Chapter Text
Blue light pulsed behind Ari’s eyelids as they breathed in the smell of grass. It itched their cheek, and the subtle chill of the damp earth was seeping into the front of their shirt. A girl’s voice called out — Ari inhaled sharply.
Pushing themself up, Ari clenched their jaw. Their body felt stiff, completely drained. A headache began beating at their temples. The girl cried out again — calling for help? Ari rubbed their hand over their face and looked towards her voice. Trees surrounded them. Something pink flashed through the underbrush.
Ari swallowed hard. They pulled up one knee, then pressed their hand on it to rise unsteadily to their feet. The weight of a drawstring bag tugged on their shoulders. Metal clinked at their waist. Ari looked down and saw a sheathed sword attached to their belt. Below, glowing blue lines arced over the grass. Shocked, Ari stumbled back. The lines were part of a giant circle full of interconnected runes.
“A spell circle…?” Ari stared at it, dimly aware that they had just been laying face-down along its edge. What was it doing in the middle of a forest? Ari’s eyebrows lowered. “Wait… what was I doing here?”
The girl cried out again, this time in pain.
“Fuck!” Ari drew their sword. They spared the spell circle one more glance, then took off running. “Just hold on! I’m coming!”
The underbrush tore across their legs. The pink flash they had seen before had been her hair and tail — she was a were-fox. By the looks of her kimono-like dress, one from the Eastern Continent, too. She had fallen, and a monster hornet the size of a dog was buzzing after her.
Mentally cursing, Ari ran in front of the girl just as the hornet fired off a stinger-missile. Ari tried to deflect it, but their arm was too slow. The stinger lodged itself in their stomach. “Ah!”
“Oh no!” The girl got back up, stepping towards Ari. “Are you—?”
“Get back!” Ari shouted, waving her off sharply as they ran to the hornet. It fired again. Ari dodged, but the move painfully tugged on their wound. Even still, their sword knocked back the hornet. Its carapace cracked. The hornet screeched, promising that Ari would regret that.
“You’re the only one who’ll have regrets!” Ari retorted as held up their sword defensively. They listened for the girl and breathed a small huff of relief when they heard her retreating footsteps. Then they hissed another curse. Two more hornets had come.
Between their wound and the woozy feeling plaguing their head, Ari wasn’t confident in their chances of killing all three monsters. Why didn’t they have a shield?
The hornets didn’t give Ari a chance to wonder further. They fired a barrage of stinger-missiles. One grazed Ari’s leg as they dodged. While the hornets readied another volley, Ari closed the distance and swung at its wings.
The swing didn’t hit, but Ari didn’t relent either. Even as they blocked another stinger with their forearm, they shouted and swung and kept at it until they managed to take down the first hornet.
The two that remained didn’t relent. The monsters kept firing, making Ari feel more like a pin cushion than a person. Their fatigue was getting worse, too, turning into dizziness. Shit. Were those stingers venomous?
Nothing Ari could do about that now. The second hornet went down with a lucky hit. The last one stubbornly avoided Ari’s increasingly clumsy swinging.
Ari tripped over their own feet. Their sword fell out of their hand. The stingers still lodged in their side dug deeper under their own weight, making Ari grimace with a weak grunt. They couldn’t go down like this. Ari struggled to get back up. The hornet clicked its mandibles, laughing at them.
“Leave him alone!” The little girl snatched up Ari’s sword and used both hands to swat down the hornet.
Ari gaped at her, impressed but terrified for her safety. Yet before the hornet could get back into the air, the little girl continued beating it with Ari’s sword. She used it more like a club, but still, it was enough to send the monster to runelight.
The little girl panted and stared in disbelief at the light until it disappeared and dropped the hornet’s mandibles. Then she remembered Ari and ran back to them.
“Mister, you’re hurt!” She started to reach for one of the stingers, but the magical projectiles were already fading now that the monsters had been banished. They left behind bleeding holes.
“Uh, yeah…” Ari started to roll onto their back, but then they remembered they were wearing a drawstring bag. They tried to reach for it, but their strength failed them. “Check my bag. I might have a potion or something.”
“Okay.” The little girl trembled as she quickly worked it open. She started taking out everything that was inside of it: a canteen, a small book with reinforced bronze corners, a knife, a crumpled paper bag with grease stains, spare clothes, a thin bedroll, a little sewing kit, and a coin purse embroidered with charm blues.
None of it looked familiar at all. Did Ari accidentally take someone else’s bag?
“That’s everything…” The girl’s voice had gone watery with tears. Her ears were folded flat against her head. “What do I do?” She looked helplessly at their things and then back at Ari. “Are you going to die? Please don’t die!”
Ari forced themself to smile, even as it broke their heart that this little girl already understood what death was. “It’s going to be okay.” They swallowed hard and rolled onto their back. Their breath hissed through their teeth with the effort. “Those stingers didn’t hit anything important.” Probably, anyway — the one that had hit their stomach might have hit something, but maybe they were lucky. They put one of their hands over that wound to stem the blood.
“You’re still bleeding…” Her hand went near the wound on Ari’s arm, but hesitated. She sniffled and wiped her face on her sleeve as she kept crying.
Of course she was scared to touch their blood, Ari figured. The girl was what, seven or nine years old? Ari couldn’t tell.
Ari looked at the spare clothes. It was a ruffled pink blouse and a short brown skirt, a sharp contrast to the blue collared shirt and dark pants they were wearing now. Ari didn’t want to ruin what might’ve been someone else’s stuff, but they didn’t have much of a choice. “Can you cut up that blouse into strips? We can use it as bandages.”
The girl jolted at the hope of a plan and snatched up the blouse. She started to tug on it, trying to tear it like one would with a piece of paper.
“Use the knife,” Ari said, pointing back at it in the grass. “It’ll be easier.”
“Oh! Okay.” The little girl picked back up Ari’s sword. Before Ari could remind her that there was an easier blade to use in their maybe-stolen belongings, she had stabbed it tip-down into the grass. She held the end of the blouse taut against the edge of the exposed blade and did a little sawing motion to start cutting it.
Ari’s eyes widened. It looked safer than if she had used their knife. Ari wondered how she got so clever.
While the girl worked, Ari asked, “What’s your name?”
She looked surprised, then giggled shyly. “My name’s Hina.” She took a moment to wipe her face again before she continued cutting the blouse. “What’s yours, mister?”
Ari smiled weakly. Being called mister felt weird, like putting on a coat that was too big. “It’s Ari, but I’m not a mister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry! So you’re Miss Ari?”
Ari laughed, but regretted it when it made their stomach hurt worse. “No, not a miss either.” That title felt like a too-tight dress, stifling them. “I’m, uh…” They blinked, fighting off a lightheaded feeling. They had lost more blood than they thought. “I’m neither.”
“Neither?” Hina paused again in her confusion.
“Not a boy or a girl,” Ari said. “Just call me Ari, okay?” They forced another smile.
Hina nodded resolutely. “Okay.” She finished cutting the first strip. “Where should I start?”
Ari held out their arm. “Easy one first. We’ll need another smaller wad of fabric over the wound before you wrap it up, though.”
Hina nodded again, looking more determined than ever. There were frilly accents along the neckline of the blouse, and she cut that off for the make-do gauze.
“What were you doing out in these woods all alone?” Ari asked while she bandaged their arm.
Hina froze, then bit her lip. Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “I… I lost Mommy…” Her tears fell and she quickly tried wiping them away again so she could continue wrapping Ari’s arm. “Monsters attacked us.”
Ari looked at her in horror. “Oh gods, I…” They nearly swore, but held it back.
“She told me to run, too,” Hina said. “I tried to find her after it got quiet again, but then those flying monsters found me.”
“Wait, so she… is your mom still out here somewhere?”
“She has to be! Mommy’s really strong!” Hina pulled on the bandage a little too hard, making Ari wince. “Oh, sorry!”
“It’s okay.” Ari was just relieved that Hina hadn’t actually just watched her mother get murdered. Still, though… her mother was missing. The woman was probably in worse shape than Ari if she wasn’t out looking for Hina right now.
“Mommy’s probably fighting more monsters.” Hina picked back up the blouse to cut another strip. “She’ll find us soon.”
Ari figured Hina said that more for her own benefit than theirs, since Ari sincerely doubted that. They didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise, though.
By the time Hina finished bandaging Ari’s thigh, she had used up most of the blouse. Ari told her to cut up the skirt next for the wound on their stomach. The rest of their injuries were shallow cuts or puncture wounds, and they were already starting to scab over.
Ari was most worried about the venom in the stingers. Because of how weak they had already been when they woke in that spell circle, it was really hard to tell what was just fatigue and what was the effects of the venom. Either way, they didn’t think they’d be able to stand any time soon, much less walk.
“What do we do now?” Hina looked back over Ari’s belongings.
“Good question. Can you pass me that canteen and help me sit up?” Ari figured some water would help, even if they still weren’t sure about trying any food yet.
“Yeah.” Hina pushed them upright and tucked their bedroll behind them, then handed them their canteen. Her eyes were drawn back to the book. Her head tilted. “Is that a spellbook?”
“Huh?” Ari reconsidered it as they sniffed the canteen and confirmed it was just water. “Maybe? Let me look at it.” They carefully drank a couple sips.
“It isn’t yours?” Hina looked confused as she picked it up.
“I don’t know where any of this stuff came from.” Ari frowned, trying to remember anything about what they had been doing in these woods. The harder they thought about it, the more confused they got. They didn’t remember where they had been going, either. “Where are we?”
“Whispering Woods. Mommy and I were going to Rigbarth to see Uncle Kumo.”
Neither of those places jogged their memory. Where the fuck did they come from, then? Throwing that question onto the rest of the pile, Ari held out their hand for the book. Hina passed it over. It surprised Ari that it did actually contain spells. What surprised Ari more was that they recognized them. There were spells for Fireball, Water Laser, Earth Spike… It seemed like at least one for every element. They continued flipping through it and did a double-take when they saw the spells for Heal and Medipoison.
“There’s medical magic in here!” Ari exclaimed.
“There is?” Hina said before her eyes widened with excitement. “We can heal you!”
“That’s assuming we have the runes to cast it.” Ari frowned. Now that they were thinking about it, it was hard to tell if their fatigue was just physical, or if that spell circle had taken a lot out of them magically. “Do you know how to cast magic?”
“Um… no. But I can try!”
Hina’s enthusiasm was cute, but Ari didn’t need enthusiasm. They sighed and looked back down at the spellbook. The fact that it contained multiple types of spells instead of just one struck them as weird, but Ari didn’t know enough about spellwork to know why. Or, well, maybe they did once, but forgot along with everything else. Just how bad was their amnesia? Then Ari noticed that the pages weren’t quite even. Eyes narrowing, Ari looked more closely at the seams and realized the pages were cobbled together from multiple books.
Hina began to look uncertain. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. This spellbook’s weird, but I think I can use it?” Ari turned their attention back to the spell for Heal. Skimming the text beneath it, Ari noticed the first part of the paragraph was missing. The left page was blank. They flipped back a page, but it was a different spell. Ari glowered at the book. Whoever put this thing together only wanted the spell circles and nothing else.
Instinct more than anything else guided Ari’s hand to the center of the spell circle. Even though they couldn’t remember ever casting magic before, what little was on the page was enough to remind them of how it was supposed to work. They tried to focus on it, straining to push their runes into it, but the effort made them more lightheaded.
“Ugh…” Ari held their forehead. “I’m not strong enough to use this right now.” If they forced themself to cast it anyway, they felt sure the cost to close their wounds would do something worse to them.
“Will you be okay without it?”
“Yeah.” Hopefully, anyway, Ari thought. “We shouldn’t stay here,” they said, starting to push themself up. “Let’s—” Ari’s arm gave out under them, and they fell with a grunt onto their side. “Or… maybe not.” They rolled onto their back. “I think I need another minute.” Monster venom usually wore off on its own, didn’t it?
Worried, Hina moved Ari’s bedroll and helped them put it under their head. “A nap might help. I’ll keep watch.”
Ari hummed in acknowledgement, folding their arm over their eyes. The grass was cold and damp behind their shirt. It kind of felt nice, though, after that fight. They wondered if it would be better to send Hina on ahead. She had done okay against that last hornet. Then again, if they ganged up on her… Ari didn’t want her to take that risk.
“Thank you for saving me,” Hina said more quietly. “Mommy’s gonna be really happy to meet you. I’m sure she’ll find us soon.”
It took all of Ari’s self-control not to let their doubt show. They wished they could share Hina’s trust in her mom, but they couldn’t bring themself to have that sort of blind faith.