Side A – Yasgrid
Yasgrid woke to the bright sunlight of a new day. Beneath her, soft mosses formed a pleasantly fragrant bed and the roots of a great oak rose providing shelter and the shade which let her sleep the short while after dawn that she had.
“I guess we’re okay?” she said, speaking to the Darkwood without expecting any sort of answer.
“That depends entirely on you and whether you think you’re going to get away again,” Kayelle said.
Yasgrid bounced to her feet like a startled cat. Beside her, King sat on a low tree limb, unperturbed as he groomed himself.
“As you can see, she is unharmed,” King said as though the encounter was entirely inconsequential.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not true,” Kayelle said. “But you do seem to at least have all of your limbs. Marianne will be pleased even if it means she loses our bet.”
“Uh, hello?” Yasgrid said, at a loss for how Kayelle could have found her, and what had driven Kayelle to seek her out in the first place.
No.
The how was obvious with a moment of consideration.
It was sitting on a branch cleaning the back of its head with a paw.
The why though?
“Hello. You do remember me don’t you?” Kayelle asked.
Yasgrid glanced down at her hands and found they were the usual Elven one’s she’d had at the end of her usual Elven arms for months. The dream of the basalt and lava hadn’t been real. But it still felt real.
In her chest a warmth stirred and a deep an concerning suspicion crept into her mind.
Its okay, she whispered to her heart, still time for slumber, you can rest for a while yet, no need to get up.
The answer wasn’t one formed in words but in groggy contentment.
Her dream wasn’t as unreal as it perhaps should have been.
“Yasgrid? You know who I am right?” Kayelle asked, mischievous joy shading over to genuine concern.
“Someone I would call sister, though we share no parents,” Yasgrid said. “Or I suppose I could call you Kayelle. That might be simpler.”
It was a harmless bit of mischief, but it accomplished Yasgrid’s aim of putting Kayelle at ease.
“For the gods’ sake, you’re as awful as Nia is,” Kayelle said.
“More so I suspect,” Yasgrid said with a grin.
“Oh no, no, that is not going to become a competition,” Kayelle said. “I miss that little bug, but she can handle being her charming self even from beyond the horizon just fine it seems.”
“You saw the town,” Yasgird said, guessing that was why Kayelle had sought her out.
“The one that looks like the Darkwood decided to play dress up as a mountaintop?” Kayelle asked. “Yes. Lovely place. Lovely people too. Surprising number of them in surprisingly good shape as well. Most notably the ones who’d, by all accounts, been burned to death in the fire.”
Side B – Nia
Nia awoke to find herself where she wanted to be for the rest of her life. Margrada’s arms gave the morning a heavenly warmth and weight which made Nia feel like the whole world was hugging her.
Then she made the mistake of trying to move.
Stonelings have amazing constitutions from what Nia had observed. She’d come to be certain over the months that she’d made out better in the trade just based on how much strength and stamina her body held.
The problem, she discovered, is that Stoneling alcohol is brewed, distilled, or alchemically concocted to account for the general Stoneling body mass and poison resistance.
Technically, this wasn’t a new discovery. She’d drunk with the Roadies before after all. Somehow though, each time she reminded anew, and each time her soul cried out in promise that ‘never again would she so much as touch a drop of the foul hate-liquid, if only she could be spared the agony she’d brought on herself this terrible morn’.
She tried to credit herself that, this time, she wasn’t tempted to pick up a Shatter Drum and attempt to ‘fix’ herself through it’s magics. Nia knew she was an idiot – no one with even a handful of functional brain cells would have drunk as much as she had – but she was enough of a Drummer to know that Terrible Cosmic Power plus Splitting Headache did not equal anything good.
“You’ll want some of this,” Margrada said and passed Nia a small jug. “Just sip it at first though.”
For a moment, Nia thought Margrada had snuck some of the Roadies’ rotgut back from the celebration and was forced to wonder if this was an attempt to ensure that Nia would never play recklessly again but ensuring her capacity for coherent thought was permanently obliterated.
That wasn’t Margrada’s style though. If she really didn’t want Nia playing the drums, she had vastly more interesting methods of keeping Nia’s hands busy.
The sip Margrada had suggested proved to have none of the harsh bite of the Roadies rotgut. In fact, it had no alcohol to it whatsoever. Instead the drink held a mildly bitter and salty taste which Nia found her body greedily wanting more of, despite her stomach being previously uncertain that it would ever desire to hold anything ever again.
“You are a goddess. A living, incarnate, goddess,” Nia said after her fifth, increasingly longer, sip.
“You can thank Horgi for that,” Margrada said nuzzling the back of Nia’s neck. “He said we need to functional today, so he could spare of a jug of ‘Roady Breakfast’ for us.”
“They were holding out on us before?” Nia said, too grateful for the reprieve to be anything approaching unhappy with her friends.
“They didn’t need us the last few times,” Margrada said. “Apparently this time things are different.”
Nia took the feeble amount of brainpower which hadn’t been drowned under the tide of celebratory drinking and squeezed it for any clue what the Roadies might need her help for.
It wasn’t like they were going to trust her to carry or pack away the…
Uh oh.
“The drums,” she said. “What did we do to the drums!”