Chapter 9: Tea, Tears, and Turmoil

No book ever mentioned the annoying and disastrous parts of traveling. If the heroes of said books spent a night in an inn, it offered good food, live-music, great beer and weird cloaked figures sitting in the back to point them where to go next. Sylph and Brandon had spent the night after their first trip with a mild stomachache, courtesy of cheap and fatty food, in a grubby and noisy room at the harbor. Their live-music was a lady shouting profanities at some wyvern minding their own business, and nobody even heard about Linz or wore a dark cloak.

The second flight was not much better. Sylph lay on a rough leather mat and glanced at the three metal playing cards between her digits. Her gaze lingered on the blue four sitting on top of the deck between them. She wanted to win just once on this trip, but Brandon was an opponent like no other. He occasionally glanced over the top of his four cards that badly hid his grin. “Go ahead, play your card,” it said, “I have the counter in hand.” He knew her next move before she did.

Her tail twitched. She prepared to strike hard and aggressive and tugged on the middle card, the red three. But then, a sour smell crept up from behind and burned in her nose. She gagged and nearly added her breakfast to her hand. A slow breath through her mouth calmed her stomach, but the smell lingered. Brandon turned away, paling. The Sol behind her had spent the better part of the last two hours rethinking his breakfast and maybe last night’s dinner too at this point. Dragons were laughably prone to airsickness. Airships ripped apart their sensitive sense of balance like a storm a butterfly. She tried to ignore the smell by focusing on the cards and her plan of attack. Play the red three to get one more card and-

A piercing scream tore through the ship, and Sylph doubled over in pain. She fumbled for the pair of borrowed socks next to her and pressed them hard against her ears. The, now bearable but no less pleasant, infernal noise continued its assault through the socks. It probed her sanity and battered her temperament with every passing second; Ships should carry emergency earplugs, all enclosed spaces with nowhere to run should.

Brandon exhaled sharply and stared at the ceiling. “A baby on an airship is never a fun experience. I can’t imagine how painful that is on your ears.” He laid down his hand of cards next to the ones she dropped and studied them for a second. “Game could’ve gone either way if you played the yellow five. But knowing you, you would not conserve your hand and play the red three instead, running straight into my counter. Am I right?”

Sylph closed her eyes and grumbled into the leather mat beneath her in defeat. She was not cut out to play Sword and Shield, it involved too much thinking about other people.

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A few painful hours later, they stepped out and onto the dirty cobbles of a distant harbor. Sylph drew in the chilly air and basked in the sounds of whirring engines, markets, and conversations. She could not quite place it, but it all felt distant, new. Maybe it was the spindly pine trees peeking down at her and unusual cold, or it was the people. Her gaze followed two white Metia heading down the road. Seeing them in Carthia or Halfhill was uncommon, and she could barely recall any besides Dalian. Between the white Metia that dominated the dragon population and pasty Aer in between, the crowds felt very bland and lacked color. Even the humans omitted the diverse tunics for thicker cloaks and jackets.

Linz was still half a day’s travel away and finding a suitable airship and a willing captain proved more difficult than she had imagined. They found one, an older human man with once red hair that had turned gray, and a prominent scar through his thin beard. After a brief conversation, he agreed to take them for an appropriate, albeit lower, sum than she had expected.

His ship looked even older than he did, the hull had been re-coated enough times to spot several layers of paint flaking off at the edges. A few of the planks showed visible splinters and bends, but none of them were rotten. The name was written in bold letters on the back. “The Great Escape.” A strange name for a trader, but who knew what he had been up to in his youth. It was not very comforting.

She recalled a conversation with one of Dalian’s friends, an old brick-red Sol named Bastion. “You want to know how a captain treats his ship? Look at the engines. Never set a pfod in one with a broken engine.” The four engines turned and whirred in unison. Sylph was no engineer, but her ears could not be fooled. An engine running rough was easily heard; to her relief, none of them did. Now that she paid closer attention, she spotted all the tiny details, the replaced screws and bolts and the new piping all around. The deck was as clean as a whistle. While old, the captain clearly cared for the ship.

They entered the hold, and it became apparent that passengers were not the usual cargo. Barrels and bundles of plants filled half the hold. A smell of something sharp permeated the deck, Brandon recognized it as an additive to preserve food on long journeys. It was not their concern what he transported, she was simply glad about the lack of tiny human noise machines.

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Sylph lay curled up on two boxes, Brandon’s heavy blanket slung over her back. The wind blew in from gaps in the hull and she regretted their choice. Her legs trembled with every gust and she had stopped feeling the front of her snout. She shivered as cold tendrils crept up from below, through the gaps in the boxes, and sapped the heat straight from her scales.

She stared at Brandon sitting on his box in his long, warm, fur coat and hot cup of tea in his hands. His nose had a red tint, something she learned to associate with humans being cold, but he looked a lot more comfortable than she felt. She knew he secretly smirked about her using the blanket as he rested his head against the wall behind him.

Considering that she hatched here in the north and spent the worst part of her hatchlinghood in an icy stable, this should be no problem. She tightened the blanket and felt the water being squeezed through her body. The warm winters in Carthia made her soft.

A kettle with steaming herbal tea kept the cold manageable. It had barely any taste, but it was hot. Sylph reached out from under the blanket and grabbed her filled wooden bowl. She gulped it down in one go. Instead of falling down to her stomach, the warm tea gathered in a blob near her front. With ease, she balanced it around her body in a circle. Warmth spread from the heat source until it had cooled down to body temperature and she let go of her concentration.

Repetition was the key to success. The saying held true for her ability as well. Every liquid she consumed had done a sightseeing tour around her body. Sylph sat the steaming bowl back down on the box between them. She grabbed the kettle by the wide handle and refilled the bowl once more. Brandon’s calculating gaze flicked back and forth between her and the massive teapot.

“Do you know how often I went and refilled it?”

Sylph shook her head. “No clue.”

“You are hiding something from me, aren’t you?” He leaned forward, holding his teapot in both hands.

Her tail flicked up against the blanket. She had revealed nothing at all. “I don’t know what you mean.” The answer was halfhearted. If Brandon asked like that, it was because he had already found an answer.

“If I counted correctly, you drank about twenty-nine bowls of tea and you haven’t moved since you crawled under that blanket.” His fingers scratched through the stubble on his chin.

The very moment he mentioned it, she noticed the heaviness lingering in her body. Did she really drink that much? “I am cold, that’s all. The tea helps.”

“Everything is poisonous in the right amount, even water.”

“Yes, that’s called drowning,” Sylph snorted.

Brandon put his own pot down next to her bowl. It was quite a lot smaller in comparison. “Let’s say you are a bit more than double my weight,” he started, and tapped the cup.

“Don’t talk about my weight like that.”

Brandon ignored her comment and continued. “You drank more than enough to poison yourself.” His eyebrows raised with curiosity. “Yet you show no sign of water intoxication, or even discomfort; except being cold. Which may be because of the excessive amount of water you have to keep warm.” He stood up and eyed the blanket. “Question is, where did it all go?”

Sylph sighed and cracked a smile. “You weren’t supposed to find out.” Brandon loved to question and solve everything he deemed unusual. She grabbed the seam of the blanket and pulled it away for the grand revelation. His eyes widened, and he drew in a sharp breath. “What in Myria’s name is that?”

Her body had bloated like a corpse in water. She poked her side and watched the scales undulate. The feeling was unlike anything she felt before, as if her entire mass had been detached from her bones and wobbled freely. “And for my next trick, watch me fill this bowl.”

“How?” Brandon called out in alarm.

She silenced him by lifting her arm and hovering her pfod a few inches above the empty bowl. “Watch.” Do not drench the ship, she told herself and grabbed hold of the center inside her torso. She balanced the sluggish thing up into her pfod and the water got into motion. The act was akin to holding a bottle between two fingertips and trying to tip it just enough to fill a cup. Tip it a little too far and the bottle would flip.

The first drops formed at the bottom and gathered into a small stream that splattered into the bowl. The stream picked up in volume and Sylph tried to control it by pulling backwards before she passed the dreaded point of no return. But the point resisted, remained in place as if glued to her pfod; the bottle tipped.

Sylph stemmed all of her thought into stopping the approaching flood. Water swelled inside her chest, pushing deeper and deeper into her arm. The stream grew larger and the bowl overflowed.

“Sylph?”

She clenched her teeth and pulled as hard as she could. “Working on it!” Water dripped to the floor, then the point moved the fraction of an inch. Sensing the opportunity, Sylph summoned all the willpower she had. “Stay. In. Side!” The point shot back into her torso and had a tangible impact as the water followed and returned. Her muscles throbbed and ached as though she had just finished one of Veria’s workouts, but the stream of liquid stopped and reacquainted itself in her body. It ended well, but was not quite what she had wanted or expected. “Getting it out is a lot harder than getting it in.” Sylph rested her head on the box beneath her.

Brandon stared, a gleam in his eyes, and gestured wildly around the room. “What? I mean how?”

She grabbed the overfilled bowl and flicked its content over her head. The water mixture vanished into her scales with little effort. Her scales puffed up with pride as she raised her aching head. “I am a pathwalker now.”

She saw the questions race into his head. “That’s incredible. I thought you could only be born as a pathwalker? I know you weren’t. You wouldn’t have been able to keep that to yourself for so long. So what happened? When did that happen? Last week? Today?” Brandon dragged his box closer to her and the wood scraped over the floor with an awful screech that made her ears quiver. “How does it work? Is it water from your body or magically created? It’s absorbed, isn’t it? It is all the tea.” He bombarded her with more questions and she could hardly recall the first one as he answered himself.

Sylph picked up the blanket from the floor and slung it back around her. The tip of her tail was already numb from the cold. “It happened the night before we started the journey. And is partially why I know they lied to me. I woke up in a literal lake in my nest and leaked water all over the place. I have figured out that I absorb and release liquid that I physically touch, maybe even filter it if I want to,” she stopped for a second, guessing that she had answered the initial flurry, “And I fell asleep underwater.” She refilled the bowl once more. “And I can inflate myself with tea,” she added, and watched the scales on her arm bulge. “I wish I could answer more, but I am new to this too.”

Brandon watched the steam curl up from his cup. “Just like that, huh? Magic is strange, but you turning into a pathwalker overnight goes against all that I know about it. Why did that happen?”

“Dalian talked about some recent developments. I’ll admit that I eavesdropped on that conversation too.” Sylph watched the small bubbles vanish on her tea to avoid his glance, but not for long. He shot her the expected, disappointed look. It is not like she did it on purpose every time. “But.” She turned back and raised her voice. “Pathwalkers are born to pathwalkers. You get what I am saying, right?” She downed the bowl of tea. Brandon nodded. “Maybe I was stolen for nefarious purposes because of it, or, far more logically, my parents were afraid of what terrible things I might be able to do. Or they lost me, or I was stolen. One of those reasons.” She refilled her bowl of tea again and did not bother drinking it. Instead, she absorbed the tea directly through her pfod to satisfy more of Brandon’s tangible curiosity and warm her arm doing so. “Either way, they gotta answer for what they did.”

The tea settled into her body and as the last drop joined the vast ocean inside of her, a ripple followed, an icy shiver that brought about a wave of nausea. She stared at the empty bowl and the mere image of water made her stomach turn and throat tighten. A sick heat spread through her body like it did when she woke up in the middle of the night after eating something bad. “I think my body had enough tea.” She wiggled out of the blanket. “It’s going to be on the floor in a minute,” she pressed through her teeth, not daring to open her mouth too much.

A second wave brought her stomach all the way up to her throat. Brandon reached towards a compartment in the hull behind him and pulled out an old metal bucket. She stared, and her stomach churned. “I’d rather make it to the washroom,” she squeezed the words through her throat, but there was no way she would. A tightness crawled up her throat, her head spun, and she jumped for the bucket.

Water burst from her mouth, not from her stomach, as she had expected. The torrent continued to pour for several seconds and the bucket filled completely. She coughed, and her shaking claws dug into the rusty rim. It seemed to be water and did not smell, thankfully, but a sour taste clung to her tongue. Sylph let go and climbed back up on the boxes. While she had lost barely a fraction of the water inside of her, the nausea retreated and her body felt as though nothing had happened. “I guess I figured out what happens when I overdo it, again.”

“Then maybe you should stop.”

She took one last, longing gaze at the warmth spending liquid and decided that maybe Brandon was right and prepared for his questions. They took her mind off the things to come, the place she would soon spot through the thin icy windows and the memories it would stir. But for now, she settled on barring those and satisfying his curiosity.