The Empire’s Vizier slowed down as he approached the top of the Life Tower in the country’s capital city. He could not help but curse the wind mages that demanded it be as high as possible to facilitate its duties. A bell had tolled three times from atop it, marking the passing of a lesser royal family member, but still demanding his presence. It had been 11 years since it sounded while someone was not known to be on their deathbed from old age.

He proceeded to catch his breath before making it to the very top. He could hear the sound of a whip cracking occasionally as he heard the hysterical screaming of some lesser concubine of the Emperor. After brushing away the sweat that he worked up, he proceeded to round the final few stairs to make his way up and into the main atrium. He paused to take in the sight. A windy open room takes up the entirety of the top floor of the tower. Pillars rising to hold up a vaulted ceiling, railings of stone to keep the airflow but also prevent someone from being easily swept out. The center of the room sported three circular steps lowering down to a pool of sand dance. Off to the side was the screeching banshee, an older woman, out of age for the Emperor’s tastes. She was whipping three downed men, covered in tatters of gold robes and red from the blood. They were not flinching and using some fire magic to perceive the temperature of any bodies, they were cooling quickly, signifying they’d died and bled out a while ago.

The Vizier looked through the room, noting each pillar had several life tablets running up them. Taking a quick look, he was able to see that all the tablets at the base of each pillar were still intact. Whoever died most likely belonged to this lesser concubine and by the vitriol she was spouting, the princeling was most certainly her only one and her aspirations for possible grandeur. He lets out a small chuckle noting that she’s failed to see that she lost the only means to guarantee her own safety in the den of vipers which was the inner palace.

Looking back to the sands the winds are picking up or helping the sands replay a scene. The quality was coarse and grainy, replaying a scene with two-foot replicas of four persons. He does not recognize the individual but walks up to a custodian who is meant to monitor and ring the bell in the event that anything happens. Moving up beside him, they both watch the scene play out.

“Why is the image so sparse?” He asks the custodian.

“Quality of the spell cast by the corpses over there? There are clues that they were underground which forced the wind runes drawn on his body to only be allowed through one possible direction. There’s also... something weird that you’ll need to see to believe,” was the response given.

With a noncommittal grunt, he resumes watching. Surprise flashes across his face as he sees a dark guilder bodyguard and a gold mage butler along with a pair of silvers as guards. The princeling in question was from an extremely rich family that must have doted on him.

“Who’s the mage?”

“A monster-class dark guilder, Oswald the Pyre. Refused to fight in the war for a pardon, something about an irrational fear of arrows. The Valeer family,” he inclined his head towards the woman. “They picked him up and were going to give him a new name and a minor noble title. Most likely hoping to use him as a breeder candidate to see if they could infuse stronger mages into their bloodline.”

“There’s ample proof against that theory,” the Vizier sneered.

“Sir, they’ll believe what they want and think that any proof of the contrary is just the main bloodlines attempting to hide what allows them to come to power.”

“How much stronger than a regular gold was he?”

“From what we know? Barely qualifies. He got the title due to his ruthlessness and stamina compared to normal golds.” Was the answer he provided.

The scene shows this Oswald torturing some large buffoon with the butler and the princeling watching on. There’s enough sand to kind of make out an extremely shabbing location with a single entrance and exit. He notes that there are no windows until something new happens. A void. A void in the sands appears in the doorway.

The two silver guards are not present and they turn to address this void. There doesn’t appear to be a hurry. They seem to be perhaps conversing with whatever this void is and the gold mage butler approaches his charge.

The image sharpens, denoting that the moment of the princeling’s demise is approaching. Oswald is crossing the room and is approaching the void. Unfortunately, they only have to go on the images as there’s no means of having the contents of what is said. Some people claim to be able to read the lips, but the quality in the image is so bad. The anomaly, the void, is blocking the entrance and exit. The Vizier finally understands potentially why the recounting of his final moments would be so poor.

As Oswald approaches the void without fear or trepidation, the void stretches out a tentacle towards Oswald. The Vizier watches what is happening with rapt attention not seeing the custodian turn away.

Once the void of tentacle reaches Oswald, everything explodes out, blasting the Vizier in the face with sand. Recoiling and sputtering he turns in shock back to the scene, seeing some latent fire still present, burning itself out.

“By the devourer, what was that?” He asks the custodian.

“A true monster, the very magic itself is burning. I’m supplying it mana to keep it going, though it is slowly burning itself out. By nightfall, everything will be irreparable.” The Vizier looks out at the setting sun from the high vantage point the tower offers and frowns.

His attention is brought back to the sands as they circulate and fill in the depression made by the explosion and start the scene from the beginning. He sees the five men walking leisurely down a hallway and entering a large room, the same where the previous scene played out. The room has many men that were not visible before, rowdily drinking and eating, bandits from the looks of it, and celebrating a recent successful haul.

The leader or whoever is torturing the buffoon, slicing away pieces of meat from him. He cannot fathom why some lesser princeling would want to go play hero and clean up a bandit den and get himself killed in the process. The two silver knights take up posts for the room. The scene plays out and the custodian uses some wind magic to speed it up. The miniatures start moving around rapidly and the silver knights leave.

“How long does this go on?” He asks the custodian as he watches the dead corpses of the bandits slowly fall apart and disappear, denoting that all signs of life have long since left.

“Nine or ten hours sir,” is the response he gets from the custodian as they continue to torture the buffoon that the bandits were torturing previously. The void reappears and the custodian slows it down to just moments before the explosion. The speed of everything is slowed down to an absolute crawl as the custodian clears his throat to speak.

“Hmhmm, there’s one other thing, look there,” he says while pointing behind the main sphere of the void. The Vizier turns away from watching the point where the void tentacle would touch Oswald and finds that he’s looking at the sand pick up and form a wraith-like appearance, pouring wisps of sand so compacted it might as well become stone, grinding on itself as it moves. The wraith disappears as it enters the void, the sand just falling apart before it detonates again with sand and a bit of fire.

“This is very disconcerting,” he says beneath his breath while barely believing his eyes. The group was confident and at ease, but whoever they faced was able to kill a gold and a dark guild monster in the blink of an eye. An unknown, much more powerful monster class fire mage capable of burning magic itself?

“I’ll need to bring this information to the Emperor and see if we cannot trace the last known location of these idiots that got themselves killed.” He says while patting the shoulder of the custodian and moving to leave.

As the Vizier walks back towards the stairs to go back down, he turns to the concubine to give her a bit of advice, seeing as she’s most likely from a very wealthy noble household.

“While I do not dare to presume, I’d advise that you maybe make a trip back home to visit your aging father. You’ll be quite safe in your father’s territory. I fear the inner palace is quite dangerous for those who’ve lost their only tie to the throne.”

The anger fades from her face and her eyes go wide with terror, realizing that she’s no longer a tigres but a helpless lamb now in these halls. Given her current demeanor, she most definitely has enemies that she’s made over time and nobody wants to die slowly to poison.

With that said and a possible favor that a rich household will owe him, he proceeded to go down the long winding stairs he had spent the better part of a half-hour ascending.

Zoe was in a full-blown hyperventilating panic. Akira had just jogged off after Cara after verifying that the two guards were incapacitated. Just as they started to follow Akira, they saw his back, and then with a step he was gone just as a giant explosion shook the entire hillside. Huge swaths of crumbled earth started to fall from the roots above. That which they could no longer hold back.

The tangle of roots helped to keep a lot of the larger sections up and now there was a lot of loose dirt that came down everywhere. However, that was not the case everywhere, there was an area between them and where Akira was that had filled in the entire hallway with loose crumbled dirt, dust was still thick in the air making it difficult to breathe. What light existed was now much more muted as most of the torches had been snuffed out. It was at this time that she noticed a tentative Violet slowly start to extract a set of a dozen vines that were ensuring that everything was stable, but also rooting Jessica in place. As Violet slowly extricated herself from the walls and ceiling, loose dirt would stream down like water but thankfully there was no further sign of any more cave-ins.

The pair were hacking and coughing as the pair ran over towards the caved-in section where Akira had disappeared moments ago.

“Nononono, Cara!” Jessica yelled through the crumbled earth, panic settling in while she started to claw into the earth and Violet followed suit not fully understanding why her partner was so fervent to dig into the subpar earth.

With a slight application of wind magic, Zoe was able to pull the dust in the air down to the floor to make it easier while she too started to dig into the earth. Every handful of earth just had more slip down from above filling in and making progress feel extremely slow. Wanting to know if they were okay, Zoe pushed and pulled at the wind and could feel it move somewhat through the tangle of roots above the giant blocking mound of earth.

While trying to think about how to use the wind to verify if they were okay or how much earth there was, Zoe almost slapped her forehead at the easy omission. Using her own [Mana Tether] she reached through and down the hall, feeling the roots that were pulled down forming a web above and the cave-in before them. After only ten or so feet the cave-in relented and using her tether down the corridor Zoe found what she was looking for.

“Jess, I can feel Akira and Cara on the other side at the end of the corridor, they’re okay!” She managed to tell the distraught girl beside her.

“Akira looks to be cradling Cara... she may be hurt from whatever the explosion was. Oh! Her face has a black scar!” A gasp escaped her while she was trying to use the [Mana Tether] to figure out what was happening with their two friends.

“This isn’t going anywhere, let me try my storehouse to see if that helps, have Violet ready to help in case something happens above us?” With a possible solution, Jessica scampers away from the mound of dirt, her nails dirty and caked with earth and some blood from frantically digging by hand.

Zoe calmed herself and reached within herself, forming a connection to her [Merchant’s Storehouse] and willing it to come into being horizontally in front of her, within the mound of earth. After a small pause and Jessica anxiously switching her weight from foot to foot, she finally feels her skill gain purchase within the mound. Almost like another cave-in, a huge section of the mound just starts to disappear, falling away into the earth beneath it. She watches as she can feel her storehouse fill up with what feels like a four by four by four cube of loose dirt. The storehouse’s slightly cyan portal becomes visible, with more earth falling on top of it at the deeper parts, absorbing no more. A huge swath of ants, beetles, and worms are fleeing or writhing from the new exposure as none of them were permitted to go into her storehouse because of their status of being alive.

There appeared to be no further cave-in above them and so Zoe ran back to one of the previous store rooms and pushed to dump out all of this worthless stuff. After a brief pause, a cascade of earth falls and starts to fill up the room. Just as she was about to run back, Zoe noticed something odd, her [Merchant’s Storehouse] was not completely empty, a pinch of sand was left over. She summoned the pinch of sand into her hand and left the room to grab a torch to provide some light and take a look at whatever had ignored her initial command to get rid of all of the useless stuff that she had stuffed into her storehouse.

Getting below a torch and grabbing it, she pauses at what she was holding in her hand.

“By the devourer, it’s gold…” She whispered to herself as ideas of how she could use this started to tickle her fantasies. With a quick shake of her head, she carefully put the contents back into her storehouse as she had more important things to deal with.

Repeating the trips two more times, Zoe was able to feel that enough earth had cascaded down to open up a hole through the top, amongst all the roots, but at least it would be sufficient for them to the other side.

It is dark, but Zoe climbs forward, pushing the torch forward to fight back against the dark and throwing a lot of creepy shadows from all the roots. Pushing through the ten feet gets them to the other side where they can see Akira cradling Cara in one arm. Zoe pushes the dust in the air down to the ground while they approach the two. Jessica starts to cry as she sees what state Cara is in. Half her face and both arms are terribly burned. Akira has his clamshell of black embers in hand, they seem to absorb the light of the torch. A pitiful two dozen are there and they are slowly disappearing quickly as the burns start to heal before their eyes, starting from Cara’s mouth. The new skin was forming starting around her mouth and slowly creeping across her face. Her eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair start to fill in as the burns start to disappear as soft white skin replaces wrinkled boils and seared flesh, running down her arms to her fingertips.

Akira closes up the clamshell with only three embers still devouring the torchlight.

After returning the clamshell to within his armor, he uses his now free hand to lift Cara’s eyelid, eliciting a groan as she comes to and winces at the torchlight.

“Dad?”

“DAD!?” I yell out while flailing with my vision still having a central white dot that is fading. Sitting up, I almost headbutt Akira as I get my bearings. I see my friends and partner around me and looking over Akira’s shoulder I see the other room.

The air around us is clean, but there appears to almost be a wall of soot and dust that is hanging in the air to the room that I’m transfixed on.

Shakily I push Akira out of the way while getting up, my knees are weak as I start to move into the room using the wall to steady myself. The benches of dirt are no more, there is a scorched black crater in the center of the room. There are scorched bits of what used to be a human around the crater on the ground. Two more blackened corpses are lying against the dais. Their bodies crumpled into inhuman shapes, not moving.

Placing one foot in front of the other, I make my way up the dais to where I last saw my father. My eyes sting from the dust in the air and I’m blinking back tears. The room was reinforced by an earth mage, but there are cracks and loose dirt still streaming down in places. On the back wall, I see my father, rolled up against the wall, half covered in loose dirt.

My brain doesn’t want to work as I just place one foot in front of the other. His body is badly burned all over, dirt ingrained into oozing flesh. My knees buckle out from under me and while reaching out a hand, I pause. My chest feels tight and I simply reach out a [Mana Tether], afraid of what I might find.

The thin tether feels as though it takes forever to cross the distance that I cannot seem to will my body to cross to shake him. Once it does touch him, a faint pink soul appears before me. There are so many red scars overlapping that they almost merge together, they are faint and appear slightly pink and the color is slowly dimming.

He’s alive! Barely. But still alive.

“AKIRA! Please. Help. Dad!” I yell, choking on some sobs of relief and now worry as I scoot forward, afraid to touch him.

A shadow blocks out what little light there is from Zoe’s torch. A hand gently presses on my shoulder to help brace me as he takes a knee beside me and my father. I glance up at Akira and I can see his mouth moving but cannot hear anything amidst the constant ringing.

He pulls out the small clamshell that he showed me before that he was painstakingly storing mana embers in and I can see there are only three that quickly disappear as my dad quickly starts to convulse with a small weak cough. He slowly pulls away, he is frowning and my heart leaps up into my throat. He turns to me and starts to mouth something, I’m sorry, or something and I’m not going to take it. I smack him in the chest, yelling at him to heal my father. He just looks at me with a pained expression and slowly mouths.

‘It. May. Kill. You.’

“I DON’T CARE!” I scream. Somehow I can almost feel it, there are three angry tangles of soul parasites and if I somehow end up gaining one for my father, I would never be able to forgive myself. It would haunt me for the remainder of my life, and I don’t know if I could keep going knowing what I had done.

I can see Jessica crying while hiding in Zoe’s shoulder, and I’m sad about what I’m about to do.

“Akira.”

“I command you.”

“To heal my father,” I say, slowly letting my emotions fall away, steeling myself and just hoping that I might be able to see my dad one last time.

Jessica snaps around in horror as Akira freezes at first, going wooden, before slowly moving in a jerky fashion, like some terrible puppeteer was trying to control an unwilling marionette.

As he slowly starts to reach all I can feel is pain, a fire burning through my very being. I feel like my soul is on fire, holding back a dam of lava and my very soul is buckling under the pressure.

I had thought that Mr. Foregess had passed away and turned to Zoe as I let the sobs take over. Violet was trying to pat my head, and back, while trying to steal away my tears in an effort to make me feel better or make me laugh, but the pain was too much to deal with. Cara was struggling and yelling, but all of a sudden went calm and slowly gave out a command to him.

I whip around in shock at my best friend wanting to trade her life for her dad’s. Akira had apologized repeatedly saying that anything more would trade their lives and no father would want that for their child. However, Cara is as stubborn as her dad at times, refusing just to accept things and say her goodbyes.

What followed next was a horrendous cry that was ripped out of her. The room was lightening up as Cara was glowing, glowing from within. I started to scream at Akira to stop as my best friend’s veins started to glow orange and then her skeleton became visible, glowing from underneath her skin. The scene will haunt me for the rest of my life. Cara’s body was giving off so much light that the room started to brighten, doing more than Zoe’s torch.

I’m yelling, pulling, and hitting Akira, who’s acting strange. Violet is doing her best to try and wrench him away, feeling my panic, but it is like he’s a boulder, an ancient tree, incapable of being uprooted and moved.

While Cara’s screams become hoarse, her father’s burns are quickly disappearing while he starts to let out a hacking cough that cannot be heard over the screams of his only daughter. He quickly comes to, hearing her pained screams, as though she’s the one that had been tortured instead of him. He looks on in dread as he sees his poor daughter, glowing hauntingly from the inside and her familiar pointing at him while trembling as Zoe, Violet, and I are yelling at him to stop and are trying to wrestle him.

Mr. Foregess tries to sit up, but his arms are still a pair of blackened bones and are not responding to help him sit up. He scrambles to turn around and does his best to land a kick into Akira’s chest, but nothing happens, as though he had just kicked an iron wall.

Amidst Cara’s hoarse screams, she manages to take a breath before renewing her soul-wrenching scream. However, with this breath, she manages to use it to scream one word.

“STOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”

With that single word, the cave goes dark, the torch sputtering against the ground and the light that Cara was giving off comes to a halt.

Akira lowers his arm from pointing at Mr. Foregess and quickly moves over to cradle Cara, dragging Violet and myself with him as Cara starts to sob and just curls up into a shaking ball.

I don’t know how long I remained curled up in a ball sobbing my heart out. The ringing has started to subside and now I can hear my dad’s angry voice constantly yelling at Akira. I can’t seem to control my body’s shaking, but just hearing my father's constant curses, even though they are directed at Akira, just somehow seem to be a salve for my soul.

I didn’t kill him. He’s okay. I don’t know how much longer it took but I slowly was able to stop shaking and then slowly sit up.

Jessica is holding me and I can see Zoe holding my dad off from Akira, it looks like he wants to bite him to death. I give Jessica a nudge as I do my best to stand up before I simply run over and tackle my dad in a hug. It is only during this tackle that I notice that dad’s missing his arms.

Looking over at Akira, all I can see is shame in his face, and I want to ask if he can fully heal my dad’s arms, but the deep-seated fear from the pain I just went through catches my tongue and prevents me from even trying to form the words.

Akira, seeming able to sense or understand what I wanted to ask but am too traumatized to even utter, heads me off and answers the question that is paining me.

“You and Jessica, with a bit of practice, will be able to help him slowly regrow and heal his arms. It will just take more time, but will be a good experience for the three of you to learn soon.”

I nod while still gripping my dad tightly as I can feel him doing his best to nuzzle the top of my head with his scratchy beard.

Jessica and Zoe both come over to join in on hugging me and my dad. We stayed like that for a long time before deciding that it would be best to start making our way back home. We started to return and shimmied our way back through the collapsed tunnel, which was quite awkward for dad, as he had to worm his way through. We make our way back through the tunnel and are saddened to find the two guards had suffocated to death at some point. Jessica starts letting go of some silent tears as we make our way back to the entrance.

“What do we do about the carriage?” Jessica asks, trying to be brave and change the subject or to just think about anything else instead.

“I don’t know, sell it?” Is my first thought.

“No! No way! Nadda! Not even if the devourer demanded that we do it. Even dark guilders are hesitant to even try that. They are more likely to melt down what they can and burn the rest. I say we just cut the Devra loose and we forget we know anything about it.” Zoe adamantly begs to differ.

“That won’t work, people will ask where we found and rescued Dad.”

“Then don’t, half lies will suffice. William can simply say that he was here and some people showed up and started to fight with the bandits. In the confusion, he ran and slipped out. We met him in the woods and decided to come back. We can tell the guild where to find the bandit den and they’ll come to investigate to find that there was a cave-in from the fighting and we are unaware of what happened. We just need you to heal William’s arms and nothing more.” Akira chimes in with a possible alibi for us.

We debate between hiding it, burning it, and just cutting the Devra loose. We finally settle on Akira’s plan as it helps explain how we got dad. Not wanting to cause Jessica any more grief, I go in and fight with the plants to try and get rid of them. Unfortunately, my efforts to try and overpower Jessica’s control or intent over the plants prove to be too difficult or wasteful and I need to get her to come in and assist. With a stoic face and a slight wave of a hand, while tears start streaming down her face again, she manages to have the iron grass age and wither away to dust. While Akira does a quick sweep with a leafy tree branch to hide all of our footsteps in the loose soil and dust.

It is getting dark as we start heading back. Dad is able to walk, if not a bit awkwardly with a lack of balance. Akira disappears into the woods and while dad is grumbling I go about trying to explain to him what happened and that for some reason Akira cannot go against a direct command I give him.

“Fine, I promise to not bite his head off. But still, look at what he did to your hair.”

“What’s wrong with my hair?” I ask, confused at the change in subject.

“Cara, your hair... is mostly white with some ribbons of purple,” Jessica says in a hushed whisper. I’m taken aback at first and then grab some hair and do my best to take a look. I can see that it is dusty and dirty, but I can also see that it is indeed a platinum blond color with some of my original hair color still visible.

It is at this time that we can hear Akira approaching with the sounds of some screaming game captured by him. He comes into view and I can see a single screaming rabbit that he’s holding by the back of the neck.

“Here, its back legs are broken. You can try healing it, but it might be a bit better if you try to focus on it not feeling pain. Use rampant growth and focus on the feeling of pain that the creature is going through and try to overwhelm their body to not feel pain. Then we can look at practicing actually healing it.” He says as he hands me the terrified creature.

It takes a while, but I can feel that the creature needs 10 mana a second to try and heal. However, as I push down the path of having it not feel pain, the requirements quickly jump up and demand 100 mana to actually make the change. After just a couple of seconds of holding the intent, the creature’s screams change in tone, clearly showcasing that it is more terrified than in pain now.

“So, Akira, what’s up with my hair?” I ask, while trying to handle the rabbit, a trickle of 10 mana a second with the intent on the bones in its back legs becoming whole and healthy. The screaming stops for a bit as the rabbit convulses a bit before it starts again but it is now kicking as it tries to break free.

“I’m sorry, what happened before.”

“No, it’s okay, I’m the one that should be sorry, I forced you to do it, but even if I had to go through it again, I would,” I say while shaking my head.

“I did my best to slow the expenditure down to a trickle. Your hair... It is a sign of your soul being burned out. Your soul itself has most likely aged some thirty or forty winters because of what you went through.” He says with a wince as dad just starts swearing at him again like a sailor

It takes us a while to calm my dad down. Akira takes the lull in conversation to quickly examine the rabbit and nods to himself while complimenting me.

“You are a fast learner, but you made it so that the creature is unable to feel any pain, at all, ever. Pain is necessary to live, it keeps you from putting weight on a bad foot, to know you are injured so that you can take your time to heal. As it stands, the creature might not even notice that it was being eaten alive if it could not see the predator.” He says while giving the legs finally a twist and we hear an audible pair of snaps as he hands it to a shocked Jessica who tears up at what she just saw.

“You’ll need to practice as well and Zoe will most likely kill ‘supper’ in her first attempt.” He says, trying to console her which does not work and Zoe is insulted at the insinuation that she’d most likely unalive it while trying to heal a broken bone.”

With what seems like a fraction of the time it needed me to heal the rabbit’s legs, Jessica quickly gets it to start kicking again. As she succeeds, she quickly releases it before Akira can grab it from her and then proceeds to bar his path. Violet extends her vines out as well to mimic Jessica and blocks a huge area from Akira.

“No, leave it alone.”

“Well, that was going to be our supper, considering we will probably want to camp out, as it is getting dark and we’re still pretty far away.” He says in an aggrieved tone. It is at this point that I can feel my stomach give a slight gurgle in protest to how hungry I am since this morning.

We manage to set up a small fire on a campsite that Akira picked out and we help lower my dad to rest his back against a tree so that he can sit. He’s sweating quite a bit, possibly working through some lingering pain.

With a fire going, Akira calls Jessica and me over and mentions that there’s no time like the present with what we’ve done. With a couple of tips on how we should approach this, think about only the small bit of flesh at the shoulder that is still burned black.

We sit down on either side of my dad and I reach out a [Mana Tether] to him, not wanting to touch what is obviously still extremely sore. I can feel the mana take hold for [Rampant Growth] at 99 mana. I keep pushing with the image of what I had done to the rabbit, pushing my intent for my dad not to feel pain or discomfort. The cost shoots up to almost a thousand mana and with a successful image of what my intent is, the magic takes hold for a split second and then I can see my dad visibly relax.

Akira warns us and then uses a sword to break off what remains of the bone and guides us on what to do. With the cost back down to only 99 mana a second, it only takes twenty or so seconds before I’m spent. Jessica is able to persist longer, as she had not spent anything to prevent dad from feeling pain. But we are both extremely fatigued while our mana is now at rock bottom. I try to examine dad for any changes and see that his shoulder might have bulged out a bit and the black flesh is starting to flake away. There might be a quarter-inch or a half-inch more shoulder and start of a deltoid.

Akira had prevented us from trying to use mana embers, something about too much power without control would just cause more issues and him needing to most likely cut away whatever we did wrong. We would need to do this slowly, however, a light picks back up in my dad’s eyes. Most likely a worry that he’d never have his hands again. I can see hope in his eyes now, a shadow that was there before, fading a bit.

“Alright you girls rest for a while, I need to speak with Akira for a bit.” My dad says, all of a sudden, he’s acting a bit awkward.

“What for?” I prod.

“Men... Things...” Is all that he replies with and I’m starting to get a bit paranoid with his sudden change in behavior.

“Huh? No, what is it?” I start to badger him as he argues with me that he just needs some time alone with Akira. I finally got him to cough up the answer.

“I need to take a leak and need a hand.” He says with a terrible shit-eating grin, which has me looking horrified at the dad joke and Jessica and Zoe are in hysterical giggles laughing around the fire while pointing at Akira who’s making a face.

Akira has a pained expression but still helps my dad stand up as they head off into the woods. We huddle around the fire, waiting for our mana to regenerate while Zoe is focusing on compressing mana embers.

Zoe starts to giggle to herself before she looks over to ask me something. “You don’t think your dad would try to take a leak on Akira, would you? As kicking and cursing didn’t seem to work at all before?”

Jessica starts to giggle at the thought while she cuddles up to me after feeding Violet, and we just stare into and poke at the small fire. Smiling and talking as we huddle and wait for what tomorrow will bring.