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Lily waited, but he didn’t say anything else, brow gently pinched as he stared ahead. Lily didn’t press him harder, worried she may have misstepped on Luka’s behalf for her own gain.

They walked in stretched silence for a while before he took pity on her. “You have to condense the energy. It’s exhausting, but when successful, it will leave your hand cool, but not freezing like handling a soul or, in your case, blood.”

A tentative smile nearly gave away Lily’s surprise. She’d known how to induce the Wraith’s life ending touch for years, and in only a few weeks, she had managed to manipulate a necro aura. Now she was learning how to solidify them. Question after question raced through her mind, but she found herself asking only one: “Souls are really that cold?”

“Is blood?” Draven retorted.

“Not when it’s inside—Ah.”

Blood was warm in a body and cold once spilled. Souls must be the same. It explained how they powered ghosted technology. They had to be cold, or the metal would never withstand them.

She lifted her hand to her line of sight.

Bodies were what gave souls warmth.

“It can be done with a thought,” he continued, “but for you, being a willfully negligent beginner, I’d start with hand motions to get the feel first.” He clenched a tight fist and glanced at her. “Does that help your anxiety with these specters?”

Lily mimicked the movement until what he said caught up to her. “It wasn’t, um…” That was why he answered? Because she was scared of facing them, and this was his way of calming her down? Her heart fluttered in a different manner at the idea. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Draven fumbled around with his own words, eventually skimming them enough to spit out, “You’ll do fine.”

Lily clicked her tongue. “And here I thought it was easy telling someone to be okay with killing.”

“It never is,” he said with uncertainty in a short laugh. “It never gets easier to be told to either.”

That had to be another acknowledgement of his past. Surely Kyer wasn’t going out of his way to ask him to slaughter everyone he came across, nor was he. Draven only reeked of death the one time at the border. She couldn’t tell if it was exaggerating her worries or inspiring relief.

“If it helps,” he said with careful footing after she never responded, “they’re more ghostsoil than human. They show no emotion, and if what you say is accurate, they cannot be reversed or helped, only acting on the energy of the souls they have. They’re—”

“Suffering,” Lily finished.

“Yes,” he responded slowly, maybe picking apart what she was holding back. “I suppose they are.”

Lily dropped her head, plagued by thoughts of death’s dark trace on fish. Would something with an existence as cruel as a specter die peacefully, even with the Wraith? If only she could remember how the aura looked on the Stalker she killed. Luka said he saw something different about her.

“Evelian.”

Draven’s cracked voice pulled her head back up to find him staring a little too intently at the upcoming camp.

“I don’t think I plainly told you,” he began, gripping the material of his coat so hard it must’ve pinched his skin. He relaxed with a defeated sigh. “I’m not responsible for this animal you’re seeing.”

“Oh… I know. I first saw it a while before you showed up. Unless you were tormenting me with it way back then, but I don’t really get that impression.”

“Enjoyable as it is, tormenting you was not included in the conditions of my recruitment.”

Lily bit her cheek to keep from laughing. “Thank the sun for that.”

The camp appeared as did her chill, the warmth from the necro aura wearing off with every step. She spied her tent and wrapped her arms around herself, quickening her pace to meet the comfort of the quilts inside.

“If I had insight into what you’re experiencing, I’d offer it.”

She looked back to give him the last of her attention. He bled against the dark of the tree line, reminding her of the emblems hanging above the streets in Reave’s upper levels. “You don’t think I’m out of my mind?”

“I don’t get that impression.”

It wasn’t the entirety of what she wanted, but she felt… better? Draven being capable of empathy wasn’t going to get her out of being the Wraith, but she did sympathize with him a pinch more, and that made her predicament not so solitary.

“Thank you… for walking me back.”