#of course I also tell them not to criticize their peers' handwriting because it's not helpful and I'm sure they wouldn't like it if

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

I don't know if this is true for anyone/everyone else, but why does it seem like the moment (or soon after) you take a job in education, you can suddenly read some of the most atrocious, messy handwriting from children that you could've sworn you would never have been able to read before the job.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

Is it bad to have an accent ? I’m studying English at uni and all my teachers say I have to work on my accent and adopt an RP or GA accent because having an accent is bad and terrible . I have a pretty thick French accent and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to correct it and it’s making me feel very self-conscious so I almost never talk , which affect my performance in class .

Seeeee..........the thing is, there is this ideal. This gold-standard: The accent-free foreigner. (And if you do have an accent it better be from a rich white country and it better be barely noticeable and you won’t mind if someone is creepy about it)  And many learners ascribe to that ideal as well. And honestly, it doesn’t go anywhere, as far as I’m concerned. There are just very little professions where you will profit from not having an accent outside of people being happy about it. There is no practical gain. Unless you want to become an actor or a spy or the Queen’s professional doppelgänger.

So, to make this short, it’s not bad to have an accent as far as I’m concerned and your teachers sound like dicks tbh. 

We often complain about native-speakers who are rude about people’s accents or mistakes when they only know one language themselves. But I think it’s time to address that: ESL-speakers do it too - in fact, I would say that especially among people from countries where fluency in English is expected for  the younger generation, it is very common to lash out against people from the same community who have a thicker accent when they speak English and to make fun of them. And that’s just as rude as when a native speaker does it or when you make fun of anyone else for doing something you excel at.

On the personal note: You can only do something about accent if you speak and if you’re getting berated for the way you speak and that keeps you from speaking - then you’re not going to improve. It’s fair for a teacher to point out how to pronounce a word or to point out if someone’s grammar is wrong - but I study English too and while we had to stick to a specific variety when writing (either American or British), we were never told how to speak beyond pointing out mistakes in classes that were about language proficiency. And most people do improve over time, simply because their studies expose them to a lot of spoken English. I would meet people from my first semesters again in higher semesters and note how they have become more fluent and made less mistakes. Personally, I would try speaking to at least the lecturers you think might react decently about it that you’re working on it (whether you are or not) and that for that you need to speak and right now this kind of feed-back is making you more anxious about speaking and whether they would mine focusing their criticism on more structural aspects of your speaking.

As far as accents or being “accent-free” is concerned-  

I don’t even think it’s something that all speakers should aspire to. And even if someone’s end goal is to speak perfect RP or GA, that should be their personal goal. Many people uphold this strange notion of purity when it comes to people learning a language where everyone should aspire to be “accent-free” or “sound like a native-speaker”. And I guess it makes sense if you’re teaching someone how to speak that language as a beginner. It makes sense to show  them how to pronounce words and how sounds work in that language. If you have a person sitting in front of you who doesn’t speak English, it makes sense to stick to one version instead of saying “wa-t-er” in one lesson and “wadder” in the next or “caahn’t” in one sentence and “cèèn’t”in the next. It gives them a certain structure, helps them tell one variety from the other and to avoid confusion. Not to mention that if someone wants to study English they are expected to write their papers and essays in one variety of English so it makes sense that they know the general rules of telling them apart or recognizing or recognising how a word would be spelt or spelled. 

But when you finally become more fluent, you still have an accent and you still might not be perfect recognising one variety from the other. There are people who live in a foreign country for the majority of their lives but you can still tell where they come from. 

But the question is...who cares?

Don’t get me wrong, if someone wants to put their effort into learning a specific variety perfectly, I don’t see anything wrong with it and if they accomplish that - it’s quite some feat and it’s cool. Commendable. But the truth is that we all have accents. Even in our native languages, we speak in a regional accent, we probably have specific slang-words that are particular to some group. Age, class, sex, gender, education, interests - there are thousands of factors  that determine the way we speak. And it’s the same for native English speakers. There are hundreds of versions to speak English. 

I actually once took part in a public speaking class and the woman who held that class was a logopaedics trainer. And she could tell by the way people spoke and moved their mouth while speaking whether they used to wear braces, which parent they had a closer relationship with and other things. The way we speak - and the way we aspire to speak - is an important aspect of our personality and who we are and where we come from and personally, I don’t see the value of erasing that. It’s like a hand-writing and no one would tell you to alter your handwriting until you write in Times New Roman or Arial.

The thing is, when Anglos complain that they don’t understand a Scottish person or an Irish person or some other regional dialect, that is because that person grew up speaking a particular variety of English in a specific community. But for someone who isn’t a native speaker, they learn English in a community with a different native language - which means we simply speak that language with them (unless it’s for practice or a joke). I learnt English in a German school among kids with German accents and German language-habits - and teachers who had the same accent and the same habits and one who pronounced “wipe” as “whip”. And you probably learnt it in a French-speaking school among kids with French accents and French language-habits. So there is practically no way for any of us to leave school without speaking in that respective accent. But unlike a Scottish person or an Irish person, we didn’t speak that variety of English with our peers. We spoke our our native language. And I think that’s the difference for most people - that one group has a native community to fall back on and the other doesn’t, so the second one should aspire to imitating a native-speaker instead of adding another variety to the mix. 

Also you’re just as likely to speak English with people from any other European country (who also have their own accent and speaking-habits) as with a native speaker, so it’s not like you’re only going to be exposed to people who light you the way to a native accent. I remember when I made this post about “Euro-English” and people from absolutely random countries with different native languages all commented with: “No this is definitely how we speak, this is definitely our variety of English!” - meaning there are also a lot of unifying factors there too, based on our language families and cultural similarities - and how many people are there speaking like that? Hundreds of millions, probably.

Someone once pointed out to me that there are more Germans who speak English than there are Canadians. And you can do that maths  for a lot of countries: There are more Norwegians or Swiss people who speak English than people from the Republic of Ireland. There are more French people who speak English than there are Australians. That means with the exception of Americans, we outnumber people from the countries these “ideal” accents come from. And in fact, how many British people speak RP? How many Americans speak GA? And that’s just looking at western countries. There are so many varieties of English spread around the globe due to colonialism. It’s ridiculous to expect the entire world to sound like the Queen. In the end, each version is their own variety and just because it doesn’t have a native community to fall back on, I think it’s harmful to treat it as something only worth of erasing when a person’s English skills are a factor in professional success and social standing even in the community they come from.

English is the current lingua franca - a language that non-native speakers communicate in. And as I said, it makes sense to teach it in a specific way and to teach it the dialects that exist - because if everyone would just make up their own version of English, we wouldn’t understand each other and might as well not have bothered learning English in the first place. But you don’t need to have a cut-glass accent to accomplish that or aspire to have one.   

And this brings me to what I think should be the central question: 

What do you want to use your English for?

See, I did mention that if you want to become a British spy or play a British role as an actor or be the Queen’s bodyguard slash doppelgänger (a film I would watch) - then it would probably pay off to master a specific native accent as well as possible. (That said, there are enough British actors who get roles as Americans and vice-versa who don’t fool anyone and there are a lot of skills other than a specific accent that you would need to master each one). 

But those are jobs where you actively have to shed your own identity. That’s the point. You have to pretend to be a native speaker. But that’s not what you do in every-day life. In fact, most people you will interact with will probably know you’re French from the social context you are in or because it comes up in conversation, so beyond being a neat party trick, I don’t see what purpose having an RP or GA accent has here.

Of course, you might want to become a teacher, in which case, it would be important to have a specific pronunciation - but also all English teachers I had had German accents and I wouldn’t say that they would have been a million times better at teaching if they hadn’t had that - it’s far more important to know how to teach, to understand the grammar and vocabulary and to help your students to improve themselves and to understand why people speak the way they do.

You might want to be a journalist - if your interview-partner understands you and you can write in English, it’s fulfilling its purpose. If you want to work in a specific field - for example become a doctor in an English-speaking country - it’s important that your patients understand you and that you know your medical terms, but you don’t need Received Pronunciation. If you want to go into tourism, a bit of a foreign accent might actually come across as more authentic and desirable. 

So I think the central question is whether the English you speak right now serves its purpose for what you want it to - or if it is at odds with what you want to do with it.

If your accent wouldn’t pose a problem for you, then my profeschionel opinion is to fuck ‘em haters. Do what you like.  If you want to work on your accent: Do it. If you don’t: Don’t. 

But...if you feel like the way you speak English now would cause you difficulties in your job or every-day life later on - then I think the best thing to do would be to look into the specific skills you need and to invest your energy into acquiring these skills. Whether that is a specific jargon specific to one field or translate very quickly - or whether you really need to learn RP or GA. If you take a professional interpreter for example, many of them do lean to a specific variety, but have accents. It can’t be so heavy that it’s difficult to understand them, but their work requires skills beyond having a specific pronunciation. 

So erm...those where just my 2 cents on accents.

If you do want to change something about your accent - maybe even just to get your teachers off your case - I recommend listening to native speakers and particular, sticking to one variety you prefer. If you are already fluent and you understand them, your brain is very quick to pick up on dialects. (You know the thing where you watch someone speak in a specific dialect and for a while after you find yourself saying things in that dialect? The brain is very fast too do that and it also works in English, even if you don’t internalise it immediately and it feels artificial at first). Also don’t be afraid of speaking to yourself to practice. Obviously, speaking to others is important (and if you’re self-conscious or you are worried about your teacher commenting on it, maybe try asking a friend or sibling or someone to speak English with you or see if you can find a learning buddy) but I think talking to oneself can also be helpful. Because you are not trying to get a point across as you would in a conversation or have to focus on the words you are saying. You can focus on your accent and the way you speak and I think that is an important aspect when it comes to accents: Knowing your accent. Being aware of the way you pronounce words. You know the thing where you try pronouncing a word but you can never quite get there - much less if you’re trying to speak quickly or in a sentence? - It really helps to pay attention to the differences between the way you say it and a native speaker says it. Also if there is word you don’t know or that you aren’t used to hearing out loud  and you encounter it in the wild like a video or a film - it really helps to stop it and to pronounce it to yourself.

But generally, you cannot change the way you speak over night, even if you do it. It’s something that takes time and effort and it might never work completely. So really, I would focus on what you want to accomplish with your English and what future use you see for it - and focus on your strength as well, the things you’re good at. And in the short-term, I would try convincing the teachers that you are working on it but that their current course of action is actually making it more difficult for you.

[tenspontaneite]

Peace Is A Journey (Chapter 17/?)

In which two princes learn the perils of extreme cold, Rayla neglects to take proper heed of said perils, and a Justiciar receives a very important message.

(Chapter length: 19.5k. ao3 link)

Warnings: Detailed depiction of meat preparation and dead animals, food shortage, standard wound care. Exceptionally mild emetophobia warning.

---

When at last Kora’s dark wings broke across the sky, nearly a day overdue, Amaya’s gut reaction was a kind of relief that felt more like sickness. The crow came to her directly, alighting on her armoured shoulder with a flitter of black feathers. She opened her beak and cawed in her usual peremptory way, turning her head this way and that to look at her, and presumably also the metallic gleam of her pauldrons.

Amaya scritched her on the neck, as the bird liked, and showed absolutely nothing of her feelings except a minute tightening around her eyes. In a flash she’d retrieved the letter and cast her eyes about looking for somewhere appropriate to stop to read it. Unfortunately, they were en route, paused upon their horses as Amaya stared at the crow. There was little privacy to be had in the absence of the command tent.

In the end, she lingered upon her horse with the letter in her hands, yet unread, for long enough that her entourage started shifting uneasily upon their mounts. Gren drew up beside her, and signed a quick question.

Finally, Amaya sighed, and gave orders for them all to pause for a break. This was, to say the least, a letter likely to be critical to their course. Corvus’ report would tell her where they needed to go. She focused furiously on that practical thought and almost managed to fool herself into believing that her fingers weren’t on the verge of trembling. She handed off her horse to Kurien, and then, with the crow still perched amiably on her shoulder, adjourned into the treeline for what little privacy it could offer.

She planted herself on the trunk of a half-rotted log, heavily enough that she could feel the clank of her armour falling upon it. The bottom of her shield hit the wood and yanked at its harness. She didn’t care. Amaya closed her eyes for a few seconds, breathing carefully, then finally set about opening the missive.

The first thing she noticed was the handwriting. It was…messy, and lopsided, and slanting across the page in a haphazard scrawl. If she didn’t know Corvus better, she’d have though it had been written drunk. That was the first ill sign, and it rattled at her skull like the vibrations of alarm-bells. The second was the clumsiness of the code. It wasn’t a common one – it was the cipher she used only with her command team, and was the likeliest to be secure. But in places, he seemed to have forgotten it entirely. There were whole sentences coached in the more common substitution code used in most military correspondence. There were even a few parts not written in code at all. And the way it read – there had plainly been something wrong with Corvus when he wrote it.

She read it anyway, albeit a little haltingly, with the mental effort of code-switching every other line. She read Corvus’ account of the commotion in Verdorn, and his investigations there, and a nameless emotion gripped so tightly at her heart that it hurt. She read of his pursuit, and his ambush, and the confirmation-

Amaya had to stop for a moment, then, to breathe. For the second time it felt like the world was falling apart around her. They’re alive, she thought, a little numbly, allowing herself to believe it as she hadn’t when it had been merely a possibility. It was too affecting a knowledge. She had to take a good half minute to close her eyes and gasp a few harsh breaths and try to compose herself past the awful, terrible, gut-wrenching relief of it. And then – then, she had to realise that the missive wasn’t done. And that something might well have gone terribly wrong. With a curl of dread, she read on.

…It had gone terribly wrong, in a way. Not so badly as it might have. But…

She closed her eyes again, gut churning, and tried to think past the roil of emotion to assess the matter with some practicality. The boys were alive – alive! – and seemed healthy and unharmed. But Corvus’ attack had failed, and almost calamitously – he’d sustained injuries that meant he would not be able to keep his pursuit, and the elf still had her captives. She was taking them into the mountains, now. If the trail wasn’t already dead, it would be soon.

Amaya assessed the time it would take her to reach Verdorn, and sighed, and shook her head. No; it was beyond doing. By the time she could reach the place, any trail she might follow into the mountains would be long gone. She wasn’t Corvus, to track the barest imprint a boot might make in the dust on a rock. And even she knew what he’d say. Following a trail through the Belt, when there were a thousand paths a wary elf might travel? When the snow and winds would remake the trails between one hour and the next?

It couldn’t be done. They’d have crossed a mountain by the time she took up the hunt, and then they could be anywhere. There were too many paths, too many options, too many places to hide. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Gren drew near, then, evidently having decided to check on her. His expression was serious as he watched her, evidently aware of the gravity of the letter, if not its content. Amaya glanced his way, and handed him the paper without preamble. Before he could read it, she said “Get me a map, Gren. I need to work this out.”

He blinked, but managed to say around the paper in his hands “Of course,” And then he was using his voice to call for the map she’d requested. In short order she was unfolding it upon the short grass around the trunk of the tree, drawing her finger along the lines of rivers while Gren read Corvus’ report. She could see tension and relief and tight concern passing over him as he read, but she couldn’t focus on that. Couldn’t focus on emotion, much less her own, or everything would fall apart…

Amaya looked at the map. She looked at the mountains of the Belt, and the valley that cut it, and the river that straddled that valley. She looked to where it opened, and thought long and hard about what a fleeing assassin might be feeling, knowing that she was hunted. She’d want to get back to Xadia as quickly as possible. She’d want to take the path of least resistance, wherever she could. And mountains were decidedly not the path of least resistance.

Fort Viatori was the easiest path through the Belt, and to the rest of the Pentarchy, if you had legitimate business. If you didn’t, it almost certainly wasn’t an option; and besides, it was far enough off-course for the elf that there would be no time gained in going for it. The point of entry to the mountain range accessible through Verdorn…well, it wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the easiest, either. Hauling oneself and two captive princes through that gauntlet would take a while. But after that, the elf’s only prudent path was fairly obvious.

Amaya’s finger settled on the wide, boldly marked river. The Rhodane, the map proclaimed it, and on either side of its twisting shape was a thin margin of lowland denoting the wide valley that flanked it.

The Rhodane, in this part of the Pentarchy, ran almost directly East, and emptied out into the Great Bay. The wide sloping plains around it would be easier by far to traverse than mountain trails. No matter how wary of pursuit the elf was, Amaya couldn’t imagine her lengthening her journey twice or thrice over by choosing to travel through mountains rather than an open valley. Once the assassin broke from the Belt into the Rhodane’s path…her course would be obvious. Predictable, even.

‘Predictable’ was good. It was very, very good.

Amaya considered the valley, and then considered the Bay. Going around it would be a very lengthy pursuit. If she were an elf assassin fleeing home, she’d certainly attempt to stow away on some merchant vessel or other, and cut that journey short. Such a thing would be difficult with two prisoners along, but if Corvus was to be believed, they might not be much of a hindrance to her. Her gut tightened at the thought, but – well, it shouldn’t be surprising. Soldiers with decades of training fell prey to Captives’ Accord. Her nephews were only boys.

She deliberately uncurled her fingers from the tight fist they’d made, and thought of her course of action. She traced the line of the Rhodane westwards, to its intersection with Viatori, and the potential that represented. While her quarry would be struggling through the mountains…Amaya had only to take the beaten path.

Her plans solidified into something operative, and her jaw set. In the next moment, she was gesturing for paper.

She had a lot of orders to send, very little time to write them in, and only two crows to send them with. It wasn’t ideal, but…she’d make it work. And then, one way or another, she’d catch up to her boys – catch up to that elf – and find out what shape Justice would take in her hands.

 ---

 Rayla’s absence thrummed in the back of his mind with a tension like a taut bowstring, the anxiety of it compelling him to glance over to the empty ledge every other minute. Every time, the sight held nothing but the howling white of the storm, and his gut tightened a little more.

But, even in the grips of his worry, there was still work to be done.

“I’m assuming,” Callum said, in the strange ringing quiet out of the storm, “that Rayla wanted us to pile all the metal stuff away so we don’t get hit by lightning. Or attract lightning. Or something like that.” She hadn’t explained it before she left, but – given everything, it seemed a fairly reasonable conclusion.

His brother paused and considered it. “She did say we couldn’t put the tent up because the poles were metal.” Ez agreed, after a moment, and peered at their bags. “So that would make sense.”

He lifted his head, and perused their available space. Even in this shelter, it was impossible to escape every breeze. A chill gust fluttered along the skin of his neck, and he shivered. For all that it was distinctly warmer out of the snow and howling wind…he still felt uncomfortably numb from the awful cold. “…I guess we’ll just have to pile it all on the ledge out there, where the snow is.” He said, after a moment. “Help me go through the bags?”

“Sure.” He agreed, and they went over to their bags to inspect them. It was a fairly untidy affair, and involved unpacking nearly everything, but before long they’d amassed their small supply of metallics into a pile on the icy ground. “Maybe we can put it all in the tent pack.” Ez suggested, already opening said pack and upending its contents onto the icy stone floor. He took the little bag of tent pegs, and the larger tent rods, and put them back in. “That way it might not blow away as easy.”

“Good plan.” Callum decided, and in the dubious shelter of their not-cave, they set about doing precisely that.

There weren’t that many metallics to deal with. There was the iron pot, the tent poles, the scissors, a few other things…but, for the most part, they were all good. Still, the whole lot went in the tent pack and was exiled to a spot near the mouth of their refuge, where for good measure Ezran started piling rocks on top of it to weigh it down.

“No way is that going to blow away.” He said, with satisfaction, and rubbed his hands together through the gloves. “…My hands are pretty cold now, though.”

Callum rolled his eyes, and tugged his brother back into shelter. Not for the first time, he misjudged the height of the sloping ceiling and hit the top of his head before he remembered to duck. “Let’s just try to get ourselves warmed up, now. Alright?”

“Sounds good to me.” His brother sighed, and they pulled the outer-tent and inner-tent off to arrange.

After some struggling, they got the inner-tent fabric inside the outer-tent, and aligned their doorways so that they could actually sort of crawl inside – as Rayla had said, kind of like a weird and especially voluminous sleeping bag. The tent doorways were wide enough to accommodate Callum and Ezran easily, and there was plenty of room for Rayla too. They might even have more space to themselves tonight, compared to when they were squashed inside the actual tent.

In the absence of anything else to do, they sat inside their makeshift sleeping bag and went through their bags for additional layers of clothing to wear. Considering the number of layers they were already wearing, this mainly involved putting on a second pair of socks and an extra sweater each. Ezran also withdrew Azymondias’ egg and tucked its alarmingly bright glow under the covers with them, the light spilling out upon them from within. After a while huddling together beneath their layers, they found themselves approaching the concept of…not quite warmth, maybe, but a state of not-too-cold.

“My hands and toes are still freezing.” Ezran said, contemplatively, as he negotiated his several layers of clothing into something more comfortable. “And my ears.”

Callum huffed, and reached out to try to pull his hat down a bit further. Sadly, Ezran’s hair was just too immense, and the hat remained stubbornly distant from his ears. “Pull up your scarf.” He advised, and then followed his own advice.

“I feel like some sort of…bandit, or burglar, or something.” Ez declared, after he’d pulled his scarf up far enough to obscure most of his face. “You know, wearing a mask to hide who I am from the city guards.”

He considered that from behind his own scarf-mask. “Well, I guess we did steal a dragon egg. Or…steal it back, I guess, since it was already stolen.” He said, and thought further. “And I stole Claudia’s primal stone. And we all stole our own stuff from the Banther Lodge?”

“We stole the boat from the Banther Lodge too.” Ezran reminded him, eyes now sparking with a familiar sort of mischievous delight. “…Callum, I think we’re pirates now.”

“…What, for stealing one little boat?” He asked, amused.

“Pirates steal boats.” Ez decreed, with a firm nod. “And pirates are way cooler than bandits. So even though we only stole one boat, we can be pirates instead of bandits.”

Callum considered it. “Your logic is very convincing.” He decided after a second, lips twitching, and then wilfully poked his brother into prognosticating. “What would our pirate ship be like?”

Ezran, needing very little prompting for that sort of thing, spent the next ten minutes lovingly describing their vessel of dire piracy, as well as a few anecdotes from its legendary travels.

It would be called the Storm Dragon, or the Thundersnow, or the Galewing; Ezran couldn’t seem to decide on a name, and kept calling it by a different one at multiple points throughout the telling. Ezran had decided that the figurehead would be carved in the shape of a dragon’s head, obviously, and that the sails would be dark blue, and that probably Azymondias would be with them (hatched and grown huge, of course) so he could just ruin anyone who tried to sink their ship, so they’d obviously be an immortal scourge of the Xadian seas. Except they’d be a friendly scourge. Ezran wasn’t entirely clear on how one was to be both a scourge and friendly, but he sounded exceptionally sure of himself even so.

He was in the middle of detailing how he would locate and befriend a legendary Deep-Sleeper when Rayla returned, hauling herself precariously from the narrow ledge with a large bundle of branches tied to her back with the rope.

“I’m back,” She announced, somewhat redundantly, as she staggered exhaustedly towards them and shrugged off her makeshift rope-backpack with enormous relief. He eyed her, a little alarmed at how stiff and hunched-in her posture was, and at how much she was shivering. She brushed a gratuitous coating of snow from her cloak and hat, her movements almost clumsy. “You would not believe how cold it is out there.”

“Well, we were in it not that long ago.” Callum reminded her, at the same time as he cast a worried glance over her. He paused for a moment, then extricated himself from the sleeping-bag-tent, goosebumps raising on his skin as he abruptly became colder. He hadn’t quite realised how much it had helped to sit inside the tent layers like that, but now…determinedly, he stood and approached her, giving her a more detailed once-over for signs of injury. Or, well. New injury, at least. Her left arm remained very thoroughly injured, after all. “…You alright?” He asked, after a moment, hesitating with the urge to reach out.

She looked at him from beneath her hat, eyes settling on his. She blinked, shivered, then raised her hands to pull her scarf down from where she – like them – had been wearing it as a sort-of lower face mask. She looked a great deal colder with her face properly visible, the skin flushed unhappily from the chill, mottled and almost purplish in places. “…I’m cold.” She answered, succinctly. “Very, very cold.”

“Maybe you should go rest for a bit?” he suggested, finally conceding to the impulse to reach out, and undoing the fastening at the front of her cloak. The fur of the thing was now unpleasantly wet from melted snow, and the outer parts had actually frozen into a stiff, icy coating. “You can go sit in the…er…tent? And I’ll try to get the fire started.”

Her eyes lingered on his for long enough that he squirmed, looking down to focus on helping her out of the heavy cloak. Her expression, though tired, was softly grateful. “…Thanks.” She said, after a moment, and gladly shrugged her shoulders from the cloak when he moved to take it. She shivered again, presumably from losing the extra layer, her arms hugging reflexively around her sides. “It’ll be a pain to start,” She warned him, as she stumbled over to the pseudo-tent. She looked like she’d been planning on saying more, but became distracted with trying to negotiate her way out of her boots instead. Her fingers seemed uncommonly clumsy; even the ones on her right hand.

He made a neutral sort of ‘hmm´ at that, laying out her cloak on top of the tent-fabric where Ezran was still sat. Somewhere in there, Bait was glowing, but it was barely visible beyond the two layers of thick textile. Somewhere in there, the egg was glowing, and that was very decidedly visible. It was ridiculously bright. “Well, it’s better than no fire, I guess.” He reasoned, and went to gather some rocks to make a respectable fire-border. He elected to put the fire towards the right of their sheltered cliff-dent, not too close to the edge, but not far in either. With luck that would keep it out of the wind, but also let the smoke flow out properly.

Callum reflected, for a moment, on how even a week ago he’d have known absolutely nothing about proper campfire placement. It was a little weird to think about. We’ve come a long way, he thought, distractedly, and glanced briefly out into the storm. It was so stark and white with the snow that, despite knowing that there was an entire mountain range out there, he couldn’t see any of it. Not even the vaguest silhouette of another mountain was visible. It was oddly unnerving; as though there was nothing left in the world except them and the storm.

Finally, with the border done, he looked at the firewood. He paused. “I see why you said this is going to be hard to start.” He said, ruefully. Most of it looked decidedly live, and not only that, but damp with snow and ice. It did not provide the greatest of conditions for fire-starting.

Rayla grimaced. “Yeah, I pretty much just hacked apart the closest trees.” She admitted, which explained the discs of what looked like actual tree trunk that were mixed in with the branches. “Didn’t want to stay out longer than necessary.”

“I don’t blame you.” He said, with feeling, stealing a glance out at the howling storm. “Still. This is going to smell interesting.” Live branches, he’d learned, tended to stink and smoke a whole lot when you burned them. He squinted. “…If I can actually manage to start it, anyway.” After a pause, he started going through for the most dead-looking branches, or failing those, the driest.

It took a fair bit of negotiating, but eventually judicial use of the flint coaxed a few reluctant embers into the kindling. They sputtered alarmingly in the cold wind, so Callum positioned himself between the fire and the storm, facing towards the others, and sheltered the tiny flames as they grew. Rayla, he noted, had huddled so far into their tent-thing that only the top of her face and her horns were visible, eyes peering out to watch his progress. She didn’t say anything, but she was plainly watching. It made his skin prickle a little. He wondered what she was thinking.

After a moment, he averted his eyes and set to work peeling pine needles off the rest of the firewood. They were useful, after all, and the branches would burn easier without them. When he’d finished stripping one twig, he dropped it in, pausing with his fingers over the fire. Even this small, the heat of the fire was enough to be felt, and his hands started to sear with the painful ache of too-cold limbs finally exposed to warmth. He winced, but carried on, peeling pine needles from the branches as heat returned painfully to his fingers.

Around five minutes later, the flames had grown enough that he didn’t think them to be in immediate danger of going out if he left them, so he shifted aside and beckoned. “You should come over.” He said, to Rayla and Ez, both of whom were ensconced wordlessly in the dubious warmth of the tent-layers. “The fire’s getting pretty hot.”

Rayla and Ezran exchanged a glance.

“We should probably move.” Rayla said to Ezran, almost conversationally, as they huddled motionless within the covers. “The fire’s there. It’ll be warmer.”

“But I don’t want to move.” Ezran expressed, and from the look on Rayla’s face, she rather agreed with the sentiment. “We just got feeling almost comfy and warm….”

“…It’ll be warmer by the fire.” She reasoned, in the tones of someone trying to convince themself more than the other person. “Even if it will be completely horrible to get out from under the covers.”

Ez made a small, pathetic sound at this, and neither he nor Rayla moved.

Callum, watching this, rolled his eyes. “You could just shuffle the whole…tent-thing….over by the fire, you know.” He pointed out, fingers working a little more nimbly at the needle-stripping now that there was a little heat in them. “You don’t have to get out.”

Both of them stared at him like he’d just unveiled the secrets of the universe. “Oh, that’s a good idea.” Ezran recognised, immediately won over by the notion, but Rayla seemed less convinced. She looked slowly between the fire and the tent-covers, looking phenomenally conflicted.

“This is flammable, though.” She said, very plainly warring with herself, or possibly her training.

“Okay, sure, it’s not exactly the best camping practice to bring something important and flammable too close to a campfire.” He agreed, because Rayla had certainly mentioned that once or twice before, with the sort of practiced conviction that suggested she’d had it drummed into her head over the course of several years. “But, a counterpoint:” He turned, and gestured very emphatically to the storm behind them. The howling, blinding, exceptionally cold storm. Helpfully, the sky chose that moment to let loose a muffled rumble of thunder. “Do you really care about campsite guidelines now?”

Rayla stared at the fire like a starving woman would stare at food. “…No.” She admitted, glumly, after a second. “No, I do not.” She sighed, and grabbed handfuls of tent-cover, sitting up in preparation to start shuffling the whole lot forwards. “I suppose it’ll be hard for us to catch fire without noticing, at least.”

“I think those camping guidelines are probably mostly about leaving things near fires without watching them.” Ez reasoned. “We’ll just keep an eye on it! It’ll be fine.”

She grumbled something mostly incomprehensible except for ‘would kill me’, then without further ado, she and Ezran conducted the whole ungainly affair of shuffling themselves out of the back of their alcove towards the fire. Callum had to hastily move his pile of pine needles out of the way to avoid getting them scattered everywhere.

The expressions of utter, gut-wrenching bliss on their faces as they drew close to the heat of the fire…well, it made Callum realise that he’d warmed up more than he’d realised, sitting there. Either that, or the two of them had been getting colder, even huddled together under those covers. It was something of a worrying thought. He glanced at their pile of firewood, and tried to judge how long it would last. They’d never needed a campfire to stave off terrible cold before, and had always left their fires to burn out overnight. But if the fire was necessary to keep them warm in the middle of this storm…

“I’ll need to get more.” Rayla said, glumly, as if she’d read his mind. He jolted a little, and saw that she’d followed his gaze to the firewood. “Before it starts getting dark. We’ll need enough to last the night, or we’ll freeze.”

Callum stared at her, appalled, and then looked out to the storm. It remained imposing. “You’re going to go out again in that?”

“I have to, Callum.” She returned, with a touch of asperity. “If you think it’s cold now, you just wait ‘till the sun goes down. We need to keep this fire burning all night – we won’t survive otherwise.”

He shut up quickly at that, looking away as his fists clenched. It was strange, the pang of fear her words produced in him. Despite everything, despite the difficulty they’d faced to even get here…the idea that the cold could easily kill them was unfamiliar and daunting. It was never a threat he or Ezran had faced before. They’d always been so lucky…

A sigh, and she shuffled a little closer, the movement producing a leathery rustle of the tent layers against themselves. Her hand – her good hand – settled on his shoulder. “Sorry.” She offered, quietly, though he wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologising for. She was right, after all. “…We’ll be fine as long as we have the fire.”

He looked down at it, the rapid flutter of the flames as mesmerising as ever. “…Will we have to stay up all night, to make sure it doesn’t go out?” He wondered, and Rayla grimaced.

“We’ll need to post a fire-watch.” She admitted, and withdrew her hand to glance between him and Ezran. “One of us needs to be awake to make sure the fire stays lit. If we lose the fire, we might be too cold to move by the time we wake up to start another one.”

The two of them were silent for several seconds at that. Callum could tell Ezran was as daunted by the danger as he was. It was so…new, and bewildering, to have to worry about something like this. “So, are we going to take it in turns?” Ez offered, tentative. “Like guards do? Taking it in shifts?”

Rayla eyed them. “…I’d try to take the whole watch myself, but…”

“Yeah, no.” Callum told her, at once. His arms folded, and he levelled her with his best stern look. Rayla was absolutely not going to stay up all night in a storm like this when she should be resting as much as possible, on account of her horrible injuries.

Her lips twisted with some complicated emotion. “Yeah, thought as much.” She said, wryly, seeming torn between displeasure and affection. “Well…whether we split it two ways or three depends on if you think you can stay awake, Ez.” She said, turning her attention to his brother. “And be honest. If you fall asleep on the job and the fire goes out, it won’t end well for us.”

Ezran opened his mouth with reflexive affront, looking seconds away from saying that he absolutely could stay awake, thank you very much. Then he stopped, apparently a little nonplussed, and sat silent for a few seconds to actually consider it. “…Normally, I think it could be a problem. Staying awake, I mean.” He admitted, sullenly. “But at the moment I think it’ll be okay. Because…well.” He looked down at the covers – or, Callum realised, at the brilliant light spilling out from under the covers. “Because…Zym.”

Callum stared. “What about Zym?”

His brother waved, in a dithering sort of motion. “….The storm?” He attempted, haltingly. “It’s just…it’s making him so awake, compared to normal. It’s really hard to ignore.” He shook his head. “Actually, I think I might find it pretty hard to get to sleep tonight in the first place. And if the storm gets any closer…”

“It will.” Rayla said, with certainty. “It’s not heading right over us, I think, but close enough.” She squinted at the sky. “Might take a while, though.”

Both of them turned their eyes to her. “How can you tell?” Callum asked, fascinated, and she made a complicated face at them.

“…Wind direction?” She tried, looking decidedly uncertain how to explain it. “And the thunder. You can tell how far away lightning is striking by counting how long after the lightning-flash it is ‘till you hear the thunder.” She observed their expressions, and rolled her eyes. “It’s not magic, you know. Just training.”

“Well, it kind of is. Being a storm, and all. Sky magic.” He reasoned, and she rolled her eyes at him.

“You know what I mean.”

“I think you’re right, though.” Ezran said, thoughtfully, and from the shifting of the light under the covers, Callum thought he’d pulled the egg into his lap. “Zym can feel the storm-magic getting…denser? Like it’s getting closer. It’s weird.”

Rayla very clearly wasn’t certain what to say to that. “…Glad to have the unhatched Dragon Prince agree with me, I suppose.” She settled on, in the end, then shook her head. “So. If you think you’ll be able to keep awake…” She paused, narrowing her eyes. “And if you think it’ll be harder to sleep the closer the storm gets…you should take the last watch, Ezran. You’ll take first, Callum, and I’ll have the mid-watch.”

Callum shrugged. “Sounds good?” He offered, then paused. “…How do I know when to wake you?”

“A while after the Moon’s past its high point.” She answered, near automatically, and that didn’t help at all.

He pointed at the storm. “I don’t know about you, Rayla, but I can’t exactly see the moon through that.” He reminded her, and she stopped short, staring at him with a momentary bewilderment that transformed her entire face.

“…right. Humans. Can’t feel the Moon moving.” She muttered, evidently to herself, and that was interesting. He was about to ask her about it when she shook her head and spoke again. “In that case, just….make a rough guess at how long ‘three hours after nightfall’ feels like. Judge it by how long pieces of wood take to burn or something.” At his expression, she scowled at him, and said defensively “It’s not like I know how you’re supposed to tell time without the Moon there to judge by.”

“…You can feel the moon moving, then?” He took the opportunity to ask. “Like, even when you can’t see it?”

Rayla gave him the increasingly-familiar ‘you’re asking about something so obvious I’m not entirely sure whether you’re joking or not’ look. “Of course?” She offered, in the end.

“Cool.” Was Ezran’s response to that. “Where is it now?”

Without any hesitation whatsoever, she turned and pointed towards a section of their rocky shelter, close to its uneven floor. “That way.” She said, entirely certain of the answer, and rolled her eyes at the fascinated looks they both cast her way. “It’s nothing special. Any Moonshadow elf could tell you where the Moon is.”

“…Do other types of elf have things like that?” Callum wondered, after an intrigued moment of thought. “Like, er, do the Sun elves always know where the sun is?”

Rayla shrugged. “Haven’t really talked to any Sunfire elves, but I assume so.” She paused, and added “I know Skywing elves can tell when bad weather’s coming in, though. Got a sense for the winds or something, I suppose.”

“Elves all have such interesting names.” Ezran mused, looking up at her from close range, obviously curious. “What are the other kinds called?”

She sent him that ‘are-you-having-me-on’ look again, but after a second or two of squinting apparently decided he was serious. “…Earthblood, Tidebound, and Startouch.” She informed him, looking gently exasperated with their abject lack of Xadian knowledge. “I don’t really know much about the other kinds of elf, though. I just grew up with other Moonshadows.”

“You knew about Skywing elves being able to sense bad weather, though.” Callum pointed out after a second, having determinedly committed all the race-names to memory.

“Well, yeah.” Rayla frowned momentarily. “I’ve talked to Skywing elves, though. My village trades with the nomads in the desert, sometimes. There aren’t any Sunfire or Earthblood villages anywhere near, and Tidebound…” She snorted. “As if.” She didn’t even mention Startouch elves, he noticed.

Callum held quiet for several moments as he thought. It seemed like Xadia was a lot more segregated than he’d assumed. People in Katolis seemed to have this idea that all of the elf types lived together in huge, prosperous cities ruled over by dragons…but apparently, they all mostly kept to themselves. It was kind of weird. “You live near a desert?” he asked, eventually, because that was probably the easiest question to ask.

“There are nomads in the desert?” Ezran pressed further, and Rayla started to look vaguely daunted by all the questioning.

“Sort of, and yes.” She answered, vaguely, before extricating herself from the tent-covers. “But enough interrogating me. I should be warm enough now to go on another trip out, anyway.” She went to inspect her heavy cloak, and grimaced a little at its condition. It was still absolutely sodden. “…I think I’ll be better off without that.” She decided, and headed for where she’d laid the rope-harness she’d carried the firewood in.

“…You can take my rain cloak instead.” Callum offered, helpfully, even though he wanted to tell her to stay in shelter, to not risk going out into the storm... “It’s not that warm, but it's more waterproof than furs.”

She blinked, and inspected him for a moment. Eventually, she nodded. “I’ll do that.” She accepted, and went for his bag. “Thanks.” She hesitated as she shrugged on the cloak and fastened it one-handed at the front, pulling the hood up over her horns. It took a few seconds, but eventually, she spoke. “…If you can, there’s work that needs doing, while I’m gone?” She said at last, glancing at Ezran with a light frown. “Those birds I caught – they’ll need plucking.”

Ezran very deliberately looked down at the egg, and did not react. Callum couldn’t help but notice that, remembering the way his brother had manifestly felt the demise of the unlucky doves. That was a lot more unsettling, now that his mind was less numb with cold. “…Yeah, I can do that.” Callum said determinedly, because – because if she was going to be going out into a blizzard, he could certainly pull the feathers off of some birds.

For a second, Rayla looked relieved at that. Then she shook her head. “Alright. I’d best get going.” She said, and pulled on the straps of the wood-carrying rope harness she’d rigged. “I’ll be back in…” She waved. “A while.”

Predictably, the words sent anxiety spearing through his gut. He had to close his eyes to catch his breath for a second. “Don’t suppose you could be more specific?” He asked dryly, as if the thought of not being able to tell if she’d been gone too long hadn’t just gripped him by the throat and squeezed.

She gave him a long look. “Well, I’d tell you ‘half an hour’,” She said, equally dry. “But as we’ve already learned…humans can’t judge time by the Moon moving.”

He wondered if it was weird to feel inadequate for not having an inborn magical moon-power. “…Right.” He managed, after a moment. “Wish we had an hourglass, or something.”

“We can add it to the list of things I should have stolen from your lodge, I guess.” Rayla shrugged. “Write it in under ‘cutlery’ and ‘bowls’.” She checked her straps, checked her blades, and then nodded to herself. A second later, she was stepping out towards the ledge, towards the storm-

He had a hand raised involuntarily in her direction before he could blink, an unthinking attempt to stop her, to pull her back – but he swallowed, and forced the hand back down. “Come back soon.” Was what he said in the end, and she shot him an inscrutable look. She’d clearly seen his aborted attempt to reach out.

A second lingered with her eyes on him, and then her expression softened. Just a little, but it was there. “I’ll be fine.” She promised, and then turned away, and…left. She just…left, stepping out of the meagre shelter where the wind pulled at her cloak and the snow obscured the edges of her, and then – out along the edge, where the snowstorm swallowed her in seconds.

Callum turned to Ezran then, not sure if he was looking for reassurance or…just sort of expecting that his brother would have some sort of comment for this situation. He didn’t, though. Ezran’s eyes were fixed on the egg, which he’d withdrawn just enough that Callum could see his fingers smoothing over its shell. He hesitated. “…Ez?” He asked, tentative, and his brother’s eyes snapped up to him as though he’d been awoken from a dream.

“Um, yeah?” He said, a little awkwardly, and his eyes drew back to the egg as if he couldn’t look away.

“…Is something wrong?” He asked, after a panicked moment of his gut absolutely not knowing how to deal with Rayla being out in the storm and something being wrong with his brother-

“No, I’m fine.” Ezran answered unconvincingly, and after a furtive glance at him, seemed to realise that that wouldn’t work. In the end he sighed, and looked down at the egg again. “It’s just…um. We can….sort of, feel her a bit?”

Callum stared uncomprehendingly.

“Rayla.” He clarified, fingers smoothing over the shell. “She’s – there’s so much Sky magic out there. And she’s moving through it, and we can sort of…feel her moving through it. She’s getting a little too far away, though.” He frowned. “It’s kind of tricky to follow her. Like…trying to catch smoke. Or grab water, maybe.”

He stared for several moments longer. “…That’s weird.” Callum concluded, eventually. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s also pretty awesome that you and a baby dragon can…feel through magic like that, but – weird.”

Ezran’s lips twisted with a strange humour. “Yeah, pretty much.” He agreed, eyes going half-lidded and unfocused. “I don’t think I can follow her any further, though. It’s…I’m not used to this.” His brow furrowed. “It almost feels like what me and Zym did when we….reached out, and loosened her binding. It’s so…” He couldn’t seem to find the words.

“Tricky?” Callum suggested.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Maybe we’ll practice while she’s gone. It’ll give us something to do while you…work on dinner, I guess.”

“Er. Right.” He agreed, a little thrown, and spent a few seconds inspecting his brother for any sign of upset. He was very plainly noticed.

Ezran’s shoulders hunched. “You can stop doing that, you know.” He said, with a bit of an edge to his voice. “Watching me like you think I’m gonna have a breakdown every time we talk about meat.”

“Er.” Callum said again, because there was no graceful way to say ‘actually that’s exactly what I’m worried about’.

His brother sighed in a familiar, annoyed sort of way, and averted his eyes. “I don’t like thinking about dead animals.” He said, shortly. “And I really don’t like feeling them die. But…we have to eat, and – and those birds are the only food we’ve got, and I’m hungry.” He sounded, for a moment, upset and plaintive – like the hunger was really bothering him – and Callum immediately felt like the biggest failure of an older brother in the world. “I can deal with it. You don’t have to treat me like a baby.”

Callum’s first thought was ‘actually, I’m treating you like my little brother who I care about and want to be happy’. Then he decided that sounded good enough, so he said “Mostly I’m just treating you like my little brother, who I care about, and want to be happy.”

Ezran sighed again, but it sounded more tolerant this time. He rolled his eyes. “I know.” He said, half-fond and half-exasperated. “You big dumb brother.”

He squinted at him, hearing more than a hint of Rayla in those words. “What, you’re picking up insults from Rayla now?” He asked, and finally shuffled over to their bags to go for the towel-wrapped corpses of the birds.

His brother made a rude noise. “’S not an insult, when she says it.” He said, with all due certainty, eyes lingering in Callum’s direction for just long enough to glance at the strange, twisted shape of a dead dove. “She’s just weird and doesn’t know how to use normal nicknames.” He thought for a second, and continued as though quoting someone. “Or terms of endearment, maybe.”

Callum coughed a little, surprised, and then felt heat prickle at the back of his neck. And possibly at his cheeks as well. “Er. I guess.” He admitted, because there really wasn’t any feel of an insult to the way she called him a ‘dumb human’. He uncovered both doves and set them aside, noticing with a bit of a grimace that they both seemed to have frozen uncomfortably solid. He wondered how you were supposed to defrost entire birds. “…So, you’re picking up Rayla’s nicknames now?”

Ezran shrugged cheerfully. “Well, she is my ‘sister’.” He said, removing his fingers from the egg to do the air quotes. “So why not.”

He considered that, and shrugged. “Fair enough.” He acceptded, and moved a while away from the campfire to start plucking. With the distance, he immediately started feeling colder, and it didn’t help that the doves were cold enough to chill his hands even through the two layers of gloves – but he got to work anyway. It went easier than it had with the goose. The feathers were smaller, and less viciously entrenched. Particularly the wing feathers. It was still a little disturbing to look at the motionless, lifeless faces of the dead birds, though. Their eyes were open, gone sort of cloudy, and it was unsettling to look at.

Callum’s hands were numb with cold by the time he finished, and the wind was tossing feather-down across the camp. He watched a cluster of it catch on the rock in one corner of their crevice, struck by the similarity of its colour to the snow further out in the storm, then sighed and returned to the fireside. He placed the plucked birds under the towel they’d been carried in, and settled in to warm himself by the fire again. It was startling, how much of a chill he’d managed to pick up merely by sitting a couple of metres away from the fire.

For a second…he couldn’t help but think about how cold Rayla must be, out in the storm, perilously close from any fire. He tried not to dwell on the thought, but it had a way of sticking.

“Don’t suppose you’ve had any luck with your weird dragon-storm-sensing thing?” He asked his brother, whose eyes were closed, arms settled around eggshell in a now-familiar way.

Those eyes opened a little. “Kinda. I’ve been practicing…reaching out? It’s weird.” He shrugged. “The stronger the storm gets, the easier it is. But Rayla’s still too far away for me to feel her.”

He determinedly didn’t focus on that. His gut clenched anyway. How long had it been? It certainly felt like half an hour…or longer… “I wonder if you’ll be able to do this when there’s not a storm?” He said, instead. “Then you could feel ambushes coming a mile away.”

Ezran rolled his eyes. “It’s more like, I dunno, fifty feet away. Or something. I can’t really tell how far out I can feel this stuff.” He shrugged, looking abruptly a bit uncomfortable. “It’s…um, well, I can find animals, though. Animals are everywhere. So if we need to…I know where to find food.”

That was somehow reassuring and disturbing at the same time. “…Good to know?” He settled on, eventually, and cast his eyes about looking for something to do. In the end, he nursed the fire a little, and then settled in to pluck pine needles from branches, going so far as to remove his gloves to make it easier. He was beginning to form a very tidy pile of needles in one of the jars. Eventually, Ezran returned to his…weird empathy powers, and they worked mostly in silence. The quiet served to emphasise the howling bluster of the storm, in a constant backdrop to every passing second.

And still, Rayla didn’t return. It became long enough that Callum grew genuinely worried, sneaking glances back along the precipice several times a minute to check for any sign of her, each time having to quash the sparks of panic that arose when she still wasn’t there. The blizzard raging beyond their shelter seemed in full-force, now, the snowflakes larger than the palm of his hand, and so thick that the sky might as well have been a solid wall of increasingly-dim white.

It was getting later….and colder. Even next to the fire, it was cold. He worried a great deal about what it must be like for Rayla, out there in the thick of it.

“She’s been gone kind of a long time.” Ezran spoke, after a while, when they’d been quiet for long enough that their worries lingered palpably in the air between them. “Do you think she’s okay?”

“…I’m sure she’s fine, Ezran.” Callum said, determinedly, refusing to consider any alternative. “She knows what she’s doing. She won’t let a bit of snow stop her.”

Ezran nodded, first slowly and then a little more emphatically. “…Yeah. Yeah, she’s fine.” He said, forcefully cheerful, and glanced at the fire. “Do you think we should try to have some stuff ready for her when she comes back? So she can warm up?”

Callum blinked, and turned to look at him more fully. “Like what?”

“Like…warming up a spare sweater by the fire? Or making tea?”

“We don’t exactly have any tea leaves with us, Ez.” Callum said, amused. “But….you know, there’s tons of pine needles.” Ezran made a face, but didn’t object, so Callum went for the jar he’d been keeping the things in. “You want to go get some snow for us to melt?” His brother sighed, and then reluctantly set the egg down to peel himself from the covers.

In short order, they had a small pile of fresh snow (gathered from the less-sheltered edge of their ledge) piled into the iron pot, and were peering at it in concern. “Do you think it’s okay that we’re using a metal thing in the camp?” Ez spoke, peering at it. “What if it gets hit by lightning?”

“We’re under a rock ceiling, with half a mountain on top of us.” He reasoned, after a moment. “I bet lightning can’t get us through there.”

“Then why did Rayla make us put all the metal stuff over there?”

That stumped him for a second. “….Maybe if the lightning comes from that way?” He suggested, lamely, pointing out at the storm. His brother looked unconvinced. “I don’t know, we’ll have to ask her when she gets back.” He said in the end. “For now, let’s just boil some water and assume the lightning probably isn’t close enough to hit us yet, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Ez nodded, a little distractedly, and sat by him beside fire while they watched water boiling. It was not very exciting. After a while, he added in some pine leaves, and the steam arising from the pot became steadily more aromatic. This was also not very exciting. None of it was a sufficient distraction from the fact that Rayla still hadn’t returned.

It had been so long. Way longer than half an hour, surely. It wasn’t like he had any way to judge the time, but it had to have been longer. Maybe even twice as long. Or more. She’d been gone too long. How long was too long to be out in a storm? He had no idea. He really had no idea. He didn’t know anything about – mountain survival, or storms, or how dangerous cold was. He really didn’t know how long was dangerous, how long was too long to be out there – he didn’t know anything. Once again, he was just…completely useless.

What were they supposed to do if she didn’t come back? He’d…have to go looking for her. He didn’t know how he’d safely get across that ledge, but – he’d have to try. It wasn’t like he could just…leave her out there, it just – he couldn’t. When it had been too long…he’d have to go. But…how long until it was too long? How long until he couldn’t sit around any longer? How much longer should he wait?

And then-

Ezran sat suddenly bolt-upright, as though he’d been prodded with a hot poker. He blinked, rapidly, and then his eyes slipped closed. “Oh.” He said, with palpable relief. “I – either that’s Rayla, or it’s some other person-shaped thing coming closer. She’s nearly back.”

Callum dropped his pine branch immediately, head whipping around to stare at the precipitous approach as though she’d appear that very second. She didn’t, of course. However far into the storm Azymondias – and by proxy, Ezran – could feel…it was far enough to give them a fair bit of advance warning.

Either that, or she was moving very, very slowly. The thought made his expression tighten, and he watched the edge anxiously for any sign of her. Ezran did, too, opening his eyes to watch with more concrete senses than whatever he’d been practicing with for the last while.

Finally, finally, she came into view. Her silhouette broke through the featureless white, indistinct and vague at first, then more defined as she approached. She made for a hunched and strangely ungainly shape emerging from that storm; as though she were shuffling more than she was walking. And then finally she was in full view, turning into the shelter of their ledge with palpable relief, looking utterly exhausted and perilously cold. She seemed so focused on walking that she didn’t even notice them staring at her.

It only took a second for Callum to drop everything and rush towards her. Ezran was only a second behind him. “Rayla,” His voice was almost an exclamation, torn half-ways between utter relief and terrible anxiety. She looked up as they approached, but strangely sluggishly, her eyes tired and the visible skin of her face purple with cold.

“Callum.” She mumbled at him, the words muffled through the red scarf she’d pulled up over her mouth and nose. Her hat was pulled down over her forehead, and only the part of her face on level with her eyes was exposed. “…Took a bit longer than half an hour, I suppose. Sorry.”

He reached her and came to a stop, hands raising on instinct to – to check on her? To see if she was okay? He wasn’t exactly thinking about it. He lifted his fingers to her face and winced at how terribly cold it was to the touch. “You’re freezing.” He found himself saying, dismayed, and was tugging her by the hand towards the fire before he even knew what he was doing. “Why did you stay out so long?”

“…Rabbit.” She answered, stumbling after him with an uncharacteristic gracelessness. “Saw it hiding – thought I could catch it…” She blinked, slowly, and sighed. “Got a bit turned around in the storm. Won’t be making that mistake again.”

“Are you okay?” Ezran asked, anxiously, drawing close enough to her that his expression went pinched and – he started shivering, just for a second, as if his body had forgotten what its own temperature was. “You’re so cold, it’s making me feel cold.”

“…I’m a tad chilly.” Rayla said, vaguely, and winced a little as Callum finally pulled her in range of the fire. “I’ll be fine, though, you can stop fussing.”

Ezran stared at her. He did not seem especially convinced.

“Uh-huh.” Callum said, sceptically. He’d have been far more credulous if not for how clumsy she seemed and how weird her voice was. “Yeah. Sure. We’ll just pretend that you’re not – not hypothermic, and weren’t just out in the middle or a horrible mountain storm for most of an hour, yeah, that sounds great-“ His voice, entirely against his will, became more and more shaky the longer he spoke, his breath starting to hitch a little, and he had to stop for a second to close his eyes and breathe.

When he opened them again, Rayla was staring at him with that strange expression again. Bewildered, and a little uncertain. “…I’m probably not hypothermic.” She offered, after a moment. “Or if I am, it’s pretty mild.”

“Oh, it’s only mild hypothermia! Well that’s just fine, then!” He said acerbically, and in the next moment found that the jitter in his breath had abruptly filled the rest of his body, an anxious energy propelling him into motion. His fingers went for the ropes of her firewood harness, untying the knots as she’d apparently not thought of doing, swiftly and carelessly enough that the wood all fell to the stone floor behind them with an awful clatter. She looked down at him in what seemed like surprise, as muffled beneath that distant tiredness as all of her expressions were at the moment. “Damn it, Rayla.” He muttered to her, expression tightening at the sheer chill of her left hand when he pulled the gloves off of it.

“…I’m fine?” She attempted again, still looking at him with that strange, startled expression. He didn’t answer, and instead pressed her hand between his without the slightest ounce of self-consciousness; he was too rattled for that. He pulled her to the other side of the fire, muttering agitatedly beneath his breath the whole time, though he had no idea what he was saying. In the next moment, the merest second after he’d thought of it, he released her to undo the clasp on his cloak and pull it roughly off of his shoulders, immediately setting to fussing over her own clothing.

“You can – I’ll just-“ he muttered, disjointedly, as he divested her of the thin rain-proof travel cloak, pulling the hood from her along with it. It was, despite everything, wet and half-stiff with ice. “You should wear mine. It’s not wet, and I’ve been sitting by the fire, it should be warm-“

“Callum-“ She tried, but he was far too fixated on getting her warm and safe and – and he tugged the fur cloak around her shoulders, pulling it tightly, her hair warping strangely under the pressure in a way hair shouldn’t. He fastened the clasp at her front before he investigated, pulling a section of her hair free from the fluffy collar of the cloak, and stared in disbelief.

“Your hair froze.” He told her, stridently, holding the frigid end of one long strand up so she should see. Tentatively, she lifted her still-gloved hand and took it. It was, indeed, actually iced-over at the ends – with the colour of her hair, it looked more like a thin sheet of ice than anything.

She twisted her fingers, experimentally, and the end piece snapped off. She was left holding around an inch of very icy hair. “…That’s…” She attempted, a little weakly. “Weird.”

“’Weird’.” Callum repeated, off into his own agitation again, fingers shaking with frenetic energy. He snatched at her hand and pulled the gloves from that, too. It wasn’t quite as horribly cold and discoloured as the bound one, but it was – it was still not good, her fingertips were icy, the skin was mottled- “’Weird’, she says, ‘weird’-“

“Callum-“ She attempted again, still without success, because Callum was still on a mission. He clamped that hand briefly between his own, too, to chase at least a little of the chill away, and then took her by the shoulders and walked her over to the layers of tent arrayed by the fire.

“Get in the tent.” He told her, mind whirling through a dozen different things he should be doing. “It’ll be warmer – maybe you should take your boots off? I don’t know how cold your feet are – maybe we should put some rocks in the fire, then put them in there with you so you heat up quicker-“

“Callum,” His name came again, but this time it was Ezran, accompanied by a small hand at his arm. He started, then looked down. His brother was looking up at him, solemn but sympathetic. “It’s okay. She’s fine. Breathe.”

He held still for several moments, mind gone abruptly blank. Then, very slowly, he exhaled, tension slipping in jerky gradations from his shoulders as he forced some of the anxious, agitated energy away. It left him feeling terribly drained. “…Right.” He said, very quietly, and breathed, and exhaled again, and closed his eyes. When he finally looked back at Rayla again, he managed to be a little steadier about the whole thing. “I need you to get into those tent layers and warm up.” he told her, as evenly as he could manage, which wasn’t very. “And – I’ve already got some tea brewing, so you can have some of that, and that’ll help too, and….” He closed his eyes again. Breathed. “It’s fine.” He said, quietly again, more to himself than anyone, and shuffled away to stoop by the fire.

He saw her wavering uncertainly, out of the corner of his eye – but he just stirred the pot, breathing carefully, shoring himself against the taste of acid in his throat and the way that stress kept trying to rise from its hot pit in his chest into a burst of hysteria.

Callum tried to focus on the water, but was entirely unable to remove his attention from Rayla. So he was perfectly aware of her shuffling closer, and lifting one frigid hand to his shoulder.

“Callum…” She said, uncertainly. “I’m…sorry I was gone so long?”

He felt his shoulder tense under her hand, and then he slumped. He looked up at her, then reached up for her hand, tugging her down until she was beside him at the fireside. “Damn it, Rayla.” He said again, quietly. “I – we – I was so worried.” She didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so he shook his head. “Just…get warm? Please?” A little anxiously, he reached out and adjusted the cloak around her shoulders, as if that would instantly fix the issue. It didn’t, of course. She was still pale-faced and shivering.

“…I am, trust me.” She said, just a little wryly, and turned her face to stare into the flames. “Being this close to the fire already feels too warm.” She pulled the scarf down from her face, settling it back around her neck, looking so horribly tired that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she fell asleep on the spot.

He remembered the way heat had hurt, earlier, when he was warming his hands up. “…Well, as long as you’re not getting any colder.” He conceded, reluctantly, and didn’t try to chase her into the tent layers. He did fret at her until she removed the boots, though, and set her feet in their thick socks by the fire to warm up.

“You got a lot of wood this time, Rayla.” Ezran remarked, and Callum looked up to see he’d been spending his time productively, arranging the wood into neat piles further from the campfire. And…well, Callum hadn’t at all paid attention to the firewood beyond getting it off of Rayla’s back, but Ez was right. There was a lot of it. Way more than the first trip had yielded. Even if most of it looked like it had come from Rayla systematically dismembering an entire tree. There were a lot of discs of tree-trunk there.

“I did pretty much just cut down a whole tree.” Rayla admitted, voice still a little slow and sluggish-sounding. “Seemed easiest. And fastest.” She shrugged, tiredly. “And I can carry a lot at the moment. Still feeling stronger than I should be.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what to say to that. “Good?” he settled on. “I mean, it’s not like it’s not useful at times like this, so…” He shrugged, and exhaled another somewhat-shaky breath. “But you still don’t know why you’re stronger than you should be?”

“It’s Last Quarter.” Rayla said, a little absently, shuffling close enough to the fire that it would probably hurt even if she wasn’t fresh from a blizzard. She didn’t show any sign of being in pain, though; he supposed her pain tolerance had probably undergone a lot of training recently. “Almost Waning Crescent. I should definitely be feeling weaker. But I’m not. It’s…” The dark fingers of her left hand curled stiffly over the heat-haze from the flames. “Weird.”

“Well, I’m not exactly an expert on elves, so I can’t really help you there.” Callum said, after a moment. “I’d say you should ask Ezran, but I think he’s mainly a baby dragon expert now.”

Ez rolled his eyes. “Animal expert too.” He reminded him. “But yeah…sorry, Rayla. I don’t know either.”

“Wasn’t expecting you to.” Rayla shook her head a little, drawing up her knees to her chest and perching her chin atop them. She made a low grumbling sound. “Ugh.”

Callum looked over. “What?” He asked, worriedly.

“Horn-ache.” She explained, and lifted both hands to clamp around the bases of her horns, just over the hat. She looked very disgruntled. “They got too cold, and now they’re aching. Horn-ache is the worst.”

Despite everything, that managed to get him interested. She had said before that horns had insides, hadn’t she? “Cold makes the insides of your horns ache?” He wondered, and she grumbled again.

“Yep.” She said, shortly. “Always turns into a head-ache, too. It’s just great.” Ezran eyed her, then shuffled over from the firewood stack to reach his hand to hers, stopping just short of touching her.

“Can I?” he asked, very politely. She eyed him, while Callum watched with raised eyebrows.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I wanna see what it feels like?”

“Why?” She reiterated, staring with a sort of bemused exasperation. “It’s just like a normal headache from…cold water, or eating too much iced cream. Just in your horns.”

“I don’t have horns, though.” Ezran informed her, cheerfully. “I want to see what it feels like.”

Rayla shook her head disbelievingly at him. “Well, Ezran, if you want to share this delightful experience, you can go ahead.” She decided eventually. “But you’re completely crazy. Who wants to feel a new kind of headache?”

Callum sheepishly waved, and she turned her stare on him. “I just think it would be kind of interesting.” He defended. “But I’m not the one with weird empathy powers, so.”

Without further ado, Ezran reached out and grabbed her hand. His expression twisted strangely. “Okay, um, I really have no idea how you’re even noticing the horn-ache over that.” He said, his other hand going reflexively to his upper arm, as though to soothe some unseen hurt. Callum was abruptly reminded that, in fact, there were many ongoing threats to Rayla’s health aside from cold. His gut twisted anew.

She looked momentarily surprised, as if somehow she’d forgotten about the apparently incredibly painful lacerations on her arm. “…I’m sort of getting used to it?” She offered, a little awkwardly. “The horn-ache is…new. And right on my head. Kind of harder to ignore.” She squinted. “…Maybe you should take your hand off.”

“No, it’s not any worse than it was before.” Ezran refuted, stubbornly, with an almost comical look of concentration on his little face. “And I can feel the horns. It’s kind of cool. You can feel them? They’re sort of…heavy? And you can feel that they’re there. It’s really weird.” Callum experienced an odd twinge of jealousy, and immediately felt weird about it. It was probably weird to be jealous of your brother’s ability to empathically experience what it was like to have horns, right?

“If elves couldn’t feel their horns there, we’d probably hit them on things twenty times a day.” Rayla pointed out, an amused twitch at the edge of her lips.

“Yeah, I guess, but it’s still weird to feel.” Ez said. He paused. “I do think you should take some sort of painkiller, though. Even if you’re getting used to it….” He shuddered, and withdrew his hand.

“Probably still not a good idea to have any willow bark, though.” She said, a little glumly. “Might get in the way of all the…” She waved towards her upper arm. “Scab stuff. Early healing. And if I somehow open the wounds they’ll be bleeding everywhere again.”

Callum’s grip tightened around the sword he was stirring with. Carefully, he reached to the side for a cloth, and used it to remove the iron pot from the fire. “There’s still the lilium, though.” He reminded her. She’d seemed a lot more level-headed with the lower dose, so…honestly, he was expecting her to be relatively easy to convince on the matter. To his surprise, though, she immediately shook her head with the sort of ironclad conviction that he knew he wouldn’t sway.

“No.” She said, very certainly. “Can’t risk it.”

Ez blinked, and peered up at her. “Why not? You don’t have to go out again, right? This is enough wood for the night?” He sounded suddenly anxious, which Callum certainly empathised with. The thought of sending Rayla back out into that storm in the chill of encroaching evening, after she had already come back once clumsy and cold-numbed…it was nearly intolerable.

Rayla gave the firewood pile a passing glance. “Yeah, it’s probably fine.” She said, though a little dubiously. “As long as we don’t go mad with it. That’s not the problem, though.”

Callum stared at her. “…I thought you seemed okay with the lower dose.” He set the pot aside and turned fully to face her, more than a little dismayed. He’d sort of taken it for granted that he’d be able to treat her wounds and – everything else – without it hurting too much.

She shrugged, a little uncomfortably. “It was alright, I suppose. But it’s too risky for me to use during the storm like this. It’s…sort of a sleeping drug? Makes you sleepy. I can’t risk falling asleep on my watch and letting the fire go out, or not being able to wake up if something happens. Too dangerous.”

He hesitated. It was on the tip of his tongue to suggest she forget her watch altogether, and let him and Ez handle it, but…as if she could tell what he was thinking, she eyed him so narrowly that he wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. “…Not even a tiny bit?” He asked, eventually, and recalled his nightmare of the night before. “You woke up last night for a little bit – when I was awake – you’d be able to wake up if you needed to.”

“Without someone waking me up?” She retorted, shaking her head. “Can’t guarantee it. And that doesn’t solve the issue of me falling asleep on the job, either. I don’t remember how it was the first time I took the stuff, but yesterday at least – I kept almost falling asleep at the fire, which is…pretty much exactly what we’re trying to avoid.”

“You were pretty sleepy the first time, too.” Ezran admitted after a moment.

She waved at him. “Well, there you go.”

Ez frowned at her. “You really don’t remember it yourself?” He asked. “Like…not even the part where you scratched your arm open?”

Her lips twisted into a light grimace. “Just tiny flashes, pretty much. Enough to remember I was acting like a drugged idiot, anyway.”

Callum coughed. “Well, you definitely acted different.” He said, tactfully, and she rolled her eyes. “But yesterday’s dose worked out better?” He resigned himself, albeit unhappily, to the fact that she was probably right about lilium being a bad idea.

“Yep.” She replied, after a second of thought. “I remember pretty much everything, and only acted a little bit stupid and moonstruck. So it wasn’t so bad.”

‘Moonstruck’, again. She’d been either too drugged or too reticent to explain it last time, but maybe…

Ezran ended up asking before Callum could. “What does that even mean?” He asked, leaning forward with interest. “Like, not what the word means – you said it was about the full moon? But then you never really explained.”

“Er.” Looking distinctly caught off-guard, Rayla straightened slowly and stared at Ezran. Then she stared at Callum, who immediately tried to look like he wasn’t as interested in the answer as he was. “Just, sort of, a Moonshadow elf thing.” She attempted, looking very much as though she was hoping they’d leave it at that. “It’s not really important?”

“I wanna know anyway.” Ez said, very earnestly. “It’s so cool learning more about elves. Before we met you I had no idea that elf horns had insides, or what the other types of elf were called, or – anything? It’s just fun to learn.” He peered at her, tilting his head, and Callum saw in the edge of his smile that his little brother knew full well that Rayla was being purposefully reticent. “…Or do you not want to talk about it?”

Rayla shuffled, fidgeting with her binding in what almost looked like a nervous motion. “Well…” She hedged. She didn’t want to talk about it, and that was very obvious. But she probably also didn’t want to admit to that, because that would make it extremely obvious that whatever-it-was wasn’t so unimportant as she’d attempted to pass it off as.

Callum very, very badly wanted to know what she was being so cagey about. Was it some sort of Moonshadow elf secret? Was it something she wasn’t supposed to talk about? But…no; as he looked at her, he thought this was much more along the lines of some sort of uncomfortable or…maybe even embarrassing secret. About elves. He really wanted to know. But… “If you really don’t want to talk about it…” he started, reluctantly, and for a second she looked relieved. But-

Ezran, apparently, was far more merciless about the whole thing. “Is it something embarrassing?” he asked, gleefully, apparently picking up on the same cues Callum had, or possibly some host of empath-exclusive tells. “Do Moonshadow elves go crazy at the full moon? Is that it?”

She sort of…reeled back, as if struck, and Callum was certain that Ezran had hit uncomfortably close to the truth. “I – not exactly? It’s – it doesn’t really…” She tried, haltingly, then shook her head and collected herself. Finally, a little impatiently, she said “Alright. Yes, the Full Moon does weird things to us, and yes, it makes us act a bit weird, and that’s where the word ‘moonstruck’ probably comes from. But we don’t go crazy.” Her voice went sour.

Callum made an interested sort of ‘huh sound. “So, Moonshadow elves at the full moon act like they’re high on drugs?” He clarified, and she twitched.

“Not that bad.” She denied, shaking her head. “Just…a bit energetic, maybe. A little scatterbrained. Kind of impulsive, sometimes. It’s not really a problem.” She paused, for a moment. “Well, not for most people. Moon-mages have to deal with it more, I think?”

“Because they use moon spells?” Ezran asked, fascinated.

“Does that make the moon affect you more?” Callum wondered. “Using moon magic?”

Rayla glanced at them with that are-you-serious look again. “…No, it doesn’t.” She said, rolling her eyes. “It’s just that Moon-mages need to have a stronger connection, so they usually-“ She stopped, abruptly, eyes widening. Her next words fell numbly from her lips. “…they usually take…less…” Her voice slowed. She went utterly still. “…Oh.” She said, in a very small voice. “Oh, no.”

He straightened, exchanging a quick glance with Ezran. “What?” He asked, a little alarmed, because she had very obviously just thought of something unpleasant. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Dismayed, Rayla haltingly finished her earlier sentence: “Moon-mages take less moondust.” She said, numbly. “Moondust. I can’t believe – I didn’t even think – I completely forgot-“ At once, she was on her feet, in a flurry of agitated motion that brought her over to her bag, pulling things out of it in a haphazard manner that almost saw one sock flung into the fire. Callum tried to catch it, fumbled, but managed to hook it away from the edge of the campfire before it caught alight. ���Come on, come on,” She was muttering to herself, a little frantic, as she pulled out her assassin’s clothes and started plundering a variety of hidden pockets that Callum hadn’t even known were there. “Please, please say I was an idiot and – kept some in the wrong place, or something-“

“Rayla-“ Callum attempted, moving over with a hand half-extended as if to offer aid. “What’s wrong? Have you lost something?” Ezran’s eyes had gone very wide.

“Moondust, Callum!” She half-snarled at him. “Moondust – and I didn’t even think about it – how long has it even been?” She stopped her frenetic rummaging for a second, stilling so abruptly that the difference was startling. “A week? Eight days? Nine? How long have we been travelling?”

He did some quick thinking. “Eight days since we left the castle, including today?” He offered, watching her closely for any sign that an explanation might be forthcoming.

She scowled, the furious pace of her thoughts almost visible on her face. “So, about twelve days since my last dose.” She concluded, disgustedly. “No wonder I’ve been stronger. That’s long enough to start seeing the effects…” She deflated, all at once, her sudden burst of energy deserting her. Without it, she looked more tired than ever. “I didn’t even realise.” She said again, quieter, with an unhappily familiar sort of self-recrimination.

Tentatively, he shuffled close enough to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Rayla, would you just explain what the problem is? What dose? ‘Moondust’? What are you talking about?”

She raised a hand to her face, briefly obscuring her features. “It could be worse.” She said, almost to herself. “It’ll be a pain, but it could be worse.” She shook her head, sighed, and finally turned to face him, eyes flickering briefly to Ezran, who was watching silently. “Moonshadow elves – almost all of us – take a drug called moondust.” She said, finally. “It weakens our connection to the Moon.”

Callum blinked, perplexed, and let his hand fall away. “Weakens?” He repeated, uncomprehendingly. “Why would you want to weaken your connection?”

“Doesn’t that mean you have less magic?” Ezran chimed in, his brow furrowed. His arms tightened around the egg. “Why would you want to have less magic?”

“It’s – I’m getting to that. Just…” She exhaled, slowly, and rubbed at her temples. “Yes, it means we have less magic – and we’re weaker, too, but…for any of us who aren’t Moon-mages, it’s usually worth it.” She looked at them, lips downturned. “You see…normally, the Moon affects us. A lot.” She said, drawing the words out, as though she really didn’t want to be saying them. “It – especially for assassins, or spies, or soldiers – we can’t afford what the Moon does to us, so we take higher doses than most, and maybe it makes us weaker in battle but at least we get to keep our heads-“ She shook her head in a sudden, violent motion, her next breath coming out in a stressed puff of air.

Callum looked at her for a long moment, and put together the clues. “You mean the Full Moon really does mess with your heads, but only if you’re not taking moondust?” He summarised.

“That’s part of it.” Rayla admitted, looking so horribly lost he had no idea what to do with it. “Unmedicated Moonshadow elves at Full Moon – well, we’re crazy strong, but being strong and fast doesn’t mean much if you go off chasing moon-moths instead of going after your target. Or if you’re a spy, going moon-mad in the streets and getting caught, or – you get the idea. You never let one of us into enemy territory unless we’re on a really high dose, it’s just…too dangerous. And now I’m on nothing.” Her lips twisted into an unhappy grimace. “I’ve not been unmedicated since I was ten. I have no idea what it’s going to be like.”

Callum and Ezran exchanged glances. It was Ez who spoke, in the end. “But…can’t we just make sure we’re somewhere safe and away from people for the full moon?” He asked, tentatively. “Is it really that much of a problem?”

“Aside from the fact that I don’t really want to lose my head and get actually moonstruck?” Rayla said, sardonically. “Yes, it’s a problem, because it’s not only the Full Moon we have to worry about.” She looked out to the side of their shelter, staring at plain stone. Or…wasn’t that the vague direction she’d said the moon had been, earlier? “Six days till New Moon.” She concluded, after a second. “That’s going to be…” She buried her face in her hands for a second, exhaled sharply, then looked up at them. Her voice was tight. “Fair warning – I’m probably going to be pretty useless for the day of the New Moon. I’ll definitely slow us down. And I’ll probably be out of sorts – and really weak – for the day before and at least a couple days after. If we’re attacked, I won’t stand a chance.”

Callum eyed her with alarm. “…Okay, I see how that would be a problem for elves in enemy territory, yeah.” He admitted. One day being insanely strong but kind of crazy would be one thing, but entire days of protracted weakness of the sort she seemed to be describing…he understood a little why they considered moondust so important.

She sighed. “At least we’re probably just going to be in the middle of the mountains for that.” She said, resigned. “Unless you’ve got any towns out there, we probably won’t be attacked.”

“Unless some other tracker catches up with us.” He said, a little darkly, and she looked up.

“…Didn’t I say?” She inspected him, then shook her head. “Suppose I forgot to mention it. Callum, no one will be able to follow us through this storm. That’s one good thing about it, I suppose. We’re going to have enough of a head start after it clears that there’ll be no trail for anyone to follow after us. We’re in the clear, for now.”

He was abruptly glad that he was sitting down. He thought his legs might have buckled under him, otherwise. “…Oh.” He offered, weakly. He hadn’t quite realised how much the risk of attack was weighing at him, but…

“Well, that’s a relief.” Ezran voiced, perking up. “I really wasn’t liking the idea that someone might attack us at pretty much any moment.” He paused. “Well, I guess that’s not really a problem at the moment anyway, since I can feel people coming, but…”

Rayla’s brows furrowed as she turned to him, and Callum realised she’d missed Ezran’s little revelation of skill. “You can what?”

“Oh, you weren’t here for that.” Ez said, surprised, and then leaned in. “Right, so while you were gone…”

She listened, alternately perplexed and attentive, as he explained his experiments in using Azymondias’ sense of the storm to feel. She raised an eyebrow at the knowledge that he’d been able to sense her returning, but – when he mentioned the animals he could feel, her attention sharpened into an almost urgent interest. “You can find animals?” She demanded, with a quick glance at the rag Callum had covered the birds in.

He looked briefly uncomfortable. “Well, yeah.” He admitted. “…I did think you’d find that useful.”

Very bluntly, she said “Ezran, I was honestly kind of worried that we’d starve here, if the storm went on too long. Hunting is hard in weather like this.” She exhaled in a long, exhausted breath while they flinched. Callum abruptly remembered that she’d stated her reason for staying out in the storm so long as the failed pursuit of a rabbit, and felt apprehension stirring in his gut. He’d sort of relaxed about the food situation, what with the doves Rayla had caught earlier, but evidently he needed to start thinking a little further ahead. “So yes, that’s useful. Can you do it now?”

Ezran blinked. “What, right now?” He asked, alarmed. “But they’re all out in that.” He waved expressively at the storm. “You can’t go out again already!”

Rayla hesitated, looking at the ledge-path out of their shelter with a considering, sidelong stare.

“Rayla, no, you just – no.” Callum said flatly, attempting to be less obvious about the fact that his heart had just started racing with anxiety. “You’re still cold-“ He pointed accusatively at her fingertips, which were still unsteady enough to have a light tremble. “-and shivery! There’s no way you can go back out yet.”

“…If I wait, it’ll be too cold to risk it.” She countered, evasively, still plainly considering it.

“You’d freeze anyway, Rayla.” Ezran told her, as unimpressed as Callum. “You’ve barely warmed up. And I’m not gonna tell you where the animals are if it’s not safe for you to go out.”

She stared at him, with a sort of annoyance building that Callum thought heralded an argument. She appeared to have built some amount of tolerance for their cossetting, but apparently, even that was beginning to wear thin. “Ezran-“ She started, an edge to her voice, and Callum hastily moved in front of her to block her vision.

He thought for a wild moment on how to divert her. “Dinner!” He blurted, gracelessly, and waved in the direction of the covered doves. “I mean – the birds! I plucked them, but I don’t really know what to do next, and they’re sort of…frozen solid?”

Rayla narrowed her eyes at him, and didn’t move.

After a moment, he relented from his extremely blatant diversion and said “Look, Rayla…I know we do need more meat, but so long as the storm is going, Ezran will probably be able to point you to animals, right? So for now let’s just worry about the food we do have, and….you can go hunting tomorrow, or something.”

She stared at him balefully for a long few seconds before she conceded. “…Fine.” She accepted, though she didn’t look happy about it, and turned to inspect the rags. “…If they’re really frozen, easiest way to cook them will just be to boil them for a bit.” She said after a moment. “But you’ve got tea in the pot at the moment. And we need to get these gutted, somehow.”

“Well, we can drink the tea.” Callum said, relieved. “Might take us a bit, though. But that’s probably a good thing – I don’t know how steady your hands will be until you’ve warmed up a bit more.”

She sighed, raising her right hand to flex its fingers. The motion looked somewhat stiffer than it ought to have been. She didn’t even try the left hand. “I suppose.” She admitted. “Well, whatever. Let’s have some disgusting pine tea, then.”

And so it transpired that, with the aid of their empty jars, each of them were served tea made from melted snow and pine-needles, while trapped in a pitiful excuse for a cave in the middle of an awful mountain storm, with Ezran apparently sharing the experience with the unborn dragon whose egg was glowing in his lap. It was all faintly ridiculous, and the absurdity hit Callum all at once as he was passing a jar to his brother. He giggled, a little hysterically, and the others turned to lift eyebrows at him. It was almost simultaneous, the way they did it, and that just compounded the ridiculousness of the situation. He giggled again, utterly involuntary.

“Sorry, sorry.” He apologised, a minute later, still feeling weird and giddy about the whole thing. “It just – hit me, that we’re…us, and we’re here, in this.” He gestured at the storm.

“You’re not making any sense.” Rayla informed him severely, cradling her jar gingerly between her hands. As before, he’d opted to give her the smaller one for herself, and refill it as necessary. She hadn’t made any move to drink it yet, and he wondered if that was because she liked the warmth or because she disliked the taste. Or maybe both?

“Yeah, I guess not.” He admitted, lips twisting with strange humour. “I guess what I mean is that…it’s just so crazy that we’re here. Two humans, an elf, and a dragon egg – a dragon egg my brother can talk to – and we’re on this stupid big mission to bring peace to humans and elves and dragons and – and we’re just stuck here in a weird cave drinking pine needle tea. It’s just….” He searched for a word. “Ridiculous. And crazy.”

Her lips twitched. “Well, you’ve got a point there.” She murmured, with a smile that looked more wry than anything. “It is pretty ridiculous. And crazy.”

“Not what you thought your life would be like ten days ago, huh?” Ezran asked, and she snorted.

“Nope.” She said, and “Drink your tea.”

He grumbled, but obligingly raised the jar to take his first sip. He made a face, drank a little more, and then offered it to Callum.

“You know,” Callum reflected, after taking the tea jar from his brother and inhaling the scent, “You two apparently hate it and all, but I think this stuff is actually sort of growing on me.” The jar was pleasantly warm in his hands, the heat of it seeping through his gloves. He felt his eyelids flutter a little lower in the pleasant lull it brought.

Ezran eyed him dubiously. “…Really?” He asked, plainly sceptical, as Callum breathed another waft of pine-scented air. “But it’s…” He searched for a word “Bitter. And piney.”

“No, really?” Rayla offered, dryly, still nursing her smaller jar of the stuff. She held it braced between her hands so that it almost looked like a proper mug, and from the looks of it, was enjoying the borrowed heat as much as he was. “Piney, you say. I wonder why.”

“A great mystery.” He agreed, lips twitching, and raised the oversized jar to drink. The warmth of it suffused him, so pleasant amid the cold of the storm that he sighed quietly as he drank, with a mild and contented sort of pleasure. It helped that he really was starting to enjoy the taste of it, too. “It tastes weird, but in a good way.” He decided, when he lowered it again. “I think it’s better without the cyanroot, too. Less sour.”

Rayla made a pensive hmm sound, inspecting her beverage. She took another sip of it, looking decidedly ambivalent, and shrugged. “Well, I don’t hate it.” She exhaled, and her breath puffed white into the air. “At least it’s warm.”

“I think I’d prefer just warm water to drink.” Ezran said, but accepted the jar from Callum when he offered it anyway. He grimaced, and drank, making a face.

She shrugged again. “Warm water doesn’t protect you from scurvy.”

Ez made a glum sound, and kept drinking.

If nothing else, the hot drink definitely did help them warm up, and Rayla was less worryingly purple by the time she got through three small jars of tea. Her right hand had better colour, too, though the state of the left one still made him grimace on sight. He thought, a little flustered, that he’d better pay it more attention today. And, that was a thought… “Ez, do you think you’d be able to do that thing with, er,” He paused to contemplate the ridiculousness of having a nickname for an unborn royal dragon. “Zym? For Rayla’s binding? It’s been a couple of days now, right?” The elf in question blinked, and straightened a little at the topic, turning to watch for Ezran’s reply.

He seemed a little startled, but looked down at the egg anyway, as if waiting for its response. It never quite stopped being uncanny when he did that. Eggs weren’t supposed to talk. “…Actually, I think that would be a good idea for all of us. It might help us let off some of this…” he waved. “Storm energy. It’s kind of intense right now.” He hesitated. “Did you mean now? Or…”

Callum looked to Rayla inquiringly, and she pursed her lips for a moment in thought. “After dinner.” She decreed, in the end. “If it’s anything like the first time, I’ll get the worst pins-and-needles known to elf, and that’s pretty hard to work through.”

“Sounds good.” Ezran said. “Is there anything you want me to do while you’re working on dinner? I don’t really think there’s a lot of point in collecting snow this time, because, uh…” he nodded to their modest cliffside, which in the absence of an overhang, was quite comprehensively piled with snowfall. It was growing deeper by the hour.

Rayla considered it. “You might want to move some of that snow further in, actually. That way we won’t lose as much to the wind blowing it over the edge. I suppose snow isn’t exactly hard to come by during a blizzard, but…” She shrugged. “If we’re going to be burning a campfire for the next however-long, we might as well get hot water out of it.”

Ezran accepted that readily enough, and it was obvious by how easily he left the tent-covers (carefully swaddling the egg up beforehand) that he no longer felt particularly cold. Hot drinks and sitting directly beside a fire would do that to you, Callum supposed. His brother put his gloves back on and went off to his task, and Rayla pulled Callum aside with the rag-wrapped doves in one hand.

“They’re frozen, so this won’t be as messy as usual, but still best do this further out from where we’re sitting.” She explained, and visibly suppressed a shiver as the wind picked up her hair and ruffled at the edges of her scarf. Even just a little further out from the shelter of their not-cave, it was a lot windier. “Suppose that’s two good things about these birds being frozen through.”

He blinked. If the first was the lack of mess… “Two?”

“We won’t get blood everywhere, and it’ll be less gory than usual, so your squeamishness gets some training.” She explained, and…er.

He looked at the plucked doves as she unwrapped them, and swallowed. “…Right. Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I guess you’re, er, going to show me how to…”

“How to prepare a bird, yeah.” She agreed, taking one dove aside while she reached idly for a blade. “I’m alright with something this small, but…bigger animals? With my arm and hand like this…” She looked, momentarily, immensely frustrated. But she quashed the expression in the space of a second. “I’ll need your help with the meat from now on.” She admitted, voice tight. “Though I’ve got no idea how I’m going to walk you through your first skinning without both hands working right, so I suppose it’s a good thing we’ve got birds this time.”

Callum swallowed back his reflexive nausea at the thought of skinning. “What’s worse?” He wondered, with morbid interest. “Skinning, or disembowelling?”

She considered it, and shrugged. “Depends on the person, I suppose. Both are pretty gory. Gutting definitely smells worse, so there’s that.”

“Great.” He said, dryly. “Sounds exciting.”

Her lips quirked. “Something to look forward to.” She said, with a little grim humour, and turned her attention down to the bird. Her left hand’s mobility seemed limited to just holding the thing down. She shifted it in her grip, then without further word, beheaded it. There was a soft crunch. Callum swallowed back the flood of nausea at the sound of it, but – it was at least not as bad as the goose had been. Next she cut the tiny bird feet off, and then leaned back with a frown.

“…Something wrong?” He managed to ask.

“I’m not used to doing birds this small. And definitely not frozen.” She admitted, staring at it. “Normally what you do with birds is pull all the innards out through their cloacae. But this is kind of small. And I’m pretty sure the guts won’t come out like they should when they’re frozen.”

Callum wasn’t certain he wanted to ask what cloacae were. She apparently spotted his confusion, though, and told him anyway.

A cloaca was apparently a bird-butt. Alright then.

He thought he could have happily gone his whole life without learning that the correct way to gut a bird was to pull its organs out through its butt. Unfortunately, his life clearly had other things in store for him.

“…Well, I suppose since it’s small, I might as well just cut it open.” Rayla decided eventually. She grimaced, and then – with a sound like splintering ice – cleaved the dove open. Its insides were dark red and frozen solid, and despite the solidity – he could see the viscera, the blood, the broken bone-

He turned aside for a moment to gag, hand over his mouth, and dry-heaved a couple of times before he managed to swallow back the taste of acid, the sensation burning in the middle of his chest.

“Can’t exactly show you properly how this is supposed to be done, when the birds are frozen like this.” She said, apologetically, and shifted her grip as she stuck the point of the blade into the dove’s innards. “But, well, this is the stuff you usually take out. I suppose I’ll have to show you again next time we have something that’s not…” She waved at it.

“An icicle.” He supplied, a moment later. “Birdsicle?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Callum.” She said, dryly. “Next time we have something that’s not a ‘birdsicle’, I’ll show you properly.”

“By pulling it out through its butt.”

“Only if whatever we catch is another bird.” She said, and set that dove aside to go for the next one.

When she was done, and the frozen offal had been unceremoniously tossed off the cliffside, they returned gladly to the fireside where Ezran had already started putting another pot of water to the boil. Rayla received this very appreciatively, and promptly planted both doves into the water.

“It’ll be bland and favourless.” She explained, apologetically. “But it’s the fastest way to cook something that’s frozen through.”

Callum, who was by this point exceptionally hungry, found he did not care about flavour at all. After five minutes or so the pot started to emit some tantalising savoury smells, and he actually started to feel a little dizzy with how ravenous it made him. He stared at the water bubbling around the meat and noticed for the first time how small those birds were. Surely they wouldn’t be enough for all three of them?

A while later, he had his answer: they weren’t.

Splitting the meat between them resulted in portions that were dismayingly small. Callum wolfed his down so quickly he almost choked, and picked the bones clean, and when he was done felt like he could have easily eaten three or four more portions of the same size before he was full, but there just…wasn’t anything else, this was all the food they had. They’d cooked and eaten dinner but were all still hungry. Bait was so dissatisfied with his ration that the rest of them had had to defend their own from him, and that was just…kind of awful, making your pet go hungry. Not as awful as Ezran going hungry, but it was bleakly unpleasant even so. It was something of a sobering experience.

“…We should drink the water.” Rayla offered, a little quietly, breaking an uneasy silence. No wonder she’d wanted to go out and hunt again earlier… “Some of the nutrients from the meat will have gone into it. Better than nothing.”

So they distributed the thin broth among them, and sat by the fire drinking it, all probably thinking the same dark thoughts about hunger. “Tomorrow, I’ll help you find the animals.” Ezran said to Rayla, a little tiredly, as if this new and true introduction to the concept of not enough food had exhausted him. “There’s a lot of them staying in mostly one place, because of the storm.” His lips twisted a little. “Like us, I guess.”

“Anything big?” Rayla asked, after a moment.

He paused, and closed his eyes, exhaling slowly. “A deer.” He said, eventually. “She’s young. She was separated from her mother and now she’s hiding inside a hollowed-out tree. It’s been a while since she ate and she’s starting to get too cold to move.” He shivered, and pulled his cloak more tightly around himself. A little miserably, he added “I guess she might die in the night.”

She looked at him quietly for a few long seconds. “I’m not planning on going out again tonight.” She said. “But I think you should tell me what direction that deer’s in, just in case you…can’t find her tomorrow.”

He plainly got her meaning. “Yeah, I guess I can’t find dead things.” Ezran agreed, despondently, and exhaled. He pointed in a direction behind them. “That way. It’s hard to tell the distance, but it’s pretty much a straight line that way.”

Rayla laid a hand briefly on his arm, evidently intended as comfort. “Thanks, Ez.”

He just nodded to her, and stared glumly into his broth. Callum watched with his brow furrowed, considering his brother’s new strange range, and then considering the incandescent power of the dragon egg in the storm.

“…I get how Zym being in the storm would let you, you know, feel things moving through the storm.” Callum spoke after a while, and drew everyone’s eyes back to him. “But…being able to feel the animals like that…isn’t that your regular empathy thing? How come you can do it from so far away?”

Ezran shifted uneasily, and pulled the egg back into his lap, as if guarding it. “…It’s kind of hard to explain.” He said, eventually. His shoulders hunched just enough for him to look uncomfortable.

For a while, it seemed like he wouldn’t elaborate, and Callum shifted in preparation to nudge him, but…

“I guess…Zym’s magic sort of…I don’t know. Leaks into me? Especially right now, with the storm…” His eyes went distant for a moment. “It’s like…my abilities are really weak on their own. Normally I need to be touching someone for them to work. But since we found Zym, and started talking to him, it’s been getting stronger. I can feel people. I can sense things without even touching anyone, sometimes. It’s not really something I’m doing on purpose. It’s just…” He shrugged. “Happening.”

“Is that how you figured out what to do with the binding?” Rayla asked, eyes a little sharp as they watched him.

He frowned. “Dunno.” He admitted, after a moment. “I think with that it’s more of an even split? Zym’s really strong, and he can sense your binding, and his magic can beat other magic things, but he can’t reach out like I can. And I can’t sense the binding or do anything to it, but I can reach out. So we really need to work together for that. It’s tricky.”

She made a thoughtful noise. “Seems weird, that you can power your empathy abilities with Sky magic from the Dragon Prince.” She mused. “Empathy’s not exactly a Sky-magic thing.”

Ezran shrugged helplessly. “I don’t get it either. I was just sort of going about talking to animals before I met Zym. This…” he waved around, with that odd distant look in his eyes again. “It’s all new.”

Only eight-ish days since encountering the dragon egg, and Ezran was reaching out into storms and feeling the minds of animals all around them. Callum wondered, with a hint of trepidation, exactly how far this ability would progress. He wondered, worriedly, whether it was even safe for Ezran. He’d already said he didn’t know if he’d be able to sleep, after all. “…Maybe you should do the binding.” He said, a little uneasily. “Let off some of that storm-magic. And, you know, help stop Rayla’s hand from falling off.”

“I do prefer it when my hand doesn’t fall off.” Rayla mused, and Ezran’s lips twitched. He set his empty jar of broth aside.

“I guess now’s as good as ever.” He said, and shuffled over to her with the egg. “I think it’ll be easier this time. We know what we’re doing, there’s more magic, and I’m getting better at the reaching-out stuff.” He settled beside Rayla, and extended his hands. “Give me your hand?” Obligingly, she extended it, all dark and mottled-looking, and Ezran peeled back her variety of sleeves to expose the bandage over the binding. This, he untied, with Callum watching sharply to check on the state of the sores there. They looked much the same; dark, and dry, with no visible swelling. Good.

“Need the binding touching the egg again?” She guessed and Ezran produced a distracted sound of agreement.

“We could probably try it without, but I don’t really want to take chances with this.” He said, tugging gingerly at the edges of the binding as if to determine how tight it was. He hummed, then moved her hand until her wrist was pressed up against the egg. “There. Now just hold still, and we’ll…” He trailed off, as if he’d abruptly forgotten that he was speaking, eyes slipping closed as his fingers slid over dragonshell. In his abrupt distraction, the rest of them fell still, lingering in a silence interrupted only by the crackle of the fire and the howl of the winds.

The glow of the egg pulsed, stunningly bright. It pulsed again, and again, and again, steady as a heartbeat. Ezran inhaled slowly, and exhaled with a plain deliberation; the glow began to ebb and flow with his breaths. Then, as a scowl of concentration spread on his face, he exhaled again in a sudden short burst as the light flared-

Rayla twitched, a full-body movement, but she was careful not to remove her hand. At the same time, Ezran’s eyes opened, and he sighed. His eyes looked unnaturally bright. “That’s done, I think.” He said, satisfied. “It was easier.” His brow furrowed a little. “A lot easier, actually.”

“…Can I take my hand back?” Rayla asked, after a moment, and he blinked.

“Oh! Um, yeah, we’re done.” He agreed quickly, and her hand receded. She immediately checked on the state of the binding, fingers tugging at it.

Callum resisted the urge to immediately appropriate her hand and check for himself. “How is it?” He asked, and she pursed her lips.

“Looser than the first time, I think. But probably not by a lot.” She flexed her fingers, carefully. “Thanks, Ez.” Her brow furrowed, and she added “Thanks…Azymondias.” By the look on her face, she still found it as weird to have interactions with an unborn dragon as Callum did.

“You’re welcome!” He chirped, presumably from both parties, and she shook her head bemusedly.

Then, a little glumly, she said “Well, I suppose I’d best prepare myself for the pins-and-needles.”

“I’d like to maybe check on your wounds while you do that, please.” Callum informed her, and she frowned, as if suddenly reminded of the horrible injuries all over her arm.

“Ugh.” She said, en lieu of an answer. “This is going to be cold.” With that, she unlatched the clasp a the front of Callum’s cloak, which she was still wearing, and shrugged it off of her shoulders. She didn’t move further for a few moments, instead shooting Callum a look that was half-grumpy and half-embarrassed. Eventually he realised that, well, she needed to take her layers off, and she couldn’t exactly do that alone, but she also didn’t want to ask outright for help with something so basic-

Politely not saying anything about this, Callum shuffled closer, and helped her out of the wide variety of sweaters and shirts that she’d installed herself within. When there was only the short-sleeved undershirt left, he wrapped the cloak around all of her except the arm, and inspected the bandages.

“Not even a bit bloody.” He said, with satisfaction, and started untying the knots in it.

Rayla was giving him a strange look beneath the cloak he’d draped over her, but it was very tolerant. “It did stop bleeding yesterday.” She pointed out. “Or, mostly, anyway.”

“Yeah, but I was pretty worried you’d have opened it up while hacking at trees or something.” He said, finally able to put the thought out in the open now that he knew it wasn’t true. “It’s not like these scabs are that solid yet.”

“True.” Rayla said, a little dubiously, craning her neck to inspect the injuries as he exposed them. “It looks like it’s scabbed properly in the middle now, at least.”

“Won’t be that thick, though.” His voice was a little cynical. “You really could open these pretty easily.” He looked around for disinfectant and found, with a flicker of consternation, that Ezran had already procured the field-healing stuff. “Er. Thanks, Ez.”

He half-listened to the cheerful response of his brother, already considering the wounds. They were strange to look at, now. Without them actively bleeding, it was a little easier to see the scope of them. The one lower down on the arm was nasty enough, but the upper one…it really did gape, and all that space in-between was filled up with dark, thickening scabs. He thought the wound might well be an inch wide, at the widest part. Maybe even more.

“That’s going to be one monster of a scar.” Rayla noted, as if she were reading his mind.

“No kidding.” He muttered, a little uneasily. There was something daunting about the knowledge that, in their brief acquaintance, in their defence, Rayla had acquired scars that would follow her the breadth of her life. “All of this is going to scar. These gashes, your wrist, the stab on your shoulder…”

“More battle-scars than most Moonshadow assassins my age have, that’s for sure.” When he looked up at her, her lips were twitching, as if she found this particularly amusing.

“Are there even any other Moonshadow assassins your age?” He asked, a little exasperated, and her smile grew.

“Honestly? Probably not. Not any who’ve gone on missions, anyway.”

He looked down at the injuries again, partially because he kind of needed to in order to treat them, and partially just because something about her smile left him oddly flustered. “So you’re a precocious assassin with precocious scarring.” He concluded, and she huffed a laugh. “Or, scarring-in-progress, I guess. For now it’s just injuries.”

“Give it a month.” She shrugged. “Once New Moon passes I’ll heal faster.” She paused, a strange expression on her face. “…Probably a lot faster, actually. There’s one advantage of being off the moondust.” Her tone was dubious, as though she wasn’t at all certain whether this was a good thing or not.

What had she said earlier? Six days to new moon? He exhaled. “…Well, that’s something.” He agreed, and returned to cleaning the wounds. The one at her shoulder actually looked quite aggravated, and he frowned when he came to it. “…Your firewood rope harness,” he realised. “You must have been putting pressure on it. Rayla.” His voice was aggrieved.

She blinked. “Didn’t even realise.” She admitted, trying unsuccessfully to crane her neck sufficiently to see the wound. “I was a little cold. Made everything numb, you know. I guess I’ll have to rig it for only the one shoulder, tomorrow.”

“Ugh.” Was all he said, and he paid extra attention to that wound. When all the bandages were replaced, he asked about the bruising, and grimaced as she peeled her undershirt up to reveal the spectacular coloration of her midriff. If anything, it looked worse than yesterday, the colours darker and more distinct against the rest of her skin. There might be a little less swelling, though.

“How do you even move with your waist like that?” Ezran piped up, morbidly fascinated, from beside the fire. “I mean, I know I felt it earlier, but you weren’t moving then. Doesn’t it hurt whenever you move around?”

She shrugged carelessly. “Duh.” She said. “Not exactly a lot I can do about it, though. It’ll heal eventually.”

Callum grumbled, all the while he considered what extra padding he could provide for her when she slept. It couldn’t be easy to get comfortable on hard ground with bruises like that, after all. “Well, at least you’re not actually bleeding anymore.”

She raised her afflicted hand to waggle its fingers at him. He didn’t miss the slight grimace she made as she did so. “And my wrist-binding’s loose again.”

He inspected it, narrow-eyed, and then promptly appropriated her hand to inspect the wrist-scab. She tolerated this with only an eye-roll and a sigh, watching him as he poked gingerly around the healing sores. “…This is definitely healing faster now.” He said, after a moment, and released her hand back into her custody. “I think you should probably still keep it covered, but maybe in a few days we can stop bandaging this.” She hummed with agreement, and he helped her back into her various layers, fastening his cloak around her shoulders last. “…How’s the hand doing?” He asked, eventually, and she made a mock-cheerful face at him.

“Just great.” She expressed, lightly. “I do so love having my whole hand go numb and prickly.”

“Pins-and-needles?”

“Pins-and-needles.” She confirmed. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

Tentatively, Ezran extended a hand. When Rayla only rolled her eyes at him and didn’t move to dissuade him, he touched her wrist and immediately snatched his fingers back, grimacing. “Oh, ugh.” He grumbled, shaking his own left hand to disperse the phantom sensations. “It only hurts a little but somehow it’s so…” he searched for a word.

“Annoying?” Rayla suggested. “Infuriating? Impossible to ignore?”

“All of that.” He agreed, with another disgruntled flick of his fingers. “Please let that stop soon.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Her voice was very dry.

“…On the bright side, it means your hand’s getting better blood flow?” Callum offered. He had a thought about that blood flow, and improving circulation in general, and fidgeted a little. “And. Uh, about that…” He trailed off, and fidgeted some more as she looked at him, then at her hand, and then seemed to realise.

“Oh, right.” She recognised, sounding disgruntled. She eyed him side-long for a few moments, as if she didn’t quite want to look at him directly, then huffed and thrust out her hand. “Go on, then.”

Feeling vaguely flustered again, Callum took her hand between his own, and started with the more embarrassing part of the ever-more-established Rayla Wound Care Routine.

It…did not exactly go like the other times had.

Twice, he’d done her hand-massage when she was drugged and placid, feeling neither pain nor embarrassment from the whole affair. Once, it had plainly hurt her, and she’d felt awkward enough about the whole thing to retreat from the camp for a good while. Now…well, it didn’t actually seem to hurt, per se, but-

“Hhh,” She expressed, yet again, an agitated hissing noise that puffed out as he pressed at the hand. Her fingers twitched agitatedly in his hands, as though trying to shake off an unpleasant sensation. “Urgh.” Was the next noise, again as he pressed on the hand, her face twitching in its comical grimace, and in the next moment she made a sound half-way between frustration and disgust. She’d been doing much the same thing since the start, and…honestly, given how much it didn’t cause her pain, it was actually sort of funny.

“You alright there?” He asked, lips twitching, as she snarled incoherently at him.

“Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh,” She replied, eloquently, twitching all-over every time he pressed on the evidently tortuously numb and prickly hand. Ezran was giggling quietly in the background, and had been for several minutes. “I hate pins-and-needles. This is the worst.” Another twitch. “Hhhh,” she added, expressively, as he moved his thumb again.

“I thought horn-ache was the worst?” He offered, amused, and she made a very twitchy face at him.

“They’re both the worst.” She complained, and kept on along that vein for the following minute, until the pins-and-needles apparently started to dissipate a bit. It seemed sensible to keep up the hand-massage until her circulation improved enough that the numbness and prickling left, so he did, and eventually she subsided from her bristling, aggravated posture into something more normal.

Then, unfortunately, it did start to hurt. He noted this worriedly as the way she flinched became something more familiar. “Is it okay?” He asked, anxiously, and she made a sour face at him this time.

“Sore.” She answered, vaguely. “It’s alright.”

Reluctantly, he took her at her word, and kept at it until she pronounced all the lingering pins-and-needles gone, and her hand only a little bit numb. “The colour’s better.” He observed, when he was done, noting that the shade of the purple had indeed lightened a bit. “I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye out for your arm swelling again, if that happens like it did last time.”

“Maybe.” Rayla agreed, though she sounded dubious. “At least I don’t have to travel after it this time. My arm’s got the whole night to do…whatever.”

At the word ‘night’, Callum looked out into the storm again, brows furrowed. It was definitely getting darker, but the degree of dark was hard to judge when the storm was so starkly white. “I don’t even know how late it is.” He admitted, after a moment.

She stilled for a moment in that way he was coming to recognise as her checking the moon. “…Bout half six, I think.” She pronounced, after she was done judging. “Still a while to go before it’s dark.”

“When’s best to go to bed, do you think?” Callum asked, and she shrugged.

“Depends on you, really.” She said. “You’ve got first watch, so either way, you probably need to be up till maybe one in the morning, since it’s the dark hours we need to be most careful about. Me and Ez could really go to sleep whenever we want.”

“You should do that.” He said, immediately. “You both need all the rest you can get. Especially you, Rayla, since you’re injured and have to wake up in the middle of the night.”

She rolled her eyes at him. So did Ezran. It made them look uncannily like the siblings they’d claimed each other as. “Give it another hour, at least.” Rayla told him. “We can brew up some more stupid pine tea. It’ll help the hunger a bit.”

His stomach, discontentedly, chose that moment to rumble. “Yeah, okay.” He accepted, and went for the ever-growing store of needles.

They sat by the fire talking idly as the tea brewed, and then as they drank it, and it did make the hunger feel a little less immediate. Then, finally, Rayla pronounced it about the right time, and she and Ezran adjourned to the tent-layers. It was a little weird, to watch them bedding down for the night, while he was to stay awake.

“Night, Callum.” Ezran said, ensconcing himself with the egg and Bait hugged to his middle. Rayla was folding herself carefully onto the ground, wincing as she did so, undoubtedly pressing very uncomfortably against her livid bruising. She was still wearing his cloak, as though she’d forgotten about it. He was hardly about to remind her. “Night, Rayla.”

“…Night.” She returned, after a moment, looking vaguely embarrassed about it. Her eyes slid to Callum for a moment.

He offered a smile. “Sleep well?”

Her ears moved, and she ducked her head a little. With a murmur of assent, she tucked herself into the tent-layers until she was almost entirely obscured. Ezran, similarly, disappeared almost completely from sight, with only the puff of his hair and the glow of the dragon-egg emerging from the tent.

Feeling more than slightly strange about it, Callum lingered quietly by the fireside as everyone else fell asleep.

 ---

End chapter.

 Notes:

The timing of events during the thundersnow is pretty delicate, so there’s likely to be some weird chapter lengths for a while. Next chapter and the one after might well be a lot shorter than usual. Depends on how I break the events down.

I was extremely out-of-fandom when I wrote most of this chapter, so I have very little idea how good it is. It didn’t block me, but I was so uninspired for the majority of it that I don’t have a good sense of the emotions in it.

Go here to read the first PIAJ Q&A, a compilation of answered questions received after last chapter. From now on, I’ll be answering all piaj-related asks on tumblr in this fashion, and probably several from ao3 too, though I’ll still reply to comments. There will likely be another Q&A in the aftermath of this chapter, if/when I get enough questions.

Timeline: Chapter takes place on day 11 since start of canon. Earlier on the same day, the kids found their shelter from the storm, and the Healer Sarli encountered a new patient.

So! The worldbuilding notes:

 Camping etc

Drinking hot water is a good way to help stay warm during extreme weather conditions, especially given boiling it isn’t going to make the fire any colder. Just another way to capture the exothermic waste heat of a burning campfire.

You do indeed gut birds by pulling their innards out through their butts. (though technically speaking a cloaca is more than a butt, but the butt does open out into it, so close enough for meat preparation work.)

In this chapter, Rayla doesn’t quite get properly hypothermic, but she wasn’t far off either, and was experiencing early symptoms. It was very risky of her.

Mid-watch is absolutely the worst watch as far as getting decent sleep goes, because you don’t sleep for long before your sleep is interrupted, and when you’re done you have to contend with getting back to sleep again. Also it’s super hard to wake up in the middle of the night. Everyone hates mid-watch, it’s the absolute worst, and naturally Rayla didn’t tell the boys this because she (probably correctly) assumed that one of them would try to do it instead.

Lightning mechanics

/“We’re under a rock ceiling, with half a mountain on top of us.” He reasoned, after a moment. “I bet lightning can’t get us through there.”/ hahahaha wrong. Lightning can absolutely strike through rock and into caves. In fact, if lightning can go through a cave it will, because air is the path of least resistance in comparison to rock, so the empty spaces of air represented by caves are not necessarily safe during a thunderstorm.

 Skywing nomads

One of the three recognised types of Skywing society is that of the nomads. The clans vary in culture, size, and range, but roam most of Xadia. The vast majority utilise Amblers as clanmounts, with generally no more than one or two per clan. The nomads in the Midnight Desert, of the clan Selari, are unusual in that they are settled for the majority of the year, and only fairly recently re-acquired an Ambler. The Skywing nomadic population as a whole is estimated at around 29,400 for the entirety of Xadia, distributed among 129 known clans and six domi.

Rayla has only ever been exposed to Clan Selari (e domus Favoni) and has had no other contact with Skywing elves. As such, her knowledge of them and the nomads as a whole is very limited.

Explanations on the domi and how the migratory tendencies of Amblers shape nomad culture will be saved for another time.

 Moondust

A drug taken by most Moonshadow elves to dull their connection to the Moon. As many functions of their bodies are at the whims of fluctuations in lunar magic, this makes many aspects of a Moonshadow elf’s life more stable and predictable, eliminating the worst of the mood swings associated with lunar highs and lows, as well as the most dramatic effects of New and Full Moon. As elven fertility is tied to primal magic, moondust is also a very reliable contraceptive, and halts menstruation for any elves who experience it. (Shout-out to x, who guessed that contraception was an element of whatever was going on with Rayla)

Higher doses are administered to elves who are expected to need to operate under dangerous conditions during lunar extremes. The most highly-drugged Moonshadow elves tend to be the deep cover operatives, but all soldiers and assassins will operate under higher-than-average dosage. Some spies operating in isolated conditions may take reduced doses or forgo it entirely, but this is rare. The likeliest elves to completely forsake moondust are the Moon-mages, as the drug dulls the sensitivity of their connection as well as the power. Many Moon-mages become more adept at handling the lunar highs over time by venting enormous amounts of magic via spells.

Moondust is taken weekly, and is measured in drams. For someone of Rayla’s weight and size, one dram would be a low to moderate dose, four a high dose, seven a very high dose, and ten the maximum safe dosage. Moondust is not addictive, but does in a sense have withdrawal effects. Rayla’s extra strength of late is in part due to this, and in part just because she isn’t used to how strong an unmedicated Moonshadow elf is.

The more powerful an elf’s inherent arcanum, the stronger a dose they require each week. This dosage is usually calibrated during puberty, when an elf first begins taking the drug.

 Full Moon

I’ll not be going into much detail about this here, because the story is going to do that marvellously when the time comes, but basically: unmedicated Moonshadow elves at Full Moon are absolutely where the word ‘moonstruck’ came from, and for very good reason.

Even medicated with moondust, Moonshadow elves are not legally able to make binding agreements during the Full Moon, as they are not considered of sound mind. It is considered highly inappropriate to start anything important or make important decisions about anything while under the influence. The colloquial term ‘Full-Moon promise’ likely stems from this, referring to an impulse promise or decision that one will likely regret or renege on when sober.

 The Deep-Sleeper

An exceptionally large, terrifying sea-beast thought by most of the citizenry in the Pentarchy to be either extinct or mythical. Many sailors tend to disagree with this assessment, but being a superstitious lot, they aren’t typically taken seriously. Historically, the Deep-Sleeper is considered remarkable as it is the only large, terrifying sea-beast that lives in relatively shallow waters; it never ventures far beyond the continental shelf. Stories tend to emphasise that it only appears on the darkest, most terrifying nights. Given most people don’t actually think it exists, accounts of its appearance vary, but everything agrees that it has glowy tendrils and many, many teeth.

[klr]

Feedback is a gift

Without feedback, we’d all be operating in a vacuum, completely unaware of the ramifications of our actions. Imagine trying to learn something brand new without being able to receive feedback.

Feedback is talked about in forums of leadership, business, parenting, teaching, design, and much, much more. It helps us get better at what we do, and get better as people, both as givers and receivers. 

Can you think back to a moment you received feedback that changed your behavior or thinking? What do you remember about the situation and how you felt? What made that feedback stick?

In our long-term research group, we want to move beyond the duality of right or wrong, and into the landscape of open-ended response. Can we react to these responses in a way that cultivates deeper understanding and develops stronger meta-cognitive skills?

When I’ve had this conversation casually, I’ve observed many people assume we want to focus on better machine-grading for essays. Grading is a form of summative feedback, focused on an outcome at the end of a class or lesson.

Instead, we’d like to consider formative feedback, which is used on an ongoing basis to help everyone in a situation identify how they might improve what they are going to do next. I’m deliberately generalizing these terms beyond the traditional educational context because I find they apply anywhere. Have you ever tried to give somebody feedback to help you interact better in the future (formative), and had them interpret it as a personal judgment (summative)? Have you ever received a grade or performance review (summative) and wished that instead you’d received more advice about how to improve your performance along the way (formative)?

Open-ended response is powerful because it can explicitly reflect actual student thought. This applies not only in writing exercises for the humanities, but also in math. For example, Desmos activity builder’s question screen is designed to allow students to share their thinking with their teacher, and potentially with each other, during class. Hand-written student work on paper lets teachers see students’ step-by-step thinking. The question is: how can we, in software, provide response to that thought?

Below I’ve sketched some ways in which we can collect or display feedback to open-response questions within the user interface. (Yes, please read the handwriting.)

Note that many of these could be used in combination with each other. Forms such as freehand markup capture a kind of richness that’s missing in typed text. Voice and video recording start to capture intonation and non-verbal expression.

Within the context of feedback delivered via software, we’re also considering:

Who the source of feedback is:

Learner to self (self-reflection)

Peers

Teacher or coach

What the feedback is focused on:

The task output

The approach or process

The metacognition or self-regulation of the learner

The feedback that’s been received (i.e. feedback on feedback)

How we can structurally support:

Useful timing of feedback

Content of feedback that’s appropriate for the learner and the task

Iterative creative process

More background on feedback

As part of the background reading for this exercise, we’ve looked at Valerie J. Shute’s paper Focus on Formative Feedback, a meta-analysis of educational research literature on formative feedback. Outside the realm of software, many aspects of feedback have been studied for effectiveness, including:

Specificity. The level of information presented in feedback messages.

Directive vs. facilitative. Directive feedback tells the learner what to do or fix, facilitative feedback provides comments or suggestions to guide the receiver’s own revision or conceptualization.

Verification. Confirms whether an answer or behavior is correct. This is further divided into:

Explicit. e.g. a checkmark

Implicit. e.g. does an interaction with the learning environment yield what the learner expects, without explicit external intervention? As an example, Shute uses a learner’s actions within a computer-based simulation.

Elaboration. More informal aspects of feedback that provide cues beyond what’s provided in verification. E.g. offering more information on the topic or other examples

Complexity and length.

Goal-directedness. Goal-directed feedback gives learners information about progress toward a desired goal or goals, rather than on an individual action.

Scaffolding. Scaffolded feedback changes appropriately for different stages of the learning process.

Timing

Delayed vs. immediate.

Timely. On time to be applied in a repeat situation.

Regular. Delivered according to a schedule.

Continuous. We’d argue that continuous feedback is another kind of timing, not included in Shute’s survey. It refers to interactions such as the sliders in this essay by Bret Victor, and is one of the most fascinating for us, since it can transcend being feedback and serve as a way of discovering unexpected results.

Norm-referenced vs. self-referenced. Norm-referenced feedback compares the individual’s performance to that of others. Self-referenced feedback compares their performance relative to markers of their own ability.

Positive vs. negative. Praise, encouragement, discouragement, etc.

Feedback resulted in various levels of effectiveness depending on aspects of the learner:

Learner level. High-achieving vs. low-achieving, prior knowledge or skills.

Response certitude. The learner’s level of certainty in their response.

Goal orientation. Learning orientation is characterized by a fundamental belief that intelligence is malleable and a desire to keep learning (a.k.a. “growth mindset”). Performance orientation is characterized by a fundamental belief that intelligence is fixed and a desire to demonstrate one’s competence to others.

Motivation. What the learner is motivated by and how much.

Meta-cognitive skill. How much the learner is able to self-regulate their own approach to learning.

And of course feedback effectiveness depended on aspects of the task or activity:

Rote, memory, procedural vs. concept-formation, transfer. Rote, memory or procedural tasks could be categorized as needing “efficient thinking”, since they tend to be limited and predictable. Tasks requiring deeper conceptual understanding, or the transfer of understanding to a new context, could be categorized as requiring “innovative thinking”, since they are less predictable in nature. (More on innovative vs. efficient thinking here)

Simple vs. complex.

Physical vs. cognitive.

Shute also noticed that, perhaps unsurprisingly, physical context mattered in research outcomes: classroom and lab settings had different results in studies of feedback timing.

You might be wondering: If people have investigated all these aspects of feedback, can they just tell us what works? There’s a wide variety of conclusions and degrees of conclusiveness. None of the variables operate in isolation. And worse, the most well-intentioned feedback can have both positive and negative effects, so it needs to be executed with care. Having said that, Shute does include a summary table of recommendations for effective feedback starting on page 177.

So yeah, there are a lot of variables, which makes for a pretty complex multi-dimensional space of possibilities. Feedback is complicated.

I’d like to add some other variables that aren’t mentioned in depth within the Shute paper:

Perceived credibility of the source of feedback.

Relationship to source.

Number of sources.

Consensus among multiple sources.

Culture of learner or environment. Different cultures or environments make for different expectations around feedback.

Self-esteem of learner.

Mood and health. This includes blood sugar levels, hydration, levels of rest, etc. for both giver and receiver. (Shute does touch on this in “future research”.)

Medium. What medium is the feedback delivered in; e.g., verbal, written, delivered in person, via a computer, etc. In person, people can communicate non-verbally. Intonation, context, and body-language are difficult to transmit via digital text – that’s why we’re hunting for richer ways to use the digital medium.

In this day and age, we’re particularly interested in open-ended responses as opening the door to creativity, dialogue, and most importantly: critical thinking. We hope to experiment with a few building blocks for formative feedback that are interactive and configurable. Stay tuned!

[neighbourskid]

Future?

(original date: 06 May 2017)

People keep asking me what I want to do with my degree, why I’m studying English and Art History. I’ve been asked this question so many times, I lost count. When I was in grammar school, people asked me what I wanted to do afterwards, what I wanted to study. When I was in secondary school, people urged me to go look at jobs so I could go into an apprenticeship afterwards. Other people urged me to go to grammar school. In the end, I repeated a grade so I could go to grammar school without having to do the entry exam. Why? Because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Or too many ideas. When I was in primary school, my best friend wanted to be a marine biologist. I had no real interest in marine biology. Nevertheless, in primary school I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up.

See, I never really thought about myself much when I was a child. I didn’t live much into the future, I always lived in the moment. Of course, I looked forward to things. Like seeing my dad again the next weekend. Or that holiday that we were planning for a while now. Or going to the swimming pool next summer.

I remember my mom telling me once that she always thought I would be too dependent on my brother. My brother and me, we’re pretty close, I think. We weren’t the “typical” siblings that fight a lot because they are siblings. Of course, we had our rows, but I think most of the time we’ve been kind to each other. I think what played a lot into that, is that we’re only 18 months apart. We were the same height for a while and some people even thought we were twins. We also shared a lot of interests, I guess. Our parents never forced me into this typical girl role. Of course, when I was four, I think, my godfather gave me a doll for Christmas. I burst into tears upon seeing it. The next year he got me police cars. My mom and I always had our fights over clothes, but she never really forced me to wear dresses or exceedingly girly things, if I didn’t want to.

Our parents treated my brother and me pretty much the same. When my brother got a gameboy for Christmas that one year, I got one as well. I wasn’t forced into liking super girly things, and I don’t think my brother was forced into being super manly. I’m sure, if I were interested in STEM fields (or good at them anyway), my parents would support me in studying in them. I’m sure if my brother would’ve wanted to, I don’t know, be a professional dancer? They would have supported him.

I never really thought much about what I wanted to be when I grew up, though. My brother knew very early on that he wanted to make games and now, several years later, he studies game design. He’s there.

People keep asking me what I want to do with my degree, and honestly? I have no fucking idea. When I graduated secondary school I went to grammar school because I didn’t know what I wanted to do in my life, who I wanted to be. When I graduated grammar school, I tried working for a year, because I didn’t really know what to study yet. I was unemployed for the better bit of a year. I’ve started studying English at university last summer. I am in my second semester now and in one month it’s already finished again. I have 4 semesters left getting my Bachelor at this university. What I want to do with my degree? Not the faintest idea.

Okay, well, that is not quite true. I know what I would like to do with my life, and I suppose my English degree is only helping me achieve that. But it’s not an obvious final destination for that degree. My peers will become teachers or work in advertising, PR, as linguists or do research. Me? I have seemingly unachievable dreams.

When I was in 6th grade, I wanted to be a mangaka, I wanted to draw mangas for a living. I even had the presentation we had to have about jobs about mangakas. My teacher criticized that it was a somewhat invented job (joke’s on you, Mrs W, every job was invented at some point). I soon dropped that dream because I found out just how little life mangakas have once they’ve managed to produce something worthwhile. At the same time that I got into mangas, I also got into fan created stuff related to that. I scrolled through pages beyond pages of fanart, I read some good and a lot of really crappy fanfics, and when that wasn’t enough anymore, little me, who had no computer at that point, started to handwrite fanfiction myself. Handwrite. On paper. Or when we weren’t at home, I wrote them in unsent text messages on my crappy old phone that didn’t have a note application yet. I still have a box full of pages scribbled full with ideas and stories I wrote when I was probably about twelve.

I’ve been writing stories for nearly ten years now. I started in German but from 8th grade on, I wrote in English as well, and once I was in grammar school, English was the only language I wrote in. That’s why I’m studying English. I want to improve my English. Make it flawless. Exercise that muscle, write as much and as often as I can. If I could be a writer, I would take it in a heartbeat. It’s not easy and not something you can study at university, but at least I can study something to help me with my writing.

What I tell when people ask me what I want to do with my degree? Sometimes that, sometimes not, because it’s not all of it. I don’t know if being a writer is the one thing that I want. Especially, what kind of writer do I want to be? That question ties into one of my other dreams.

This might be obvious, but I love movies. I absolutely love going to the cinema, I love the experience of it, sitting in a room with a handful of strangers (sadly, nowadays it isn’t more), experiencing the same thing and leaving the cinema, not as strangers, but as a collective, as a group, as people who have something in common, who have experienced something together. I love that. But I also enjoy watching movies alone at home. I do it all the time. I love watching tv series. Getting into that excitement of what will happen next. Of course, I always whine about how I have to wait a week when I’m caught up with a show and can’t just binge-watch through it all, but it’s actually a very good feeling. You get to think about it for a while and then (hopefully) get the answers to your questions. What I love about the cinematic media, is that it can make you think. It can give you questions, make you reevaluate opinions you had, thoughts you had, knowledge you thought you possessed. Movies have done so much for me. I’ve learned so much about myself through movies and tv shows. I come out of the cinema inspired, ready to go and change the world. I watch interviews or panels from conventions, I hear actors and directors and writers tell stories about their work in the film industry, about their experiences, their life and I… I feel so inspired by that. These wonderful, beautiful, intelligent people create worlds out of thin air, out of nothing, and kids, teenagers, adults, so many different people see these movies and get inspired, they are touched by it. That is so beautiful!

I am so often inspired by movies and I see what they have done for me and I…. I want to give that back. To pay that forward. I know that there are a lot of kids out there who are like me, who find themselves in movies, and I would like to give this back to them. To create things that inspire them. Make a movie that will change their life. That’s what I want. I want to inspire people. Give back to them what the film industry has given me.

Do I want to be an actor? I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to try it out. I don’t… I don’t actually really care that much what I’d do, I just know I would want it to be there. I would happily bring cast and crew coffee every morning if it meant I would be part of something bigger, something that will someday inspire someone to do great things.

Right now I feel like going into screenwriting would be my number one choice. It has film and writing combined. It also helps that my brain usually comes up with story ideas in cinematic from rather than written. It’s hard writing a scene in a book when your brain supplies things like “establishing shot backed with lord of the rings style music” when you can’t actually write music into your book.  So yeah, I think screenwriting is my choice at the moment.

Why I don’t tell that to people when they ask me what I want to do with my English degree? Because they look at you like you’re a crazy nutcase or a poor child with a dream that will never come true. I know, I live in a small ass country not even close to where I want to be. I know I still have a long way to go. But why look at me like I’m mad? Didn’t you ever have dreams? Did you not want to go out there and change the world? I can not and will not believe that your dream has always been sitting in a stinking office from 9 to 5, typing numbers into a computer and whining about how crappy the coffee in the cafeteria is. If it is, then good for you and your mediocre life. If you gave up on your dream? That sucks, man, and I’m sorry. But please stop shitting on my dream.

I’ve always been a dreamer and I will never not be one. So what do you care if my dream seems unachievable? It’s not your dream. What do you care if I fly too close to the sun? It’s my own damn problem if I fall, not yours.

So please, I ask you kindly, if you feel like asking me what I want to do with my English degree with that wonderful undertone that screams ‘you should’ve chosen some other degree’? Fuck off.

[fizzyhibiscusteainapoptabsodacan]

rooookieeee

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

nuanced

“The utopian ideal of the internet—unregulated access to information, pure connectivity—now feels antiquated. Also antiquated: trying to determine if the internet is simply good or bad. Possible and necessary: thinking more deeply about how it’s rewiring our brains and warping our experience of time, about the vistas of reality it’s revealing and creating, and what to do with our positions therein, so that we do not go mad from it all nor flee altogether.When the internet was less mobile, the distinction between online and offline was perhaps more defined. There was real life, and then there was the place that hosted our reflections on it. Now we are experiencing a collision between underbaked thought and tangible experience so great and rapid and omnipresent that it’s less of a crash, more in the water supply. Those who use the internet as an escape are thought of as outliers (Catfishers, video game addicts, radicalized young men), but its increasing presence throughout our daily lives has made a state of unreality not only more accessible, but very hard to resist.Rather than providing a shadow of reality, these platforms shape reality. They’re not pure outlets for our feelings and experiences; they are catalysts for what we feel and experience, how we feel and experience, and our shrinking capacity to process any of it. What we share on social media platforms does not disappear into a void, but increase their engagement and make them more profitable—even criticism is additive to the forces we seek to counteract. (Donald Trump: “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here.”) What we share also tells people how to sell us more stuff, so that the CEO of Netflix can stand before his peers and declare that their number-one competitor is sleep—“And we’re winning!”The internet feels chaotic, but it is not out of control. The internet is not one giant, democratic forum where opinions rise to the top by their own merit; it is a very deliberate structure, carefully calibrated to convince its users that visibility is the same as power.“

suspended in mid air

PALIMPSEST is the word

The above is a photo of a photo of my aura. I had it read in Chinatown a few weeks ago and nodded adamantly as the woman told me I was “removed, observant, in [my] own castle.” It is very likely that other parts of her reading were far less accurate and that I seized only on what resonated with me, but that itself is an innate part of being removed/observant/in your own castle: picking and choosing what you’ll remember later, curating moments, architecting your own narrative, as opposed to being open to the possibility that she could’ve been telling me something that did not already fit my idea of who I am. She said, “There is something between you and the rest of the world,” and gestured as though to indicate a screen in front of her face.

This year, I graduated from high school and moved out of my parents’ Midwestern home into a New York City apartment and started acting in a play every day, wondering, constantly, what it feels like to bring down that screen. This was for the sake of being onstage but also because I was trying to start my life: How does it feel to exist in a moment, connected to another human being and to the world, without thinking about what it signifies, what it’ll look like in memory?

To be able to consider these questions at all is not only a privilege afforded by a life with time to think about HOW EXACTLY to FULLY APPRECIATE all these MAGICAL MOMENTS I am #blessed with CoNsTaNtLy!, but also just how my brain works. I started a blog when I was 11, and every day after school, I came home and took photos of my outfits for it. I was very picky about the setting and the colors and the lighting, not out of any interest in photography, so much as a desire to draw connections between things and delight at the order of it all. I didn’t feel like they were self-portraits, although I’m in every picture. They felt similar, instead, to doing plays at camp and community theater, or sitting at our family’s piano going through a Bible-thick Broadway songbook and shifting among my favorite characters.

When I stopped writing my blog halfway through high school, I began keeping journals just for myself, each one cycling through a different personality as I had with fashion and with acting. For the duration of each journal, my handwriting would change, I’d dye my hair, I’d hang new posters on my wall, I stuck to a narrow selection of my wardrobe and my music, I chose a new route for the walk to school. I am similarly strict about the monthly Rookie themes, dictating to our illustrators and photographers which colors, motifs, and types of lighting to use in their work for us. My friends get annoyed with me for how often I try to art direct our hangouts instead of seeing where the night takes us—Can we all wear these colors, walk down this street, listen to this song? That cohesion frames the moment and turns it into a scene from a movie. I don’t quite know how to let experiences just unfold and be surprised by how they affect me; I want to know that I’ll write down the aesthetic details of an event later and be pleased at how they fit together: We wore fur coats and wool cloaks, walked down Lafayette, listened to Blonde on Blonde.

Sometimes this quality veers into the realm of vampiric hubris. Like: I sat on my roof on opening night of the play with a perfectly nice fellow who put on “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison and his arm around me. Why did I let the lovey part of the song go over my head, but hear “to be born again, to be born again,” over and over, marveling before the skyline at my own personal reinvention over the course of the past few months—at how perfect it was that I was wearing my fuzzy pink moving-to-New-Yorkjacket—instead of returning the embrace of a person I liked?

There is a terrible YA novel cliché of a girl who lives her life looking for movie moments, and I recently defended her/myself in my journal:

1. Why worship a life that is movie-esque? 2. Why should something be significant for feeling movie-esque? 3. Isn’t life the real thing itself?

No. Movies are what make life real to us, because they pay attention to and crystallize emotions, colors, movement, human behavior, etc. (When I say movies, I also mean TV, I also also mean plays—even though a play is not recorded, it’s crystallized in that it lives on in the minds and memories of its audience). Movies are like “LIFE: The Best Of.” “LIFE: The Essential Collection.” “LIFE: Not Dead Yet!” So saying a moment is like a movie is how we can comprehend its beauty and grant it significance.

I can defend the art direction and the obsessive documentation, but I also know that there are different answers to the above questions. I know there are infinite moments that could take place and affect me in ways I can’t conceive of, if I could only put down my notebook every once in a while and actually live my life instead of trying to immortalize everything.

“We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. […] And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? […] To be absolutely free! […] To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! […] let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

The above is from the novel The Secret History. It summarizes why I like acting, and why I was so eager to listen and learn from all the times our playwright said to me, “You know the play. You know the character. Why are you still watching yourself perform, telling the audience how to feel about her, dictating the moment? Just be in it.” I’m paraphrasing, from my castle. But that was the gist. And, to throw a wrench in all of this, the characters in The Secret History do end up losing control and being totally present…and MURDERING someone in their state of freedom!!!! But for now, this is where this month’s theme starts: the combined beauty and danger of inventing yourself, owning your experiences, putting yourself on record.