When Alicia finally got close enough to see Lia, she realized the older woman didn’t look well. Neither of them were having their best day, Alicia was pretty sure, but even given that context, Lia looked like she was having a rough time of things. Her otherwise tanned, tough-skinned face was almost gray in complexion, and while the sternness that Alicia had come to think of as Lia’s default expression was still there, it was clearly strained; the grim determination of a warrior general hiding debilitating if not deadly wounds from their men. Whatever the bright light had been, it had extracted a toll upon Lia. Either that, the part of Alicia’s mind that was always looking for the next disaster chimed in, or the impact had wounded her in some terrible way that just wasn’t very visible from this distance. Alicia found herself cursing that part of herself, thinking of worst case scenarios during a worst case scenario was not helping.

Something rare happened as Alicia came within speaking distance of Lia. Her grim expression all but vanished as her face split open in a wide, genuine smile. While Alicia did feel her heart skip a beat at this, she also could not quite quell that part of her brain that noted that Steppefolk generally are very reserved when it comes to expressions of emotion. Thus, Lia was either so diminished from whatever was ailing her that social convention took a back seat, or so glad to see Alicia that she found it appropriate to break decorum. Alicia found both possibilities complicated in ways she could not quite explain.

“I see you found me,” Lia’s tone was as dry as ever, but there was a quaver in it that Alicia didn’t know whether to attribute to tiredness, emotion, or both. “Thank the Winds and the Mountains for that, I haven’t flashed like that since I was a teenager.”
“So I take it that bright light was you then?”Alicia asked as she landed on Lia’s rock. “Didn’t know the Deep Song could do something like that.”
“You wouldn’t, I suppose. It’s a fairly new discovery. I don’t fully understand it myself, but it’s related to how ones eyes glow when you’re subsumed in the song. It is also… oh wow…” Lia’s balance faltered, and it was all Alicia could do to catch her before she crumpled to the ground. “…very tiring.”
“Oh, yeah, I see that. Are you ok?” Alicia asked. She wasn’t sure why she bothered, Lia would dismiss her concerns and that would be that.
“I’m not as fresh and sap-strong as I was in my youth I’m afraid. Time has a way of having its way with us.”
“Nonsense,” Alicia couldn’t help but notice the expected roles in this conversation had swapped. “Tough old root like you? You’ll outlive us all.”
“You’re very kind to say so, Mountain Wind, but all the same, I think we should rest. It won’t do to travel while tired.”
“No, that’s sensible,” Alicia agreed. “I saw a chunk with some wall still on it a bit that way. We can anchor ourselves to that so we don’t drift apart when we sleep.”
“Lead the way Exalted,” Lia said as she let go of Alicia’s arm and righted herself.

Alicia was of half a mind to offer to carry Lia the little bit to their designated resting spot, even with one functioning arm it shouldn’t be too hard, but she decided it was best not to push her luck. Carrying an adult on your back wasn’t unusual among the Steppefolk exactly, in fact, in wartime, it wasn’t uncommon for long distance runners to carry their more sprint-inclined fellow warriors into the fray as to preserve as much of the latter’s explosive energy to bring to bear against the enemy. There were techniques to enhance ones natural proclivities in this matter as well. In peacetime, though, one person carrying another had implications, and even speaking about the matter was, while not taboo, definitely a charged topic. Alicia wasn’t really sure if the current situation counted as wartime or peacetime, and she had no idea whether Lia was a sprinter or more of a long-distance runner, hell, she wasn’t quite sure what she was herself, as her fitness routines tended to favor a balanced approach. So, in short, it was a prickly topic with many potential complications, she didn’t know the rules nor the person in question well enough to know them all, and Lia had indicated she’d make it there on her own. So, keeping a slow enough pace to allow the clearly tired Lia to follow her it was. The practical part of Alicia, predictably enough, had some Words and Thoughts about this, but it just couldn’t be helped. If they were going to get out of this, they had to be on the same team, and being disrespectful or indelicate about Lia’s culture wasn’t going to help in that regard. Of course, there was always the chance that culture had changed when it came to carrying folks, but Alicia wasn’t willing to gamble on it.

Once they reached their intended campsite, a corner of a wattle-and-daub hut of some sort, floating among the other fragments of lost worlds. A lot of it was rocks, but Alicia was pretty sure she saw more dirty ice and unidentifiable material that could be soil around the meager building part.
“There we are,” she sighed.
“Exalted… Alicia, are you ok?” Lia asked. Lia’s tone made Alicia pause. It was very different from her usual tone with Alicia, which Lex so fittingly had described as ‘(sounding like) she was talking with a pissy teenager hydrogen bomb or something.’
“Sure,” Alicia said, more out of habit than anything, she could feel an odd slickness on her forehead, and it felt, a little bit, like her limbs weren’t her own.
“You’re awfully pale … is the pain real bad?”
“No, no, I’m fine, don’t worry I’m fine.” Alicia didn’t feel like she was talking right now. Something else was at the helm. Some kind of automated answering machine set up in the deepest recesses of her mind. She was fine, of course she was fine, she had no choice but being fine. “I’m fine…” It was more a plea than a statement now.
Warm hands grasped the sides of her head, calloused skin with a surprisingly gentle touch. “Shhhh, it’s going to be OK Alicia. Breathe with me now.”
For what felt like approximately a thousand years, Alicia didn’t even comprehend what Lia was saying, and by the time her brain ground into action like a badly deprecated hd drive, Alicia was already taking deep breaths along with Lia.
The older woman, however, was not done there. A strange, guttural sound escaped her lips, sharp with nasal overtones, even in her addled state Alicia recognized it as the traditional overtone singing the steppefolk used to channel the Deep Song, flooding their bodies with oxygene and the strange magic-that-wasn’t-magic at the same time. Alicia wanted so badly to join in, but she knew in her heart she couldn’t. Not in the state she was in now. And so, she could do naught but be present as the overtones took root in her. At first it felt like a vibration, then it briefly shifted to feeling like rushing cold spring water, then to the deep warmth of sharing ones tent. Alicia could not explain why, but she was reminded of big cats nursing their young, of the impertinent bounce of the mustelid, the wolf pack greeting a new cub. It was soothing on a level she couldn’t even fully put into words. If any of the drugs Alicia herself had ever tried had felt this good, she would’ve been in trouble. Big trouble, probably.

Alicia didn’t faint, she was pretty sure, as much as she moved into a state of limited consciousness. She had no idea how long it lasted, but somewhere between a few minutes to aeons later, Alicia’s world slid back into focus around her, just in time for her to notice it had been out of focus in the first place.
“What happened?” Alicia asked, she wasn’t even sure if Lia was around. It didn’t change much, if she was alone with the universe it was the universe’s time to answer for a couple of things.
“Shh, be calm Alicia,” Lia whispered. She was standing over Alicia, having let her gently float just over the surface of their decided camping spot. Either that, or Alicia had teleported. She didn’t much believe it, but today was not a day for ruling stuff out apparently. “I, uh, it’s a bit complicated but…”
“You used the Deep Song, that much I get.” Alicia said.
“Yes. I reached out to the Deep Song in you, asked it nicely to focus more on repairing your body and dulling your pain. It does know how as you may have noticed, so you just gotta point it in the right direction.”
“Huh, it can dull pain?”
“What,” Lia’s tone was briefly dry. “You thought leaping over buildings in a single bound doesn’t hurt like dragonfire?”
“I… uh… suppose it would, huh.” Alicia felt very foolish then. Of course there would have to be some level of pain dulling and increased recovery along with the increase in strength or anyone using the Deep Song would be using a walker by the time they hit thirty.”
“It is a rather recent discovery,” Lia conceded with a kindly smile. “Only once the generations after the Brother Wars got old enough to start noticing what a lifetime with superpowers does to you, did we even consider it a field of study.”
“You’ve really explored this Deep Song thing since the Dragon Thane, haven’t you?” Alicia found herself saying. “I don’t know why, but I kind of expected you’d just keep using it the way its always been used.”
“There is a bit of that,” Lia shrugged. “But you only need so many High Chiefs and Soothsayers with achy knees before innovation starts looking real attractive.”
“I’m starting to suspect our worlds aren’t so different after all,” Alicia chuckled. It felt like she was putting on a brave face, but the roughness of her voice and her general sickly disposition at the moment made it a rather transparent effort.
“It’s not all good, though,” Lia said, there was a touch of resigned tiredness to her words. “Do you remember those two youths that you tangled with a little while ago?”
“The lovebirds, you mean?”
“Lovebirds….” Lia pursed her lips. “I suppose it’s possible they wind up sharing a tent eventually, now that you mention it.”
“Seemed pretty open and shut to my gay eyes,” Alicia wasn’t sure how her flippant tone would translate across the translation field, but she felt somewhat loopy off the pain relief of the Deep Song, so she couldn’t quite find it in herself to worry. “But yeah, what about them?”

“They’re having a… I’m not sure how this will sound to someone who’s not from the Steppes, so pardon me if this sounds stupid, but they badly need to Rumspringa.”
“Oh, I know that word,” Alicia said. “It’s a loanword in my language, it’s kind of a ritual of adulthood? Members of an insular religious community goes into the world at large to experience it before they decide whether to rejoin the society they grew up in or not… or at least that’s my very limited understanding of it.”
“That’s pretty close,” Lia agreed. “I see why the field chose that word, then. It’s a custom from after the Brother War, meant to respond to a new problem, well a good new problem, but a problem none the less.”
“Go on?”
“Well, now that killing each other in raids or blood feuds or to dragon-related violence was off the table,” Lia’s tone was somewhat dry again, there was something about this she found funny, although Alicia couldn’t quite say what yet “the question what one’s to do about rambunctious youths was once again one that had to be answered.”
“Oh yeah, because tribes aren’t strictly familial, right?”
“Yes, and we steppefolk generally believe that it’s best if it stays that way. Family-of-the-hearth and Family-of-the-blood can be great and terrible partners, as they say.”
Alicia snorted at that. “Girl, don’t I know it.”
“To make sure that people get around and forge both blood- and steel bonds, there’s this event, this rumspringa, if you want to be technical about things it’s the name of the festivities that opens the holiday, usually celebrated on the first couple of days of spring, as a kind of farewell to the youth, who are to go out into the world, meet other tribes, hear other songs, learn other crafts. That kind of thing. It’s generally thought to be a joyful time, but it can also be sad.”
“Huh,” Alicia said. “I figure this is kind of hard to do when everyone you know to be alive lives within a city block of each other, then?”
“Oh winds yes,” Lia rolled her eyes. “The elders have been working their hides off to come up with an alternative, but those doddering old…” Lia stopped herself “Ahem. They have failed to come up with an alternative, and the younger crowd is starting to grow impatient.”
“For better or worse they’re really good at that, youths I mean.” Alicia opined.
“If I may be honest, Exalted,” Lia said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“I mean, it’s on your mind, clearly,” Alicia would’ve shrugged, if an odd stiffness in her back didn’t hint that doing so would be a bad idea. “It’s healthy to talk about things that are difficult to figure out. Me and the other exalted do it all the time.”
Alicia had absolutely no idea where, but somewhere in that last sentence, she had fucked up. There was no loud warning klaxons or flashing red lights or anything, just a brief stiffening in Lia’s back that Alicia couldn’t have missed if she was wearing a blindfold.

“We should rest,” Lia said, already turning away to start the procedure of getting ready. “Some sleep will do us both good.”
“Yes,” Alicia said. “There’s a thermal blanket and some rope in my pack. We should share one to not waste any heat, and it’ll be easier to anchor ourselves that way.”
And that’s the way it was done. It had been slightly awkward to arrange, but eventually the two involuntary travelers managed to wrap themselves in the reflective surface of the thermal blanket, and tie one ankle each together with a rope also fastened to the wall. It wasn’t the sturdiest anchor Alicia had seen, but it’d do as long as nothing big fast and scary happened out of the blue. A part of her noted that sleeping back to back wouldn’t be as effective in sharing body heat as chest to chest would be, something she knew from her fanfic days moreso than any survival training, but the awkwardness of the moment had made her keep that detail to herself. Besides, it was moreso a question of not losing heat to the small bubbles of atmosphere around them than heating up any potential hypothermiacs. They’d cross the bridge that was the chest to chest thing if it came to that.

Alicia was pretty sure she wouldn’t sleep much. This whole situation was too odd by far. She hadn’t considered that the relief from pain that Lia’s Deep Song trick was deeply, deeply calming, and that the absence of pain itself was more than enough to lull even Alicia’s weird wired brain to sleep. Seeing as she quickly fell asleep and thus weren’t conscious to realize her mistake, it was one of the gentler total misinterpretations one could make. Alicia, for one, would not have complained even if it was possible for her.

Author’s Note: My least favorite aspect of modern Fantasy is how postlapsarian it is. Oh the age of High Magic is gone, the time when everyone used magic and impossible creatures roamed the earth has long passed. I get where it’s coming from in referencing real world mythology, as well as the Tolkienesque and Lewisian tendencies toward the same. It’s kind of the Default Fantasy Setting’s default solution to the Problem of Evil, i.e if magic exists how come things are still crap and there’s still rats to kill and fetch quests to do. It works just fine like that, but it also tends to sequester magic and magical things away as these unchanging foundational parts of the world, the Light Of Creation as it were. This is all well and good, but it’s generally a bad fit for the type of stories I want to write.

I personally like the idea of magic and the magical as an aspect of the world like physics, where understanding of it only grows less and less wrong over time as study produces more accurate models to explain the wild shit it does. This is, I suppose, my way of letting you know that you can blame that introductory course on the History of Physics I took some years back for magic and magic-like abilities being Like That in Thereafter. It’s a topic we’ll get real deep into once it’s Lex’ turn at the helm, but I like exploring it a bit before we get to Felipe, who 1: does not understand all this magic shit, and 2: doesn’t want to.

V.S.D