When Wirrin woke, she noticed a few things. She was very hot, she was distinctly crusty, and Yern wasn’t laying on her. She sat up, which hurt. She looked around, which also hurt.

  They were at Fauvaushok.

  Yern was sitting by a little fire nearby, grilling some meat. Between Wirrin and Yern was the destroyed carcass of a hippopotamus. Covering Wirrin was a great deal of dried blood.

  Wirrin was feeling pretty good, if she ignored all the pain.

  Fauvaushok, the burning spring, was not a place that many people knew about. Even among the shyolg, people didn’t come here very often. While some of the outer pools were safe to drink from, the whole place stank like fertiliser.

  They weren’t the only sulphur pools Wirrin had been to in Nesalan, but they were one of three, and probably the least pleasant to be around. The year-round warmth of the desert seemed to concentrate the smell in the way that the pools in a way that didn’t happen to the pools in the mountains near Yentava or in the far south of the west.

  Fauvaushok was also the hardest to find of any of the sulphur springs Wirrin knew of. The stream that it fed into the ocean was all but invisible, and it was shielded to the east and south by rocky hills.

  But it also wasn’t empty. It was the only permanent water source this close to Helshok Koll, and it was it was about as shielded from the elements as you could get this far north without leaving the desert.

  A few scraggly trees grew out of the long green grass around the outskirts, and a small herd of gazelle seemed to have decided that they were safe enough to graze at the point furthest from Wirrin and Yern.

  Yern looked up from her little campfire. ‘You’re a horrifying thing to behold, you know,’ she said, then looked back at her cooking meat.

  ‘My mother used to say that,’ Wirrin said. She struggled to her feet, which hurt quite a lot, and headed the opposite direction to the gazelle.

  Wirrin unbuckled her belt and dropped it to the ground, her knife and Leran’s sword landed with a satisfying thud.

  Taking off her boots proved to be a gargantuan struggle. If Wirrin tried to lean down enough to reach them, it felt like every one of her stitches were about to pull free of her flesh. But she’d made them well enough that they were immensely difficult to kick off her feet.

  Yern was still cooking her chunk of hippopotamus and did not offer to help.

  With a lot of groaning, the distinct feeling that she’d loosened all of her stitches, and enough effort, Wirrin managed to get her boots off. That was good enough. Rather than stand back up, Wirrin shuffled herself into the water.

  It was unpleasantly warm and tingled slightly. As soon as she slid into the water, it was suffused with Naertral’s nauseous power. Wirrin hadn’t thought about it, she was too busy trying to get all the blood off, but there was no way this water was actually safe to bathe in.

  ‘Once, my mages loved this place,’ Ulvaer rattled. ‘Light hated that we came here, when it’s mages could not.’

  Wirrin pinched her nose and ducked under the surface to scrub at her hair and face. Her eyes were closed, but she could feel that unpleasant warmth of Ulvaer’s seeping from her into the water.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been too much for them,’ Naertral burbled. ‘I don’t recall being here before.’

  ‘We visited, from time to time,’ Haerst bubbled. ‘Some peace, even away from the island.’

  ‘I knew of it,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘Like Poison, I do not recall visiting.’

  Wirrin bobbed back to the surface. ‘There’s not much point in visiting if you’ll just get sick or die.’

  She started stripping out of the rest of her clothes. Her jacket and shirt were tattered from the fighting and it seemed somehow odd that her trousers were completely unharmed.

  ‘The Mountain and the Swamp did not spend so much time here,’ Ulvaer rattled. ‘It is no surprise that they didn’t visit.’

  ‘I expect Gnaer and Iltavaer would have visited,’ Wirrin said.

  ‘Gnaer certainly,’ Ulvaer rattled. ‘I was not here always, so I cannot say for sure about Iltavaer. Raerna stayed away, of course. Tontaer visited, I’m sure, but could only swim when it had been raining.’

  Wirrin hadn’t realised that she was tense, but it was little surprise when the warm water loosened her muscles. She was feeling sleepy again. She didn’t want to stay in the water quite that long.

  The air was pleasantly cool compared to the water. Wirrin pushed her sodden clothes onto the sandy ground and left them there for the moment. It felt like she’d managed to clean all the blood off, so she meandered over to the boat where it bobbed in the central pool.

  Rather than try to climb onto the boat where it rode at nearly head-height, Wirrin pushed the water down until she could just step over the rail. Even that hurt.

  She didn’t have much in the way of spare clothes with her, most of her actual belongings were back at Willamette’s. But she did have a spare shirt, trousers, and some spare underwear. Her only spare jacket was her winter coat, which she vaguely regretted bringing at all, though she had worn it part of the way north to Ettovica.

  Idly, Wirrin wondered if hippopotamus leather would make for a good jacket, but a glance over at the carcass assured her that it would a struggle to salvage that much skin after whatever she’d done to it when she arrived.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  She stepped back off the boat, leaving her pack and the rest of her stuff there, sliced a piece of the carcass off and groaningly sat down across the fire from Yern. Sitting was not much fun.

  Wirrin used a few sticks to prop her own piece of meat over the fire, swivelled a bit, and lay down on her back. ‘How are you doing, Yern?’

  ‘Physically better than you,’ Yern muttered.

  ‘That’s not difficult,’ Wirrin said. Even turning her head to look at Yern was still uncomfortable.

  Yern was looking into the fire. ‘It’s…’ She sighed. ‘Autautok.’

  ‘Autautok,’ Wirrin agreed.

  ‘But you…’ Yern chewed on her lower lip for a moment. ‘You’re different.’

  ‘Changed or revealed, do you think?’ Wirrin asked.

  Yern kept chewing on her lip. ‘I can’t say it right in Kolgya either. I’m not… you’re who you are, and I knew the whole time. I’m… it’s all so much.’

  ‘Are you revealed, then? Or is this more than you expected?’

  Yern took an experimental bite of her hippo meat and took it off the fire. ‘It’s more than I expected,’ she said. ‘I… It’s more than I expected.’

  ‘It’s more than I expected,’ Wirrin said. ‘But it’s also why I didn’t want you to come with me.’

  Yern nodded and took another little bite. ‘I think… I expected it to be like a story,’ she said, then frowned. ‘I expected it to be like… hethetshya… like being told a story. I didn’t realise that that’s what I expected.’

  Wirrin tried nodding, it didn’t exactly hurt. ‘I…’ She stopped and tried shrugging, it also didn’t exactly hurt. What had she expected? ‘I didn’t give it much thought.’

  Yern snorted. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘I haven’t given any of this much thought, really,’ Wirrin said. ‘I know what I’m doing, but I couldn’t exactly say why I’m doing it. I… I know how the Church usually behaves, but I hadn’t considered that they might actually care about something. I know where I’m going, but not what’s going to be there.’

  ‘Is that the difference, then?’ Yern said. ‘In a story, I know what’s going happen, even if I haven’t heard it before. There’s a way that things go. It’s not… this isn’t it.’ She pointed vaguely at Wirrin’s entire body. ‘That’s not supposed to happen.’

  ‘You say you haven’t given this much thought,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘Aside from that fight, you seem to know what you’re doing.’

  Wirrin took a deep breath, her chest was tight, and sighed. ‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘That’s the point, really. I’ve done enough to know how most things work. I know how frequent the barges are on the rivers, I know no one comes here. I know how to travel the mountains. I even know how to fight, basically. If things start going the wrong way, suddenly I don’t know anymore.’

  ‘Are things going the wrong way, then?’ Yern asked. ‘Isn’t all this… isn’t it what you would expect to happen?’

  ‘It’s like you said: I didn’t realise things had gone… had gone a way I wasn’t really prepared for. I didn’t realise I was expecting things to go a certain way until they didn’t. And there’s only so much I can do about that, so far.’

  ‘So far,’ Ulvaer cackled.

  ‘Until you find Disease and Ice?’ Yern suggested.

  Wirrin shrugged and it was more uncomfortable than last time. ‘Until things are going the way I want them to again.’

  Yern nodded several times. ‘Which will not be the way I want them to go.’

  That was easier. ‘Do you want to go home, then? Back to Ulvaer’s statue?’

  Yern scrunched up her face. ‘I do. But then I’d miss what you’re doing.’ She shrugged a few times.

  Wirrin didn’t shrug back, but she smiled. ‘I would have said the same, when I was your age.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have wanted all this?’ Yern asked, chewing thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t want all this, no,’ Wirrin said. ‘I would have much rather wasted three months with some cute rich kids and gone about my usual business. I’m…’ It was her turn to scrunch up her face. ‘I’m here. This is happening. I’ll do it. But it’s really inconvenient.’

  ‘How about all of your tetalovt revolutionaries?’ Naertral burbled.

  ‘All those people you sent to travel to my mountain when the snows thaw?’ Mkaer rumbled.

  Wirrin groaned. ‘They’re annoying, is what about them.’

  ‘Who’s annoying?’ Yern demanded.

  ‘The Sovtlan and all of them,’ Wirrin said. ‘All those sentimental old people. Even the young ones. They’re annoying.’

  ‘So Ketla was right?’ Mkaer rumbled.

  ‘Yes Ketla was right,’ Wirrin said. ‘All they do is sit around talking about how good it was before the Church, when they had their glorious empire and benevolent Tevinan. Mourn a loss none of them remember or know anything about.’

  ‘You know better, then?’ Yern asked.

  ‘I do know better,’ Wirrin agreed. ‘You know better. That’s what I liked about the desert. It’s… people still know things, they still hold on to knowledge, sure. But it’s not… no one wants to go back, right? You want to go forward.’

  ‘You want to go forward,’ Yern said, a grin plastered across her face. ‘You don’t want to look behind you. We want to be. You want to go.’

  Wirrin groaned some more and sat up just long enough to turn her meat over.

  ‘There’s something behind you that you don’t want to deal with,’ Yern said, waving her hippopotamus chunk for emphasis. ‘So you keep on going forward.’

  ‘We can’t go back,’ Wirrin sighed, laying back down. ‘It’s gone. To seek some ideal society so rigidly, how is that different from the Church?’

  ‘Would they execute you for speaking your own language?’ Yern asked.

  Wirrin decided it was worth the effort to shrug. ‘They might execute you for speaking your own language,’ she said. ‘They might try to force everyone in Nesalan to only speak Estanen and then get upset when everyone refuses.’

  Yern frowned at her, severely. ‘You think so?’

  Wirrin shrugged again, this time it was painful. ‘I don’t know that they won’t,’ she said. ‘And I’m not exaggerating that much, really. They want to re-establish Tevinan’s empire and what they think the south was like back then. But that… it all came from moving, right? The Tevinan family didn’t have an exact plan, didn’t have their social ideals written in a big list posted throughout the south. They didn’t know that Balleh would surrender, or… they didn’t know that the people in the Sovet valley wouldn’t fight them off.’

  Yern kept on frowning at her. ‘I don’t know what any of that means.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Wirrin flapped a hand dismissively. ‘Even if the shyolg don’t actively seek change, like me, they’re open to it, interested in it, right?’

  Yern nodded. ‘It’s an inevitable part of life, so yes.’

  ‘People like the Sovtlan want to undo change. That’s different from wanting to achieve change, if you ask me.’

  ‘Did they ask you?’ Yern switched back to her grin.

  ‘They did,’ Wirrin said. ‘And they didn’t like my answer, so I left again.’

  ‘So that’s one of the things behind you.’ Yern nodded seriously, appeared Wirrin’s notebook from somewhere, made a note, and put it back into her shirt.

  Wirrin snorted. ‘I already told you the other one, leave me alone.’