A handsome, dirty man with a bow walked down the winding road. At his side sprinted a miniature maniac, running, screaming, smiling, swerving back and forth, poised to topple off the mountainside at any moment—Aether willing. Eris had smiled to the handsome man—a hunter of the nearby village, no doubt—but now stepped far aside to evade this oncoming missile.

Her eyes veered off to the other side of the path. A steep drop. They were ascending the face of the mountains now and any slip would mean a long tumble down. The sky was overcast and the air was evil in its chill, even through her cloak and furs.

Looking down from these heights she saw all of Esenia behind them. The forests below; the grasslands beyond; the plains out toward the horizon, where, from on high, the outline of hills and more trees began, and then, perhaps, the shape of shoreline to the east.

Her self-distraction was interrupted. "Watch yourself," the man said. Eris snapped her eyes back to him. “He’s going to hug you.”

She was too late to use Disintegrate, or even a fire spell. The next thing she knew the tiny creature—a child—was touching her. It smiled and wrapped its arms around her legs and bound them together in the firmest embrace she ever knew, wrapping her ankles shut like rope used by slavers, slobbering on her, drooling, and infecting her with diseases untold.

She was aghast. She raised her arms in disgust, trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. “It is touching me!” she said. “Get it off!”

Aletheia fell down to her knees. “What’s your name?”

When he saw the girl open her arms, he unhatched himself from Eris and rushed over to her instead, and the two hugged.

“He’s Carys.” The man’s accent was thick. He smiled affectionately. “He’s been on a tear this week. Hugging everyone he sees.”

“He’s so cute!” Aletheia said.

Eris drew herself away. “He is deranged. Do parents not control their children in Voreios?”

“He’s just a lad,” the man said, “got too much love to keep it to himself and his family. Nothing wrong with that.”

“You say it is cute to let him molest strangers when he is young, yet no one would suggest allowing such a habit to fester.”

“How old is he?” Robur asked.

Eris thought seven or eight, but the man replied, “Three. He’ll be four next month, won’t you?”

“Delightful,” Eris sighed. She crossed her arms and waited for her companions to stand, but when the boy left Aletheia, he suddenly rushed back to Eris. Again he wrapped himself around her legs, putting his disgusting infantile face on her knees and sniffling against her thighs. “Help me!” she cried.

Aletheia laughed. “Don’t listen to her. She’s mean.”

“I swear, if you do not—” She cut herself off with a growl, trying her best to remain composed. They were wanted in too many places. They could not make enemies in Voreios already.

The man laughed. “All right, Carys. You’ve hugged her enough.” Then he repeated the command in a strange language—Eris had only ever heard it spoken by Guinevere—and the child obeyed at once.

“Bye!” Aletheia waved to them.

“Safe journeys,” he said, and then they were gone.

Eris sighed in relief. Then she shuddered at the memory.

“Come on,” Aletheia said, clearing seeing Eris’ face. “Even you can’t hate kids that much.”

“I cannot think of anything more revolting than being touched by a child such as that. My new leathers are covered in drool.”

“No they aren’t!”

“They are! See!” She pointed to a place where the child had clearly let his nose run over her skirt, but the girl was blind and did not see it. “Let us get far, far away from this village and hope we never experience such an encounter again.”

Her companions followed after her as she set back down the road. They had been going uphill all week. Her feet ached. She was freezing. All her muscles burned. She longed to use Blink to travel instead of her feet, but it was dangerous to use over long distances, and she was not certain it was safe for her—parasite. She would merely drain herself anyway, and that would make the journey far worse.

“He was just excited,” Aletheia said.

“Then next we can get another dog. Perhaps he will hump my leg too.”

“You know—that’s what you’re going to have someday?”

Eris stopped to glare at Aletheia. “No. If you find such revolting creatures so delightful, you will enjoy raising it. But my contribution ends the day it is born. We have gone over this many times before. I hope to never see him once he is—like that.” She shuddered.

Aletheia sank. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

“Why would I have changed my mind?”

“I thought you liked him now.”

Eris put a hand on her stomach. It was well-concealed in her winter clothes, but such a gesture revealed it. “One day. When he is not so revolting and does not smell or scream or cry. I will be happy to meet him then. But until that day comes, I want nothing to do with him.”

Robur interjected. “May I ask—why you dislike children so much?”

She groaned. “Because they are irritating!”

“I’m irritating,” Aletheia offered.

“Yes, but you do not need me to change your soiled linens. And you also do not need me to bathe you, feed you, and spend a fortune caring for you. And you do not smell or drool.”

“We often smell,” Robur said. “We rarely bathe.”

“This is insane. Do either of you truly think I could be a satisfactory mother? Why do you badger me so? Can you not be content that I have decided to let the child live?”

“You loved Rook,” Aletheia said. “You could love his son, too. I think…you wouldn’t be that bad. And I’d be there to help.”

Eris was appalled by this. She looked to Robur.

“…I am simply curious,” he said. “In Arqa I met several mothers who did not care for the lives of their children, but were forced to carry them to term for social considerations. You seem to care, yet insist you are disinterested in raising him.”

She threw her hands up in frustration. “Yes! Because having a child requires no effort! Raising a child requires—interacting with one! And I hate children! Gah! And I hate the both of you!”

She stormed back off down the road. It was not lost on her, as she fumed, that her companions had gotten her to shift the conversation: from her concerns, to those of Rook’s son. But Eris did not care about the concerns of an unborn parasite. She cared about herself. She cared about her own ambitions and her freedom. She wasn’t planning on leaving him with Aletheia because she disliked children—that was incidental. She would do it because she had no other choice, and she knew she would make a poor mother, and she did not want to be one anyway.

But that encounter was a reminder. Eris truly did loathe children. To say she hated them was an understatement. She had forgotten for lack of exposure. She did not understand them, and hadn’t even when she was one. And that night, when she gazed down at her own body, she felt horror to realize that such a monstrosity was what was lurking, invisibly, beneath her own skin.

This was the edge of Esenia. Voreios was the farthest northern reach of the Old Kingdom. Past these mountains there would be fewer and fewer ruins, and it wouldn’t be long before there were none at all. The great mountain range that separated the Land of Blood—for that was what Esenia meant in Regal—from the unknown realms beyond had once been a grassland, allowing the ancient Senerians to swoop down on horseback and colonize the peninsula, and then build their great cities, and then their Spires.

They all knew how the story went from there. Those same Spires led to the Fall, and so, indirectly, the grasslands that let the proto-Esenians in also led to their own destruction. For now the grasslands were gone. Now the mountains were impassable to any beasts of burden, and even on foot it was a treacherous jungle.

Few made the journey every year. Those who did braved thick forest, steep terrain, and endless monstrosities that called such inhospitable land home. Any travelers were certain to be assailed by hobgoblins, stray Arktids, great owls, giant spiders, and the savage wildlings that lurked within the tall trees.

By the time they arrived not a single leaf was green. All the canopy was bright yellow and pink and purple overhead, and within a week of their trek scaling up and down uneven forest hills they found themselves wading through seas of detritus.

The air chilled more and more each night. Weeks passed.

They were attacked countless times. An Arktid attempted to steal Eris’ staff and was set on fire for his trouble. Three great spiders were turned to ash for assailing them at camp. Goblins, and later hobgoblins, ambushed them on the brief stretches of trail they found through the wilderness. Each time the threat was dispatched with varying ease.

Three magicians in concert could fight off an army. Eris alone could take castles. The outcasts and refuse of Voreios did not threaten them. But they did slow them down, and make the journey all the more miserable. They needed to stop early to set camp, so one person was always on watch, to ensure they were never caught off guard and killed through a slip of attention.

The cold was a far more insidious threat. The mountains were frigid. Weeks turned into a month; snow began to fall most nights. It took magic to keep them all warm. They huddled together at night beside conjured fire, their bodies close together. It was cold as Chionos. Eris had rarely felt so awful.

Winter was here.

She swelled to an unbelievable size. It was a romantic mythologizing, but she traced the moment of her son’s conception to that first night she and Rook accepted their feelings for each other, when they had made the most ecstatic love imaginable for an entire night. They had not slept together for months previously, so it could not have been before; and the demon of Moronos had known she was pregnant when she communed with it mere days later, so she knew it had happened by then. She was disturbed to think the demon capable of detecting ‘life’ so long before it was truly alive. So, she concluded, it had to have been on that night with Rook in the hotel.

Her calculations were not foolproof, but she saw no reason to rob her life of that small slice of romance. She could not express it or articulate why, but the thought of that night in particular, conceiving then of all nights, was supremely erotic. So she believed it to be so.

That was seven months ago. Part of her wished Rook could see her now, for he would not recognize her. A smaller part was glad he was dead, for he would have been insufferable had he known.

The affliction had gone from an unseen illness to a change in appearance to now a serious disability. Her ankles were always swollen. Her back ached. She was always hungry yet never wanted to eat. These symptoms were bad enough but exacerbated to the extreme by their journey. She was desperate to reach the other side, but the bad weather slowed them down. They moved mere miles each day.

Thankfully Aletheia could still hunt. But that only made them lose more time.

But the pain, the discomfort, the general malaise—Eris could endure all this without complaint. It was the sheer size she couldn’t stand. She found herself unable to breathe often as the child crowded her lungs. She hit everything possible. She could not lean over.

And the child—now it was awake. The fluttering was gone, replaced by acrobatics that never stopped. This thing was trying to break free from her womb. It battered from within her stomach. Punching her. Kicking her. Forcing her to lurch over. Making her vomit. It was a horrible, disturbing, deeply unsettling experience; all her life Eris had seen herself as an individual, and even throughout the last three months she had not considered the child much more than part of herself except in moments of contemplation. Day to day it was little more than an illness that would not let up.

Now it was something different. It was—he was—alive, undeniably, and he reminded her every hour, and sometimes she saw the shape of his hands or feet through her own skin and shivered. She nearly cried when she stole away from the party to be alone and found herself still in his company, because she could not be alone now. Her vice of solitude went forever unfulfilled.

But when she clutched herself, she cared less and less. Over the preceding months she had received glimpses of comfort, to feel proximity to Rook again. Now, when alone, she felt it all the time. She didn’t understand Aletheia or Robur. She didn’t know how they thought. Their minds perplexed her. Even Rook, the man she was closest to, was infinitely alien. She could hardly comprehend him, after so much time. But this child battering her intestines—she understood him. They shared a connection far beyond any she had ever known with any other person. It was a special thing. A fleeting thing. She knew it would not last. It would be gone when he left her and became all the things she hated about infants, and when she lost control of him. But for now they were trapped together, and it was a taste of something delicious she knew she would never have again. The same completeness she felt, to have a friend in Rook—she found it again here. A loneliness that had haunted her for her whole life, loneliness she didn’t know she had, was finally gone. And she did like it.

But he always got in the way. On a particularly cold night they huddled together by their fire, freezing by the snow. Aletheia and Eris shivered as snow fell. Robur was some distance off on watch duties.

No matter what her companions did, someone touched her stomach. It was impossible not to touch it. And Eris hated that. She did not like being touched. She enjoyed the closeness she felt to the child, but why did he have to take up so much space?

Over the course of the night’s cuddling—ostensibly for warmth—Aletheia’s head drifted down onto Eris’ belly. Eris hated to be a pillow, but she tolerated it, trying her best to sleep but finding little success, until…

The kick. A painful jolt for her, a tap for Aletheia. She shot upright, confused, but to see Eris in the depths of recovery, smiled broadly.

“He’s awake?”

“He is always awake.”

“Can I feel?”

“No.”

“Please?”

More lurching. Another kick. Eris gasped. This was the ‘fun’ of pregnancy. The creation of life. It was magic, in its way. Power she had. She could no longer sustain the misanthropy required to keep Aletheia away. “Fine,” she hissed.

The girl peeled off Eris’ leathers and exposed her stomach. The cold air bit her flesh. Aletheia pressed freezing fingers to the skin there, feeling the impossibly immense roundness—and within, it was like Eris’ body was the ocean. Her stomach churned and kicked and flipped; it was too horrifying to watch and she fell to the side, gasping, ready to vomit as nausea overcame her, but the girl was amazed.

“What does it feel like?” she asked.

“Horrifying,” Eris gasped.

A moment passed. Then Aletheia pulled the furs and leathers back down, and replaced her blanket, and embraced her. It was a disarmingly affectionate hug.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “He’s going to be great.”

Eris said nothing. She was too preoccupied by the thought that this was the fate Rook had wanted for her. She would never understand that about him, either. Everything was so confusing. A year ago life had been simple. Deadly, passionate, pleasurable. Now her existence was impossibly complicated. That was so much worse than even the cold, worse than all the symptoms, worse than everything. It was enough to make her despair.

Aletheia must have sensed these thoughts, because she hugged Eris again, then settled against her in an embrace. As she righted herself she could never admit that it felt good in that moment to have someone to ground herself against, to help anchor herself against the storm of confusion. It had been that way the night of Rook’s death, too. So she let the girl have her embrace. She returned it cautiously. She relaxed. And she made no further stir when Aletheia brushed against her belly.

They reached the other side of the mountains on a day when snow fell. The whole of the skies toward Voreios were gray and all the land was white. From the cliffs, they saw the final Spire. The mountain range snaked around miles to the east and from a pinnacle it extended to the clouds, piercing them with its black metal tip.

“The final Spire in the web of the Oldwalls,” Eris said. “We will see no more going forward.”

“How much farther do you intend to travel?” Robur asked. He glanced at her; no clothing could conceal her size now.

“I don’t think anyone is going to cross the mountains after us in the winter,” Aletheia said. “We’re safe here. Right?”

Eris nodded. “Safe from Khelidon. But there are threats here enough.” She wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak to ward off the wind.

“It would be wise if we found some village to wait until you gave birth,” Robur said frankly. “This winter is dangerous for everyone, but would be fatal for a child.”

Eris still found the notion of ‘birth’ hard to comprehend, but it was becoming a closer reality with each day. “There is a fortress called Coedwig that I have read of some miles into the forest,” she said. “I know little else of this place.”

“Guinevere was from Voreios,” Aletheia said.

“She was. I do not know—or do not remember—where, however.” Eris pulled up her hood. “We will find somewhere eventually.”

“We have three months. That’s plenty of time.”

“Actually…” Robur said. “Premature delivery is a possibility now that Eris has entered the third trimester. It is unlikely I would be able to keep the child alive except with magic, but it may occur earlier all the same.”

“Or it may occur later, yes?” Eris asked.

He nodded. “I suppose so.”

She straightened her back. “I am well enough to continue our journeys, and fight, if that is what is required—for now. So let us proceed.”

So they descended down into Voreios. And so started the final stretch of this journey.