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Like so many places Orym has been, the Hellcatch Valley is breathtaking from this high. The reason it steals Orym’s breath to look out at it, though…
Well, that’s a different reason entirely.
It’s late, far past the hour Orym usually curls up in the crook of Fearne’s legs, stealing the warmth she has in abundance to stay warm. His quarters feel cavernous, even though Orym chose the smallest of the rooms available, too large for him to comfortably wedge himself into a corner and get the rest he so badly wants. And if he can’t sleep, he might as well be on watch for other threats. Orym keeps his eyes fixed on the distant horizon, or else on Catha as it rises bright and silvery overhead, certainly not looking directly beneath the ship.
The desolate landscape, scarred and marked by more than just the Calamity, but all that befell this place in the age that came after, has an eerie sort of beauty to it. The ship that carried Orym to Jrusar took a different route, from the north, and so his first view of the Hellcatch came that second day, when the last of the Wilds disappeared behind them. Growing all the way up to the edge of the chasm, Orym imagines that the lush jungle once continued all the way to the shores of Marquet until the earth itself collapsed beneath all that teeming life.
One instant with his feet firmly planted and the next tipping, falling backward, one hand extended toward the railing as it peeled away. For a moment, Orym felt like he was the one holding still, that the world was just rotating on an axis around him.
Falling.
Falling.
Is this it?
“Somehow didn’t expect to find you out here.”
Orym looks up and back to find Ashton sauntering their way toward him, one hand thrust into their pocket and the other loosely clasping the neck of a bottle half-full of carmine liquor. The rations they packed for this trip, he supposes. Everyone has their own thing, something to lighten the burden of the journey.
Chetney brought a store of wood in his pack. Fearne bought a satchel of violet-blue dried mushrooms on their last day in Jrusar and has spent the last few nights trying to convince Orym to try one with her. The merchant says it’s the closest thing to seeing the ethereal plane without actual magic.
He snaps himself from the memory with a blink, realizing Ashton’s now standing next to him, leaning against the railing with their feet planted wide enough that the natural rock of the ship doesn’t sway them at all. Their eyes – one lustrous golden brown and the other gray-blue and smooth as a riverstone – are fixed on the ground below, searching.
“Didn’t see anything moving down there,” Orym says, tucking his chin back on the top of the rail and scraping the inky sky with his eyes. “Nothing up there, either. All clear.”
Ashton grunts inarticulately, their mouth pulling with the twinge of a frown, like he’s said something they don’t like. It’s several seconds before they clear their throat and say, “Security or not, no one would have blamed you for staying below deck for one night.”
“Oh, the wounds?” Orym looks down at the deep, purple-red contusions blooming down his arms. There’s a series of matching ones beneath his shirt and breeches and he’s pretty sure he cracked a rib or two when he slammed into the sail of the skyship. It doesn’t feel great, really, but they have a few days before they’re going to be in Bassuras and he’ll have plenty of time to recover before then.
So, rather than make a thing of things that will only heal and fade, Orym shrugs and says, “I’ve been hurt worse.”
“Yeah, and I’ve taken a long fall off a high place before, too. Like I said, no one would blame you if you took the night off from watch duty.”
The fall, of course.
Orym drops his eyes back to the ground below them and quickly snaps his focus back onto the far horizon when his stomach lurches. Ashton’s been watching him for weeks now, always first to pipe up when Orym’s hurt a little more than usual. This is different than lying on the filthy cobbles of Jrusar and staring at the sky, Ashton braced against a nearby wall while shouting for someone to get a healing spell off on Orym.
This is personal for them, a little too close to a bad night at Hexum Manor. Even if Orym knows only the barest facts about what happened that night, even if Ashton insists it’s all fine, he’s seen the way they were after the falling trap in Hytroga’s manor. He witnessed the way they reacted to reliving those memories, stood aside and let them process them the way they needed. It’s personal.
“I don’t want something like that to keep me from being useful to everyone,” Orym answers at last, closing his eyes and getting a flash memory of the first few instants of the fall. His stomach swooping in instinctual terror. His people were meant to burrow, to stay tethered to the ground, and he’d felt the call of gravity then, reminding him that he’s no creature of the air. He has no wings, not even his scraps of magic can save him when he flies too high.
He shudders without realizing, not until he hears Ashton’s soft snort of humorless laughter.
“It’s all right to be afraid. Even fearless Ashari guards are allowed to get shaken up when something like that happens.”
“Oh, I’m no stranger to being afraid. I just can’t let that get in the way. I’d rather face it as much as I need, until I’m not afraid anymore.”
For a moment, there’s no sound but the howl of wind overhead. The sails groaning as they shift course. The planks creaking beneath their feet, enough that Orym grabs hold of the rail tighter. He doesn’t want to be afraid of this. In time, he won’t be anymore.
Ashton’s voice is very quiet when he asks, “Is that what you did before?” There’s another pause that fills with the sound of the Hellcatch and the skyship and the weight of the day. “After the attack on Zephrah.”
For all Ashton likes to tease, pretending they don’t know the difference between Ashari and Zephrah, they’ve been paying more attention than he thought. Orym hums noncommittally.
How many times has he thought about that day, turning over those memories, searching for a revelation about what happened? Reopening that wound over and over until it didn’t hurt him anymore, until he didn’t shy away from it. At the time, it had seemed like the only way to faithfully serve the memory of the people he lost, but Orym’s now starting to wonder if it was just another way to prolong the pain to avoid the betrayal of moving on with his life.
“I suppose I did,” he says with an air of finality, like closing a book and returning it to its place on a shelf. “What about you? Are you doing okay with what happened today?”
Ashton’s face breaks into a fresh smile, but this time they actually look like they’re teetering on the edge of real laughter. His lips fit over the mouth of the bottle, drinking without so much as a shiver, even though Orym can smell how strong the proof is from where he’s standing.
“I see what you’re doing, you know,” he says when he finishes his drink, extending the bottle down to Orym. “And if you want me to let you do it, I will, but I want you to know that I see it.”
It figures Ashton would catch him in the dodge, just as much as it tracks that he’d let Orym get away with it, too. Ashton’s much sharper than he pretends, catching everything around him even if he doesn’t flinch. It’s probably easier to play-act the brute if no one realizes how much Ashton’s catching on to every little detail around him.
“Fair enough.” Orym accepts the bottle and sips more delicately from it, smiling around the edge. It’s bitter and strong, tasting medicinal and strange on Orym’s tongue, but maybe that’s the point.
“You’re not used to people seeing it,” Ashton presses, just when Orym thinks they’ll drop the subject completely. Their eyes have moved from the horizon to Orym alone, incisive and sharp in a way that Orym supposes should make him feel exposed.
“Doesn’t bother me if they do or don’t.” Orym shrugs and takes another drink. He likes Ashton’s coping strategy more the second time, the underlying sweetness rising to the top now that his tongue is partly numb.
“Bothers me, though,” Ashton says, as though it’s a personal affront that Orym would rather keep his peace than trouble everyone else with things they can’t really do anything about. “Most people don’t care to look when someone’s suffering, and you’ll just do it silently and thank them for not saying anything.”
Orym doesn’t argue with that, but the reasons for it aren’t worth discussing here or now. Ashton’s doing a good thing, coming to check to see if Orym is all right after something bad happened. Orym would do the same if their positions were reversed.
So, rather than acknowledging whatever point Ashton is trying to make, Orym offers the bottle back and smiles. “That’s not who you are, though.”
“That’s absolutely who I am,” Ashton answers instantly, the same knee jerk instinct that makes them prefer working with mercenaries, because they’ve learned not to trust the subjective morality of other people.
Orym just hums again, a dissatisfied little noise that he feels in his chest more than he hears it over the sound of the ship.
“You don’t believe me.” Ashton snorts, nudging Orym’s hand with the bottle.
“I don’t.” Smiling, Orym elbows Ashton in the hip and accepts the bottle without drinking, just holding it in the loose ring of his fist. “But if you want me to pretend I do, I will.”
Ashton laughs, bright and loud, a noise that rolls out of their chest like Orym’s startled them. “Asshole,” they say, but they turn to rest their back against the rail and get a clearer view of Orym’s face.
“It must feel liberating, leaving Jrusar without that debt hanging over you.” Debt is the wrong word, Orym knows that, but it’s the one that Ashton preferred to use to describe the deal that kept him chained to a city he has no love for. Jiana Hexum’s reputation precedes her, at least in the circles Orym dwells in. In any case, whatever shape it was in truth, Ashton’s arrangement with Hexum is done. “You could go anywhere now.”
“And yet I’m going to fucking Bassuras.”
Orym thinks of everything he knows of Ashton. They’d said once that the state home they’d taken their name from was in Bassuras. The place Ashton and The Nobodies came from. And now Ashton’s going back, like some backwards homecoming, if such a place could be called home. A place they’re from, as much as Jrusar or – or wherever else Ashton might be from.
Considering all of that, holding it in his hands and then letting go, Orym allows Ashton the brush-off.
“And after? You’re free now.”
Ashton turns a wry smile on him, like they want to say something else. Orym recognizes the instinct to needle him, to poke a little too hard in a soft place, and just as quickly sees Ashton put it away when it comes to Orym.
“If you’re worried that I’m going to ditch the group, I’m not. I – fuck, help me – I think I like all of you, as much as I like anyone. I’m not going anywhere. Or, rather, I guess I’m going wherever you all are.”
Yios, Orym supposes. And then further afield, probably. It had all been so clear before, the day he’d stood in front of the Voice and got the news about the first lead in six years. A new purpose. A path – any path – set before him was better than staggering through the wreckage of his life, trying to find his own way. Now all his hopes of a swift resolution were dashed that first day in Heartmoor Hamlet, when it was clear Orym had run out of rope on the lead with Estani and the Lumas twins.
He says none of that, though, resting his weight against the rail and watching Catha. It feels safer to ask, “How does it feel, though? Being free to choose.”
Ashton hesitates before answering, their voice strained when they say, “Doesn’t feel real, you know?”
Orym does know. He looks up to see Ashton watching his face, like they’re taking measure of him and deciding something.
“I guess I’m not sure when it starts feeling real,” Ashton confesses, the words rushing out of them like it’s a dark secret they can’t carry on their own anymore. “I get up in the morning and think it was all some elaborate dream. One day I’m pretty sure I’m going to wake up and find out it was.”
Orym sees the gesture for what it is. A hand extended across a chasm. Even under the circumstances, Ashton wouldn’t be vulnerable for just anyone, wouldn’t come above deck to find Orym if they didn’t mean it.
Shadows dropping from the sky. It doesn’t last a minute. It doesn’t last half a minute.
No one screams when Orym’s world ends, is the thing. There’s just chaos one minute and silence the next to mark the ragged edges of two lives broken off too soon.
Bloody, grim silence, and Orym’s cruelly unbroken life stretching out ahead of him.
“It never starts feeling real,” Orym explains, blinking the memory away. Blinks past all the surreal unmemories that came after, when he was still getting his bearing in the world. “You get better at living in that unreal state.”
He’s sure Ashton sees him then, because they hold that moment of tense silence between them before releasing it with a smile that’s more comforting than Orym thinks they know. “Fake it ‘til you make it?”
“That’s all I’m doing,” Orym returns, smiling easily for them. “I never figured it out. I just kept going, waiting for it to feel real. Or maybe for it to stop feeling so real so I could wake up.”
“Let me know if you ever do.”
In the middle distance, a bird unfurls its enormous wingspan and drops into a free falling dive, apparently spotting some living prey among the shattered landscape. Orym sees the moment it fans out its wings, catches itself before hitting the ground, and then lifts back into the sky. He starts to say something about it to Ashton, but the words catch in his throat when he looks up at their guileless expression as they study the wide expanse of the Hellcatch beneath them.
Moonlight makes the crystal in Ashton’s head shimmer brighter, casting moonbows in the wisps of low-hanging clouds around the ship. The gold stitching together all their cracks is luminous against the brackish tinge Ashton’s skin takes in darkness.
For an instant, it leaves Orym breathless, until the winds shift and Ashton’s demeanor with it. The gleam of his eyes are just as sharp as ever when they slide down toward him. “You call Dorian yet today?”
“It’s barely morning back home.”
It’s an immediate deferral, kneejerk and instinctive by now to keep himself from thinking of Dorian, how much he misses him. How different today might have gone if he’d been there. It comes out so fast that Orym doesn’t even have the chance to stop himself from saying home, when he’s not entirely sure where that is. Whether it’s Tal’Dorei in general, or a more ephemeral place than that.
Either way, Ashton arches one crystalline eyebrow, the pupil of their brown eye dilating a little more than the cloudy one. This apparently is one thing Ashton doesn’t plan to let go. “You think it might make you feel a little better?”
“I told him we were leaving Jrusar a few nights ago,” Orym protests softly. “Just in case, you know?”
“That was before you almost died.” Ashton looks back to the ground with a deepening furrow in their forehead not unlike the deep grooves in the earth below. Thinking about a promise they made to Dorian before he left, Orym supposes. A promise he didn’t ask Dorian to extract anymore than he asked Ashton to swear it.
“I’m fine,” Orym insists, putting away that single moment of gut-clenching fear when he’d known he was going to die. The same one that Ashton must have felt, watching from somewhere else. They’d both thought he was going to die and he’d lived.
There’s the smallest tug at his pocket before Orym realizes that its contents are noticeably lighter. He looks up in time to see Ashton turn the Sending stone over in his palm, staring at it for a few seconds before beginning to trace the outline of the rune with one crooked thumb.
“What are you–”
“Calling your best friend.” Ashton lifts the stone to their mouth. “Orym fell off the skyship today. Probably could have used those boots of yours. He says he misses you.”
“You could have said I’m alive,” Orym suggests dryly and rolls his eyes at Ashton’s smug grin when they flip the stone back toward him to wait for Dorian’s inevitably panicked reply from the pulsing rune. “And I never said that.”
“Didn’t have to. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, either.” Ashton leans their forearms against the rail and lifts the bottle back to their mouth. Their voice is lower, more serious when they add: “Don’t wait until you almost die to call him to say you’re all right. It’ll make you both feel better.”
Orym wants to tell them he doesn’t have that kind of dependent friendship with Dorian, that Dorian trusts him to look out for himself the same way Orym trusts him to do the same. That there's no reason to bother Dorian with a blow-by-blow when he's handling his own business. It’s good advice, though. Too good to just brush it off.
So, he tucks his head down against the rail and accepts Ashton’s offer of the bottle one more time. “Gets cold up here at night,” he says, thinking of the unappealing prospect of trying to sleep in his too-large bed.
“Always welcome to be my big spoon,” Ashton says with a loose grin, like they’re hoping Orym will take it for a joke when he knows very well it’s not. They tap the rail twice and start to push back. “But you’re right, it’s fucking cold out here.”
Orym begins to bid them good night, but he never gets the words out before the stone flares to life in his palm, voices cutting through the night air.
“–call back right now–”
“I did – Orym, you’re okay, right? I heard your voice, but Ashton said–”
“Off a skyship, Nancy?”
He looks up to find Ashton with their head tipped back, chest shaking with silent laughter, and Orym can’t help it, either. He folds his small fingers around the stone and holds it up against his chest and laughs more than he has in weeks. Years, maybe.
“One use per day, too,” he says when it finally passes, leaving Orym feeling lighter, like he broke the seal on something that needed to be released. His smile is soft and sincere when he bumps a fist into Ashton’s hip. “Thank you, Ashton.”
“Don’t mention it,” Ashton says, their face making it clear that they mean it literally, starting to pull back from the rail, from Orym, from this tentative, vulnerable space neither of them are used to being in.
Orym turns away from the edge for the first time since he came out to the deck, but he doesn’t let go of the side, watching Ashton. There’s something else, something maybe Ashton hasn’t heard before. Something he might only believe if he heard it from Orym.
“Ashton,” he calls, just loud enough that Ashton can brush the whole thing off if they want. “You make a good leader for us. Coming out here to check on someone who had a rough time. Maybe you don’t want to do this forever, but if you want to lead, then I’m right behind you.”
The look Ashton passes his way is calculating, a little like Ashton is trying to decide if Orym is making fun of him. Their cheeks darken then, a dusty emerald that’s near onyx in the moonlight.
“Appreciate it.” Ashton clears their throat noisily, the chains on their fingers jangling brightly in the night air when they pat Orym gently on the shoulder, not pulling away at all when Orym rests one hand on top of theirs, gripping no tighter than he’s holding onto the rail. “I’d follow you, too, Orym. Any of us would.”
Orym begins to protest, the same things he’s said to Dorian and Fearne before: I’m not a leader. I have no idea what I’m doing and I don’t want to fail you.
All he manages is an incoherent sputter, though, and Ashton laughs. They don’t try to change his mind. They don’t tell him that his refusal to lead is why people want to follow him anyway.
All Ashton does is sweep their eyes from Orym’s toes back up to his face before gesturing to the stairs leading below deck. “Come on, then. Eight hours, just like you asked. I’ll even be the big spoon.”