CHAPTER 4-5
Phoenix

After everyone had dried off following their swim, they had begun hiking again, still traveling upland, until arriving in the early evening at a clearing with a breathtaking view overlooking the western beach and Drowned Channel far below. Something large and Zoidian-made stood darkly at the far end of the glade, a building of some sort, but Phoenix couldn't tell what it was, and Áthas had very pointedly not led them over to it.

As he helped her clean up after dinner, he couldn't help but watch Heinrich on the other side of the campfire across the clearing. His brother seemed different in some way than he had been this morning, though Phoenix couldn't quite place how. He'd asked what he and Fynn had been up to earlier, as he'd seen them go swimming off together towards the waterfall, and noted the cut on his brother's shoulder that hadn't been there earlier, but all Heinrich had said was that they'd found a different spot to go diving for treasure, to see if there might be any to be found in a more out of the way place like that. Phoenix had a ticklish sort of sensation that there was something Heinrich wasn't telling him, but was content to let it lie. If Heinrich wanted to tell him, he would.

Fynn, who was seated next to Heinrich at the fire, leaned over to tell him something, causing Heinrich to laugh. Phoenix didn't realize how overtly he was staring until Áthas' voice interrupted his wonderings: "Something on your mind?"

"Be careful what you wish for. The inner workings of my brain are incredibly dull," he joked immediately, though the look on her face indicated she wasn't even remotely buying his smooth deflection.

"Well, if there's anything you'd like to talk about, I don't mind listening, you know."

"Thanks, but I'm good."

Áthas straightened from the bucket of soapy water she'd been bent over and gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment. "If you say so."

Had he always been this transparent and Áthas was merely the first person to call him out on it, or was she really this intuitive? To be in her presence was to feel as though there was nothing he could hide behind - and he had a lifetime's worth of experience at hiding.

"Do you hide, too?" he found himself asking, though he had no recollection of consciously choosing, at any point, to speak the words aloud.

She straightened again. "Hide?"

"Never mind." He felt a surge of gratitude for the low light, that his rapidly flushing cheeks would not be visible to her. A burst of laughter came from the bonfire some distance away and he looked over at the others again, though he could feel Áthas' eyes on him.

"No, what do you mean?" she wanted to know.

Phoenix sighed, and walked over to the cheerful creek that was a few steps behind them. Through a gap in the trees above, the slender crescents of the moons cast silver shimmers on the creek's ripples, leaving them dancing in the light. "I don't know," he said at length. "Sometimes it feels like you wake up one day and suddenly you're an adult, and you're just waiting for someone to notice that you have no idea what you're doing, at which point they'll brand you as a fraud. So you hide, and hope that you can fly under the radar until you figure things out and can better live up to the role you find yourself in." He turned; she was standing a few feet away and watching him silently. "Like, do you ever wonder what happened to the things we used to dream of when we were younger? Where did those futures go that we imagined for ourselves?"

Áthas didn't say anything for a moment, then ventured, "I'm not sure any of us arrive in adulthood fully prepared for what's to come. We acquire what we need as we go along. Were you learning the things you would need to know as an adult when you were ten? Or were you focused on learning the things you would need to know as a ten-year-old when you were ten?" She came to stand beside him, and both of them watched the water without really seeing it at all, only halfway listening to the creek's merry chuckles. "This is about Heinrich again."

Phoenix couldn't tell if she were asking or stating this. "It is," he admitted.

"You think he's just going to decide one day that you've been terrible at caring for him?"

"Maybe I wouldn't word it that way specifically, but kind of, yeah. It feels like someday it'll dawn on him what a failure I was." It had been years since Phoenix had spoken to anyone with this level of raw honesty; it was terrifying but liberating.

"What do you think Heinrich used to dream of for his future? Before the cataclysm?"

"What?" What did that have to do with anything?

"What future do you think he used to dream of for himself?"

"I think - I think he probably wanted to be the adventurer who finally found the Troll Queen's lost treasure," he said, referencing a fairy tale many Imperial children were familiar with. He smiled at the distant memory.

"And what about all his time in the orphanage?" Áthas pressed. "What future do you think he was dreaming of then?"

Phoenix never liked to call that era to mind; even now, Heinrich rarely spoke of it, and Phoenix's understanding of his brother's many years there was still sketchy, at best. But he had never needed many of the actual details to imagine little Heinrich in some dark, terrible place, curled up alone in a corner, crying and hungry and cold. "I -" He faltered as a thick knot of helpless grief rose in his throat.

Áthas turned to him, taking both of his hands in her warm ones. "I'm sure he was dreaming of his brother, of a future where you could both be together again."

Phoenix nodded wordlessly, not trusting himself to speak.

"Remember that, when your fears tell you that you're not good enough," she said softly. She regarded him for a moment, head tilted just slightly, then squeezed his hands. "I'll wrap up here. Why don't you go back to the fire and let the others know that I'll be along shortly for tonight's story?"

He nodded again and squeezed her hands back, savoring the unexpected wonder of this physical contact between them, then took a deep, steadying inhale and made his way through the whispering trees back to the bonfire. He hadn't actually expected that Heinrich would have somehow vanished in the time since he had stepped away to help Áthas with the dishes, but when he sighted his brother again on the other side of the flames, the relief that crashed over him hit like a tidal wave.