The girl wakes to the aroma of roasting meat, simmering broth, and smoke. Head throbbing, her mouth feels like it’s filled with sand as she notices the tray to the right of her bed, covered neatly with a linen cloth. Rolling over with a groan, she tosses the cloth to the side and inspects her meal. A hard honey-berry biscuit, spiced meat, and a mug of cold nettle tea.

Too impatient to stir in a lump of sugar to mask the bite, she forces down the bitter tea, gagging slightly, but it’s enough to moisten her mouth so she can tear into the tender, flavorful meat. She’s wiping biscuit crumbs from her chin as the door creaks open.

“It’s about time, menina,” comes a silvery voice from behind a bushel of vegetation.

“How long was I out?” she asks.

“Less than two days,” he replies, bringing in a second basket of chile peppers, herbs, and roots to be cleaned and dried. After wiping his hands on a stained rag by the fire, he lifts the kettle from its stand. Glancing at the empty tray with approval, he fills her mug with steaming, spiced bone broth.

Wrapping her fingers around the hot metal, she inhales the savory scent before taking a tentative sip and sighing as the heat in her belly radiates outward, loosening her knotted muscles.

“Saba?” she pauses, “Do you think it worked?”

The man is a redwood towering over a bear cub, his soft eyes hiding the sharp, tactical mind behind them. “Only failure would make itself known at this point. Everything continues to happen, always at the same time, all at once. We must let things continue to unravel. Gather your thoughts, and while we eat, we’ll revisit the steps you’ll need to bond your primary Tamaru,” he says, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder. “A handful of turkeys passed through recently, so we’ll celebrate the absence of certain failure with stew.” Saba gives her shoulder a squeeze, turning to rummage in one of the wooden cabinets. He tosses her a small vial of liquid.

“One sip,” he reminds her.

She wrinkles her nose and uncorks the vial, taking a delicate swig. The tediously brewed tincture, made from brittlebell thorns, has long been used for its invigorating and pain-relieving effects in small doses, but take too much and sleep becomes elusive, a warrior’s best friend.

The grinding in her head quiets, and her skin lightly tingles. It’s been almost two winters since she made the mistake of sneaking a few extra swallows of the syrupy potion, and the incident had grown into a pleasant ribbing between the two. Saba no longer griped over having to waste several doses on himself to stay awake for three nights keeping an eye on her until they both collapsed into sleep deeper than the dead.

After finishing the broth, she wraps herself in one of the giant furs piled near the cot and steps out into the chilly mountain air. Saba follows minutes later with a variety of dried chile peppers, cilantro, and achiote, which he sets next to a pile of roasted onions, tomatillos, garlic, and tomatoes. Sitting astride a large molcajete, he lays the chilies on a comal sitting above the fire before returning his attention to the molcajete, adding the roasted ingredients and grinding them into a thick paste. The girl finds a smooth log to sit upon and watch.

Living within the untamed forests at the base of Draigh Ridge is grueling and primitive, but Saba still manages to coax an array of rich and complicated flavors from the wild game they catch using foraged and garden grown vegetables, roots, herbs, and his never-ending supply of spices. A stark difference between the frozen mush she was forced to eat all those seasons ago.

Nearly eight winters have passed since he rescued her from a cage, but Saba continues to keep the details of his own past out of reach. When she pokes around his ability to cook, he tells of adventures that seem too grand to be real, but the timelines stay vague, and she can never prod too deeply before he changes the subject. His evasion tactics rival his culinary skills.

Because of the veritable lack of information, she finds herself inventing details with her vigorous imagination. She writes him a sweet childhood of impish exploration and silly consequences. In her mind, he grows into an adventurous young man, traveling more lands than she can name, ending up as the gruffly kind, leathery force that now sits delicately dredging chunks of meat through salt and pepper and dropping them into the pot. Though he remains a mixture of fact and fantasy, she can’t help but trust in him. Sometimes paternal in his own way, the old man is nothing if not a consistent and practical mentor.

As each season passes, Saba continues to teach her to harness the energy fluctuations due to her ancestry with little regard to the harm it causes him. New scars are added to his skin’s map of trauma with each session, and she now understands why she was brought to the subterranean chambers only once during her captivity.

“In Hindar, Skoth are forbidden to forge a binding,” he told her long after they fled the prison in Ochon. “That’s why they kept you drugged with Hollowshade. You scare them because you can do it without thinking, without training, as young as a season or two. It comes as natural to you as breathing, and only without fear can one manipulate the flow in both directions. They love control and convenience, and they fear what they don’t understand. This is why you cannot go home as you are.”

She wanted to ask him who “they” were and where she was, but she couldn’t find her voice. She had never heard the word “Skoth” until then, but she clung to it as the only piece of her identity she knew. The misty remnants of a past she couldn’t be sure was real lapped at the edge of her mind’s eye back then, having only been three or four seasons old and reliable memory formation only just beginning. A mother and father somewhere, possibly brothers and sisters. She had to have been somewhere before she was taken. A person couldn’t be taken unless they had something to belong to. The questions and the longing used to plague her thoughts, bubbling up when she needed to concentrate most, but over time she got better at forcing them down, burying the uncertainty beneath layers of control and will. Their mission is what she belongs to now.

Saba has wasted no time since then, methodically introducing her to several styles of combat starting only weeks after using a portal stone to travel from the arctic tundra of Ochon to the deciduous forests of Aprora, each physical lesson accompanied by maps and a rich history about the continent it was born from and the people who practice it. When she shows promise, she trains extensively in that style.

The rhythmic “ka-thunk” of the grinding stone encourages the girl’s mind to wander further, shifting to Saba’s history lessons, usually told over a steaming bowl of broth after strenuous training. They breathe life to tales long forgotten, stories of the Hindari clan wars and territory battles. He told of how the minority of Elemental clans won influence over Spirit, Fauna, and Flora not long after the Endless Ravage appeared, deposits of gemstones multiplying from continent to continent. Her eyebrows had climbed as high as they could reach at the mention of the Endless Ravage, and she remembers the lesson like it was yesterday.

He sat across from her, cleaning a small cut on her cheek before applying a salve that sped up the healing process.

“What did you learn during our practice today?” he asked softly.

“Patience. Wait for an opening before committing to the strike.”

Saba nodded, watching her as she got up to ladle bone broth into two wooden bowls. Though her muscles were protesting with every motion, she quickly returned to the floor to listen.

“Tell me about the beginning,” she said.

Saba sipped from his bowl before clearing his throat, “Not long after the War of the Seven Gems, the populace began to grow content with their crystal amulets, preferring to use the simpler, safer, and less draining magic to go about daily life. One needn’t travel to Aprora and bond Tamaru to master their talents. The major freeholds began to be fitted with enough gems to take full advantage of the lighter magic, and as everyone grew accustomed to their ease, it was only be a matter of time before the smaller, rural clans followed suit. Only a small fraction of the defeated clans resisted, banning the usage of gems. They remain isolated and ignored by the Watchers of Clans to this day.”

The girl had finished her broth, curling under a hide of dense Cirm-fur.

Saba lowered the oil lamp before continuing. “Along with the old ways, the tradition of story-telling began to fade as several clans started to write down their histories, often without regard to any standard of accuracy. Building a legacy mattered more than facts, and I’d say there are only a handful of us left who still know the truth, who’ve seen the scroll. It’s why I spend so much time talking to you as training you, but even I don’t know everything. I only know what I know.”

“It was so easy to change everything?” she asked.

Saba was silent for some time. “It only seems easy upon reflection. The many threads that weave together to form the tapestry of history are often harder to see in the moment. Harder to guess what consequences come from reinforcing one thread while cutting another. The Ravage changed everything when it tore up through the dirt and began consuming everything in its path. The clans were forced to sign the Treaty of Jaliff three days later.”

A scraping blade snaps at her attention like the crack of a whip. Saba transfers the paste from the molcajete into the pot of simmering stew. He adds another pinch of cinnamon and some bay leaves, humming softly to himself.