Once night finally fell, I wandered from the caravan to see what kind of nightlife the small village had. Small places like this often have an even greater nightlife than the larger cities. Music and drinking through the cold night is how most people manage to drive away the heavy silences, the dark, the cold.

Especially when the darkness brought to mind that fiery night and the dulled moans of those who now lay at the bottom of the lake, dead.

I was not disappointed. In the middle of the village, there there was a large bonfire, around which people drove off the winter cold. There was no singing, no music. However, there was lots to drink, and a few stray hares cooking on the fire.

I wandered into the fire pit with my hood up. There was no doubt in my mind that, with a second look, people would recognize me here, but I did not want to flaunt my presence. I wandered over to the fire and pressed a few copper coins into the hands of the man passing out the hares. He looked at me for only a moment, as though trying to decide if the communal distaste of the new visitors was worth the copper passed to him. A moment later, I walked away chewing on fresh meat. I walked over to one of the logs piled around the fire, and sat down. Most people glanced over and avoided me. That was fine, at least they weren't bothering me. I would eat and linger around the nice warm fire until it died out.

By the time I was licking the grease from the meat off my fingers, one of the men of the village sat down, with his back leaning against the log.

“Lady Ridia called you Stiri. Are you?” He asked.

“I-” I stopped. Normally, I would have professed who I was, in hopes of a job. However, what if he was working for Kos, or Baliancia? “Might be that Lady Ridia mistook me for someone else. Why?”

The man shrugged, “I might have a job. I heard that Stiri was a heartless assassin, and hoped that he might be able to accomplish a little job I, and a few others of the village had.”

“I might be willing.” I said softly. I took out my flask, and took a deep drink from it. “What is it?”

“We want you to-” he stopped and looked up. I followed the direction of his glance. Ridia had entered the circle of flames. She wore a long, black dress that flowed around her like shadows fleeing the light of the flames. Her hair glowed red in the firelight as sparks danced around her, like fireflies.

The man stiffened next to me. “Not safe. Come back tomorrow.” He said. He got up and quickly fled the fire as though he were being chased from demons from the underworld.

Ridia looked around, glancing about, oblivious to the silence that had fallen upon the circle. Many people left. The man who had been selling hares had already taken the last few charred chunks of meat he had and ran off into the dark village. As he passed, I heard him mutter, “witch,” though not to anyone but himself.

What an interesting reaction Ridia got when she came into a crowd of people, and also, not quite the reaction I would have expected, Of course, the show of power she had displayed earlier, bringing Cara, Rico and myself into the village, even though there was opposition to it was not what I would have expected either. The people of the village feared her, and she used this fear to... Well, to do what?

“It's late.” I said as she came close to me. “I would have thought you to have gone to your bed already.”

“Is that why you only came out now? Because you thought I wouldn't be here?”

Yes. I thought. “I've always preferred the nights,” I whispered, “I would have thought that you knew this.”

“I know.” She said. “A long time ago, I learned to prefer the nights as well.”

I stared into the fires as I drank from my flask. Slowly, people were leaving. Apparently, Ridia's presence here made people uncomfortable. Few people who seemed to have wanted to stay around wandered off as more and more people decided to leave. The fire began to slowly die, sending smoke and sparks up into the cloudless night sky. The half moon glared down at us, its pale light only beginning to break its way through the mighty glow of the flames.

“You don't seem to be well liked here.” I said.

“I'm not.” She sat down next to me on the log. “I don't have to be well liked. I came here to do what I had to do.”

“And what did you have to do?”

She stared into the fire for a long time, watching it die like an old animal. She held her hand out towards me, asking wordlessly for the flask. I hesitated as I remembered her doing the same thing years ago, sitting up in bed, looking out at the moonlight. Now she was asking for the flask again. After a moment, I dropped it in her hand. She took a small sip, then handed it back.

“I wanted to do something good.” she said, “That's all. Artis was destroyed by fire, and people were trying to rebuild. I came here to help them. I brought what money I had, and helped to rebuild.”

“And they fear you for this alone?”

“No.” she said softly. She held her hand out to the dying embers of the fire. With a few subtle movements of her fingers, the embers, the glowing fragments of wood rose into the sky, and formed a great, fluttering butterfly. It's wings beat at the air, sending waves of warmth towards us. The dying flames were rekindled, as the sky was alight with the flapping of flaming wings.

Then it dropped. The ashes scattered on the ground, flew up into the breeze that cut through the village and out towards the lake. The fire was dead, and the moon sent its rays down.

“I see.” I said slowly, “You're a mage, like Rico.”

“No.” Ridia said, “And if you can come to sit with your friends before the sun went down, I would have told you so. I am not a mage. That kind of power is... Almost like a shadow of a mage's power. I was never able to learn how to truly wield the powers of the elements.”

“I never knew you to have that power.” I said, “Unless you hid it from me.”

Ridia turned, her eyes blazing like the great butterfly which only moments ago had risen from the ashes before us. “I hid nothing from you!” she snapped, “Nothing. You, on the other hand, you hid everything you really thought about me from my own ears! You left me without so much as a goodbye, or an apology! Nothing!”

I propped my elbows on my legs, and rested my chin in my clasped hands. She should know, I told myself, why I left. She did know, but she wanted to hear it from my own mouth. She wanted to be sure.

“You told me...” she said after I remained silent for longer than she would have liked, “You told me you... You told me you would take me with you. You told me you would take me to the capitol.”

“I didn't” I said as I stared into the dark ashes, “I told you I would like to. I told you it would be wonderful if.” My stomach writhed as I spoke those words, as I thought of myself when I was younger, being so foolish to speak them. Being so foolish even to get involved with her. I wondered for a moment if the same was true of Christen and Rico, if I was foolish to associate with them as well. However, Christen had a job for me, and Rico was following me around, wanting nothing from me but the pendant. It was different.

“Why did you tell me all that, then, If you were only going to leave!”

“I told you what happened to Cara.” I said softly.

There was a long moment of silence. somewhere in the distance, an owl cried out its hunting cry.

“I remember what you told me. I remember the stories I had heard. Stiri, the heartless assassin. The most reliable assassin ever known to men. Man, woman, child, it makes no difference to him. He even killed his own mother.”

“Cara wasn't my mother.” I snapped. The image of a wrinkled and scarred old face leapt into my mind. Insane screams, pitiful cries.

“I know that, but that's what they say. And aren't you happy? It's good for business anyway, Isn't it? A good story?”

“Perhaps.” I said.

“They tell your stories here too.” she said, “Some nights, by the fire. I hide behind the houses and listen, so that they won't all leave like they did tonight.”

I smirked, “I suppose you know then, that I was right. You cannot deny that it would have been too dangerous for you to come with me. You would have been killed.”

“I know.” She said, “And I was so angry at you.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you.. You..” she seemed to flounder for the words. “You don't know what you did to me!”

“What did I do? Tell me, exactly what I did. I paid to sleep with you, and then when I had to leave Teans, I did.”

“You know you did more than that, Stiri.”

“Anything else was unintentional.”

“Every night.” She said slowly, the words being expelled from her lips. “Every night, for nearly half a year, you found me. You brought me to the Inn, and we spent the night together. And don't say it was only because I was a whore. There were some nights I just sang until you fell asleep.”

“You had a good voice: I was buying that.”

Her brown eyes burned with anger, “You protected me! You made sure I didn't have to wander the streets, looking for any man that might bring harm to me.” her hands turned to fists that clenched her dress, wrinkling the fabric. “You protected me, and then you left me. You were the first person to ever, ever take care of me.”

“It's not my fault your parents died. It's not my fault you were used as a n indentured servant. It's not at all my fault you ended up whoring your body on the streets.”

“But it's your fault you left!” she snapped. “And I was angry. I understood it, but you could have said something before you left! 'goodbye', 'I'm sorry,' 'I'll be back someday.' Anything!”

She finally turned her hateful eyes away from me, and looked up, staring at the moon above. “But... I still wanted to be with you. And I knew it was dangerous... So I tried to fix that.... I went to Raxos.”

“Raxos.” I said softly. Raxos, the island of magic. Supposedly the island where the first Mage shattered the moon and brought magic into the world for the very first time. It was there, and only there that one could be trained in the fine and mysterious arts of magic, and only those who were skilled, diligent, or desperate could succeed. Or at least, that is what is said. It was a mysterious place which, truth be told, I myself had never been.

“What was it like.”

Ridia smiled. “The island itself?” I nodded. “It's very large. Nothing like the islands of the Cyclades. Those islands lay like stars to the moon in comparison to Raxos. The island is covered in forests, and the villages there are built amid the forest. There are only two castles, and those are the castles where the mages live, and their apprentices.”

“Are the castles able to compare to the ones here?”

Ridia stared into the skies, as though they showed her the island. “The castles are made of coral, the one to the west is pink, the one to the east is violet. They're larger than any building here. I think they might even surpass the unpassables in height alone.”

“...So you're a magician now?”

Ridia shook her head. “No, not really. They call me one, but all I can do is...” She waved her hand and a rock laying a small ways away from us flew into the sky, and landed in the middle of the ashes. “That's all. I can move things. That's how they made the castles though. And it's thanks to that power that we were able to rebuild the village here as quickly as we could... If you could call this rebuilt.

“But I didn't leave to learn how to build houses, and I didn't return to help a dying village. I did it so that I could travel with you. I wanted to be safer, to defend myself.”

I turned the flask in my hands over several times, examining the glow of the moon on its silver exterior. “Yet you came here?”

“You told me you liked Artis. You told me you had friends here. I was worried that you might have been here when it was destroyed.”

I smirked. “I was. I escaped.”

For a long time, silence resounded around us. Even the owl I had heard earlier and gone silent after its hunting. One last ember in the fire took life on an unburned piece of wood. The flame flickered, fighting off its eventual death, fighting off the icy air that surrounded us.

“I still want to go with you.” she said.

“It's more dangerous than it ever was before.” I said. “You can't come.”

“I can't come with you, but that girl can-”

I stood up, stashing my flask in the folds of my cloak. “Damnit.” I said, “You don't-” I stopped myself and took a breath. “Yes. She's travel ling with me. What does that say about her? She hired me to bring her somewhere, by the way.”

“What if I paid you? What if I paid you to bring me wherever you went?”

I shut my eyes against the light of the glittering fire. “No.”

Before she could speak again, I walked off into the darkness. The cold of the night, the darkness surrounded me, broken only by the faint glow of the moon. I walked out of the village, away from all the sleeping people in their little houses, and sat before the edge of the lake. The ground was covered in ice, and the lake before me glittered, its waters still and dark. Under the lake, under the water somewhere, Foster lay. Up on the hillside, under the ground that was perhaps colder than the water lay Cara. Either way, if Ridia did come with me, those would be the only two paths that would lay open for her: Death by my enemies, or death by my own hands.

And of course, the same fate awaited for Christen and Rico if they stayed around for too long.