Lairas stopped seeing the Hunters’ lights after a few hours of running, even with the occasional break to catch his breath.

He didn’t let himself hope, however - Hunters often outpaced the main force in order to identify a target, before retreating with their scent firmly caught. After that they would retreat back to the actual retrieval team, and lead them inexorably toward their quarry.

Living in the Wellspring Temple had let Lairas catch sight of many a caught criminal, brought back to the Outer Sanctum for the disbursement of justice. Shamans were both spiritual leaders, officers of the law, and in many cases city officials. The Wellspring Temple was the de facto centre of government.

But seeing spirits of Penance emplace a minor - or major - curse, or level a geas on an offender, had always proven horrifying. Their punishment - supposedly - would exactly match their crime, though by what metric they decided that Lairas had no clue.

What would be the punishment for stealing and unleashing a spirit of Slaughter on the world? Slaying all those patrol officers?

Soul-wrenching pain was a common sanction - Shackling, cursing them to obey orders given to them by city officials was another.

But Lairas suspected he would be made an example of - he would receive the Hermit’s Torment, a year stuck in a perpetual daze, locked away from the outside world and forced to confront the tormented wailings of spirits of Solitude.

Lairas had seen that punishment only once in the Temple, and it had been for a man accused of multiple acts of sodomy and murder.

He shook those thoughts away. So long as he kept towards Scant, he had a goal. He would have to work out a method to throw off his pursuers.

“Mm, curious that you only intend to think of that after you have lead them to a town full of innocent people,” Slaughter noted with a giggle of laughter.

Lairas had pre-committed to a course of ignoring Slaughter, at least for the purposes of his escape from the Hunters, so he remained silent.

“Do you think they’ll ignore that they can smell you hiding among them?” Slaughter continued. “Your scent will pervade that town with its stench of blood and death. You might as well dump a dozen carcasses in the town centre!”

His next step faltered a little. The red haze was providing him some physical enhancement, and besides that he was pushing a tendril off against the ground with every step - he wasn’t exactly sure how much it was helping, considering he was still limited in his usage of the spirit-aither, the cloud of fundamental matter created by their conceptual core.

Each type of spirit’s aither was supposedly inflected towards their core, providing strange side-effects and abilities - but they could all affect the physical world, to some degree or another.

Which also meant that they must be detectable to spirits of Hunting, Lairas realised with an internal groan.

He had been assuming that merely mingling his scent with a few dozen other people would delay the Hunters from realizing he was in the town; but if indeed they could sense the inflection of the haze, they would be able to track him down even if he retracted it all inside his body.

So Slaughter was probably telling the truth.

“Of course I am,” the spirit laughed. “But I also know of a way to avoid the Hunters’ attention… if you’re still willing to consider that partner question.”

His next step faltered again, and this time Lairas nearly fell over. He had been keeping to his promise of silence, but that hadn’t taken into account the notion that Slaughter might sound genuinely contrite.

If there was a chance that Slaughter was beginning to come around, then surely he had to pursue it? That was simply the demands of his larger goal, which was to get strong enough to actually enact his revenge.

“What made you change your mind so suddenly?” Lairas asked, still cautious despite the spark of hope.

“Perhaps I’m beginning to realise that you might actually get away with this,” Slaughter replied, voice sounding grudgingly respectful. “If, indeed, you do somehow manage to escape the Hunters - and so far, you’ve impressed me with your resourcefulness - then I should be focusing less on tormenting my kidnapper, and a little more on ingratiating myself to them.”

“To get me to let my guard down?” Lairas pushed, voice accusatory.

“No, no, of course not… simply to establish a quid pro quo - I would rather not be entirely quashed within your conceptual core, such that it is a fight simply to experience the world around me,” the spirit explained. “Perhaps we could come to an arrangement… in exchange for some of my power and advice, you would grant me a tighter leash, perhaps make this relationship less master-and-servant and more... equals.”

Lairas barely dared entertained the throb of anxiety in his heart.

He had had… acquaintances, among the other acolytes, to be sure. Colleagues, peers, fellow students, but… no friends.

Part of that had been his own reservation, the secret fire of revenge he had kept secretly burning all those years. Perhaps another part had been his lack of sponsorship to become Enspirited - none of the shamans had deemed him capable, and he had no wealthy family - no family at all - to pay them to change that.

But the largest part, he was sure, had been his foreign features. The other students had been tall and willowy, high-boned and, generally, blonde with pale olive skin. He was shorter, broader, with a too-narrow nose and ruddy skin, afflicted with a spray of freckles and burnished, ginger-brown hair.

The prospect, therefore, of actually having someone to confide in… someone to discuss with and rely on… even if they were a spirit, was tantalising.

Lairas shook his head wary of the fact that Slaughter could divine his surface thoughts if he wasn’t actively preventing him from doing so.

It was a strange effort to do so - so long as he activated and consciously wanted the spirit blocked, he could do so with ease. But if he was distracted then the block dropped, and Slaughter leapt on the weakness.

He imagined that it wasn’t typical for one’s Enspirited companion to seize on that constant weakness, but it was an aspect of their bond that he found frustrating.

Fortunately, he was beginning to get the hang of it.

“Even if I did believe you,” Lairas finally replied, “I would have to hear your whole suggestion in full before I even considered it.”

“Fair enough,” Slaughter responded, still with that slightly-repentant slant to his voice. Or was that just wishful thinking on his part? “But you should focus on getting away for now, and I’ll tell you when we reach Scant.”

“No,” Lairas responded, firmly. “If you actually do intend to establish a ‘quid pro quo,’ prove it now. Tell me what your plan is before we get there.”

“Bah,” the spirit scoffed. “Where’s your sense of whimsy?”

“I’m not joking, Slaughter,” Lairas responded, gritting his teeth. “We can go right back to the way things were, and I will definitely commit to not trusting you, or you can lay it all out in full right here, right now."

“Heavens above, if you’re going to be like that,” Slaughter sighed in exasperation. “Then fine.”

Lairas said nothing, just stopped and took out the map. He studied it for a moment, then said, “I’m waiting?”

“Alright, alright, let me treat the moment with a little gravitas,” Slaughter responded, with mock-irritation in his voice. “I’m trying to prove I can be a big help.”

Lairas checked the stars, squinted at the map in Illumina’s light again, and changed direction a little. There was a stream nearby where he could fill his canteen and maybe confuse the scent a little.

“It’s simple, really,” the spirit began. “The Hunters are looking for the scent of me, a spirit of Slaughter, inflected by your scent. But, if we simply overload their senses with my scent, then they’ll have no clue where you are or which direction you scampered off in!”

“And how do you intend to achieve that?” Lairas replied sardonically.

“Why, we just kill the whole town, of course,” Slaughter stated, voice almost baffled, as though it was the simplest thing in the whole world. “Spread their bodies about the town, cast a few deep into the woods, maybe set up a false trail of bodies, and simply continue on our merry way.”

Silence reigned the forest for a few moments.

“What!?” Lairas whisper-shouted. “You can’t seriously believe I’d consider that!”

“Why not, fleshy?” Slaughter responded, voice cruel and mocking now. “What happened to ‘anything in pursuit of revenge,’ hm? Shouldn’t you be willing to sacrifice anything for your goal? Or do you not see the memory of your family as worth it?”

Lairas fell silent, fury wracking his body. He had let himself hope.

“I will never become like you,” Lairas vowed. “I will never senselessly turn to murder or evil simply because it is the easy way to get what I want. I’m not like you.”

I’m not like them, he thought silently, his mind cast back to Slaughter’s visions.

“Won’t you?” Slaughter taunted. “Have you not already? Those patrolling guards would have lived, had you not thought your petty vengeance more important than their lives. Tell me, what gives you the right to decide what is and is not evil? Hm?”

“You were the one who killed them!” Lairas protested, keeping his voice from wavering with an effort of will. Had that really been less than twenty-four hours ago?

“I am a spirit of Slaughter,” the spirit’s voice mocked. “That was part of what you were signing up for. Did you not think there would be consequences for jumping on the quick and dirty route to power? This is your life now- you will forever be condemned to an existence one moment of lost control from ending those of everyone around you.”

Lairas slowed, hearing the babbling of the stream through the woods ahead of him. He tried to tune out those words from Slaughter, tried to focus on the immediate - but his resolve was more than a little shaken.

A rolling shiver ran up his spine, and he knelt by the stream to cup some water in his hands and splash it onto his face. Scant was near, now, and he would need to come up with a better plan than Slaughter before then.