The bear-maiden sat on the ground far, far from the others. So far away that the grass underneath her was crisp and green, unspoiled by the conflict. At this distance, the thousands seemed like an ocean of steel and red, pierced by poles of black wood and flags. More cries and shouts and cheers and toasts were made despite Reynfred's request, though how many came from her guild, she did not know. Most of the intact bodies had now completely been piled up into mounds and carts by the serfs. The squires and the priests wandered about performing their duties. White robes and red robes, faceless and old. They did not suffer the consequences of this battle, not physically. Yes, they saw the dead and the rotting, but they did not inflict it. They did not take the lives of young men.

Fresh tears fell from her eyes as the bright red face of Rannulf played again in slow-motion. A young man. Barely any years into the chances of making a family. A legacy. You took that.

She had, as she told Tamas, thought that she was ready for the battle. To kill. To see death firsthand. She knew that she wasn't truly ready for any of it, constantly revealed to her by way of that stomach-knotted emotion. She wanted to believe. So many tales had her parents told her of Drayheller adventurers braving the most dangerous of locations to see what knowledge could be gained. So many books had she read of warriors facing off against things such as dragons and giants and liches, unafraid of the horrors they presented.

She couldn't do it. Not at first, and each time after was harder than the last. She had kept herself from killing them, avoiding them, not wanting to be as vile as those fighting against her. As those fighting with her. There wasn't a point or purpose. She held not a sliver of the hatred these humans had for each other. There was no bias towards them or disgust for their beliefs. And she held this until she could not avoid it any longer.

It had been an accident that so quickly grew into a pattern.

For two years, she prepared herself for this eventuality. Learned the art of combat from the men-at-arms, the masters-at-arms, and braggarts who called themselves overseers. Hunting and hiking to hone her body's stamina and endurance. Documenting the stories of those she called comrades. Learning the cultures. The religion. The customs.

None of it had mattered in that horde of metal and flesh.

She had seen the very stories she spent two years learning end in seconds. Never to be completed with a good ending. Decapitated. Bisected. Skewered. Gone. And she had taken part in that. The young man Rannulf. The giant whose face she caved in with a relentless beating. The man she decapitated. And the woman she sent flying off to an unknown, and likely unsavory fate.

What an account to bring back to your people.

The sound of hooves broke her pity-drowning. "What are you doing out here, Drayheller?" asked a voice that was equal parts sickly sweet and bitterly snakish. Gíla felt pins and needles pierce her hide at the very utterance of such a voice.

Gíla looked up into the blinding rays of the sun and covered her eyes with her arm, though the stinging tears did not help matters. From what she could see, an armored figure on a horse stood before her side-faced. Even on their steed, they were lithe and tall, a dark shadow outlined by the sunlight. A longsword was sheathed on their left hip and a cloak ran down from their shoulders to their rear. Gíla made to stand, but they waved her to remain seated and dismounted their steed.

"I asked you a question, Drayheller," the figure asked again, stepping closer. Their voice planted even more pins and needles into the bear-maiden's body.

"I...um...just wanted..." she stammered, wrong-footed yet again in the company of this knight.

The figure chuckled. "Just wanted to get away from the carnage?"

Gíla nodded.

The figure hummed and knelt to meet the bear-maiden's gaze unhindered by the sun. They were armored in the knight's plate of the Duke, which was far more embellished and gleaming than even what Reynfred would manage if cleaned of the muck. It was clean, made of pure unblemished silver with golden trims along the sharpest edges of the plates. Their eagle beak visor was pulled down over their face, and their eyes were hidden in the shadows of it, though their coldness could be felt in Gíla's heart. Their cloak was cream-colored, somehow unstained, and was clasped to their shoulders with black iron lion's heads.

They ran gauntleted fingers along the ground and traced particularly long strands of grass. "Well, enjoy it while you can. Soon enough, there are going to be a lot more fields like this one. All bloodied and ruined and gross."

Gíla blinked. "I know."

"It's good that you know. You should be prepared for it."

"Why are you over here?" the bear-maiden snapped without thinking, turning the question around.

"I saw you sitting over here all alone," the knight answered with another trace of grass. Behind them, their horse neighed softly and bent its head to nibble on the bloodless grass. "The sun kept me from making out who you were until I got closer, so I figured you were either a horrible spy or someone looking to get away from the stink."

"Right," Gíla muttered. She made a motion with her arms. "Well, you found me."

"That I did," they said with a matching motion of their arms. "You're far drearier than I expected. First battle?"

Gíla nodded.

"First kills then, judging by your hands. And your eyes. Who was it? Some old man with an ax trying to hunt you down like some wild animal? A crooked woman hoping to bring your head to the king like some trophy to mount on the wall?"

Gíla did not respond and looked away, burying the urge to remember yet again.

The knight hummed, then snapped their finger - a horrible scraping noise of metal. "I see. Younger then. A boy or girl maybe. Or someone close to it."

"Why are you asking me these things?" Gíla blazed, her eyes widening with a burst of frustration. "You are wearing knight's armor. You've seen war. Should you not be...doing whatever it is you humans do after it?"

The knight laughed haughtily, something that added pincers alongside the pins and needles. "Oh! So what, is this whole dreary thing a Drayheller practice? Are you all so somber after a conflict?"

"We don't normally fight. And if we do, not like that."

Another haughty laugh now traced with something barely noticeable as malignant. "Oh, you're a civilized people then. Not like humans, who're so debased and depraved. Are those words good for your accounts? You're supposed to be documenting us, right?"

"I already got what I wanted," Gíla said hoarsely. "All I needed."

"And what are you going to do with it?"

Go home. I am done here. "Go find my family. I'm done here. Done with this."

The knight tsked and shook their head. "One battle, and you're giving up your quest to see the rebellion through? What about when the Duke takes the throne? Or when we lay siege to the capital? Don't you want to see that?"

"I want to see you leave me alone," Gíla blazed, rising to her feet. Gervais Tamas had already questioned her ability to stay in the fight. He had chastised her for feeling for the dead boy and all the others she had killed herself or seen killed. She did not need that again from some nameless knight in bloodless armor.

The knight matched her movement perfectly and far too fast. Her blood froze at how quickly they had mimicked her. Even worse, they stood only a chin's length shorter than her. She cast a look at the badge on their chest, directly underneath a lion's head clasp. It was not a badge of any guild that stood now. It was one of whose banner did not stand proud in the field but had been visible before the deluge. A star-headed mace with a curved guard above the grip, made out of a polished purple metal stuck to the plate with wear-resistant epoxy - roughly three inches in length and two in width. Gíla had seen that banner off to the eastmost portion of the army. A purple star-headed mace on a field of silver. The badge of Gíla's lieutenants was the shî, minus the red field that the captain's badge possessed, and was more or less the same length and width.

"Who are you?" she asked with curiosity hot in her voice.

The knight tilted their head, straightened, and then raised their hands to their helmet. With a quick tug, they removed it and pulled down their mail coif, revealing a cold maiden's face of unearthly beauty. Her skin was creased at the nose as if from too-frequent scowling and was almost translucent like ice with how snow-white it was. Her hair was an entrancing silver tied back into a short tight bun and had long straw-like traces of pitch-black dye in some spots. Her face was kite-shaped and sharp, emphasized by her dagger-thin gray lips and large piercing argent eyes. She grinned enough that a flash of her teeth was visible. They were perfectly straight and white.

Human, but at the borderline. Is she a knight? What wars has this creature fought?

"Are you okay?" she questioned in that same voice, though it had also now taken on a somewhat husky quality to it. She cradled the curved-beak helmet in her left hand and brushed a stray strand of silver from her forehead.

Gíla did not know how to respond. It wasn't that she had never seen this woman before in the two years that she had been training, yet she wore the armor of the Duke. It certainly was that none of the others in the surviving army seemed to have been aware of her, and if they were they did not appear to be hostile. Gíla did not know how to respond because of the magnetism she felt this woman was capable of. How much greater it was than Reynfred's. And how in control and hidden this woman was keeping it. It terrified her.

"I'll take your silence as a no," the woman snorted. "And I take it that I'm not what you expected."

"I just assumed..." she tried to say before fading off, unsure of what would sound polite, correct, and easiest to avoid the dangers this woman represented.

"That I was some posh, annoying inquisitor?" the woman finished.

"Not at all," Gíla lied.

The woman nodded and looked back at her steed. Gíla studied it for the first time. A brown destrier mare of admirable size, dressed in a bloodstained caparison bearing the star-headed mace sigil and further decorated with gold-painted horseshoes.

"Pretty, isn't she?" the woman asked, noting the bear-maiden's admiration. "My captain gave her to me when the Duke called for the rebellion. I've been spending the past two years bonding with her. She served me well. Kept me from ending up like the rest."

Gíla offered the slightest of chuckles. "Covered in muck?"

The woman did not return the expression. "Yes. Blood and gore are for the barbarian and the beast. I am neither."

Gíla scoffed at the implication. "Then what am I?"

"A Drayheller," the woman answered simply.

"And you?"

The woman smiled brilliantly. "Someone like a Drayheller. Civilized. Genteel. Enlightened."

"Enlightened." The bear-maiden grinned warily and dragged out the word slowly, emphasizing each syllable.

"That's me," the woman giggled. It was an unsettling noise. "Guess that proves that I am that posh, annoying inquisitor you thought I was."

Gíla said nothing.

The woman approached her steed and ran her free hand along its mane. "You should come back to the others with me. We're heading off back to the camp soon and then phwoosh...to the Star Bastion we go."

Gíla's breath caught in her throat at the utterance of the name. "Wait, what?" she asked. "The...The Star Bastion?"

The woman nodded with a small purse of her gray, far too thin lips and an accompanying mhm. "That's what I said. Mille announced that was going to be our new staging ground. It's large enough to hold us, and we can safely grow our numbers from there."

Gíla felt her blood run cold again, and her heart beat heavily like a drum. She had, naturally, read about the place in her books. The structure in question was a place of legend in the kingdom, something older than Aslofidor's bloodline. Older than the dynasty before him, whose borders stretched almost entirely to the eastern coast of the continent. No, even older than anything else before that in the past two thousand years. It was a place said to have withstood the might of the warlords of old, never having been successfully taken in a siege.

A hundred thousand times was it attacked over the years, and each time the invaders were repelled with such unmitigated force that before long it was left alone to avoid inevitable attrition. It was one of the only places legends such as the Barons of Time or the feared Arcaenomancers of Emperor Magnentius Kharn could never win. Not even the Dragon Riders of the Hell Pit from the north could ever hope to breach its defenses. Eventually, it became abandoned and forgotten. The curse of its impregnability was that its rulers died in stagnation, unable to do a thing without opening the risk of being attacked once more, watching as the world around them changed rulership, and they were lost to the history books.

Until Alsofidor the First recovered its existence and location. Empty of its previous owners, it was finally taken in an anti-climactic fashion. Such a prize could never be allowed to be in any hands but the king's most trusted. Thus, it had only been given to the royal family's most devoted advisors: the Ircotts. The current ruler was said to be Broone Ircott III, a stubby fat man with as many chins as he had chefs to cook for him. Lord of the Star Bastion he was still, though. How had the Duke taken control of it?

"Um, wait," the bear-maiden called out as she noticed the woman mounting her steed. The woman turned with a crooked brow of expectancy. "What's your name? Lieutenant...ma'am."

"Yours first, Drayheller." The woman's tone was far more agreeable now, lacking both the sickly sweet and the bitter snakish accents. The huskiness of it had also lessened but was still present alongside a certain calming softness.

The wind whistled between them. "Gíla," she answered in a low voice.

The woman allowed another smile to her ethereal face and replaced the helmet on her head. "Jira," she said. "My name is Jira ne'Jiral."

Night had fallen upon them with practice like the curtain of a stage play. The woods around them, dark and only occasionally lit by firebugs, whispered with tales of old bent trees and groaned with ancient brooks that knew no sunlight or people. Leaves so darkly green they looked black in the moonlight shook with a light breeze, and critters of diminutive size bounded and crept through the bush - staring at the masses of flesh and metal that encroached on the borders of their home. Larger beasts like wolves also stalked, but they too kept their distance, especially those that drew far too close to the camp of the Eye. Gervais Tamas, still armored with his wounds bound in gauze, stood sentinel at this border, and the bear-maiden saw him glare so deeply into that vast dense darkness. Glare like it was a living thing in itself, waiting for it to blink and run away. But the forest never ran, and when all fleshy mortal life was gone, they would remain tall and strong. Her parents had taught her of the forest and its ancient ways that knew no morality or judgment. No bias or hatred or love. It was too old for it, they said. Too old to care for what came after it, knowing that until the stars themselves descended upon the world to set it aflame, they would always stand and live.

The bear-maiden regarded the one thousand that made rest in this place. She wondered if they felt the same about the forest. If they cared about it, or even cared to care. Of those from the Eye, she had an immediate answer, for they prayed not to the forest that it remain as peaceful as it was, but to their God Almighty. They prayed to him that the night stay calm and that they could make the long journey to the Star Bastion further south. Gíla, too, found this place to be calm, though ascribed to no praying for it. It was isolated along the dirt road for the mountain hold. Lonely in the vigil of the world, but she knew that it didn't care for loneliness. It wanted to rest, just like the army next to it. Sleep and rest. She wished for this as well but found that memory of the days past was far too invasive for such a thing. Rannulf, the woman, the decapitated man, the giant. Their faces - or lack thereof - stuck in her mind like her fist stuck in that giant's head. Remaining there, pressing hard against the calm of the forest that she wanted to feel. She had breathed slow and deep to drive them away the first night of camp near the woods, succeeding in drowning their images in the moonlight. Dreams resurrected them and since then, she had gained only catnaps and snoozes during the day and night.

"You sit alone, once more," said a familiar voice. Pins and needles.

Gíla looked away from the forest's darkness to see the thin figure of Jira ne'Jiral approaching her, outlined in the firelight of the bear-maiden's small bonfire. She was dressed in her off-duty clothes - loose gray garments and leather boots that accentuated her figure and height. It was true. Gíla was alone again, though not by her own choice. Rather, it was because of the exclusion from her guild. The Eye had found her wanting in passion for battle and God Almighty's demands for justice despite her words to Galeran Reynfred. Gervais Tamas - so stoic and bulldog-like - had treated her with extra disdain, something echoed by his closest apprentices, Eadnod and Gaenbeald. "You should return home, Drayheller," he had said. "You are clearly incapable of accepting the ways of war. You will only be a liability in battle." It had only been a short week following his first conversation with her following Vucan, and how quickly he had turned already as she suffered the indignities of her actions and dour attitude. Only Jira ne'Jiral had found something in her heart to treat the bear-maiden with respect and kindness. Perhaps that is why Gíla had such difficulty finding comfort in the woman's presence. It was almost unnatural. Unacceptable. Plus, the silver knight bore a visage and a voice that did not belong in the Kingdom of Aslofidor or Central Khirn, yet no one else seemed to either notice or care. No one except a red-haired woman who always seemed to watch the knight from afar. The bear-maiden had meant to speak to the woman but found that any chance to do so was lost the minute she considered it.

This was the confusing part of the woman and simultaneously the most intriguing part that prevented Gíla from sending the knight away despite that lack of comfort. She was an enigma to the Drayheller, just as the Drayheller was an enigma to everyone else. Human, but at the borderline. To act the way she did in the presence of those who were almost unaware of her existence, aside from the occasional order or formal conversation, was baffling.

"And you ignore my comments, once more, too," Jira said with a chuckle in her husky voice. No more pins and needles.

"I'm sorry," Gíla said, blinking away the forming theories in her mind. "It has been a long march already and I am...out of sorts, I should say."

The silver-haired woman smiled with her dagger-thin lips and sat on the opposite side of the fire. Her face was softer in the orange glow, almost motherly in the way that it looked at the Drayheller. "You still think of those you killed?" she asked plainly.

Gíla could only nod in the affirmative.

"That will last for a while, but you must-"

"Get used to it, I know." Gíla's voice had become harsh with irritation. "I've heard the same malfaring thing for a week now. I don't need to hear it again. I don't want to hear it again. I've already decided to stay with this army and see the rebellion through like I originally planned, but if I hear that I need to get used to the unnecessary brutality of it all - something that should have been left in the days of Acominatus - then I will break...I will...I will eat every horse in this camp."

Jira laughed with considerable volume and mirth, smacking her knee. "Would you really?" she asked after calming her humor.

Gíla was silent for a moment. "No, no, I wouldn't."

"Do your people eat horses?"

"No. My people don't eat...much meat. We mostly eat fruit, berries, insects, and fish. Like true bears. We are also partial to sweets. Pastries and the like. If times are tough and the family has gathered enough food for a resting season, then we'll hunt deer and moose and elk."

"Have you ever eaten a human?"

Gíla looked appalled. "Malfar no. Never. We're scholars and nomads. Not savages. Not beasts. If you want to see a bear-kin eat a human, look for grizzly or polar. Not my people."

Jira smiled and tapped her knee. "Has it ever happened in your history, though?"

"Has what happened?"

"Has there ever been a Drayheller who went savage and bestial?"

Gíla considered the question. "Not to my knowledge. Well, maybe. There was one tale of an overlord from long ago. My parents recounted it to me."

"Tell it to me."

Gíla cleared her throat, unaccustomed to such eagerness to hear of her people. "It's from near the beginning of our recorded history. Arthfal the Hammer. He was said to have made a voyage over the Jade with his family and conquered an old Dwarven city. It's anecdotal, probably apocryphal, but it's said that that city became Asne Unarith, our capital city in E'aura."

"That's quite the anecdote. What became of the dwarves?"

"Wiped out. All attempts to retake Asne Unarith were allegedly broken by Arthfal's automaton army. He...he turned the machines of the city to his will and had them serve as his defenders while he grew the population in E'aura."

"That doesn't sound like the Drayhellers of today."

"That's because he was killed by his own family for straying so far from the ways our creator intended."

"Your creator?"

Gíla fell silent and looked back to the forest. "A tale for another time, perhaps."

Jira sniffed. "Fair. Now tell me this, then...why do you sit alone when you could be sharing these tales with your people in the Eye? Tell them about you and your race and get them to understand that you are not this...dangerous enigma."

"You want me to tell them about the time one of my people apparently conquered an entire city of Dwarves, which they don't even believe in, and expect them to trust me?" Gíla finished her question with a hearty, mocking laugh. "They have a hard enough time believing my people are real. Goes against their ideas of God Almighty's intentions for this world. If I go around telling them that we killed an entire city of a race of technological inventors humanity hasn't seen in eight thousand years - if my parents are to believed - they'd burn me on a pyre with their precious Duke presiding over the matter."

Jira shared it. "Well, perhaps not that story. One step at a time. I don't know, tell them about your nomadic practices. Some of the old lore you've uncovered about humanity. Drayheller marriage rites, I don't know."

"Drayheller don't marry," Gíla corrected, returning her eyes to Jira and wagging a finger. "We just choose and live with that person for the rest of our lives."

"Sounds like marriage to me."

"We don't marry as you humans do. There's no ceremony, there's no church or what have you. We just choose and everyone accepts it. We live in families, not clans or tribes or cities. No more than eight at a time. It's simple. We live for so long that having a piece of paper that could be lost or damaged or a rustable ring would just be impractical. My parents have been together for two hundred years. Not a shred of documentation for it, but every other family we've met just accepts it."

"How long have you been around?"

"Sixty years. I'm the youngest of three. My brother is eighty, my sister is eighty-five. They had picked their people last time I saw them. I wonder where they are right now. They decided to leave the kingdom after it went into civil war."

The pair were silent for a while after this, now gazing into the fire and watching the sticks crackle and snap with embers. Somewhere overhead, an owl hooted and another responded. "Do you plan on finding them again?" Jira asked. "Your family."

Gíla nodded and hugged her knees to her chest. "Of course. One day. I'd like to meet the people my siblings have chosen." She smiled at the warmth provided by the imagination of such an event.

"What about you?"

Gíla blinked. "What about me?"

"Have you picked your person?"

The bear-maiden shook her head. "Oh, no. No, I'm not into that stuff. Never have been. I'm just focused on the adventure."

Jira smiled small and thin and breathed through her nose. She stood up and cracked her back by twisting. "You should tell your guild these things. They may like you for it. Knowing more about your people."

Gíla smiled as well, though hers was smaller and sad. "I doubt it."

Jira made a noise and looked back at the large encampment and all the fires lighting up the sky. "Well, I like you for it, Drayheller," she said without returning her gaze to Gíla. "I'm going to name you my traveling companion, and you've no choice but to accept it. I've no one else, my guild is destroyed. So make our journey enjoyable and tell me your tales."

Gíla said nothing as Jira walked away, disappearing in the darkness between campfires.