was worse in the sun deserts, but even this far out it still feels wrong. Like your head's being squeezed, y'know?"
"Oh." He hadn't noticed anything beyond how tired he was and how much his legs hurt. "I honestly didn't really feel much."
"I think it has to do with having a magical core. I'm surprised Zym is doing so well - I'd have thought the lingering spells would've targeted him simply because of what he is."
Zym happily rips a hole through her cloak, a truly terrifying sound considering who the cloak belongs to. She smiles at him and Callum wonders if he's allowed to be jealous of an infant dragon. "Anyways," she starts, and even her tone is fond. The true power of the dragon prince. "You should be safe to make a fire - there's little to no chance anybody will see it, and there's no point in being cold if we can help it."
She disappears into the trees at about the same time the sun disappears beneath the mountain-line, and Callum hastens to gather stones and firewood before visibility drops too much. Zym continues his quest to desecrate Rayla's cloak, before finally getting bored and opting instead to tag alongside Callum, weaving himself through Callum's heels with the same cheerful obliviousness dogs exhibit seconds before causing a disaster. He seems to find Callum tripping over and swearing very exciting, if the facelicking is any indication. One faceplant, three un-princely swearwords, and a stubbed toe later, Callum has a respectable little fire going in the heart of the copse of trees. Zym gnaws on one of the twigs too green for the fire.
Rayla returns with unbandaged arms, drenched hair, a topped off waterskin, and a netcloth filled with a variety of completely unrecognizable berries and mushrooms, which Callum shoves into his mouth anyways, fully committed to whatever happens to him. For her part, Rayla grabs the netcloth back after he makes a face at a particularly bitter fruit - "They're not all for eating, genius-" and offers Zym some of the bluer berries while he spirits away the waterskin. "Thanks," he finally says, after emptying the skin of half its contents. She snatches it out of his hands - burns still vivid on her skin - and offers some to Zym, who gives it a curious sniff before returning to the berries. Shrugging, Rayla ties it shut before finally letting herself slump backwards next to the campfire. There's a comfortable silence, accompanied by the sounds of crackling firewood and Zym noisily working his way through his meal, and the sky finishes darkening overhead, stars and moonlight filtering down through the weave of branches.
After hunting through his satchel for a piece of unbroken graphite, Callum scoots closer to the fire and takes out his sketchbook, flipping past the pictures of Claudia, his mother, Bait, and - more recently - Ezran, Rayla, and Harrow, to a blank page not quite close to the middle. He writes the words 'Xadian Plants and Properties' near the top and underlines it, before sketching out the berries Rayla had brought, medicinal herbs she had pointed out during their walk, and flowers she'd warned him away from due to their characteristics. Below each sketch, he scribbles notes on edibility, uses, side-effects, and where to find them, and tries very, very hard not to think about how Ezran would've just loved to be here right now.
His hands follow his thoughts, and before he realizes it, he's staring at a soft-shaded pencil outline of his little brother, looking away towards a kingdom he hasn't drawn yet, face as solemn as it was when Ezran hugged Zym goodbye. Callum stares at it, unblinking. He wonders if Corvus is enough to keep Ezran safe. He wonders if he can stand to bury another family member and survive it. He stares at the picture of his baby brother.
"Let me see."
Rayla's hands are gentle as she thumbs through the sketchbook. Callum has to close his eyes and run his hands over Zym as nonchalantly as he can, because she talked to him about this already, he needs to get over this. Corvus is enough, and Ezran is fine.
"Oh, you've got me in here, I look very cool-" she dodges his panicked swipe, grin on her face, before scooting around the fire and flipping the pages faster. "And Ezran - you got his face down perfect, very nice - and that Claudia, maybe less of her, yeah? Just less dark magic users, good for our collective health, we don't need that - is this a dragon burning a, a - what-?"
"Marshmallow man, give it back."
"A-no-a marshmallow man? What's a marshmallow?"
"Rayla." He tries to steal it back, but her arms are simply longer than his, and he's not trying too hard, mindful of the feverish burns marring her limbs. "That is - that is the saddest thing I've ever heard get said."
"Dramatic human." She somehow manages to turn the pages with only one hand making contact with the book, which should make no sense, she has just four fingers. The next page she lands on is also of Rayla, as is the one after that, and he would be more embarrassed about it if Rayla didn't seem quite so impressed. "I'm definitely more serious than this, I never smile this much - but this pose is nice, good form, very good form, Runaan would be proud - and is this- this is your mum, right?"
She's found newer sketches of Sarai since last time, ones with his mom wearing her royal wedding gown, his mom gardening and threading flowers through Ezran's hair, his mom wearing her battle armor from all those years ago, before Harrow, when she'd go off on patrols with the Standing Guard and leave him with-
"Your mom was a soldier?"
"A lieutenant, for Aunt Amaya." He remembers how his mom would always stand slightly behind Aunt Amaya the way Gren does now, how they'd catch each other's eye and sign one-handed so fast that hearing civilians wouldn't even realizing they were talking. He finds himself smiling. "She was really cool. She'd have to leave a lot, but then she'd come back with all sorts of stories and souvenirs and things. Sometimes, if her team went into Xadia itself - don't look at me like that, this was before the whole thing with Thunder, not so tense, you know? But sometimes she'd bring back little plants or bugs or things that would glow or sparkle. It was a really good time. I mean, I missed her, obviously, but she always came back."
Rayla is quiet for a moment, studying the sketch of his mother in full armor. Her face is unreadable, and as he stares - not that he means to, obviously, he's not - it's not staring, he's being very normal and not awkward at all - he notices that her eyes seem to glimmer and reflect the moonbeams piercing the tree canopy. "Who would you stay with? The king?"
"Huh?"
"When your mom went out."
"OH - no, King dad, the uh, the king, dad - no, I didn't stay with him."
Wow.
She looks at him with what looks like surprise on her face, though whether it's from his response or the delivery, he can't tell. "Do humans just leave their children unaccompanied when they have duties to attend?" she asks, and she sounds like she's making an effort to sound confused instead of scandalized.
"I mean, no, of course not," he responds. His tone must be sufficiently affronted because she immediately bobs her head in agreement, like she hadn't thought otherwise for a single second. He'd call her out on it, except he distinctly remembers accusing her of drinking blood, so he really can't say much. "I stayed with my dad."
"But you just said-"
"My first dad, before he-" he pauses, frowns, shakes his head clear. "He … he's gone. Died."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I don't really remember him all that much."
Rayla nods, sympathetic. Pauses. Frowns. "That…" she trails off. Looks away, looks back, shrugs a shoulder. "That doesn't make a lot of sense." she says slowly. "Not that-I mean, not that I don't believe you, but- I don't know, it just seems kind of weird."
"What, that my first dad died?"
"That you can't remember him."
He looks at her. "I mean," he starts, "I was like, very young when he died."
"But you were old enough to remember your mother's stories and souvenirs."
He opens his mouth. Stops. He almost says, "They were memorable stories," except that would imply his dad was somehow less memorable, and that is a level of unfortunate phrasing he's not at all emotionally ready to deal with at midnight in the boonies of a magical land that collectively exiled his people. "Yeah, I don't know," he says instead, sidestepping that whole mess. "I know I spent time with him, and he watched me when mom was out, but I honestly don't remember his face or what he sounded like. I don't even remember how he died."
"Was-so-" Rayla stutters, halts, bites her lip and looks away. "Never mind, it was a stupid que-"
"He was a good dad," Callum interrupts, seeing where she was going and disliking it immensely. "Like, really good. I know I liked him a lot, and even though I don't remember what he looked like, I remember feeling, you know, safe and happy. I just don't know what my brain did with his face."
Rayla nods, flipping through the sketches of his mother serious, smiling, laughing, occasionally accompanied by her children or Amaya or King Harrow, but never anybody else. "Sounds almost like a damnatio," she says.
"Language."
She clicks her tongue at him like she's annoyed, but there's an amused smile on her face when he looks over. "It's not a swear word, although - oh, funny - I guess you could call it a curse word." She waggles her eyebrows like she just said something clever, and Callum stares. "I don't know what you're talking about," he admits, and she deflates, joke defeated.
"A damnatio," she says, slightly put out, "is a spell that erases people's memories and perception of someone or something. It's usually used in combination with an official Scouring, but if it's effective enough it can be used in isolation."
"Right." He reaches over one last time for the sketchbook, and she hands it over easily. "I understood about half of everything you just said."
"It's - er, hmm, how to explain- it's like," Rayla tips onto her back again, face to the moon. The torched flesh of her arms appear almost to glow in the light, but the weak flicker of the campfire makes it too hard for Callum to observe closely. She hums in thought. "Imagine, imagine that somebody does something really bad. Like, setting fire to the royal library, or, or, or trying to usurp the bearers of the Royal Burden - honestly anything that insults the Queen and King. Depending on the crime, the event or person would be brought before whatever power in charge of them is and spelled to go away."
"So, killed?"
"More than that. Any memory of the criminal, crime, or tragedy would disappear from everybody's mind - people that knew them would forget, any mention of them in books or letters would become impossible to read or remember, and anybody that tried talking about them would immediately forget what they were talking about. Completely erased - if it was a person, it'd be like they never existed. If it was an event, like it never happened."
"And-" Callum's hands grip the sketchbook, where he keeps the memories of everybody he holds dear, everything new and everywhere important, copied perfectly from a mind that has always had uncannily perfect recollection. "And people - people are okay with that?"
"Why wouldn't they be? Nobody wants to remember a criminal or a tragedy if they can help it."
"What about the criminal's family? What if the tragedy is worth remembering?"
"Well, okay," Rayla's face is slightly chagrined now. "The spell doesn't always work perfectly. People that are close enough to the event or the person would remember - like, if my parents ever presented themselves, they'd be exiled and subjected to damnatio for sure, but I might still remember them simply because, well, I spent my entire childhood with them. For a big part of my life, I had a big connection to them. For all that was worth." The last part is spat.
He doesn't know how to deal with her ire, doesn't really understand it, so he keeps his mouth shut and stares at his sketchbook, wondering what he'd do if one day he opened it and found himself unable to recognize his own family's face. All his memories, taken because some monarch had decided tampering with minds was worth alleviating an insult. It scares him.
"How many people have been forgotten?" He asks her.
She looks at him. "Callum, I don't know. That's the whole point - they were forgotten. I wouldn't know because, if they were magically stricken from memory, I wouldn't even remember they'd ever existed."
Really scares him.
"You don't have to worry though," she says. She's staring straight at the moon now, and her eyes are definitely shining, her arms definitely glowing - she'd told him, told him she was a magical creature. "It's never been used on humans. I don't even know if it works on you people - I think being connected to a primal source is necessary for the spell to take effect."
It's a small comfort, even if the actual overall concept creeps him out to no end. "You're just okay with that?" he asks. "With having the king and queen decide what you can and can't remember?"
Rayla shrugs, eyes half-lidded. "They carry the Royal Burden," she says simply. "We might have our own ideas about what to do about a situation, but at the end of the day, if they decide something - erasing our memories or what have you - then, you know, we abide by it. Because they're our rulers. You should know this - you literally lived with your king."
He had, but dad had never explicitly used his crown to coerce Callum into doing anything. He'd even hesitated to use his position as a parent to justify orders, which for a long time Callum had interpreted as reluctance on King Harrow's part to acknowledge him as anything other than a spare body. The memory of dad's letter sends a pang through his heart, but it's a good pain. Callum squeezes his eyes shut before he thinks too hard about it and does something embarrassing, like have feelings in public. "I guess," he says, because it's easy.
Rayla's eyes slide all the way shut, and the breath in her lungs and at the back of his mind even out as she starts falling asleep. Callum's pretty sure it's unintentional - Rayla always insisted on taking first and last watch during their trek to Xadia, weirdly opposed to letting Ezran or Callum lose too much sleep, weak, subcentury-lifespan humans - but the exhaustion he'd observed in the last twenty-four hours seems to have finally taken its toll. Bemused, he watches as Rayla slips into a dead sleep.
Zym is a buzzing-warm weight at his side, pressing his entire body against Callum's thigh and resting his little dragon head on Callum's lap. It's adorable, and also makes for a very, very effective trap, arresting his movement lest he disturb the dragon. If he concentrates, he can hear the faint noise of Zym snoring over the crackle of firewood.
He closes the sketchbook quietly, and prepares himself for first watch. He glances at Rayla, and a moment passes silent, calm. He opens his sketchbook.
The night passes peacefully.
Rayla doesn't wake up even once during the night, which is a testament to how overworked and burned out she must have been. Callum counts himself dubiously lucky she stayed asleep, if only because he himself knocked out about halfway through the night, and he's pretty sure she would have strangled him if she'd woken up to find nobody on watch duty.
Zym is a little lump of limbs and scales, and Callum tried to squash down the feeling of immense guilt he gets when he has to jostle and push the dragon off his lap, but he really needs to go and Zym seems very determined to stay right where he is. When he finally manages to free himself, Zym simply snorts, licks Callum's hand once, and tucks his head back under his wing. The the resemblance to Ezran is astounding.
Callum files it away for later in favor of heading in the direction Rayla had said the stream was, figuring he might as well take advantage of the early hour to see if he can wash off some of the dust, dirt, and grime from his skin and clothes. Twenty ambling minutes with a much needed break later, he finds himself in front of the clearest, quaintest, most non-threatening stream he's ever laid eyes on. Rayla approved, he thinks as he chucks his boots off next to some equally picturesque bush and strips multiple layers of disgusting, sweat-stiff clothes off into the stream.
The water is cool, but the air is so dreadfully hot and sticky that he doesn't mind, and he focuses first on scrubbing his pants, socks, undershirt, scarf, and overcoat between the smooth stones lining the bottom of the waters, taking care not to rip the stitching. After finding a sufficiently low-hanging branch to let them drip-dry, he takes the small lump of soap wrapped in oilcloth and twine - greatly reduced from the bar he'd initially taken from the Banther lodge, especially after splitting it with Ezran - and rubs at his skin until he feels more like a decent person and less like a walking mound of garbage. He mixes the suds with sand and scrubs his legs and arms, lathers his hair into a frothy mess of white, and finally just sinks until he's submerged up to his nose. He hasn't been this clean since he and Ezran stole away into Lujanne's stone bath and wasted half a bottle of liquid that smelled nice and foamed like nobody's business.
Like the previous night with the sketchbook, or right before that in the cave, his mind drifts to Ezran. Is he awake yet? He used to wake up so horribly early when he was five, but now that he's older he's been staying up later and later and sleeping in more and more often-but does Corvus know that? Would Corvus care? Has Ezran had a chance to take a bath? Will he return to his kingdom covered in the muck of a two-week journey? Will he - and the thought sends wave of cold sweeping through Callum's lungs in a way that has nothing to do with the brisk water - will he be accepted by his people as rightful ruling king? Will others, people power-hungry and desperate, paint targets on his back and try to kill him? Will the guard, kind though they seemed, protect Ezran to the fullest of their abilities, or will they be complicit in the disposal of a child sovereign?
Will Viren-
The sudden memory has Callum ducking his head under the water's surface, as if by hiding underwater he'll somehow dodge any and all reminders of the man who literally stole his voice and denied him audience with his own dad, and who'd - unblinkingly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world - said that King Harrow had known about the egg, maybe even condoned it. The thought pisses him off to no end. King Harrow had been a stern, no-nonsense leader when he'd had to be, and his history as a commander would shine in the brisk tone he'd sometimes adopt when issuing orders to his soldiers, but he'd also had a moral compass the approximate shape and size of the hole mom had left when she'd gone off to battle to never return. Taking Thunder down, that's something Callum can understand - that's politics, history, grief - but an egg?
Impudent little mongrel.
Callum closes his eyes and sinks deeper into the water.
Submerged, the vacuum of normal sounds, the seeming absence of gravity, the way his body feels like it's being pulled and swayed by the current - no longer heavy, no longer bound by the earth, supported effortlessly on all sides - combine to create a feeling of weightlessness, like he's a leaf being pulled along by a wind gust, or the suspended, frozen breath of a snowy morning. It's so close to freedom, skates towards a sensation akin to what he imagines birds feel when they glide down on summer thermals. He could stay like this forever, lost in this quiet glide of water. The only thing missing is air.
He breaks the surface of the water and takes in a huge breath. He'd held off long enough from breathing that the air tastes sweet now, a relief against the sharp ache in his chest that had appeared in the last thirty seconds he'd spent under. Stupid, he thinks to himself as he pants and stands and tried to get his breath under control. He's nowhere near you. You didn't have to do that.
Still, he feels a bit better. There was a balm to the weightlessness and illusion of freedom - it had soothed something in him, whatever it was that had freaked out at the memory of Viren's glowing purple eyes, hands clawed around the glowing gold of Callum's voice. Like nothing could touch him. Like he was safe.
Callum doesn't slip under again - the jitters are almost all gone, and he's not a fan of holding his breath that long, breathing is fantastic thank you very much - but he does close his eyes, focusing on the air cycling through his lungs. A still-nervous part of him is curious to see if he can still pinpoint Rayla and Zym's breathing from all the way over here, so accustomed he's become to sensing the presence of their breath over the last day and a half. He casts about for it - stepping back into his own head to that place he found after waking up from that godawful weird dream - and just as he starts following the path of a playful breeze threading high through a maze of branches, he gets -
-yanked sideways
[-his breath catches, chest paralyzes-]
-into a rolling mass of glass-sharp green and twisting rime, hands borne of stupidity and desperation reaching down to throttle his throat and drag at his lungs, squeeze down on his chest, stab down into his eyes, robbing sight and air and replacing them with something choking, foul, and opaque-
take it take it TAKE IT
-his hands, his heart, his spirit are shackled and he's being dragged down down down into something lightless and void, any sense of direction gone and any sense of autonomy stolen, he's bound by this rot and grime, arrested wholly and frozen dead into an unnatural state, forced and molded into the wrong shape and puppeted along to a script that he can't follow-
stop fighting it and take it
-he wants to cry out but he doesn't have a mouth anymore, or a face, he is nothing, can do nothing, he's gone and replaced completely by-
Hot metal floods his mouth and Callum yanks back, terrified and lost and haunted by the memory of that spell, that face talking about destinies. In a half-wild knee-jerk reach for comfort, he casts about for the air, any air - a breeze, a gust, a sigh - and finds the racing in-and-out breaths of a treefrog a mile away, the quick-paced measure of a bird gliding high above, the slow-soft air of a turtle surfacing a meter behind.
The disciplined breathing of four sets of lungs half a mile away, approaching at an alarming rate towards the stream.
Oh fuck.
The soft warm windboy leaves in a hurry, but his soul energies are gentle and unharried and bump gently against his own arcanum, which means it is safe to stay asleep a bit longer. The fast moongirl is also still asleep, and the bestboy had often (loudly) agreed that she was the leader, even though the magic has said multiple times that she does not connect to the Burden. But bestboy is kind, and has a soul like dust and safety, so it is acceptable to forgive what he says and let moongirl take the reigns.
And moongirl is still asleep.
He tucks his head under his wing and commits to her example.
Then a bird sings, and a lizard runs past, and the grass bows and shifts in a breeze, and the breeze itself is so happy and free, nothing like that desolate vacuum cave from the day before, and it fills his heart and lungs with a vigor to run and play - so he opens his eyes and does.
Moongirl's cloth thing - and he knows her name is 'Rayla', but 'moongirl' is much better, he is an expert at naming things - is full of holes, and he pokes them and tears at them and the threads stick to his scales! And his teeth! And it is exciting and clingy and fun and fast! And he jumps and whirls around and tears at it with his claws to show it who's in charge, and the cloth rips so satisfyingly, resistance and then sudden give, and he feels very strong and ferocious!
And then he notices his hunger, which he remembers from yesterday, so he drops the cloth that smells like moongirl and shuffles over to the bounty of berries moongirl had brought from the waterstream in the east, and picks out the darkest and bluest, because those are the ones that taste the best and make his scales thrum with charge.
Moongirl stirs a bit while he eats, but does not wake, so he ignores her. He cannot connect to her magical core the way he can to birds and breezes and storms - she is of a different facet of nature, subject to a different force than his own - but he can feel the boundaries of her arcanum and it is fuller than before, healed from her encounter with his lightning, and it makes him happy. He had not meant to wound her or force her to draw on her core - but all is well, as it seems the moon must have shone a bit more brightly; the red blisters of yesterday have smoothened and become fainter, and her core sings out the contented thrum of an arcanum well-nurtured.
A soft gust blows through the copse, and he turns to it, listening. The wind speaks of birds and insects, of growth in the east and lingering death in the west, of oncoming humidity and possible plans for a cheeky rainfall, and of two direct subjects and two peripherals who steadily make their way to a common water-fount. And it says-
-panic-
and
-fear-
and
-angerFURYterrorrunningrunningrunningCATCHITgetawaygetawayohnoYES!NO!-
Azymondias summons pure spitting static, spreads his wings, and flies.
In retrospect, he should have just finished putting all of his clothes on. If he was going to die, at least he could've done it wearing blue. Mom had always said he pulled blue off well. Instead, true to form, he ends up grabbing one shoe - one, just one, two would have been excessive apparently, now he's down to one damn shoe - throws on his pants, belt, and shirt, and starts booking it through the thick underbrush as if he'll actually make any progress before they-
"What's tha-"
"Why is it-"
He's so slow, has to lift his legs so high up just to get past the buttressed roots of the taller trees, and there are logs and fallen branches and vines and all sorts of ferns, and he remembers where everything is, he remembers everything, but just because his mind can pinpoint where the next fallen log is going to be doesn't mean he can physically lift his feet any faster or pump his legs any harder.
Something shoots past him, buries itself deep in the trunk of a tree he doesn't glance at, and impossibly, his foot tangles on a vine that his memory says wasn't there the first time he passed through, and when he inevitably loses his balance and stumbles forward on his hands and knees, more vines and ferns and branches rush up to ensare his limbs and trap him. He tries to push himself back up, but his feet keep slipping, his ankle is tied by a vine that shouldn't be doing that, how is it doing that - and to his growing horror, his left hand is steadily sinking into the mud, long thick leaves wrapped around it to keep it in place. He grabs at it with his right hand, looks for a way to get leverage, lift it out, get the hell away from here, but-
-he glances behind him-
- and misses the tip of a pointed blade by inches.
Oh man, oh fuck, he's so dead, Rayla's going to be so pissed.
The blade is held in the steady, balanced hand of a dark-skinned elf with thin pointed horns and an unwieldy backpack, and behind her he can see four more elves, some armed and some not, all with similar guarded expressions, as if waiting to see if he'll reveal an unprecedented ability to escape this complete hellmaze of a situation. He waits too, just in case.
"You should not be here," says the elf holding the blade to his neck. Her face is as unyielding as her sword grip, voice even and rhythmic in its delivery. "You're an aberration in this land, a flaw in its fabric."
He opens his mouth. "That's not very nice of you-" he starts, because it's the kind of thing he'd say to annoy Rayla, and maybe if he just talks as if she were there he'll end up summoning her out of the air itself. The elf's eyes widen when he speaks, and behind her the others shuffle and twitch, one actually reaching for something on their back. It's a reaction of bad startlement, and as he watches, one of the elves dressed in long pale green robes holds up a sun-kissed hand and makes a fist.
Plants surge to wrap around his knees and elbows, and the hand that had started sinking into the ground shoots down even deeper into the mud as the earth itself begins drawing it in. It's completely terrifying, and he thrashes as dirt and root conspire to bury him.
The first elf with the blade is staring at him with an extra air of caution about her, which he patently doesn't care about because he's busy trying to choose between screaming and begging for help. "Stop moving, blood drinker" she instructs, but he can't, it's going to swallow him whole and he's freaking out, can't she see he's freaking out?!
The elf in the green unclenches her hand by a fraction, and the ground stops interring him, vines loosening just enough to let blood flow. With a panicked sort of bemusement, he notices his hands are completely numb, and he wiggles his fingers a bit to try to ease the pins and needles.
It's not a popular move, because the robed elf twitches again, and all at once Callum is pissed the hell off. "Literally what do you think I'm going to do to you?" he spits. "I'm neck-deep in dirt and all of you have swords or-or weird magic stuff on me. I had some soap. That's where I'm at right now."
"You reek of dark magic and drank blood in a sacred river, and then have the audacity to pass yourself off as harmless. Typical." a pale-haired elf scoffs. She has thick, strong-looking horns and dust-red facial markings sweeping down her brow, giving her a perpetual scowl. She looks like she could fold him in half with a look. "Like you said, he doesn't belong here. His death is an easy decision.
"Woah, woah, wait-" The green-clad elf draws her coak over her face to cover her eyes, and a tall elf near the back with thick hair and gold markings turns around, as if unable or unwilling to witness whatever it is that the sword lady is going to do to him. He seconds the sentiment wholeheartedly. "I haven't even done anything!"
"The blood of one of your victims is dripping from your lips as we speak," says green cloak elf, and the large-horned scowling elf snorts and shakes her head.
His hands aren't free enough to touch his mouth, but he can feel the clumsy soreness of a tongue recently bitten, can remember the feeling of blood flooding his mouth when that darkness filled the hollows of his bones and prodded him to seek refuge in the air, thirteen minutes ago in the stream. He opens his mouth to tell them that they're mistaken, it's all a big misunderstanding, he's not some monster, but the elf with the sword is raising the blade high, the ropes holding her backpack falling apart as something inside moves, lurches, breaks free, and Callum is going to die, right here, in a land denied to his people for generations, wearing one shoe and no blue.
He closes his eyes because he's afraid.
So he doesn't see when Zym bursts through the thick canopy and crash-lands in front of him, wings flared and mouth blazing electric and teeth flashing white at the group of wide-eyed, shocked elves.
There's no pain, no ache, no exhaustion - everything feels as if it's working right, energy resonant and singing and happy, vibrant from an entire night of the moon's kindness. It's hands down the most suspicious shit to happen this entire journey, up to and including the whole deal with the shady dark mage girl who went and turned chains into fucking snakes, TWICE, and if it didn't feel so good to just lay as still as possible and revel in the lack of pain, she'd have ripped up camp and set off hours ago. But it does, so she keeps her eyes shut and tries to prolong this rare instance of peace.
Consciousness ebbs and flows. There comes a moment, at a point when the sun has warmed her skin for too long for it to be anything other than mid-morning, where her body physically can't take anymore rest, and she reluctantly opens her eyes and commences her post-wake ritual of hissing at the sun. Bright, bright bastard. Once her eyes have adjusted to the absolutely excessive retina-searing brilliance of a cloudless day, she looks over to where Callum is surely keeping watch, because heavens knows she'll kill him if he let the prince go unguarded-
She blinks.
He's not there.
When Runaan had first taken her up as his apprentice, she'd gotten long, careful months of training in how to keep her head cool at all times. She immediately forgets all of it.
Because Callum is gone.
And, as she darts from the spot where Callum had last sat, sketchbook abandoned next to the pile of satchels, waist-packs, and cloak, she comes to the heart-freezing realization that Zym, the lost dragon prince she'd sworn her life and magic to over a fortnight ago, is also gone.
They're both fucking gone.
Because she was sleeping.
Suspicious, it was suspicious-!
The months of composure-training were accompanied by lessons in how to track creatures both magical and nonmagical, and she falls back on those with a combination of diligence and dread. No scuff marks, no raised earth, no broken branches or blood to indicate a fight - plus she'd have woken up, she'd been comfortable but not that comfortable, dirt's still dirt - and Callum's sketchbook looks like it'd been gently placed down, not thrown as it would have in a forced kidnapping. She takes two quick breaths and plunges down into her core where the memory of the moon chimes high, sinks into the white-flow of moonbeams and silver-light, and spreads her awareness as thin as it'll go. She opens her eyes.
The same campsite is now overlaid by a series of branching lights, sparks concentrating in clusters around tree branches, stones, and vines - the essential magic that runs through anything and everything, forming the underlying structure upon which Xadia itself is built on. The marks on her face burn as she scans the campsite - she's channeling an admittedly stupid amount of energy into her eyes, and it's been a long time since she's done this, she's supposed to be careful but-
-they're gone-
-she really doesn't have a lot of time.
Whiteblue swirls scatter, jitter, and spasm near where she'd last seen Zym. That must be his energy trace, she thinks, studying it intently with watering eyes. It's a lot less stable than I'd expect from a dragon - but he's a baby still, a hatchling, of course it isn't steadied yet.
In fact, she realizes, it's a good thing Zym's energies are so erratic. The scintillating, back-and-forth electric swirls and zaps produced by his core are unique, unlike anything she's observed before - there's no way she'd confuse it with the energy inherently present in a breeze or a storm. Even if a zephyr blows through, even if a bird or even another skywing elf comes along, the energy signatures won't blend or fade or become confusing to pick out, because Zym's trace is just that unique.
She blinks salt and sting out of her burning eyes, picks up the cloak, satchel, waist-packs, and sketchbook, and unsheathes one blade. With her other hand, she picks out a purple-black berry, puts it in her mouth, and braces herself.
The juice is acid, burning and painful, and as she swallows she can feel it shooting down her veins into her heart, her pulse quickening, her breaths deepening. The burn in her eyes is supplanted by the burn on her tongue.
Her magic, dammed by daylight and sunshine, breaks open and flows freely.
She scales a tree and pushes magic into her eyes and hunts down her prince's trace, leaping from branch to branch, violet eyes glowing hot-white with stored moon magic. She won't be able to find Callum like this - he's human, he doesn't have a trace, doesn't have a core - but she can find Zym, must find Zym. She refuses to let herself think otherwise.
(coward)
Pulse too fast, magic too free, and heart too fractured, Rayla shoots off into the canopy, following the swirldance of her future King's soul-energy and praying against reason that she finds them in one piece.
A/N: :)
