Helspira shuffled forward on her knees. “I know you said you’re only good for resurrection and shadow blades, but I don’t suppose a spell for conjuring a flame is floating around in that head of yours, is there?”
“Don’t give him any ideas.” Benjamin pointed a cautionary finger. “I’d rather he spare us the threat of his temperamental magic. Flint and steel will work just fine.”
Sikras rolled his eyes. “You melt the flesh off a student’s face one time and suddenly your magic is ‘temperamental.’”
“I heard it took three clerics to heal that man. It’s a miracle he survived with his corneas intact.”
“Thatmancalled Vessik a talentless bastard with no annunciation skills,” Sikras muttered. “He deserved everything he got. In Vessik’s defense, deconstructing the spoken art of wizardry is nothing short of a miracle. It’s all just a mishmash of suffixes and prefixes and tonal inflections paired with annoyingly specific hand gestures. One mispronounced syllable or twist of the wrong finger and suddenly you’re melting a man’s face off.”
Kneeling in the tall olive grass, Benjamin produced flint and steel from his pack. “Never understood the appeal of magic myself. The lifespan of an energy caster is shorter than a damn soldier’s. Fools’ egos are always too big in battle. The number of mages I saw kill themselves with the magical recoil from their own spells could fill a cemetery.”
Sikras smirked. “Pearls of wisdom from the only dead man in our company.”
The clacking of steel striking the flint mingled with Benjamin’s amused chuckles as Sikras snapped the last stick and set it aside. Familiar rustling captured his focus, and he squinted to see the shavugin had returned, pale bones like a beacon in the spreading darkness. A limp and bloodied hare dangled from its jaws.
Sikras pried the hare from the undead beast’s maw. “Well done. I can’t say I’m delighted that you chose the most adorable of the forest creatures to slaughter, but calories are calories.” He passed the rabbit to Benjamin who immediately set to processing it.
A glimpse of the meager firewood pile guaranteed a few hours of heat at most. Sikras studied the soulless shavugin, mindlessly awaiting additional instruction. It would’ve been easy to deploy it again, but the annoyance of fetching more wood himself paled in comparison to the guilt brought by unnaturally forcing labor from dead animals. Vessik had always hated exploiting the deceased.“I don’t enjoy disturbing their eternal rest,”he would say with a grimace. And Sikras didn’t enjoy disturbing Vessik. Blood and bone, what he would give to hear another one of Vessik’s lessons on exhibiting empathy. With a sweep of his hand, he severed concentration on the spell, and the bones clattered lifelessly atop the soil and grass.
Digging a knuckle into a sore spot on his back, Sikras glimpsed Helspira, who was once again enamored with the little wastrus plant poking from between the high grass.
He couldn’t tell which was gentler, her smile or her touch, as she brushed her thumb over the fuzzy leaf. Her expression was as infectious as the plant itself. “I’ve never seen someone grin so broadly when handling wastrus before.”
“How could they not?” Her voice was reflective, admiring. “It’s beautiful.”
“Farmers would beg to differ. It’s an invasive species. Chokes out a lot of crops, and it’s highly toxic if ingested.”
She flashed him a smirk. “Lucky for me, I’m not eating it.”
“You sure? Might pair well with that corpse I resurrected.”
A short laugh rattled her frame before she plucked the small plant and held it out to him. “Touch it.”
Sikras arched a brow, hesitating longer than he wished he would have before he ran a finger over the wastrus’ velvet texture. Funny, he had grown up around wastrus his entire life and had never touched it before. The preconceived notion that it was nothing more than a nuisance had been enough to deter such actions. The plant was universally disliked. In fact, he couldn’t recall a single soul who had spoken well of it. Yet the wastrus’ texture matched that of the soft part of a horse’s nose, and Sikras couldn’t call to mind a single instance where anyone had anything bad to say about soft horse noses.
Just like that, it suddenly seemed strange that everyone hated wastrus.
The enormous, emerging moon overhead cast a glow, and Helspira’s red iris caught the light. “Isn’t it soft?”
“Very,” Sikras replied.
Seemingly satisfied with his answer, Helspira sat back, rubbing the leaf between her fingers like a soothing ritual. “You’d never find anything this soft in Chthonia. Do you want to touch it, Ben?”
Benjamin ran the skinned rabbit through with his sword and held it over the open flame. “I appreciate the thought, but physical sensations elude me these days.”
“Oh, right, sorry.” Helspira tucked the plant away. “Do you ever miss the little luxuries of living?”
“Uh ...” Benjamin’s skull twisted toward Sikras before he watched the rabbit rotating on his blade like a spit. “Wow. What a question.”
Sikras’s stomach sank faster than a capsized ship in a turbulent sea. The chastising words that Death had uttered unto him at Saelihn’s castle pierced his mind like daggers, and a flurry of nervous laughter sputtered from him. “What a question, indeed. Just goes to show we don’t know one another very well at all, do we? We should remedy that. Right now? Okay. I’ll go first. Helspira”—he blurted the first thing that came to his mind in a desperate attempt to shift the conversation off Benjamin’s thoughts on mortality—“the pink hair. Bold choice. How did, why did, what’s up with that, hmm?”
She blinked once, twice, her brows furrowed at the sight of Sikras’s frazzled body language. “Well, it’s not a choice, really. Warm tones are common in Chthonia—pinks, oranges, yellows. Helps demons blend in with the landscape. Easier to stalk prey. What’s with the gray hair?”
“Genetics.”
Helspira frowned. “You’re lying.”
“Get used to that,” Benjamin muttered. “Sikras is a compulsive liar.”
