As promised, it rained in the afternoon. Using some leaves since our waterskins were full of nothing but repellent, I collected enough rain to finally satiate my thirst before we moved on. I expected the rain to stop, but it continued for several hours, only letting up near sundown for a little while before restarting again as we were setting up camp. Though heat magic kept Vaozey and me warm, the lack of any kind of shelter besides the trees made sleeping difficult. At least we didn’t have to cook anything, I thought as I ate some more jerky, trying to figure out what animal it had come from.

I awoke to Vaozey yelling in alarm and sprung to my feet before I was fully alert, causing my blood pressure to dip briefly and my vision to fizzle out for a moment. Once my senses came back, I saw Vaozey breathing heavily, batting at her arms and legs half-heartedly and scowling, and I sheathed my sword.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she replied, using the tree to push herself up to her feet.

“Will it be a problem?” I asked.

“No,” Vaozey grumbled. “Let’s just go, my whole body is soaked, hopefully we dry out a bit once we start walking.”

After a morning of walking, we reached the tree line around noon, though the road still wasn’t visible yet. I knew we had to be moving in the right direction though, the map I had seen gave me enough of a sense of the positions of the cities that, topologically speaking, it was impossible for us to continue to head east forever without crossing some kind of well-trodden path. Since we were both hungry, we stopped near some rocks and sat down to eat.

“We need to re-apply repellent now that we’re dry,” I said as I chewed yet another piece of dry meat. This must be monkey meat of some kind, I thought, it’s not deer, it’s definitely not bear, and the pieces are too large for it to be from a squirrel or some other rodent. I had seen a few monkeys before we left the woods, herbivorous types with green and brownish fur, so it made sense. Watching Vaozey eat and remembering her reaction to the last monkey, I decided not to inform her.

“What’s the point?” she asked. “They can just ignore the stuff, you saw what happened in the camp.”

“We don’t know what happened,” I replied. “The repellent has to have some effect. We have plenty, I’d rather not be caught off guard.”

“Doesn’t it give you headaches?” Vaozey asked.

“I’d rather have a headache than end up being ambushed or tracked,” I replied.

Though I preferred a headache to an ambush, I still didn’t like a headache very much. The rest of the day was a bit of a haze as the nerves in my forehead and behind my eyes voiced their protest to the repellent, making every hour feel long but also simultaneously distracting me enough that I had trouble focusing on anything I was doing. As we walked through a field of tall grass, Vaozey took to picking out long blades that came within her reach, burning them with magic, then letting the ashes fall to the ground.

We didn’t really need a campfire since we still had another two days of rations in the backpack, but Vaozey made a small one anyway once the sun went down. Finding wood that was actually burnable was hard because everything was still damp, so instead of just doing it myself I had her replicate my heat magic trick to dry out the fallen branch she had retrieved and broken up. It took her just under an hour to finally get it right, but once she did, a smoky fire followed not long after.

In the middle of the night, I woke up to find her still tending the fire, apparently having added more wood to it after I drifted off. The nearest tree was about twenty meters away, which made it surprising that I didn’t hear her walking over to it. I’m really growing to dislike sleeping, I thought, back when I first arrived anything would wake me, but now it seems like I’m losing that ability.

“You need to rest,” I said, sitting up from my makeshift grass bed.

“I got plenty of sleep last night,” Vaozey replied, not looking up from the fire. A moment later she slapped her arm, then sighed. “I’ll be fine for a few days,” she assured me.

“Even if you need less sleep than me, you won’t be able to function if you’re awake for days,” I replied. “It’s past midnight, get some rest.”

“I don’t need it,” Vaozey insisted. “I’ve told you before, I only sleep half the night most nights anyway. When I don’t, I end up… like this morning.” It had become less common in recent days for my human instincts to be totally in opposition to my rational ones, but I found that the human part of my mind was urging me to continue the conversation at the expense of sleep, while rationally I was certain it would be pointless.

“You have nightmares,” I said, giving the human side what it wanted.

“Obviously,” Vaozey sighed. “It’s been a while since I’ve had one, actually. Ever since I left Owsahlk they’ve been few and far between. Last night though, ants. Everywhere. I was drowning in them, it felt like I was choking to death until I woke up.”

“I’ve had realistic dreams before,” I told her, remembering one of my first nights. “If you’re worried about appearing weak or unreliable because of these dreams, I would rather you just go to sleep instead so that you can be rested and alert.”

“Is that an order?” Vaozey asked.

“Advice,” I replied. “I can make it an order, but somehow I don’t think I’d be able to confirm that you followed it correctly, so it’s pointless.”

“Seyt,” Vaozey muttered. “Why do you have to be so seytoydh reasonable sometimes?” The question was obviously rhetorical, so I didn’t reply, which made Vaozey sigh again. “So, what, you’re going to tell me all this shit actually bothers you? You get the dreams too?”

“What?” I grunted, only half-pronouncing the word.

“Nevermind,” Vaozey muttered, rubbing her face. “Gods, what kind of a stupid question… feel like I’m not even me anymore sometimes.” Again, I had a human instinct to pry, but Vaozey glanced over and appeared to read the intent from my expression, and shared it. “And what about you mister high noble?” she scoffed. “Big three name slumming it in Uwriy, pretending like you aren’t royalty? I have to admit, if you weren’t lying, I’m shocked.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied.

“Lying then,” Vaozey grunted with a hint of amusement, and I realized what she was referencing.

“I don’t have three names,” I informed her. “Is that some kind of status symbol here?” I recalled some royal names I had heard before having a syllable between the first and last names, but I wasn’t sure if that qualified.

“You could have said you had four,” Vaozey joked. “What you told that guy sounded long enough, for sure.”

“It was just one,” I said, and she raised an eyebrow.

“That was one name?” she scoffed. Not even really a name, I thought. “Wait, was that actually your real name?”

“As I said, it’s something unique to me,” I replied. “To call it a name might be incorrect.”

“If it’s not, then what is it?” Vaozey asked, and I recognized the same prying instinct that I had in her expression. She already knows I’m not Gwahlaob, I thought, I suppose I could work on an alternate backstory.

“Where I’m from… people like me don’t have names,” I explained. “What I told Mawyeyz was a unique identifier that included my role and a sequence of numbers used to discern me from others like me.” Vaozey didn’t reply right away, her mouth partially ajar as she processed what I told her.

“You were a seytoydh slave,” she said, eyes wide. “You were a combat slave, that’s why you’re so good at fighting.”

“No,” I said. “I was trained as a fighter from an extremely young age.” Vaozey’s eyes narrowed, and her expression turned angry, but she wasn’t upset with me.

“How young?” she asked, and I thought about how to express it in human terms. All of my training, even my creation, was done in varying degrees of virtual realities. My perception of time inside of them did not necessarily correspond to the passage of time outside of them, so I had no idea how old I was when I was finally let out into the physical world and put on my first real mission. In fact, I’m not sure which mission was the first “real” one, I thought, most likely though, it was the village eradication in the late 2200s.

“My entire life,” I replied. “For as long as I can remember.”

“Your parents taught you?” Vaozey prodded.

“I didn’t have parents,” I replied.

“Then who-” Vaozey began.

“As you surmised, the military,” I interrupted.

“Jhoyzawlay,” Vaozey swore, gritting her teeth and looking away. That’s not the reaction I expected, I thought.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

“Your people make children join the military?” Vaozey asked, sounding disgusted. “That’s what you just said, isn’t it?”

“In a sense, yes,” I replied. “Some of us are born and raised in such environments, it’s how we produce our soldiers. Depending on the intended role for us, we receive different training.”

“It’s despicable,” Vaozey replied. “How old were you when you first fought? When you first killed?”

“I’m not really sure,” I replied honestly. Subjectively, my first real kill would have been somewhere around ten years old, I thought, if I consider simulations though, no more than three. It’s hard to remember that far back.

“‘A nation that forces even a single child to take up arms for its defense would be better burned to the ground, for it is already destroyed’,” Vaozey said. “Those are the words of Roydlow.”

“Didn’t you recently tell me that it would be better for the children of Rehvites to die rather than convert?” I asked. I didn’t really care about the ethics either way, but the fact that Vaozey held such contrary positions was surprising.

“That’s different,” Vaozey deflected.

“I don’t really see how it is, besides the children having a slightly better chance of survival,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” Vaozey sighed. “But now, at least I understand why. It explains a lot about you, actually.” I wasn’t sure what to make of that statement, but before I could ask, I ended up yawning. Vaozey yawned as well, then blinked a few times and looked back at the fire. “You know what, I think I will sleep,” she said. “All this talking has tired me out.”

The next morning, just an hour after we started walking, we found the road, and a merchant caravan walking along it toward Kuhtehsh. Judging by how they reacted to us, they probably thought Vaozey and I were bandits at first, but once we assured them that we weren’t going to rob them everyone calmed down a little bit. They had come from Awrehrehzha, and when asked about their travel time they told us that they had been walking for eleven days, and expected to spend two more before reaching their destination. So, optimally, that means we can probably make it there in ten days, I thought to myself as Vaozey negotiated to buy some dried fruits and water from their stores.

Later on, in the afternoon, we passed by another group of people, an armed band of Steelheart Company mercenaries. It had been some time since I interacted with Steelheart, so when I heard them say the name aloud it surprised me. They didn’t seem to know who me or Vaozey were though, and informed us that they were on the hunt for a criminal who had escaped from the nearby town of Rowrehz, which was to the direct south. I hadn’t really paid any attention to the map outside of the route I was intending to follow, but I was fairly certain they weren’t lying about the town’s location. After exchanging some pleasantries, we went our separate ways, and soon enough it was dusk again.

“Found an ant,” Vaozey said, picking an insect off of the ground near our fire and crushing it between her fingers.

“That one was too small to be one of the dangerous ones,” I replied, re-heating the soupy paste I had made out of the remaining jerky and some tuber-like roots I found nearby.

“They could all be dangerous,” Vaozey retorted, chucking the insect’s corpse into the fire. “We don’t know anything, they could be cooperating.” I almost laughed in amusement but managed to contain my reaction.

“Most ant species are hostile to each other,” I explained. “Even colonies of the same species sometimes fight over resources. It’s highly unlikely that they would be cooperating with another species. It would be like trying to train wild-” I paused, remembering something I had realized back outside Towrkah but hadn’t asked about.

“Wild what?” Vaozey asked.

“There are no dogs here,” I said. “Your people, they don’t train many animals, do they?”

“Besides the pack beasts, not really,” Vaozey confirmed. “Most of the wildlife around here is either too skittish or too violent to be worth trying to train. Even the pack beasts are something we brought over from Dahmpiyah during the colonization.”

“So do the Dahmpiyahns train more animals?” I asked, wondering aloud.

“They have some animals they keep for food,” Vaozey replied. “They don’t do well here though, they’re too stupid to avoid predators. Besides, Uwriy has about a hundred times more deer than people in it, we don’t need them.”

“What about animals for combat?” I asked.

“Like in Yahn Gwah and Iynahfehn?” Vaozey asked with a half smile. “Things for riding and such?” Yet another detail I didn’t know, I sighed.

“No, I mean as combat animals,” I replied. “There were animals called dogs that were very common in my homeland, four-legged pack hunters. They were trained to fight people, as well as track them.” Vaozey thought about it, curling her lips in for a moment.

“What do they look like?” she asked. “We don’t have those here, but I’m curious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drawing of one.” I suppose I could draw one, I thought, Or, maybe…

“Give me a minute,” I said, making a circle with my fingers and thumbs to create a flat area that could be fully saturated with my magic. Taking a deep breath, I focused on an image of a dog, then slowly began making lines and points of dim light between my fingers. It just looked like noise at first, with no real coherence, but as I started to get the outline into the right shape the rest of the rendering became simpler. Three minutes later, I had created a floating representation of a dog between my fingers and even colored it with some simple glowing shapes.

“That’s incredible,” Vaozey remarked, having been enraptured with observing me while I worked.

“You’re not the only one who needs practice,” I grunted, and the image wavered from the small distraction. “This is a dog, specifically it’s a Rottweiler breed of some kind. Obviously, this is just a representaiton, the real thing looks slightly different.”

“Looks like a tihlael with floppy ears,” Vaozey said, and I finally let the image go out. I had used almost thirty percent of my immediate reserves on the rendering, but thankfully not much of the solid fuel in my cores. That was definitely the most complex magic I’ve ever produced, I thought, worse than the game board, even.

“What’s a tihlael?” I asked.

“They live in the forests out west,” Vaozey explained. “I’ve never seen one, obviously, but I read about them as a girl. Supposedly, they’re smart enough to understand speech, and some people even think they have their own language because of all the different noises they make. They tend to avoid people, so the only records of extended contact with them are from people who encountered injured ones.”

“Has anyone tried to train them, or reason with them?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Vaozey shrugged. “They were just in a book full of animals I read one time. Apparently though, a few of the people who helped injured ones had dead animals laid out on their doorsteps for months afterward. If your people train these things, you’d know more about them than I do.”

“Right,” I grunted. “Anyway, my point is that it would be extremely difficult to train different ant species to work together if they weren’t naturally inclined to do so. I don’t even understand how they trained the one they’re using, it shouldn’t be possible.”

“So when you say they can be hostile to each other, do you mean like cities, or countries?” Vaozey asked.

“Very similar,” I replied. “They’re insects, so the way they think about it is likely very different, but in essence they fight as groups against each other.”

“Little bug wars,” Vaozey snickered. “With little bug captains and little bug kings, fighting over leaves and scraps of meat the size of houses. It’s a wonder they can tell each other apart when they all look the same.”

“They identify each other by scent,” I replied. “To them, it very obvious who is part of their colony and who isn’t. In fact, it may be even more obvious to them in the heat of battle than to a human.”

“Scent?” Vaozey asked.

“Ants can’t see very well compared to humans, due to a number of factors,” I explained. “However, they have a highly developed sense of smell. They use it for many things, like marking where food and resources are to help members of the colony navigate. That’s why they walk in lines, the line itself is usually marked by a chemical of some kind that they can detect.” Vaozey laughed, then tossed a stick into the fire.

“So your people, the same ones that train tihlael and use children to fight wars, have enough time on their hands to figure out how well bugs can see and smell,” she remarked. “I think you all must be completely insane, but then again, I’m probably just as nuts.” She took a swing of water, burped, then cleared her throat. “Little ant soldiers wearing perfume uniforms, tearing each other to bits with little ant swords and spears,” she chuckled to herself.

“Uniforms…” I echoed, the words slotting into place in my mind. I felt as though I was thinking someone else’s thoughts for a moment, ideas cycling so quickly through my consciousness that I could only grab them for an instant before they slipped away again.

“What?” Vaozey prompted.

“The repellent isn’t a repellent,” I realized aloud. “It’s a uniform, or rather it’s something like one. That’s why the regular Rehvites don’t need to wear it, and that’s why the official guard formula is different from the one we have. It’s not keeping the ants away, it’s telling them to leave us alone, to ignore us. The smell of it identifies us as being something they should avoid.”

“But then why would they attack that camp?” Vaozey asked.

“They were hungry,” I replied. “Or maybe it’s not the same uniform as the guard one. It’s hard to know, ants don’t think like humans do. Maybe the guard formula is something they’re trained to respond to one way, and the one we have is just something that smells similar to a danger signal. Without further analysis, it’s impossible to know for sure.”

“They went after a storage tent,” Vaozey recalled. “It wasn’t the people, necessarily, it was whatever was in the tent that they wanted.”

“They had plenty of rations,” I added. “Ants tend to prefer foods high in protein. If there was a colony nearby that was starving for some reason-”

“But on the same day that the priest was supposed to arrive-” Vaozey interrupted.

“It could have been a coincidence,” I interrupted back. “Mawyeyz said there were some colonies nearby but that they weren’t an issue.”

“Seytoydh pretty big coincidence,” Vaozey muttered, and I had to agree. For a moment, the only noises were the nearby cricket-like bugs and the fire crackling as neither of us knew what to say. “I’m taking the tree,” Vaozey finally said. “If I can’t sleep tonight, knock me out tomorrow. You were right, I need the rest.”