At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a heavy impact on the ground, then a number of Uwrish curses being muttered in a hoarse, but distinctly female, voice. Once I woke up in the morning, I found that Vaozey was already up and facing the sunrise, slowly working her way through a pile of small sticks that she was burning with magic, one by one. As we departed our campsite and began moving roughly southward on the road, it started to rain again, but not as heavily as it had previously. Instead, for two hours, the sky sputtered out occasional drops of water, just enough to dampen the ground and cool the air without turning the dirt beneath our feet into mud.

About halfway through the rain, since Vaozey wasn’t in a talking mood, I decided to do a bit of magic practice of my own. I had been thinking about the technique that Mawyeyz used to remove the ants from the woman in the militia camp in the back of my mind for several days. It was like a heat gun, almost, I thought, quickly putting something together in my mind. Magic’s main limitation was its range, so any technique that could be used to overcome that limitation was extremely valuable, even if it wasn’t immediately useful. I reasoned that, if I were able to figure out how to replicate Mawyeyz’s heat gun technique, I might be able to adapt it into some other form of long-range energy weapon technique, or at least increase the power to the point of human-to-human combat viability.

I already knew how to move air with force magic from my bit of practice in the Zae’ey’yaob mansion, so setting up a construct to do so wasn’t particularly difficult. Heating air probably would have been hard for someone whose understanding of heat only allowed them to produce fire, but for me it was trivial. Within about fifteen minutes of starting, I made a construct that could produce a gentle stream of warm air at a low cost, but there was a problem: When the construct was activated and moving air, sometimes it would sputter and cut out intermittently. I had never had such a problem with magic before, and it confounded me for some time.

It’s the rain, I realized about thirty minutes after trying to figure out what the cause was. By sheer luck, I saw a raindrop fall through the center of the construct just as a cut-out occurred, finally solving the mystery. It seemed obvious in hindsight, but even now knowing what was happening I couldn’t quite understand why it was happening. As I tried to figure it out, the rain stopped, so I was forced to pick up a few pebbles from the ground for further experimentation. Vaozey didn’t even notice me stop behind her, fully caught in her own thoughts or occupied entirely with walking.

After dropping a pebble through the construct, I noticed that something about the effect was different, but it took five more tries for me to realize that what was different was actually the sensation of the pebble passing through the construct. Magic didn’t typically produce any kind of sensory feedback beyond two things: the sensation of whether or not magic was activated at all, and the sensation of how much magic power was being used. Both were actually the same thing, in essence, but the first was distinct because it was a movement from the zero point. When the raindrops were passing through the construct, it felt as though the magic was cutting out entirely, but when the pebble dropped through, it felt as though the magic was “straining” somehow, like it wanted to consume more power.

The specific heat capacity of stone is lower than water, I thought, dropping the pebble again, I wonder, could that have something to do with it? Adjusting the construct again, I removed the heat component and slowed down the rate at which I was moving air until the drain in power was so minimal that I could barely tell I was using magic, then dropped the pebble through, Sure enough, I felt the sensation of magic stopping and starting just as the pebble passed through, faintly tickling some unknowable section of my brain. Vaozey finally looked back, seeing me dropping a pebble into my hand a few times, then shrugged and looked forward again.

The desired output level of magic power is of higher priority than the desired effect, I concluded, dropping the pebble again. It made sense from a system design perspective, but I had come to believe that such a perception of magic wasn’t wholly accurate. Still, if I were making a tool, I would certainly not design one that could suddenly draw immensely more power than it was intended to at any given moment, even if it was able to draw such power if desired. I dropped the pebble again, feeling it touch the invisible disc of air that I was moving, and grunted softly. I wonder, could this be used in the way I’m thinking right now?

Rapidly changing from one construct to another was sometimes tricky, but because of the way magic worked, it was possible for someone with sufficient mental acuity to prepare an action but not perform it until desired. Around the disc of air, I produced another force magic construct, a simple repulsion that would force whatever was inside it upward against the force of gravity. Then, closing my eyes, I dropped the pebble. I felt the power in the first construct cut out, then activated the second. Disappointingly, the pebble hit my palm; I didn’t react quickly enough.

It took ten more tries and a number of revisions to the overall structure of the dual construct to finally make one that worked: A disc-shaped detector that could be maintained at an extremely low cost, and a larger ovoid “grasper” that forced anything inside of it to the center with as much force as I so desired. Finally, when I dropped the pebble, I felt it touch my detector, then felt nothing as my grasper took hold of everything in its range. When my eyes opened, the pebble was floating five centimeters above my palm, spinning slowly. This is how they do it, I smiled, This must be how the Rehvites are so accurate with force magic shields.

“Vaozey,” I said, looking across the campfire. In response, she merely grunted, not looking up and taking another bite of her food. “I need you to throw some rocks at me,” I continued. Again, I got a grunt as a reply. “It’s for magic practice,” I said. “I’ll be facing away, you need to throw them at my back.”

“What?” Vaozey finally verbally replied, looking up.

“Rocks,” I repeated. “Get some, throw them at me.”

“Why?” she asked, and I sighed.

“Magic practice,” I repeated, and Vaozey blinked. Slowly, she looked around, glancing at a few stones around us. “Ideally, ones that aren’t too large, and can be thrown fast,” I said.

“Yeah, okay,” Vaozey mumbled, standing up and walking over to the first rock.

Again, in the middle of the night, I heard Vaozey fall out of the tree she was sleeping in. This time, since we were both in trees, I wasn’t close enough to hear the swearing afterward, but I knew she probably did it. She didn’t ask me to knock her out with magic, I thought drowsily, She’s probably fine. I drifted back off into a nondescript dream, and found Vaozey already awake the next morning again, going through some motions with her mace that I hadn’t seen her using in combat before. She noticed my approach, putting the weapon away, and we got to walking once more.

Around noon, we came to a creek, and I paused my practice for the day. Having Vaozey throw rocks at me was a good way to learn the weaknesses of the technique I was working on, and I certainly learned a few. The maximum practical cross-sectional area for a detector was only about thirty centimeters, and trying to catch something moving through it without seeing that thing was extremely difficult and energy intensive. Changing the shape of a detector and the shield could sometimes better conform it to the body, but the mental strain and magical expenditure of maintaining it also increased, the latter being more important. Finally, multiple detectors of smaller sizes were actually easier to maintain at once than a single deformed one, but it was impossible to tell which detector was triggered, so all the shields had to be used at once, increasing the overall cost.

The most efficient method for covering a large area with detectors is probably multiple constructs, spaced out correctly, I thought as I pulled my gambeson off and prepared to bathe, But it’s the least efficient for actually stopping anything. I suppose I could use them on my peripherals to cut down on-

“What are you staring at?” Vaozey asked, glaring at me from inside the creek.

“Just thinking,” I replied. For some reason, she didn’t like the reply.

Later that night, as we sat around a fire for warmth, Vaozey once again appeared to be entirely dissociated as she slowly ate some dried fruits and stared into the fire. After we had bathed earlier in the day, I noticed that her walking cadence had changed, growing more plodding and exhausted. I knew the signs of fatigue well enough to see them, so I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t asked for help yet.

“Do you need to be knocked out?” I asked.

“What?” Vaozey grunted, blinking unevenly and looking up from the fire.

“You haven’t slept in two days, have you?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” Vaozey replied.

“You’re not fine,” I countered. “What do you think would happen if we were attacked right now? You can barely keep yourself alert during the day. Do you need to be knocked out so you can sleep?”

“I am fine,” Vaozey insisted. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had these problems, it’ll go away eventually.” We stared at each other for a moment, on the cusp of an argument, so I decided to end it before it happened.

“For your own good, I’m doing it anyway,” I said. “This is an order, once you’re ready to sleep for the night, I’ll knock you out.”

“No you won’t,” Vaozey refused.

“You said you would-” I began.

“Don’t you seytoydh think I didn’t notice you leering at me today,” Vaozey snapped back. “I saw you doing it before too, but I didn’t say anything then.”

“What do you mean by ‘leering’?” I asked, surprised by the sudden change in attitude.

“You’re a man, you know what I-” Vaozey growled, bearing her teeth at me.

“No, I don’t,” I replied, cutting her off. “You’ve said that before, and I didn’t know what you meant then either.” I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but I did, and Vaozey was caught in place for a moment by the reaction, frozen mid-sentence. After another second of silence, she exhaled, and her shoulders seemed to deflate.

“I hate this,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes with her hands. “I hate this so much, I can’t stand it. I should never have…”

“Explain yourself,” I ordered.

“I’m sorry, okay,” she replied, looking up. “I’m sorry I stole those seytoydh magic boosters. I shouldn’t have done it. Gods, I’m sorry, so just stop it now, please.” Her final sentence didn’t even seem to be directed at me, and turned to a whisper as it finished.

“I learned something from that event, so no apology is necessary at this point,” I replied.

“It’s not about-” Vaozey sighed, stopping her sentence mid-way through. “You are seytoydh impossible to talk to sometimes. I’ve never met a man with such a frustrating combination of reason and lack of common sense in my life. Even if you were a slave soldier, you’re still a man, you should have learned these things. I’m still not even convinced that you aren’t just ztpowoydh with me.”

“I’d like you to explain the events of Towrkah now, actually,” I said. “We have time.” Vaozey winced, her face scrunching up into a wrinkled mess for a moment, then she exhaled a long growl.

“He wanted to seyt me,” Vaozey stated. I didn’t really translate Uwrish curses, since they were usually cultural references or otherwise meaningless in their pure definitions, so it took me a second to figure out what Vaozey had said.

“Oh,” I deadpanned.

“Specifically, since I was leaving town, he wanted me to ‘spend the night’ at his place so he could ‘show me something I’d lust after for the rest of my days’,” Vaozey elaborated. “Does that explain it, or do you need it spelled out more?”

“Why didn’t you just refuse Awptheyn?” I asked.

“I told you back then, I’m not good with this sort of thing,” Vaozey explained. “I froze up, and he thought I was okay with it.” A memory of a similar encounter of my own wormed its way up into my consciousness for a moment: Taaljheyz propositioning me in the Hatchet Crew headquarters. Back then, I didn’t have as complete of an understanding of my human side, and the impulses that rose within me were quite disruptive because of it.

“But you’ve done the reverse multiple times,” I said. “You asked Koyl to do something similar back in Owsahlk-”

“That’s different,” Vaozey cut in.

“How?” I asked, getting a few seconds of silence before the reply came.

“Because I knew he wouldn’t do it,” she finally said. “It was just banter, I knew he wouldn’t lay a finger on me. No man would, or at least back then no man would. Now, I’m not so sure.” I tried to form some kind of coherent thought to produce a reply, but everything seemed to slip out of my grasp. I simply had no reference level for what Vaozey was talking about, only why it would potentially bother her. Being deemed genetically unfit for reproduction is likely unpleasant, I considered, but I don’t see why she would be seen as such. Even if she isn’t a trained fighter, or overly emotionally stable, she’s extremely durable if nothing else.

“I don’t…” I began, stopping my sentence short as I realized it probably wouldn’t make any sense to Vaozey. “Did the fire affect your ability to produce children or engage in the act of copulation?” I asked, opting for my second question.

“What?” Vaozey asked back, her tone a mixture of offense and shock.

“How did you know he wouldn’t have taken you up on the offer?” I asked, trying to clarify what I meant.

“Were you blind back in Owsahlk, or are you just forgetful?” Vaozey snapped back. “There’s a limit to how polite someone can be, you know. I don’t mean to spit on your manners since you’re one of the only people who ever showed me any, but don’t act stupid.”

“I’m not acting,” I replied. “I am genuinely asking you, how did you know that Koyl wouldn’t have accepted your offer?”

“Because I looked like a seytoydh burnt piece of meat!” Vaozey yelled, slapping the back of her right hand into her left palm for emphasis. “Because my seytoydh moymz are melted to my chest, and that’s not saying anything of what happened below the waist! Because I’m taller than him with broader shoulders and my voice sounds like an old hag’s unless I squeeze my throat so tight I can barely breathe! Are you seytoydh stupid, or are you just some nayraym who can actually get his jhoyt hard for that sort of thing!?” The level of emotion in the outburst was shocking.

“None of that renders you physically incapable though,” I stated, trying to calm her down.

“In the name of the seytoydh gods, I was ugly, okay?” Vaozey snapped back, rolling her eyes in exasperation. “No man would want to be with a woman who looked like that, or at least no sane one. I had made peace with that, or so I thought, because being ugly at least made it certain. Now I’m wearing some other seytoydh ngoyth’s face and apparently she’s not as ugly even if she’s plain-”

“It’s your face,” I corrected.

“It’s not my face,” Vaozey growled lowly. “I don’t care if it’s on my skull, it’s not me that I see looking back when I see my reflection these days, it’s someone else.”

“Objectively speaking, the facial features you currently possess are the result of the shape of your skull and underlying musculature, as well as your skin,” I said. “It is your face, regardless of its appearance.” Vaozey’s whole body shook for a moment in apparent frustration, and she took a deep breath.

“This isn’t the face of someone who’s killed as many people as I have,” she replied in a tone of forced calm. “This isn’t the face of someone who lost their whole family and survived. This isn’t the face of someone who can reach inside a person’s skull and melt their brain. This is the face of some dumpy half-noble brat with a wide jaw, stupid thin lips, and a dumb, vacant expression that makes her look just approachable and innocent enough to be enticing and vulnerable. It’s the face of who I could have been if I was who I was supposed to be when I was born, and I seytoydh hate it.”

“It looks average,” I told her. “Outside of your eye color, you could be any woman on the street. You don’t stand out, visually speaking.”

“I was never average, don’t lie to me,” Vaozey muttered.

“I’m not lying,” I replied.

“You’re being polite, which is basically the same thing,” Vaozey countered.

“Average is good,” I said. “Having an appearance that stands out is inconvenient, especially for a warrior. If I were able to change my appearance, I would make myself appear more like the average Uwrish man.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Vaozey sighed. “Gods, I’ll just tell you since you’re probably too thick to figure it out. My mother was the eleventh daughter of the Duchess of Duwbkaav, and my father was a businessman from Pehrihnk. In case it’s not obvious, that means I grew up fairly wealthy. Not as much as the Zae’ey’yaob kid, but I got to read books regularly and we had a maid, so I wasn’t exactly poor.”

“Your family disallowed you from interacting with people?” I guessed. I had picked up on the implication that nobility sometimes considered interacting with non-nobility to be unpleasant, so that was my best assumption.

“No, I just… I was always weird,” Vazoey tried to explain. “I was lanky and tall, I liked running around outside or reading long books, never wanted to dress up much, and so on. That alone would have been a problem as a girl, but being rich meant the other kids’ families were afraid of us, my mother especially, so making any friends was hard. Then it came out that I couldn’t do magic when I was ten, and then…”

“You were burned,” I finished.

“That came a bit later,” Vaozey corrected. “Even non-Revhites can be cruel when it comes to some things, you know? When people realized I couldn’t do magic in my teens, even though my younger brother and sister could by the time they were each ten years old, they made fun of me even more than usual. I remember my mother saying ‘Just wait Vaozey, in a few years, those boys will be tripping over themselves to talk to you’. Never happened. Even my maid, whenever she’d come to clean my room, she’d tell me that things were going to get better. ‘You are special girl Vaozey, you will see, you very lucky.’”

“She was Gwahlaob,” I said, recognizing the fake accent Vaozey put on when quoting her maid.

“Yeah,” Vaozey sighed. “That’s how I knew you weren’t. She was Sihz, so it’s not exactly the same, but she used to teach me about her homeland when I was a little girl. Always used to tell me how I was so lucky to be born to a loving family, in a peaceful city, with plenty of money. I wonder if she believed that when she was soaked to the waist in oil, screaming her last breaths in a pit of fire.”

“The waist?” I asked.

“Extreme heat can kill pretty quick, you should know,” Vaozey replied. “When they burned us, they wanted to make sure we didn’t die right away, so what they did was soak us to our waists in oil, toss us into these pits they dug with our hands bound so we couldn’t climb out, then light us up. There was oil at the bottom too, so we couldn’t put out the flames. Once we were dead, they’d just pour the dirt over us and fill in the hole, easy grave.”

“Why not just kill you by decapitation, or some other method?” I asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Vaozey scoffed. “To make a show of it. Even the neighborhood boy I had a thing for attended my family’s burning, can you believe that? Stood there with his teylm girlfriend watching as they doused us and tossed us in. ‘They’ll be tripping over themselves’ indeed.”

“How did you survive?” I asked, wondering aloud. I had my own theories about the speed of Vaozey’s regeneration due to her lack of magic use, but they were largely unsupported.

“Don’t know,” Vaozey grunted. “Well, I do, but you wouldn’t believe me, I’m sure. My point is, I was ugly even before I got burned, so don’t seytoydh lie to me about it and stop seytoydh glancing at me when you think I’m not looking. If you’re feeling antsy or tense, take care of it on your own, I’m not interested.” As she finished speaking, Vaozey looked down at the fire again, the dark circles under her eyes seeming to sink in further from fatigue.

“Where I’m from, physical appearance is not a meaningful metric for reproductive success,” I began.

“I am not going to-” Vaozey began.

“Reproduction in my homeland is given as a reward for exceptional service, demonstrated ability, or sometimes to those specifically bred to be used as gene stores when population falls low,” I continued. “I understand that it isn’t the same here, but you need to know that your people’s practices around this subject are very strange to me, and my confusion about this topic isn’t some kind manipulation or deliberate ignorance.”

“Yet, you’ve slammed your way through enough reyzhaeley that you’re not totally ignorant, I’m sure,” Vaozey scoffed.

“Why would you assume that?” I asked, inferring her meaning from context.

“You’re telling me that a fighter like you, in some strange land where you get a woman given to you to seyt for being good at fighting, has never been with anyone?” Vaozey huffed, sounding like she wanted to laugh but was too tired.

“I can assure you, it’s quite dissimilar to what you’re describing,” I said. “And no, I have not.” Gaining that level of prestige would have stood out too much, I thought, and besides, the act would have been pointless anyway.

“Ngiyvdoym, but okay, let’s say I believe you,” Vaozey retorted. “Furthermore you’re telling me that, looking like this, or even like I used to, wouldn’t matter in the least?”

“It would be beneficial,” I replied.

“How in the-” Vaozey began to protest.

“So long as there is no outward indication of disease, general aesthetics are irrelevant for reproduction,” I interrupted. “In my homeland, your scarring would be considered a mark of exceptional durability, a quality that many would want for their offspring. Your stature and frame, as well, would be advantageous since they are larger and more muscular than average. If anything, repairing your facial scarring would have caused a slight negative impact on your reproductive viability there, as it would indicate vanity and potential emotional instability.” Well, if you could heal with magic though, it wouldn’t matter, I thought, warbreed would fight their own tribes to the last man for such a power.

“Are you-” Vaozey stuttered, blinking a few times in shock. “No, you’re not, I can see it.” Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed as she examined my expression, trying to figure it out. “I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with you and your people,” she said.

“What?” I asked, after a brief moment of nervousness.

“You look at people the same way people look at… rocks. Or maybe blades of grass, or even rats,” Vaozey said, gesturing vaguely with her hand. “Like we’re not any different from anything else, like we’re not even human, just another thing in the world. You do it to yourselves too, if you’re any indication of the average. It’s like your soul isn’t in your body, it’s sitting just behind it, or above it, watching everything go on from a safe distance instead of being inside like it should be.”

“Though I can’t say anything about the latter half, the former description is essentially correct,” I shrugged. “I don’t see why humans are different from any other living thing, really. Humans are just more socially and mentally complex than most animals, but the basics are the same.”

“You can’t even conceive of what it’s like…” Vaozey muttered. “You really do have no idea, do you? You don’t even know what I’m talking about. That’s why you never tried anything with me either, you just don’t see people like that. I was worried for nothing, this was all just in my head…” I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, so I just shrugged again, and she put her face into her hands for a moment. “Pass me your knife,” Vaozey said after a minute, raising her head up and holding out her hand.

“What do you need it for?” I asked, tossing it over to her. She looked at her reflection in the blade, grimacing.

“Making some corrections,” she replied, bringing the blade up to her face. In one motion, she drew it from the top left of her forehead down across her nose, cutting her eyebrow. Then she made a second cut, from the center of her right cheek down across her mouth, slipping the blade past her chin. Finally, she took a small chunk out of the side of her left cheek, leaving a jagged line that touched her jawline, and snipped out a small section of her left ear to leave a mark on the helix. Much blood flowed from the wounds even though they sealed quickly, but Vaozey didn’t wipe it off. Instead, she wiped the knife on her pants and held it flat again so she could see her reflection.

Though her initial reaction was a flinch, Vaozey didn’t look away. Instead, she tilted the knife, and her head, so she could see the extent of the wounds she inflicted. As she did, the tension that had sprung into her upon the initial viewing fell away, as did more stress that I wasn’t aware of until it left. Muscles around her jaw and forehead that I hadn’t been paying attention to relaxed, subtly changing the shape of her features. After that, she smiled, making a strange toothy grin that seemed to contrast heavily with the blood covering her, and began to laugh. Her voice came out not in angry, mocking tones as I expected, but in jovial ones instead.

“Are you… alright?” I asked, not entirely sure of what I was watching. Is this what it looks like when a creator human has a psychotic break? I wondered.

“I think so,” Vaozey replied, tossing the knife back to me. “I’m really tired. I think I’m just going to sleep right here. Don’t wake me up before morning, alright?” I opened my mouth to respond, but Vaozey had already leaned over, and it appeared she had passed out almost immediately after finishing her sentence, snoring loudly.

There were no screams or swearing that night, only the sounds of insects and birds, and when I woke up in the morning, Vaozey was still asleep in the same spot, dried blood caking her face, making its blissful expression appear almost death-like.