Submission (#3788) Approved

Elnin: Lunarity ELN1432, Gwynceirw ELN1777, Aisling ELN706, Foxglove ELN1668
Wordcount: 2588. ....Sorry about that.
Region: Kyendi
Feature: Sure, if my Daeva guesstimates are accurate. I kind of just went off what we know about them, and what logically follows from what we know. If they were predictable or possible to outwit I don't think they'd have the intense "do NOT go off the road" reputation that they do. My understanding's that any encounter should be regarded as fatal unless you're very very lucky, so that's how I wrote Gwyn's story. Didn't say anything about appearance, since I have no idea. Hope that's okay!

Eyre is a dangerous world for kittoms, especially unattended kittoms who spend more time trying to figure out why they don’t remember anything from two years ago than they do watching where they’re going. Kyendi is almost the worst of it, and this is a fact Lunarity can tell you in not-insignificant detail. Vahl d’Sari’s worse, yes, and he’s certainly never managed to figure out how to get in, just in case he ever needs to do so. But Kyendi is almost as bad, in its own way, and maybe that was part of the reason why he spent most of his time travelling every other part of Eyre.

Kyendi is hospitable if you stay near the coast, or on the floating islands. Really, anywhere around actual civilization, if he’s being honest. But getting from the Eldertree to Sulapei isn’t easy, even though it’s a major trade route for food and supplies throughout the summer months, when it’s a passable journey at all. For a lone kittom, it’s more difficult, bordering on impossible around every time of year that isn’t less than a fortnight away from the summer solstice.

So he found himself walking alongside an Adventurer four times his size, his saddlebags firmly against his hips, steadfastly ignoring the conversation happening on Gwynceirw’s back between Foxglove and another kittom hoping to see the big city near the Eldertree. The conversation might have been intriguing, given that he’d never really lingered in Eiloen for very long, but he had a long journey ahead of him, from Silveil to Bellmoril to Ealei before returning home again before winter took ahold of the world and he was stuck somewhere to wait it out.

The thought brought back a brief memory of Strynhalde winter, three journeys prior when he’d been trapped in a town with a population of six buildings total for a month, waiting out the storms. He shivered despite the warmth of the day, daring a glance to his forelegs, sporting the extra fur they’d gained that month to keep him warm and he hadn’t shed yet.

Maybe it would be years before he did shed the extra fur he’d gained. Or maybe he’d never shed it at all. He looked up again towards the path, eyes scanning the trees to either side of them for any fae or Daeva that might be lurking in the depths. A deep, low huff rumbled the air beside him, and he looked up to see Gwynceirw looking at him.

“No Daevas on this road this time of year, puffball,” the Adventurer rumbled, tone less irritated than he’d heard from him before, but not so much amused, either. “Don’t go worrying your tail off into a ditch.”

He looked away again, the mana around the tips of his ears fizzing into a tangled snarl of fur in embarrassment. True to Gwynceirw’s word, after a few more feet he could see the ditch just on the other side of the path, previously hidden by midnightberry bushes and suddenly all too evident and all too deep. If he fell in – and with the way his mind wandered and the way he didn’t learn any lessons from his time in Ealei, when a stray wind had saved his life – it would force the caravan to stop and Gwynceirw to have to shake off Foxglove and two other kittoms from his back and dig Lunarity out of the ditch.

Better to keep his eyes on the road. He looked ahead again, occasionally looking down to scan the ground he was about to step on. One wrong pawstep in Ahza that had unearthed a sinkhole and three snakes was enough for that. He’d learned his lesson about roads not always being as safe as he’d like, even if he hadn’t quite internalized the “don’t wander off the road” lesson yet.

It really was a beautiful day out, a few drifting clouds in the sky but the sun bright in the air, Dusk low on the horizon where it didn’t remind everyone of how much of a losing battle it was against the Daeva. One day, he wanted to go to Vahl d’Sari for himself and see what all the fuss was about. He’d only ever seen one other elnin with miasma poisoning save Gwynceirw himself that couldn’t be shaken off with a week of rest and enough sneezes. Gwynceirw’s shattered horns and anima spikes seemed to act more as body armour than anything else, and that elnin had mana leaking out of their chest and crystallized anima spikes jutting from their shoulders. It seemed to him that if they’d just made themself a chest-protector of heavy-duty leystone, there was really no cause to be concerned about the dangers of miasma. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to challenge Gwynceirw to a bar fight.

Or maybe, he just hadn’t gotten close enough to be in over his head about it, and that was the only way he learned anything. He glanced up at Gwynceirw again, whose stride was slow enough to almost be comical, while he was cantering along just to keep up. After a moment, Gwynceirw glanced back at him, one eyebrow raised.

“Something wrong?” he asked, expression still funereal, voice still unimpressed with Lunarity, the road, and the greater world.

“What happens if a Daeva does jump out of the wood?” Lunarity tilted his head, flicking his gaze briefly to the road directly in front of him and a distance out, before looking back up at the Adventurer. “Obviously it won’t happen, but you travel on foot, and I stick to the main paths when I can. I get the feeling you’ve seen it happen before.”

“You die,” Gwynceirw replied. Lunarity didn’t look away again in embarrassment. After a moment, he sighed, inhaling deeply before continuing. “I mean it. We’ve got” – he glanced briefly behind them to the three caravans, the first hitched to his shoulders with a harness in a quick headcount – “a half-dozen travellers with us including yourself. That’s ten elnin, three of which who are sleeping inside carriages that we can’t wake up or carry with the five seconds of reaction time that a Daeva might let us have. Of the seven that could run, maybe the three fastest would make it, and that depends on whether you think you can beat a Daeva at full flight back to the nearest town, three hours back, or if you fancy your chances in the faery rings.”

“Do they really refuse to pass us up as a meal that much?” His own voice was half-wondering. The conversation between Foxglove and the other two travellers seemed to quiet, as if they were all paying attention to this conversation now. He couldn’t exactly look back and see, he wasn’t so coordinated as to be able to walk backwards and carry a conversation.

He hadn’t seen many books about the Daeva, at least not ones that he could both afford and take back with him. For a brief moment, a stray cloud wandered between them and the sun, sweeping a wave of shade across the gravel-lined road. A shiver ran down his back, and he ignored it, focusing on the path in front of him. “I mean… Most things run if you fluff out your fur and snarl loud enough, especially elnin of your size. Would they really challenge you that quickly?”

Gwynceirw scoffed, a sharp, deep sound of either amusement or irritation. “Anything bigger than a newborn Daeva would eat me for lunch, and all the magic we have in our party wouldn’t do anything but anger them more. Novalite and moonpowder are controlled substances, puffball, you’ll never find a decent weapon against the Daeva outside the guilds. You see one of them, you drop your mana signature as low as it’ll go and you just hope it goes after someone else. The moment it’s not looking at you anymore, you run, and you run until you’ve put two or three settlements between you and it, and if your energy doesn’t last that long, you die.”

“Seems like a pretty good way to get it to target a city, if you’re fast enough,” he remarked. He didn’t bet his chances on being the fastest runner in the party – far from it, given one of the travellers was a new Adventurer with some sort of animic contraption that they’d sworn up and down was a new flying contraption. Even if he was the type of person to rob them of the contraption to preserve his own life, and he didn’t think he was, there wouldn’t be time. He’d heard once from a Noble in Zevija that a Daeva could rip through a party like this in a matter of minutes.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Gwynceirw who answered, but Aisling, who’d always been sweet whenever he did talk to her. “No one’s going to bet on that,” she said, cantering forward until she was close enough to Gwynceirw’s caravan to not have to yell to be heard. “They eat magic, you know, and turn to miasma what can’t be eaten. And there’s never only one.”

Gwynceirw’s voice picked up the thread, easily if still grumpily. His voice, still gruff around the edges, turned reminiscently wary. “I’ve seen a few Daeva, in my time, but never from close up, and certainly never had a true encounter. The way to handle them is to run away, alert the nobility, and then run farther. We avoided the whole of Strynhalde for two years, once, after an outbreak in one of the eastern towns. It’s summer, and this is a busy enough path that the mana’s reinforced. We’ll be all right on this journey.”

Lunarity glanced back to the road.  It was well-used enough to be mostly soil, but not quite hard-packed dirt of a road travelled by hundred every day. The jungle was as deep as ever, and to his left he could spy some great stone structure, carvings faded with lichen and time. Something blue glittered for a moment in the foggy depths, just enough to make him wonder if it was a flower or the fae or worse, a temporal anomaly. A gap in his knowledge flickered to his attention. “What do the Daeva even look like?”

“That big hulking thing with too many teeth that wants you dead,” Gwynceirw answered, not missing a beat. “You don’t stand there staring at it to see what it looks like. You feel the miasma around it and you run before you pass out from the poison. Closest I ever came to one… didn’t even see it, didn’t know what I’d run into until hours later, when the inn I stopped at got reports of two Knights almost dying to it. Just felt the miasma, felt it like a manawell’s evil twin, and ran.”

“We ran like our tails were on fire,” Aisling said, voice loud enough to be heard but soft enough to almost sound dreamy. Lunarity twitched an ear. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say there were teeth under that dreamy tone.

– Her blonde hair cascading around her shoulders, her horn squarely in the centre of her forehead, golden eyes shining with sugary sweetness and sweeter poison. She holds a full teaset on a platter, and there is most certainly something toxic in every single cup. It’s worse than roulette, he knows there’s a different poison procured from a different place in each cup, and none of their guests are here because they want to be, being served because they’re hungry. He loves her. She’s exactly as many teeth as she needs to be, and she shows none of them. He loves her. –

Gwynceirw chuckled, rough like rocks tumbling down a cliff. “Got out of town come the dawn, still haven’t been back to that area.” He didn’t seem to notice Lunarity’s shudder at the memory, or the barest stumble over a few mossy rocks on the path. They probably weren’t fae-rocks that cursed anyone who moved them. Probably.

One of the kittoms on his back, younger and smaller than Lunarity, piped up with a flare of their teal-blue mana. “But you said Daeva fly, and I’ve never heard of them walking or anything, and everyone knows you use water to clear out the wrong kinds of mana from your workspace. Can’t you just hit the nearest river and hope the town’s downstream?”

Lunarity scoffed. “I think I’d take my chances against the Daeva, if it was that or water.”

Gwynceirw, who wasn’t a close enough friend to him to know of Lunarity’s memory issues, but did have the unfortunate experience of having to dig him out of the bottom of a caravan when they’d encountered a surprise rainstorm on the edges of Faerindell, let out a full-belted laugh at that. “You would say that. I’ve seen you in Zevija and Strynhalde and Ealei, and you don’t know the first rule to dealing with Daeva. Don’t bother ever going to Enmir, Lunarity, you’ll die within ten minutes of crossing the border when you wander into the Shaedmoor by accident and trip into a Daeva lair.”

Lunarity looked up at the Adventurer, still shaking his head in gruff amusement, and smiled brightly up at him. Note to future Lunarity: take a detour from Bellmoril before Ealei, and see what the fuss is about in the Shaedmoor. Gwynceirw glanced back at him after a moment, abruptly stopping his laugher.

“Don’t tell me, puffball. I don’t want t’ know.”

Lunarity smiled brighter. “I’m heading to Silveil first,” he remarked, as if this was of no consequence whatsoever, as if they all didn’t know exactly what he’d noted to his future self. “There’s all sorts of illegal things there, and one of the healing poultices I needed when I almost died in Ealei had definite estyelan juice in it, and my host said they got it from Silveil on their annual trip. Bet I could find a novalite dagger if I tried hard enough.”

Aisling’s dreamy voice cut in before Gwynceirw could answer that one, a little distant-sounding but clear over the steady breeze keeping them from Kyendi heatstroke. “He won’t make it to Enmir, he’s going to die in Silveil long before he gets close,” she said, smoothly and as if she wasn’t paying full attention. Lunarity knew from the last time a kittom had fallen into a ditch and how fast she’d darted in to save them from a few broken bones that she was always paying full attention. “Gwyn, we might have to put the poor darling on a leash to keep him alive.”

Lunarity laughed. “I’ll come back,” he assured them both. Foxglove, the only one of the three on Gwynceirw’s back within his peripheral vision, was watching him with some amusement on her face. “Don’t you worry, I have no other option. If I don’t come back to my house and give my fae neighbours another pie, they’ll eat me themselves. Let’s be real here, if I met a Daeva the fae would come out of the woodwork to drag me to safety just so I can make them more food. Nobody wants to lose the baker that doesn’t charge.”

This was such an absurd statement that Gwynceirw started to laugh again, and they were marching through the one well-used road between two towns in Kyendi, and the sun was shining and the jungle was deep with howling and fog, and it was the first week to another adventure.