Velykos was not entirely sure how he had ended up in this situation.

Intellectually, he supposed, he understood exactly how he'd ended up like this; the strides he could take as a large, towering stone elemental were much larger than the strides of any of his skeletal companions, and as a result, he could move much faster with less effort than the other five. This was fine and expected, and he had intentionally slowed down so they could move at the same pace. He did not need to get anywhere in a rush.

They didn't particularly seem to agree, though, once they noticed. It hadn't taken too long after that for Iliss-the-lizardkin-lady to suggest that they simply sit on his shoulders, and Velykos hadn't really had any reason to object; they were all relatively light, and it took no great effort for him to carry any of them.

It was just that, well... they didn't all fit on his shoulders.

Which was how he'd ended up walking along the desert with two skeletons on each shoulder, and the captain perched on his head.

Velykos almost sighed, but didn't; the act would have disrupted Harold's balance, and the poor man had already fallen off once.

Besides. He didn't hate this. He'd grown fond of his companions, over time, and as awkward as this was, it was one way they would leave a permanent mark on his history — anything they did would be permanently etched into his stone, even if it was only by the smallest amounts. Every tiny chip and small bit of rock that eroded away because of them was another memory of the people he'd come to consider friends.

Normally, he'd say that it was a way for mortals to leave a permanent mark on him, even after they were gone — but he supposed that this particular group of companions weren't necessarily mortal, anymore. Maybe now he could have smaller friends that would stick around for a long time...

He rather liked that thought, he found. It had been a long time since he could consider having friends that would last. There was a reason he had chosen to devote himself to his chosen god instead, keeping most of his interactions with mortals to something short.

But kind, of course. Always kind.

"What're ya thinking about, big guy?" Harold asked him from atop his head, and Velykos chuckled. "You're makin' them thinking sounds again."

"I do not make thinking sounds," Velykos rumbled, amusement clear in the rolling pebbles of his voice — or at least, he thought his amusement was clear.

"Ya do. I can hear 'em. Sounds like sand tricklin' down." Harold nodded, and Velykos felt the movement through the tiny vibrations in his stone. "...Not that I'm sayin' your brain is like sand or anything. But there's a sound, I'm tellin' ya!"

"You've been going on about this sound for days," Iliss grumbled from his left shoulder. "He doesn't make thinking sounds! I can't hear anything!"

"Just cause you don't hear any sounds don't mean he don't make any! You just ain't got any ears."

"Neither do you, captain," Iliss pointed out, folding her arms obstinately. Ixiss — who was in fact her brother, Velykos had learned, and was sitting next to her — groaned.

"Oh by the gods you two have been arguing about this for days," he said. "Who cares! It's just a noise!"

"It's a noise that doesn't exist!" Iliss protested. "Our captain is hearing things!"

"I can hear you," Harold said, glaring at her.

"See! He's hearing things."

"When did ya get this sassy, I swear," Harold grumbled.

Velykos, who was quite content to simply wait them out while they bantered, let out a chuckle when they were done. He didn't address the conversation at all — he didn't think he made any noises, though Harold did have an uncanny ability to notice when he was lost in thought, so perhaps there was in fact something the captain was picking up on. Instead, he changed the subject. "We are close to the next marker. We can take a break there, I think."

"By 'we', you mostly just mean you," Iliss snarked. "Wait, do you even need to rest?"

"He's got no muscles," Ixiss complained, punching his sister in the shoulder and making her bones clack uncomfortably; she glared at him. "Why would he need to rest?"

"I don't know, maybe his magic gets tired?" Iliss shrugged. "I don't know how stone elementals work, do you?"

"I do not need rest, necessarily," Velykos interrupted before the argument could go any further; as much as he found the banter between the two siblings amusing, he found it could get to be a bit much rather quickly. "But I find it is good to have structure. It is easy to lose track of time and self if you simply wander with no regard for what surrounds you."

"You speak from experience?"

It was Olag, that time, who spoke. The orc sat on his right shoulder, with his human friend half curled up beside him; Nathan was still having trouble actually participating in the conversation.

"I do, yes," Velykos answered. "There was a time when I did little but wander. It is... easy to lose time when you do this. And I suppose I was grieving, in my own way."

The others fell silent. He'd spoken of his story to them before, of the priest that had guided him through so much of his early life and then simply vanished; his mortal friends didn't seem to know quite how to react.

"Sometimes we need a little time to get used to our circumstances," Velykos added gently, and this time the words were directed towards Nathan; the man in question twitched slightly, but didn't say anything further.

He'd tried, over the last couple of days, to see if he could reach out and connect with him — but it was difficult. Depression was the barest beginning of what he was going through; he was half-catatonic most of the time, staring at the missing flesh on his hands.

Velykos understood. He'd even tried to help, in his own way; tried to find a healing spell that would reverse their condition.

But there was nothing. Not even when he spoke to Nillea; she had no clue of a solution, either. Their state wasn't a status effect, was the problem. The system didn't recognize it. It was simply something that was, due to an odd circumstance that would almost certainly never be replicated again. He'd heard a little bit about that from them, and what Misa had managed to pull off was certainly an impressive feat.

Everyone was grateful, even if not necessarily happy with the circumstance they were now stuck in — all of them except for Nathan, who simply curled tighter in on himself.

So all he could provide for Nathan was companionship, and hope that the young man would find a way to grow comfortable with his body in time. Or perhaps they would find a new solution for him! A way to move his soul into another body?

It was a thought, at least.

"I can hear ya thinkin' again," Harold told him, and Velykos... well, he didn't particularly understand the mortal habit of sighing, but he was very much starting to.

The desert they were in was the one where he had originally spawned; it was a breeding grounds for stone-aligned mana, although Velykos couldn't help but notice that the concentration of it seemed rather lesser these days. Little makeshift quarries of stone were scattered across the desert, a small stone tower in the center of each acting like a little beacon to draw in more mana. That mana would slowly seep into the stone and rock around them, and over a long period of time, create a new stone elemental.

The quarry he was looking for was the one he had spawned in. The one he'd met that priest in, so long ago. But it was far, deep in the depths of the desert, and so for the time being—

"Oh fer cryin' out loud," Harold muttered.

—They would have to take refuge from the heat in yet another quarry.

Not that there was any real need to do such a thing, since none of them needed protection from the heat, exactly. They all just agreed it was uncomfortable, and there was always a little bit of history they could learn from each. Like it or not, his mortal friends were all learning a little bit about stone elemental culture.

...Which was mostly just a lot about stone elemental babies. Though that wasn't quite the right word for it.

"Are we ever going to rest somewhere different?" Ixiss muttered.

"What is wrong with the quarries?" Velykos asked, framing his question as though it were an innocent one, and he felt perhaps the smallest amount of satisfaction in the way Iliss simply folded her arms and sighed.

"I just don't want to get almost-crushed by a newborn elemental again!" the lizardkin-skeleton complained. Velykos shrugged — making all four of the soldiers on his shoulders yelp in response, grabbing on to steady themselves — and then lowered them all down to the floor of that quarry.

"It is a learning experience," he told them sternly.

"We already learned that lesson!"

"It is a learning experience for the stone elementals," Velykos clarified with what amounted to a grin, flecks of dirt and smaller stone falling from him as he chuckled. Ixiss groaned in response.

"Dammit."

There was a small ritual Velykos had taken to doing, now, at every one of these quarries they stopped at; they didn't stop all that often, after all. So every time they did, he knelt down by the stone tower in the center, and he prayed to Nillea.

Not all that long ago, it would have been a simple prayer for protection before he moved on. Now, he tried to do a little bit of what he'd learned from Sev — that the relationship between gods and mortals perhaps did not have to be so blindly transactional, with favors rewarded in return for faith and obedience. That whole thing was merely a construct. Instead, he could begin his prayers with a single question:

How are you?

Nillea never answered directly — but something about the bond he had with his chosen god pulsed, and he felt his connection to the earth deepen in response; she was, after all, the goddess of the earth. And the earth right now felt to him like it was something shallow and desperate; the soil here was that of a desert, so it was all loose sand, and yet there was something else to it—

Ah. The desert was empty. That was what the connection rang with; a response to his question, an emptiness and a loneliness.

It was true that there were a lot less stone elemental children around than there should have been, on top of the strangeness of the mana. Velykos wondered how much of that was Nillea specifically, and how much of that might have been the rest of this problem of missing gods; could they really know how much was missing in their knowledge?

"Hey," he said out loud, surprising even himself; when his companions looked up at him, he tried to smile in response, though he'd been told that his attempts at smiles were largely terrifying. "Would you like to try something together?"

"...And what is that, exactly?" Iliss asked.

"I would like to sculpt an offering to Nillea," Velykos said. He had been mulling over the thought for a while, the idea of creating something as a dedication to both the old and the new. Perhaps it was an activity his new friends would enjoy. "A small token to commemorate a moment I hope will become important."

Velykos hesitated before he shared his next thoughts; saying the words felt like it would make them more real. Iliss stared at him curiously, but it was Nathan looking up slightly that spurred him to speak.

"...And perhaps," he said slowly. "It will also be a small dedication to the god I may have once had."