Ugh. Guys. College is hard. Life is hard. I'm so sorry that it's taken me this long to get this chapter out to you all. I try to update at least once a month, but sometimes real life gets in the way. I hope you'll forgive me!

Have some exposition and a teeny tiny bit of plot movement in the meantime!

Thanks to CallmeCrazylol, SaRan1999, Blue-Black Flames, and Dictator-Chan for reviewing! You guys are the best! Also, huge thank you's to Storyteller of Darkness, Skyx3, MiraRobin123, and Wolfmoon356 for following us! Welcome to the journey, I hope you have a good time!

"So you're saying you're a parasite."

'Not quite,' the voice chuckled. 'We exist more in a sort of symbiotic relationship.'

I scoffed. "That would imply that you do something for me in return for me giving you a body."

'Do not patronize me, Child. I do far more for you than you think.'

With the rest of the group asleep, the voice and I finally had a moment to talk. I was seated in a chair between the beds occupied by Rita and Estelle, absently noting the even rise and fall of the mage's chest. She really didn't need someone to monitor her, the healers here in Heliord, combined with the constant vigilance of our resident princess, made certain that she would be back to hurling spells and insults by the time she woke up.

But once Estelle had her mind made up, there was no talking her out of it. So here I was.

'Does any of what I said make sense?'

"Well no, but it makes me feel better to know exactly what you're doing to me."

'I have explained everything as best as I can,' she said hotly. 'The fault does not lie with me if you do not understand.'

I held my hands up in mock surrender. "No, no, I understand you perfectly. You live in my head and take aer out of my body because just taking it out of the atmosphere isn't good enough for you."

'Then I'm gald we understand each other,' she sniffed in response.

"But nothing you've said can explain why I was crying blood." Which seemed like a pretty important thing to figure out.

There was a pause, then a sigh. 'I suppose not.'

I scoffed. "You suppose. Look, you can do what you need to do to keep yourself alive, but just give me a head's up if it's going to kill me, alright?" I shook my head and scowled. "Common courtesy, man."

'My best guess,' the voice cut in angrily, 'is that your body didn't know what to do with aer of that density and did its best to dilute it before distributing it to the rest of your body. I had been storing aer since we entered that cursed city to keep it from burdening you, but there was simply too much for me to do while still in this form.' She spat the last part, and I suppressed a sigh. This wasn't the first time she had hinted that she hated being attached to me. 'The overflow was up to your body to handle. After a while, it ran out of places to store the aer that was pouring in, so it started to push it through your bloodstream as a last resort.'

Huh. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

The voice huffed. 'It is. Aer was not meant to flow through human hearts.'

"It wasn't?" I didn't actually know how the relationship between aer and the human body worked. I knew that aer could flow through the body – it had to for artes to even be possible. I'd always assumed that that happened through the blood. "Is that why my chest felt like it was going to burst?"

I had been so distracted by the pounding in my head back in Caer Bocram that I hadn't noticed how much my chest hurt until we were led to Heliord and I had trouble breathing any deeper than a shallow pant.

'Presumably, yes. Do you truly want a lesson on aerobiological functions?' the voice sounded smug, already knowing the answer.

She laughed when I scowled and said I didn't.

'As I was saying,' she continued, heading back to her original train of thought, 'the aer was likely physically inside your veins, displacing the blood that was supposed to be there.'

"It needed somewhere to go," I cut in, starting to understand.

'So it came out your eyes and through your ears, where the capillaries were weak.'

I groaned and pinched at the bridge of my nose. "Lovely."

'I would recommend staying away from large quantities of dense aer in the future.' I could hear a grimace in her voice when she spoke, though I couldn't quite place why.

A particularly strong gust of wind blew across the room through the open balcony doors, and Rita shifted uneasily. I waited until she had settled again to collect my thoughts.

"You don't sound pleased with this development," I mused, smoothing out the blanket curled tightly around our young mage. "We're learning things, isn't that something we should be happy about?"

The resounding scoff bounced around my mind. 'Astute observation, child.'

"I am nothing if not astute," I grinned cheekily, stretching my arms above my head. My back popped and I had to suppress a groan at how great it felt. I was still tired and my body was still sore, but I felt less like death than I had before I'd fallen asleep.

My gaze fell upon my companions, all still sleeping soundly. Except for Karol. Who knows where that boy had gotten off to. I had half a mind to wake Yuri for his shift just so I could go back to sleep for a few hours before we figured out what was happening next, but ultimately decided against it. It had been a long day for everyone, and the effects of the aer had a tendency to linger.

Wait –

"Why didn't this happen to the others? We were all there, we were all exposed to the same thing. Why only me?"

I waited several long minutes for the voice to respond.

'It did happen to them,' she finally admitted. 'It just happened on a lesser scale. The aer flowed through their veins and on through their hearts, much like it did yours.'

I nodded, remembering how difficult it had been on Karol. "Okay, but why was my reaction so much worse?" Did the universe really hate me that much?

'That, ah, would likely be my fault.' At least the voice had the decency to sound sheepish. 'I have been siphoning aer before it enters your body for the majority of your life, which is why you can perform strike artes with practice, but casting is difficult for you.'

"Asshole." And here I thought I was just subpar at gathering the necessary aer.

She carried on like I hadn't spoken. 'In the past, I have been able to keep you from feeling the effects of higher density aer. As a result, your body's tolerance for it is dangerously low. When we entered that basement, I was unprepared for the amount of aer we would be facing, and most managed to slip past me.'

"Which is why it hit me so hard, so suddenly?"

'Yes.'

I bit my lip. "Okay, but now you know and can be ready for the next time. Unless you can't handle it like you claim you can." I sneered the last bit, expecting a biting retort about her strength and the price I would pay for underestimating her.

'Mmm,' came a hesitant reply.

I sat up a little straighter. "Wait, you can handle it, right?"

The silence that lingered felt different than before, and I knew that she was trying to avoid answering. I almost knocked the chair over in my haste to stand and glare at the wall.

"No, no. You don't get to go quiet on me again. I will find a way to physically fight you if you go quiet on me."

There was a huff, a short sort of laugh, before: 'Watch your tone, you will wake them.'

I waved a hand absently at the others, but did lower my voice. "They're fine. You're not getting out of this. Can you do it or not?"

'Of course I can do it, child.' I smirked. There was the fire. 'A better question would be for how long; an answer I do not have. It would be best for you to avoid aer krene and Hermes blastia altogether.'

"Wait, avoid what?" Those were new to me.

'Aer krene are the wells through which aer enters the world and Hermes blastia are interesting little amalgams that should not be an issue much longer.'

"Okay," I drew the word out, trying to wrap my head around what she was telling me. There was something short about her tone that led me to believe that she didn't want to discuss it. But I prodded anyway. "And why do you know about these?"

'Stories for another time,' she dismissedairily.

Well okay then. I could tell when I was fighting a losing battle, but I wasn't quite done fishing for information. "What do you think would happen if I were near them?"

'I do not wish to speculate, but I am not my strongest in this form.' Ooh, she was bitter about that. 'By the way your body has, for lack of better words, decayed in the past several hours since the incident, I do not think it wise for us to find out.'

"You think it would kill me?" I asked bluntly. It wasn't like the voice to beat around the bush unless it involved something dangerous. That, and she had said us. The voice didn't care about what I did unless it put my body in danger. My death would mean her death too.

A sigh. 'In time, yes. I believe that your body would be unable to handle the stress and will simply cease to function.'

"Oh." That wasn't what I was expecting to hear. I sank back into the chair and slid slowly down until my chin hit my chest. I opened my mouth to say something probably less than eloquent when Rita shot into a sitting position with the most dramatic gasp I have ever heard.

I sat up straighter in my chair and schooled my expression into something like passive amusement and raised an eyebrow at the way she whipped her head around, trying to figure out where she was.

"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty," I commented drily. A stray ray from the setting sun found its way into my eye and I flinched before scooting my chair out of its way. I could feel a headache coming on, and the bright lights were the opposite of helpful. "Or should I say good afternoon?"

There was a shuffling sound, and I turned to meet Yuri's gaze before looking sharply away. I still didn't want to talk to him.

"What the hell happened?" Rita touched a hand to her head and took a deep breath. "I feel like I ran into a wall."

"Speaking from experience, are we?" I grinned when she scowled. "You just ran into a ton of aer and decided to take a four hour nap. I can understand your confusion though."

"Oh, lay off, will you?" She was – was Rita blushing? "I had to do something. The blastia was out of control!"

I kept my thoughts to myself and shrugged. She wasn't one to admit that she was wrong, and I wasn't in the mood to argue. Speaking of things I wasn't in the mood for, I felt more than saw Yuri get up and make his way over, and I took that as my cue to go occupy another space. With one last pat on the little mage's leg, I stepped over to the balcony.

Delta opened a single, sleepy eye, and meowed softly. I reached down and ruffled her ears as I walked past. She shook her head with a huff and stood slowly to follow.

The view off the balcony was absolutely stunning. We were about five stories up, and overlooked a beautiful little mountain range. The city was built in between two hills, more a series of connecting bridges than anything, and the inn was situated over the steep incline that was the back of one of the hills. The protective barrier was about the height of my chest, and there was a clear inscription warning the reader that the inn was not responsible for any injuries sustained while playing on the railing.

They probably didn't want people sitting on it.

So I sat on it.

I could hear the echoes of a conversation happening back in the main room and did my best to tune them out. The buzz in my head was growing, melting their words into a meaningless stream of sounds that I could be bothered to interpret. If it was important, they'd tell me about it later, and I didn't want to take away from the view.

In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. The headache, the absence of witty remarks, and my needless desire to sit on the edge of a cliff were all leading up to something and I had just decided to ignore them.

So I was caught completely off guard when the dragon and his rider made a surprise guest appearance in my field of vision, not three feet away from the edge of my nose.

"Oh, fuck."

In the panic that was my mind for the next several seconds, the only sensible thought I had wasn't even mine.

'Fall backward, Isadora. I swear, if you fall forward and we somehow survive I will kill you.'

I fell backward, and I fell backward hard.

The sound of my head bouncing off the linoleum flooring echoed into the sleeping quarters, and I could barely make out the shuffling of movement over the screeching in my mind. I scrambled to right myself again, and made it on to all fours before the beast in front of me roared. I froze.

Someone blew past the balcony door, Yuri probably, if the shouting was anything to go by, but didn't attack like I thought they would. Was I blocking his way or did he want me gone so badly he would let this thing take me out for him?

'That is absurd. He is not like that.'

I didn't have time to ask her if she was talking about the dragon or about Yuri.

The dragon continued to stare into my soul.

I met the beast's eyes and tried to channel all of my emotion away from my eyes. I could fake confidence in front of this thing. It didn't have to know that my only weapon was sitting propped up against one of the beds inside. It didn't have to know that I was powerless to protect myself without it. It didn't have to know that I was beginning to feel afraid.

I choked when I realized that it probably already knew.

Its mouth started glowing, gathering aer into a ball so concentrated that I could feel the life leaving my lungs, and I knew I had to move or it would kill me. The voice was screeching, but I had no idea what she was trying to tell me, and I couldn't tell if that was my fault or hers.

But I balked when I moved to get out of its way. I could easily get out of the way, sure, but the attack wouldn't just stop because it didn't hit me. It would keep going, barrel through the inn where the rest of my travelling companions – my friends? – were standing. But if I just took the hit…

I had just accepted the fact that I was ready to protect these people, but I didn't know that that ideal would be put to the test so quickly.

I stood there, took a breath, and steeled myself, decision made.

And then Yuri, bless him and his quick reflexes, was in front of me, sword out and up in a defensive position, catching the blast of aer on the flat of his blade before flinging it back at the dragon. It dodged easily, and the aer dissipated back into the atmosphere.

With a wild roar, the dragon disappeared into the distant clouds with a few powerful swishes of the its tail. The ringing in my head disappeared with them, and I felt the cool sensation of a sigh spread blissfully across my mind.

I sank back onto my heels and was wondering what the hell had just happened when a heavy hand rested on my shoulder. I looked up into Yuri's dark eyes, my face schooled into something that I hoped was impassive and raised an eyebrow.

"You alright, Scout?" Was that concern in his voice?

There was a growl from behind him that was decidedly neither of our animal partners. "Ooh, I'm gonna kill that dragon freak the next time I see him!" The aer was shifting subtly as Rita tried to put a lid on her rage.

Estelle was awake and wringing her hands nervously in the background where she stood with – when did Karol get back? Confusion was etched across both of their faces, but neither of them spoke.

I gently shook off Yuri's hand and rose to my full height. Delta wove her way through my legs, her weight a comforting presence as I took a calming breath. "I'm fine."

Eventually Rita sighed. "Just when the conversation was getting interesting."

"Hey, that's enough talk about Estelle's healing artes for now," Yuri said.

"That's alright, I have most of it figured out by now anyway."

Karol was looking back and forth between Yuri and where the two girls were standing, confusion clear on his face. "Wait, what are you guys talking about? Come on, tell me!"

I started inching my way toward the door as an argument between Rita and Karol caught fire. Yuri noticed my slow attempt at an escape and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged, but something told me to wait instead of leaving.

His eyes were searching mine, his face straight and no trace of the judgement I had expected to see. I fought the urge to scoff, I wasn't going off on my own to spite him, I just needed something to do. We'd been cramped in this room for too long, and there was still a lot of nervous energy coursing through my veins from the conversation I'd had with Estelle.

I just needed space, and I didn't need permission for that. I didn't need his approval.

But here I was, waiting for it.

He nodded once before jumping into the ongoing conversation to tease Karol. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding and ghosted out the door and into town.

The sun was sinking lower and lower on the horizon with every step I took, and I raised a hand to stifle a yawn. I'd been allowed to sleep, yes, and I was no longer exhausted, but I was still tired. It was the sort of tired that penetrated my bones and echoed through my soul.

'You're being dramatic.'

"I have every right to be dramatic," I huffed back under my breath. I'd strolled up to a little shop and didn't want anybody to overhear me talking to myself.

I was stocking up on gels and some other small things when a little wooden block caught my attention. It wasn't anything impressive, just a little thing that fit easily inside my cupped hands. Each side of the cube was painted a different color and had a three by three grid carved into it. I turned it over in my hands, intrigued.

"Ooh, you have a good eye!" called the woman running the stall. She tripped over herself trying to make her way back to where I was at the counter. She placed the bag of things I'd asked for in front of me and gestured at the cube. "Go on, give 'er a twist."

I raised an eyebrow, but did as she instructed. The right column of the front face rotated up, and the left column rotated down under my fingers, revealing the colors that had been on the bottom and top sides in their places. I grinned up at the woman.

"It's a puzzle."

She smiled brightly and nodded. "Mix that puppy up well enough and you'll have hours of fun trying to set her right again."

A smile wormed its way onto my lips as I continued to fiddle with the puzzle, getting a feel for how the pieces moved against one another. Already the colors of the front face, which had been white in the beginning, was a rainbow of pieces that didn't belong.

I loved puzzles.

"How much?"

But the woman just waved a hand. "Don't fret about that, dear. Just promise that you'll put her to good use and pass her on when you've figured her out well and good."

"Oh," I blinked back at her, "but I couldn't –"

"You can and you will!" the little woman insisted. "That's how I got to have her and that's how I want to send her off. You look like a bright girl, I'm sure you'll have a good time learning her ways."

So, smile still on my face, I walked away from the little shop with a bag of treats and a new timewaster. Delta sniffed at it when she returned to my side from where she had been wandering and seemed to nod her approval. I rubbed at her ears.

"Oh, there you are Is!" Karol was suddenly at my elbow, all smiles.

I blinked back at him. "Here I am."

He didn't catch the way my words dripped with sarcasm and tugged at my sleeve. "Come on, we're heading for Keiv Moc! Rita has to check out the aer disturbances in the forest there for the Commandant's blastia researcher and Estelle is coming along, so we all get to travel together for a bit longer!"

"I thought Estelle was going back to the capitol?" There was no way Alexei had changed his mind. The princess was too valuable to the Empire to allow her to just wander off again. And to Keiv Moc, of all places?

"Not yet. Alexei asked Yuri to look after her so she could help Rita with her research."

I smirked at the thought. "I'm sure Yuri loved that."

Karol's brows drew together for a moment before letting the comment pass. "Anyway, we're leaving soon so hurry up and meet us back at the inn when you're ready!"

And then the boy ran off, tripping over his own feet as he went. There had been a question on my lips, and I let it slip at his retreating back.

"He still wants me around?"

'I don't think he ever wanted you to leave,' the voice said softly.

I blinked. They had assumed that I was coming with them. Yuri had sent Karol to find me and bring me back so we could leave Heliord together.

Huh.

Delta and I walked slowly, contemplating the strange turn of events. For one, Yuri wasn't going to kick me to the curb; a thought that made my chest feel much lighter than I thought it would. On the other hand, there was the situation with Estelle. It didn't seem logical for Alexei to let her go, not when he had worked so hard to get her back.

That is, unless there was something else going on? But what else could there be?

I asked the voice what she thought of the situation.

It was a few minutes later, and there was a slight hesitation in her voice when she finally responded. 'Something is not right here.'

I sighed, resigned. "Peachy."

Not a lot happens her in the way of plot movement, but we get to know a little bit more about the voice and what's happening between her and Is. And we got a rubies' cube! What a great day! If you know what happens in the game, you'll know what I mean when I say that Keiv Moc is going to be an interesting ride for our girl.

Ah well, I'm sure everything will be fine.

-Han