noceur (n.) one who stays up late.

The moonlight was rich here; here, at last, there was a tiny glimpse of the sky. It was the kind of moon that had always made Ilja dream of salvation; it was a purifying kind of light, that seemed in itself a kind of sculpture. All was painted silver; moving his way slowly through this tableau of frozen forestry, Ilja could not help but feel that the brash red light flickering from his torch seemed almost… gauche. He was a human moving through a more orphic realm, some strange demonic kingdom removed from such mundanity; to have something as ordinary as fire was to commit a very grave sin against the strange, esoteric rules of the new world into which they had stepped.

He moved slowly from the clearing, until the fire around which Ghjuvan and Khalore huddled was lost to the darkness. It did not take long; even at night, this was a damned grey forest. Then it was just Ilja, and the harsh red light of his torch, and the sense that the forest around him was breathing slowly and waiting – just waiting – for him to fall. Well, he imagined it would not take long. Ever since they had placed foot on Illéa, he had felt rather as though he was falling.

Falling, constantly falling.

What lay at the bottom?

It was harder here, than it had been at camp. It was harder to tell what they expected of him. Pekka was meant to be here; they were meant to have a leader. Nez was meant to be here; they were meant to have a wild card. Hyacinth was meant to be here; they were meant to have someone to strategise for them, to put eighteen generations of experience to use. But they didn't, and now they didn't even have their Hierophant or their Star or their… where did the list end?

Ilja didn't know what he was meant to be.

So instead, he stayed quiet, and he watched, and when he had seen it – it – elementary, so elementary it needed no name – he had realised he had no choice but to leave. He didn't know who he was meant to be, but he knew what he could do. He could try. He could try to help how he could; he could do this much, and little else.

Repent. Atone. Salvation.

The harsh red light of his torch revealed the unmistakeable shape of prints beneath his feet. Nothing human – something clawed, something injured, something stumbling for somewhere safe to die. Here, on the bark, there was black blood staining high and low. There, amongst the leaves, splattering of viscera and flesh, cleaved free from the beast to which it had once belonged. He picked his path carefully through the woods, aware that at any moment something much darker could lunge from the shadows.

The moonlight seemed to carve a path forward for him. He came to a steep slope, where the forest seemed to give way into a vastly dark cavern far below the earth, and skirted it cautiously. Something had thrashed its way through these trees; something had laid nature low.

And then he saw it.

Here, before him, lay their pursuer. It was a great, dead thing; earlier, in the frenzy of panic, he had not fully comprehended just how enormous it was; it would have barely fit within the orphanage's dining room. It was a heaving pile of feather and claw many times larger than the young man that stood before it now, its maw stained with blood and viscera, its dark flesh textured in great overlapping scales. One of its wings hung from its back, cleaved from the spine, blood coagulating along its translucent edge; there were long open wounds along its ribs, where the druj had torn it open, sternum-to-throat. This was the thing that had seemed to stalk them through the woods for so long; this was the thing that had lunged to attack the druj threatening Khalore and Ghjuvan.

And as Ilja stepped closer, Kinga Szymańska began to rip herself free of the veins which bound her to the dead thing she had once been.

She had torn herself mostly free of the corpse that had been her monstrous form; she had been bound into it forcefully, veins and arteries and sinew keeping her human form tied tightly to the skeleton of the beast. Or maybe that was just how it seemed from here: as Ilja stepped closer, he saw that the monster she had been was rotting away, slowly, dissipating into so much smoke and feathers. There were black marks burned into her arms and face; her clothes were torn and ripped. He could not tell if she had been the thing, or if she had been within the thing; perhaps there was truly no difference.

Placing a hand against the dead thing, he found that it was still warm, though breathing no longer. It felt like carrion; it felt like a beast which had been slaughtered very long ago; it felt like something which had been drawn into death in weeks past, not minutes. Cautiously, he set his foot onto the enormous black haunch of the beast, and climbed slowly up the corpse, twining his hands in the dark feathers. He was surprised to see that there were feathers; it had seemed so scaled and lizard-like before. In front of him, the lean Warrior was struggling with something pinning her to the carcass; her muscles strained against her skin, like they were about to burst from the very seams of her body. In the narrow few days she had been gone, she seemed to have lost weight; she looked exhausted, and hungry, and angry.

Ilja stepped forward, and sliced the last tendril of flesh pinning her to her Moon form. Kinga tore her wrist free – and immediately grabbed Ilja by the throat, her face contorting into a furious snarl. He had forgotten how strong she was; she lifted him clean off his feet.

He barely managed to choke out the words. "Nice to see you too, Szymańska."

She blinked. Her entire face was blackened with black ichor and mucus, made to look almost otherworldly in the rich silver light of the moon; she looked utterly dishevelled, her hair hanging in blood-heavy tendrils around a badly bruised face. There was a wild, dark look in her eyes that slowly faded now as recognition dawned. She dropped him, her grasp on his throat easing; she kept her hand tightly twined upon his lapel, like she thought he was wrought of dream-stuff and might dissipate if she let him go. "Schovajsa?"

"The one," Ilja said, trying to keep his voice level even when a tiny voice in the back of his mind whispered this is a druj, this is an it, this is a monster. "The only."

Then she did let him go. "You're alive."

"Yeah," Ilja said. It felt unnecessary to say more. "Thanks to you."

Someone else might have tried to feign modesty; Kinga was not someone else. "Yeah," she said. "I tried."

Ilja dropped back to the ground, and watched as Kinga stumbled from the carcass; before he could try to catch her, she hit the ground hard, the air rushing from her lungs in a great exhale. She groaned, tiredly; then, with a great exhalation, a shudder ripped through her that seemed to shake the very bones of her being, and as it did so, the thing she had once been shook as well, feather and claw and fang. What had been black flesh began to dissipate, slowly, into so much smog.

"Jaga wasn't kidding," Kinga muttered. "Hard to adjust to two legs again."

She seemed to have given up on trying; she just sat there, on the ground, staring up at the moonlight. Her face was slowly regaining its usual features, her familiar strong jaw, the vein beneath it juttering out an unsteady heartbeat, and thick eyebrows slowly darkening as though she had greyed into fogginess during her time as a beast; the mask of feral anger that had momentarily possessed her had dissipated utterly. She was here. Ilja almost couldn't believe it. She was here. Unbidden, there came to mind that voice again: there is nowhere you could go that I would not follow.

It was something. For the first time, it felt like the world had smiled upon the Warriors.

Ilja didn't ask if she was okay; he just said, with a note of slight wonder, "you came back."

"Of course I came back," Kinga said, very softly. Her voice was a mere ghost of itself; it was as though she had forgotten how to speak, as well as how to walk. "I made a promise."