Chapter Text
Even after all these years, the sight of the Black Tide eating away at another settlement makes something in her chest twist painfully.
It isn't like she can do much, not when she can see countless Black Tide monsters already wandering through the faint silhouettes of the destroyed buildings. She's fast, yes, and her ability has saved her more times than she can count, but she's not stupid and that looks a great deal like a losing battle. She has seen enough of them by now.
And it is a losing battle, because it is already lost. She watches the fire dancing between the buildings and trees and fields surrounding the small coastal village. She follows the monsters with her eyes, making sure to stay away from their – and the fire’s – reach at all times. She sees echoes of what had once been a peaceful home, nondescript and humble. And, of course, completely vulnerable to attacks.
It's a shame, she thinks absent-mindedly. She has seen more than enough villages like this that fell against the Black Tide, abandoned by everyone else, too far away to even call for help and be heard in return. She thinks back to Okhema, the only city that will stand until the end, watched over by the unmoving Titan. It's been too long to feel anything when thinking about that place.
She waits around the area, not really knowing if she's lingering to later search the village for anything she might salvage or to pay her respects to the victims. But she does, and when the few Black Tide creatures leave – weren't there more? – she starts inching her way into the fields surrounding the village.
Flames eat away at what was once a beautiful golden field of wheat, before it turned to ash. The few buildings littered next to the coast are mostly crumbled, destroyed. Cipher doesn't hope for any interesting loot to be found, but she still wanders in anyway. Curiosity killed the cat, and all that.
She walks through the paths leading up and down from the old docks to the village itself, trying to ignore the pungent and heavy smell of blood and burnt flesh. She tries not to look at what she knows are corpses strewn around carelessly. She does sneak inside a few houses, the ones where the fire doesn't have any more to consume, and tries to feel disappointed when she predictably doesn't find any hidden treasure or gold.
(She finds echoes of the families that once lived there, as well as splatters of blood that she looks away from as soon as she understands what she's looking at.
It never gets any easier, even after centuries of wandering and finding echoes of tragedies everywhere.)
She's about to call it a day, throw a thought to the victims and hope for their peace wherever they are now, wonder again if the Prophecy would save them in that beautiful world it speaks of, before leaving this place behind as fast as lightning. She's already walking out of the village when she sees it.
It? Or maybe–
Cipher frowns deeply and changes course. She finds herself being pulled to the side, behind a nondescript house already consumed by the flames. She can see a shadow hidden against the wall, something stained with red, and for a moment she mistakes it for another corpse.
But then her ears pick up the very obvious noise of heavy breathing coming from that shadow and it hits her – oh, it's a survivor.
“Oh, poor soul,” she mumbles, a bit empty and distracted, as she gets closer.
It becomes abundantly clear that the survivor is actually– a kid. Gangly and skinny, just a young boy. His tattered clothes are streaked with both dark and red blood and he's clutching a farming tool so tightly his hands and arms shake with the strain.
When Cipher crouches next to him, his eyes stay staring straight ahead, wide and unseeing.
Now, that's a problem.
Cipher eyes the farming tool, half broken and dull, with cautious eyes and wonders if she could get it out of his hands without the boy trying to cut her head off in his panic. Touching him in any way to get him away from the destroyed village is out of the question, too.
Oh, well. She is quick. She can probably rip the weapon away from his hands. Whether that would make the situation better or worse– eh. She would deal with it then.
So, she hurriedly takes hold of the farming tool and rips it off the boy’s hands before he can even process her movement and closeness and jumps back until she’s out of his reach.
And good thing she did, because the boy startles so badly he jumps up himself until he’s standing on unsteady legs, turning his head this way and that, jaw clenched in a terrified snarl. For a moment, Cipher wonders what she could do now to get him to snap out of his chaotic thoughts and panic. Again, touching and shaking him would go over very badly, but at least he – probably – wouldn’t plunge a rusty farming tool into her neck.
So, she throws the farming tool far away from them and when the boy’s eyes unconsciously follow its trajectory in the air, she lunges forward, catches the boy around the waist and drags them both out and away from the destroyed village.
Half a second later, she drops him in the middle of the remains of the wheat field, still untouched by the fire spreading closer and closer. The boy, predictably, panics and falls down on the ground again with a choked gasp that sounds painful and backs away from Cipher.
This would probably be a good moment to make it clear that, hey, she isn’t trying to kill him – quite the opposite, really.
“Hey, hey! You’re okay! We’re okay! I’m not gonna hurt you! I just needed to get us both out of there,” she explains hurriedly, with a grin she’s sure looks nervous and poorly practiced after weeks of traveling alone, without even Bartholos to keep her company. “See? We’re not in the village anymore. There are no monsters around.”
The boy chokes on his own breath, eyes still wide and mostly unseeing as he looks around. His fingers dig into the earth. Huh. Cipher supposed that getting him away from the village would improve his condition, but apparently not.
She feels at a loss, then. She has never been much of a comforting type of person – she leaves that mostly to Tribios, maybe once upon a time to Aglaea herself. But Cipher? Ha, she’s used to working solo with the occasional collaboration with Bartholos – Zagreus in disguise, really – and that’s it. She never gets involved in the tragedies eating away at the land unless she really really needs to, has never had to deal with trauma that isn’t her own, so–
She’s understandably nervous. And when she’s nervous… she rambles.
“... and we should really get out of here, pronto, before the fire catches up and we can’t even leave the field anymore…” She looks away into the distance, where she hopes to find some shelter to rest. “There should be some ruins around here– around that tall tree, maybe. I remember…” It is then that she finally notices the eyes watching her. Watching, instead of staring at nothing. She turns back to the boy and finally meets his eyes, now wide and confused and hiding what’s probably fear, but present. Or, as present as someone who has just gone through a truly traumatic ordeal can be. She grins anyway. “Hey. You here with me at last?”
The boy doesn’t respond, but he stares at her.
“Nothing to say? Not even your name?” she tries.
The boy continues staring at her wordlessly.
Cipher’s grin falls and she sighs, feeling the exhaustion from the taxing day finally weighing on her like a rock.
“Okay. Okay, I can work with this,” she mutters to herself. She can’t quite stop herself from rubbing her eyes tiredly and looking at the boy again, frowning at the blood still covering him from head to toe, the wounds she can see littering his body – and she wonders if she should be worried about any serious injuries. “C’mon. Up. We need to leave.”
She offers him a hand and the boy looks at it some seconds later, slow like how Aglaea used to sew her most delicate pieces. He stares at Cipher’s hand as if he has never seen a hand before, and Cipher grimaces at the twist in her chest.
She’s not cut out for this kind of thing. She should just– drag this boy to the nearest village or city state and drop him at the feet of whatever family would take him and then– forget about anything that has happened today.
But the boy blinks and takes her hand and the blood makes his hold slippery and his clear exhaustion means that he almost falls back on his face as soon as he tries to stand up with her help and– Cipher sees something that reminds her of more than a thousand years ago, when a grandmother took a kid under her wing, no questions asked.
And so, she leads them both away and away from the destroyed village. The boy never releases her hand and after he tries to look back at the village once, Cipher pulls him forward – hurries to keep him from falling down – and makes it a point to look him in the eye.
“Don’t look back.”
The boy doesn’t, after that.
—
After a longer walk than she would have liked, they find a few ruins and a river.
Cipher pushes the boy to the river so he can clean off all the blood and dirt and stays close as she rummages through her bag in search of some clothes she can lend him, keeping a careful ear out for any signs of drowning.
The boy is unnervingly quiet as he goes about his business. No word leaves his mouth as Cipher offers a few simple pants and a tunic that should fit him good enough. No grunts, no complaints as his fresh injuries – fortunately nothing too serious Cipher can’t deal with – brush against the clothes.
“I need to tend to your wounds,” says Cipher, pointing at the few bandages she has found lying around. “Keep still.”
And he does. Honestly, Cipher could very well mistake him for one of those unnerving mannequins that Aglaea used back in the day, still and compliant and silent. She finishes her treatment as soon as she can and–
Ah. Golden blood.
Just as gold as her own, glittering under the soft light of a perpetual dawn.
Her hands hesitate for a moment, but she keeps going anyway, covering all signs of gold. The boy doesn’t react, staring with unseeing eyes at the river.
Suddenly, the idea of running with this boy back to Okhema jumps at her. She thinks of dropping this boy at Aglaea and Tribios’ feet, making him their problem. They would be much better at helping this traumatized kid than her, they would get yet another Crysos Heir, someone who could help them more than Cipher can now, self-exiled as she is.
But she glances at his eyes, at his unmoving form, and can’t quite bring herself to do that just yet. Okhema is a nest of vipers at the best of times – she knows that well. They would eat a country bumpkin like this alive, and that’s not even accounting for a traumatized country bumpkin.
She can do something. Maybe. Hopefully.
Oh, Kephale above, she sure hopes she doesn’t fuck this up.
Suddenly, the silence is way too heavy for her, too much, too loud, so she leans back on her hands, appraises her work with a critical eye.
“I don’t think I actually told you my name… Not that you told me yours, anyway. I’m Ciphera– but call me Cipher.” She offers a hand that she knows the boy won’t take and a wry smile that the boy won’t return. She lets both fall after a moment of no reaction with a sigh.“So, if you won’t talk to me… then I get the right to nickname you until you deign to tell me your name, boy,” she says, trying to joke a bit, if only for her own benefit. This kind of atmosphere, so heavy and melancholic, only tires her and makes her think, which she tries not to do too much, unless she ends up overthinking and where would that take her? Nowhere good, that’s for sure. “So… What to call you…?”
The boy blinks and turns to her slowly, not quite curious, but at least responsive. He glances at the bandages covering his arms and blinks again, maybe curious about their existence, maybe confused about how they got there in the first place.
Cipher’s eyes get drawn again to his pale hair, his pale skin, and it reminds her of distant stories about a time when the weather was ever-changing–
She grins.
“Hehe… From now on, you’ll be Snowy!” she proclaims, pointing at him with a sharp finger.
The boy – Snowy – blinks at her again, but he doesn’t seem particularly offended by her nickname, so that’s good enough for her. He doesn’t look particularly amazed by it, either, but the moment the boy answers with anything other than a glance in her direction is the moment Cipher is called a hero.
(She does hope that one day this scarred boy will be able to smile again, though.)
(She really hopes she’s there to see it.)
(... Maybe she can understand now how Aglaea felt, hundreds of years ago, when Cipher visited her store and offered her totally-not-stolen goods.)