Arc 2 - Chapter 30.5 Interlude: Moonlit Discussion

Eliza waited until her daughter’s breaths slowed to a contented, steady beat of deep sleep. She gently stood up on the pads of her feet, careful as to not make noise and avoid the creaky floorboards as she dressed.

Gwen had been so good, being back in society. Sure, she did have the episode in the tree, but Eliza had been worried her daughter would go catatonic at so many new people. The fact Gwen had turned around and comforted Eliza herself was just more evidence of how blessed — no, lucky — Eliza was to have had her in her life.

The memory of the coilfish noodles brought a bittersweet smile to her face she couldn’t hide even to herself. They’d brought her back to a time in her life when she was new to the city and a kindly café molly had taken pity on her and let her have a bowl of noodle soup every morning for a month when she had no money or home of her own. The sweet, savory scent of coilfish mixed with the herbal mix above the undertones of wheat noodles had soothed her aching stomach so long ago under the shadow of a kind, if tired smile.

Eliza froze as Gwen shifted slightly, but she stilled shortly after. Eliza resumed dressing and pulled a stashed canvas bag from their hiking bag. The poor thing was quite worn out by now, but it’d seen them through the rough terrain of the island she now knew to be Guine, so it’d more than done its job.

She snuck downstairs with minimal sound. Her steps became slower, more careful. Gwen needed her sleep, but she didn’t want to wake the cottage’s other resident, either.

Sasha was…

Eliza didn’t know what to fully think of her. Kind, certainly, knowledgeable on a level with plants that made her own experience with wildlife survival guides and edible plants she’d scoured pale. By the darkest Paths, she’d even corrected some things the survival guides printed in her time wrong.

She’d taken them in, treated Gwen with medicine she could make very little of and was assuredly expensive, and even fed and clothed them to an extent, given they’d arrived with literally what Eliza could carry with her, staggering in from the wilderness. She’d been in her right to be demanding repayment of some kind at this point, but she simply hadn’t.

But the woman wasn’t revealing everything to them. That was fine, Eliza wasn’t blabbing her own secrets to Sasha, either, but that still left this indiscernible tension, a barrier to full trust she wasn’t willing to cross yet.

Eliza navigated the cottage without issue, everything as they’d left it the night before when they’d come back from the trip to Stonetown. She cut through the front room and through the drying room when she froze.

Sasha was sat slumped over at a table in the corner next to shelves and shelves of dried herbs and other plant material. Her red petticoat was on a nearby stand. Eliza held her breath, but the light snore from Sasha made her sigh in relief.

Eliza glanced over her shoulder to see a mortar and pestle, several bundles of odd, pearlescent flowers similar to the one she’d given Gwen the day before. They really were lovely, and Eliza suspected Sasha could have made a killing back in the capital, Salaca.

Eliza hesitated. She was trying to sneak here, but…

Sasha had been good to her, to Gwen. She might get cold, sitting out here with the hearth’s fire only a dim ember at this point.

Ever so carefully, Eliza took Sasha’s petticoat off the stand to place it upon her shoulders. That should help with the chill, although from experience Eliza knew Sasha would wake with a sore back.

The moment Eliza’s claw made contact ever so lightly with Sasha’s shoulders her mage sense lit up as with the touch she felt the magic pouring off Sasha.

Eliza swallowed as her mind raced and she slowly backed off.

That…

That was a lot of magic she’d felt. In fact, that was more magic than she had and she had a sigil implanted in her spine encouraging growth of her mana channels.

The only people she knew from Illia in her time before everything went wrong who would have that much would be war mages. Mobile artillery pieces.

It…

It changed nothing, she realized. She’d known Sasha wasn’t saying everything, but again, so was she. It did raise questions as to why she had such a developed mana channels when she posed as an herbalist and apothecary in what was a nice, if backwater village that mostly subsistence farmed and sold fish to the Spire in the southeast, creatively named… The Spire, although evidently it had an official designation as “Southeast Spire 04” or something like that.

She’d gotten the basic talk from Sasha, in their first days here, filling in holes Jonas had left her with. Stonetown was on the frontier, a recent-ish resettlement near the edge of the coverage of the Southeast Spire nestled in the Southeast of Illia, largest island of the Illiana archipelago and the de-facto capital of the Illiana Constitutional Monarchy. Or at least it was, Eliza thought with an unhappy thought on her entire civilization. Within the Spire’s coverage, the world was livable, even similar to what the old world had. Outside its coverage, well, “hostile to sapient life” was an accurate term.

Eliza had no idea what to think of the Spires themselves: grand artifacts, evidently made in old Illia by her own people in secret. She’d never heard of the things in her service in the navy; bunkers, refugees, contingencies for total war with Corsen Empire or any of its vassal states, but never a Spire that could hold back a hostile world to survive a literal apocalypse. Sure, she wasn’t a general or grand admiral or the like, but she had been an officer nonetheless and never got so much as a meow about these things. The fact that some form aristocracy had taken hold and ruled from them in seeming fiefdoms across Old Illia was even more confusing and concerning, given no one in her time treated the old nobles as anything more than silly titles of a bygone era, and that included her.

Moreover, someone with Sasha’s mana and thaumic potential? No sane governance would throw her away, even if they had regressed to aristocratic rule. If Eliza was right, her potential meant she was utterly wasted in a small village like this. Something had gone very wrong in Sasha’s life for her to be out here.

Eliza couldn’t say for certain given she didn’t go around poking the villagers, but she was pretty sure even if they all lined up for her to examine for magic, none would burn so intensely as Sasha did.

Shaking off her ponderings,  she crept out of the room, bag in claw.

Outside, the moon was high, and the stars were out. Many of the flowers in the garden around Sasha’s cottage had closed for the night, but a few others had opened brilliant white petals under the moonlight while moths flittered to and from them.

Eliza admired the peaceful scene before departing for the forest.

The sense of peace didn’t last past the tree line, but she’d faced worse. She’d lived the past five, going on six years of her life in the wilderness. Besides, she had the vicious blade Holly had given her and her survival knife in her boot. She’d be fine in these woods.

She didn’t intend to go far. Just out of sight of the cottage with an old stump covered in moss was more than sufficient. She’d have liked to do this indoors, but Sasha’s cottage wasn’t her workshop and she wanted privacy for tonight. She’d trust Gwen with this, but she needed her sleep and didn’t need to worry if it failed.

Here, out of sight, she pulled out her bag. From it she took everything she needed for tonight’s experiment: a length of copper wire, plyers, and the mana battery from the golem.

To call her setup primitive was an understatement. Copper wire alone was…

It was kind of shit to work with, when it came to mana. But it was all she had. Same with plyers. Oh, they were fine plyers, but they were what she’d had in her pocket on the Sandcutter when it sunk. She’d like a proper thaum-meter to gauge mana levels exactly and general conductibility of materials for thaumic energy, a heating element, connection nodes, and more, but well, she had none of that right now.

Still, she would make do.

First, ever so delicately, she took Sandy’s orb out. It was still opaque, none of the energy or life a Spirit Core should display. The only sign it wasn’t a total blank core was a tiny, tiny dot of amethyst. Touching it, Eliza could feel a faint pulse inside, but it was so subtle he might be imagining things.

When installed on a ship with a mana reactor, Sandy’s power requirements were easily taken care of. Outside them was a more complicated matter, but the spirit cores were if nothing efficient. Sure, installed in a ship she needed a lot more power to function, but outside it she didn’t have nearly the same power draw, either. Sandy had lasted months outside the ship, but shortly after leaving the quarry, she’d gone quiet. She hadn’t said a word, just stopped responding as Eliza stubbornly made her way forward step by step. That screamed some sort of error, but what Eliza was unsure of, but she could at least try to figure it out.

Sandy was a friend, an ally, and a comrade. She wouldn’t be left behind.

Patting the orb gently and ensuring it was stable on the stump, she pulled the next item out of her bag. The golem battery was bulky, a big robust thing of iron engraved bands wrapped around crystal meant for intense use. The dull crystal refracted what moonlight there was. She wrapped the wire around the crystal, and ever so slowly tapped it with one finger.

Eliza sighed as she felt nothing. It was still very dead. She pulled out one of her three remaining shard thrower batteries and began wrapping them in wire with intent to create a connection across all three leading to the golem batteries.

She didn’t want to use her N-23 shard thrower’s batteries for the simple reason that weapon was what had saved her life, practically a companion. She also didn’t have a great way recharge them given machinery to do it efficiently had also sunk on the Sandcutter, and port facilities probably no longer existed or were buried under tons of rubble hundreds to thousands of kilometers away She could do that herself, but that’d be inefficient and…

Well, it’d involve submerging the batteries in her own blood. She’d rather not do that. First, it was just inefficient and would take forever using the blood as a pathway to her own life energy converted to thaumic energy to power the batteries. Two, it was uncomfortable as it required a small pool of liquid blood, which required a deeper cut, opening her up to infections. Finally, she just didn’t like seeing her own blood. Yet it was a rough way to charge things without equipment she’d learned in her survival training, although that had been more focused on general recharge of mana batteries as a whole. Still, the basics could apply.

With all that in mind, she’d happily use the batteries as a preferred alternative, but the issue was their design. She’d read her history. Early shard throwers were infamous for expending all their energy in a single shot. The newer designs in her N-23 were efficient to a frightening degree, and the batteries reflected that design philosophy in their low but consistent output resistant to wear and tear. Quality made, compact, practical, and really gods damned annoying given she needed a burst of thaumic energy they were designed to literally be resistant to providing.

Wrapping the other end of the wire crisscross around the thrower batteries and the golem battery, she created a connection and focused. Beneath her claw tips she felt the slow but steady pulse of mana in the smaller battery.

It took a bit, especially given she was pushing them to do the opposite of their intended function, but she was gradually able to siphon some mana from the bound N-23’s batteries and into the cruder, but more robust golem’s battery.

This took nearly forty-five minutes of focus and effort. It was about as tedious as working on formula tables for calculus. But it was done.

A poke with an index claw confirmed the battery faintly thrumbing with power. Nowhere full, but it was enough for her purposes.

Reworking the wire with her pliers, she delicately wrapped it around Sandy’s orb and then connected it with the extended length to the battery. Biting her lip, she willed the golem’s battery to expend all its energy in one go.

The mana flow was jerky and nearly unresponsive to her will for a long moment before it sluggishly flowed into Sandy much slower than she’d have liked, which she could only blame on doing this in the woods with a piece of wire and pliers and a golem battery that was likely fifty years old before the damn world ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Some dissipated into the air and left her perception, but a bit did seep into the sphere. The amethyst star at her sphere’s core flickered, and for a few moments Eliza saw the amethyst expanding before it promptly retracted.

Eliza slumped. Failure.

Eliza had hoped it would be an easy fix and Sandy would wake up with that. With Gwen sick until recently, she’d been too worried her daughter would die on her, she lacked a proper workshop that would make this setup easier, and opportunities just to try were just… rare. She was a guest, Sasha’s cottage wasn’t hers, and while cozy, it wasn’t exactly a grand sprawling complex where she could make use of a room as an impromptu workshop without notice.

“So, this is where you went off to,” a voice spoke said softly from behind her.

Eliza whirled in shock and no small amount of panic to see Sasha leaning against a tree behind her on the edge of the clearing, red shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

Eliza willed her beating heart to calm as Sasha arched a delicate brow. “Sasha! I, er, just felt like a, a, um, midnight walk, yes,” Eliza stammered and hoped Sasha bought it.

“A midnight walk. Well into the tree line and out of sight of the cottage. Beyond the night lilies marking the border of my cottage I told you signified the safe area,” Sasha said, slightly incredulous but with a note of amusement in her voice.

“And you’re not buying it, are you?” Eliza slumped.

“Not at all. I think your daughter might be better at lying than you are,” Sasha said with a giggle into her hand.

Eliza winced. That wasn’t… wrong. She’d lost her first paycheck in the military on gambling after being talked into a card game. It was a poor choice, in retrospect, and a sign of things to come.

“I guess I can’t ask you to forget what you saw?” Eliza tried in a vain hope for…

She honestly didn’t know at this point.

“No,” Sasha sang back.

Eliza sighed. “How much do you know, then?” She might as well gauge how much she had to reveal, then. Or…

Did she? Jonas’s words made her wary, but, was there harm in just saying everything to a woman who’d saved her daughter’s life and done so much for practically nothing in return?

She thought, and thought, and thought, but in this moment, she…

Didn’t know what to say. What should she say. She’d almost rather deal with a monster leaping out at her then trying to talk her way out of this.

Gods she missed Tomas. He’d smooth talk his way out of this without a blink.

“You know, maybe a bit of extended trust is in order? Although I suppose it’s nothing you might not learn from the villagers in Stonetown, if you stick around long enough,” Sasha mused, stepping closer into the clearing. Eliza didn’t miss this, as it let her get a better look at the stump and she interposed herself quickly even while realizing it was useless.

“I used to live in the Spire, you know? Our spire, that is, not the one you came from,” she said, looking up at the stars. “I was right up there with all the, what’s the phrase Megan used? ‘Overwound nip smokers addicted to the smell of their own assholes’ type of nobles,” she said with a straight face. The unexpected vulgarity made Eliza snort, prompting a smile from Sasha. “Would even say I was from an important family, but…” Sasha sighed.

“I made a mistake I couldn’t take back, and by the time I realized I was in too deep… well, it was well too late. One thing led to another, and now I’m here, Stonetown’s own, local ‘governess’,” Sasha said with a sad smile and emphasis on that last word. “As if it has any meaning. A meaningless title, for a meaningless girl. Even the town councilor outranks me at this point,” Sasha’s sarcasm came through, in that last remark.

“I…” Eliza began, unsure where to begin.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, Eliza Mor,” Sasha said, face twinged with sympathy. “No mother walks in with a nearly dead daughter in her arms from the northern wilderness is necessarily well. But, I do hope I have earned at least a modicum of trust for what I have done for the two of you.”

Eliza swallowed. She was right. By the dead gods, she was right. And…

Eliza wanted to trust someone. She was so, so tired of being alone, of being the only one she could truly rely on, of not having people she could confess. She trusted Sandy, but Sandy was gone. Even before they left the island, it’d been years since she had any contact with other catfolk, since she’d even heard a casual Hello that wasn’t out of her daughter’s mouth.  She wanted that contact, someone to just confide in, and more.

Eliza sniffled, just a little. “You’re right. Just let me go at my own pace, okay?” she said, to which Sasha nodded. “I’m not sure how much I am prepared to share. It all feels so insane… sometimes, it feels like a nightmare that only occasionally veers back to dreams.” Eliza sighed. “You know how I told you we were from the Northern Spire?”

“Yes,” Sasha said simply.

Eliza really had to work at the ball in her throat. “It’s not exactly that. It’s more complicated, but I think it’s safe to say we’re not from any spire,” Eliza said. Sasha’s eyes shot open wide and then narrowed to focus on Eliza. “Gwen and I…” she trailed off, taking a seat on the stump now and feeling silly for trying at all to hide Sandy given what Sasha had clearly seen. “We have nowhere to go, at all. I think the old play comes to mind, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’?” Eliza didn’t expect Sasha to get it, but surprisingly, she did. It was nice to know one of her favorite plays was still around.

The weight on Eliza’s shoulders intensified as she spoke. “But, until recently, we had a third. A good, wonderful friend, a comrade, who helped us survive.”

Eliza picked up Sandy’s orb and showed it in the moonlight, clearly for the first time. Sasha’s nostril’s flared and her ears went from horizontal to near vertical in an instant. “You recognize this, I take it?”

“A spirit core…” Sasha said, eyes fixated on it. “I’ve only ever seen shattered ones, one or two cracked ones long dead. This… it is still alive? Functional?” she asked, a trace of wonder in her voice.

“Her name is Sandy,” Eliza nodded. “Functional until recently, but she went dormant before cottage, she went dormant. I’ve tried to wake her up a few times since, but it was nothing serious, just giving her a bit of my own mana to not much. Tried tonight with a salvaged golem battery, and it still didn’t exactly work. Only thing I know is she is still there, I can feel the thaumaturgic energy that makes her, her, faintly, but that’s about it.”

“I see,” Sasha breathed and then shook her head. “Pardon, I was expecting a few different scenarios as to what brought you to my door, but this one is exceeding my expectations. I am a bit overwhelmed,” she confessed.

She idly poked at the moss on the ground with her shoe a moment before clasping her claws together, tail twitching excitedly behind her. “Well! I can say with certainty working on your companion in the woods at the dead of night on a tree stump is not the most ideal condition for this sort of work! I’ll allow you use of my workshop from now on.” She sniffed, pointedly. “Just silly skulking out and about like this when we have my cozy cottage and a perfectly good hearth to use instead.”

“What? Excuse, wait, what?” Eliza said, not keeping up.

Sasha stepped forward and offered her claw, a gentle smile on her face. Eliza was struck by the way the moonlight glinted off her gold, red tinted hair. “I understand you’re not ready to trust me just yet, but I see no reason to let your friend stay like that. I have a bit of knowledge here that might be helpful. Plus… I don’t know your situation, not fully, but I know what it’s like to be alone. I’m more than willing to host you and Gwen until the two of you can figure out what you want to do, okay?”

Eliza worked her jaw as she swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she managed, taking the offered claw to pull herself up.

            ~~~~

Arc 2 - Chapter 30.5 Author’s Notes

Heads up folks, we're down to just one more chapter and then arc two is finished. Hard to believe we're almost there, but holy shit it is happening.

That said, I think I’m happy with how this came out. Another case of characters talking and actually communicating, even if they’re not exactly giving away their deepest secrets just yet.

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