Alright, Bax

Secondary Camp - Mountains West of Jorung
34 Winter 217 (the day after Bax became the Yeti)

Vanja
Vanja spends the morning checking the edges of the makeshift campsite. It’s a less than ideal location. After the events of yesterday, the climb back up to the mountain cave was impossible and so the party had settled for a relatively flat area in a less protected spot, still within the fox-like beast’s territory. There’s no sign of the creature now, though, but there’s also nothing in the snares Vanja had set the night before. That doesn’t mean there isn’t small game around - there would have to be, to support a predator like the fox-beast - only that they were smart enough to avoid Vanja’s traps.

By the time Vanja returns - empty-handed - to camp, Bax is sitting close to the campfire. He’s wrapped in his usual layers of leather and furs, and what seems like all of his bedding. Vanja’s instinct is to hail him from further off, to crack some joke about her failed snares, to laugh at herself and try to get a smile from Bax, but she doesn’t.

Instead, Vanja lays one of her own pelts down next to Bax, to insulate herself from the frozen ground, and sits.

“Alright, Bax?” says Vanja, “You going to let me check you over?” The River had run dry for Vanja again, the night before. Astarael had been injured badly - the Yeti’s claws had caused deep damage; and Ethan had been hurt, too. Vanja had needed to triage, and so the only treatment she had been able to give Bax, even after his own trauma, had been a blanket and hot tea.

Now, Vanja pokes at where Bax’s feet are wrapped in his blankets, “I’ve got to make sure you aren’t going to lose any toes, from that hike yesterday.”

Bax
Exhaustion beats down on Bax like the winds of a never ending storm. He wants to move, to assist with hunting and other camp tasks, but it takes all his effort to just stay awake. He is too tired to think of what had happened the night before. Too tired to think of how swiftly he turned on his friends after his transformation. So he sits and stares at the campfire, unmoving and bundled in his bedding and furs.

So warm, so peaceful…

…

A soft thud brings him back from the brink of sleep. He turns his head slightly and sees a blurred visage settling down next too him. He tiredly blinks his eyes to clear his vision and recognizes Vanja. She begins to speak at him but her words are muffled. Bax tries to watch, to read her lips instead, but they’re a blur.

Had she always talked so quickly? Or quietly? No…no it’s my exhaustion. Need to focus…

Bax half blinks and tries to recall what he may have heard before. To think on what Vanja would do with someone else in his postion. She would want to inspect him. To insure that frostbite hasn’t taken away any appendages.

Without a word he scoots his legs towards her, kicking away blankets and furs so that she could do her job.

Vanja
Vanja glances up at Bax before shifting her position and starting her examination. She brings one of his legs across her knees, and then the other. She checks the color of his skin, pressing it pale and watching the blood flow back. The responses of his toes, and the flex of his joints. All fine. There doesn’t even seem to be mobility lost in the scar tissue of his calves and ankles, where the Swans’ pikes had cut through muscle and tendon those five years prior.

There are some minor wounds. An area of the arch where something, a stone or branch, has cut reasonably deeply. In the city, it’s something Vanja would stitch, but out here, magic was more efficient, and it meant the wound would close completely.

Vanja feels the riverlight respond, flowing through her fingers before she’s done tracing the rune on Bax’s foot. She watches the now-familiar sight of the threads of green light stitching together the injury, then brief green flashes as the light does its work and seals up the other small cuts and scrapes on Bax’s feet and legs.

Vanja pats Bax’s knee, rewraps the blankets, and settles back to sit next to him. She looks over at him, studying his face, and even as she’s watching, his head is nodding, his eye unfocused. He’s clearly exhausted.

“Bax,” says Vanja, “are you actually alright? You know what happened yesterday wasn’t your fault, right? And we’re all fine.” She elbows him, gently, “You’re lucky Ethan was able to talk you down, though. Because I was this close to just knocking you down and punching you in the snout,” she punches the air, to demonstrate, “And that would have been the end for the Yeti of Jorung! No match for Skau Vanja!” She smiles over at him, trying to gauge a response.

Bax
Glancing over, Bax smirks at Vanja’s comment and imitation of defeating the monster. She’s right though. If it hadn’t been for Ethan, for all of them, things could have ended up much worse. Instead Astarael and Ethan wound up with manageable injuries.

I owe them both severe apologies. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make up for what I did to them…

“I’m fine,” Bax responds weakly. “I think? It’s so hard to focus, I’m just so…tired.” With his mind so drowsy, it takes him longer to think and respond. But a conversation should help him remain awake.

“I don’t remember the other transformations. But I can sort of remember what it felt like. I always felt tired after, but not like this. This time is different. It’s like all my strength is gone…maybe it has to do with the transformation ending early?”

He watched the embers at the bottom of the fire pop and get carried on the wind. He could smell moisture from some of the fire wood as it evaporated.

“Are you okay? I think I remember everything, but I wanna know if I hurt you too.”

Vanja
Vanja shrugs. “You didn’t hurt me, or Sav, either. Knocked me out of the way to get a swipe at Ethan, though I can’t say I blame you. It can be so hard to resist hitting him.” She laughs at her own joke.

“And even if you had, you know me. I don’t stay hurt. I just get right back up.” Vanja catches herself. She’d been knocked out, cold, yesterday, by her own magic, somehow. “Eventually, at least,” she amends.

Vanja falls quiet, at this, and leans forward, the sudden shift making her hair fall briefly in front of her face. She rakes a hand through the top, and pulls her braids to one side, out of her eyes. Absently, Vanja pushes her boots into the snow beyond the edge of the pelt, searching for the stone beneath.

There had been snow in the ground, then, too. In the dream, or vision, or whatever had happened yesterday. But it had been different than this. Because it had been southern snow. Because she hadn’t been in Jorung anymore.

Vanja shakes her head, trying to clear it, and speaks to fill the silence.

“Last time I was knocked flat on my back like that it was at Pin’s. The man was no bigger than me, really, but he had a hard skull.” Vanja smiles at the memory, “Broke my hand, too, on that one.” She closes her eyes, thinking back. “And before that not since home, really, when my brother Mikael cracked me with the haft of his halberd - and you know the kind of force you can get with something like that.”

Vanja trails off, and the silence grows again. An uncomfortable, empty thing.

“I’ve never had my own magic take me down like that, though,” she says, finally. “It was different than a blow to the head. Or falling asleep. It felt like the River swept me off my feet and out of my body altogether and dropped me in a different place.” Vanja looks up at the Jorungun sky. Gray and white and blue. She can’t see the River, but she knows it’s there, still. “Except I’d never been there. It was your home.”

“And it seemed so real. It was…as real as this. As us talking now. I knew I was in your town, even just in that circle of snow. And above - that black sky, with your constellation. The Hunter. And I knew I was speaking to you, Bax.” She can feel color rising, unhelpful, in her cheeks. “To some version of you, at least. To the boy you were before I met you.”

“Even for a dream, it was…” Vanja searches for the right words, “a little unsettling.”

Bax
“I remember…”

In that dream, the night before the transformation, Vanja was there. But she described something similar just yesterday when she tried to do something with Bax’s monster condition.

“I remember because I had that same dream too or what I thought was a dream? Maybe a vision…I’m not sure. But I had it one night before you’d tried that magic. It doesn’t make much sense.”

He pauses for a moment and yawns. Wiping away tears from his eyes to clear his vision.

“I didn’t mean to lie about it initially. It just really freaked me out. Also we had to deal with the yeti thing still and we were running out of daylight…”

Vanja
Vanja turns toward Bax and shoves him, hard, with an open hand.

“This isn’t something you thought to mention? Once we were all safe and no one was a Yeti?” Vanja scoffs, shaking her head, “I thought I was losing my mind.

“But it was real, somehow…”

“You did seem surprised to see me, in the dream. Probably because we hadn’t met. Or because it was misaligned - you as you were then, me as I am now… And yet you knew who I was…”

She pauses and looks over at Bax, on his side in the snow, and for a moment, she can picture him as he was - the boy from the dream, unscarred and open-eyed, as she’d never seen him in reality.

Because it was a dream. It’s how I imagined he might look.

But no, that hadn’t been the case. It hadn’t been her dream at all.

Vanja’s eyes grow wide with her own realization, “It was your dream. You weren’t dreaming about me. It was your dream and I somehow…visited it. And me being there was the strange thing, not the dream itself. I interrupted something that was already happening, things you were already dreaming…”

Vanja speaks more quickly, energized. “You were trying to find something,” she says, “at the end, before I woke up. You were running to your father’s house.”

“What were you looking to find, there?”

Bax
Is the world tilted…? No that doesn’t make sense. Wait, it’s Vanja. She probably pushed me…

With a hard blink, Bax clears his eyes and finds the world horizontal with his vision. He doesn’t remember a shove or the fall, but here he was, lying on his side in the snow. He can make out some words, Vanja trying to make out what the dream or vision or whatever it was meant.

It seems like a lot to take in… he thought as he pushed himself up into his original seated position.

After repositioning himself, Vanja speaks more loudly, excited at a new theory. She speaks rapidly, emoting with her arms. Bax is only able to absorb every other word with how quickly she’s talking now. Finally asking what he was looking for in his dream that she had found herself in.

“Uhhh…I’m not entirely sure? You were there, and I knew it was you, but that didn’t make any sense. So I thought maybe we could find answers or a clue in my old home?

“But I suppose it also could’ve been a chance to see my father again…I’m sorry Van. I’m not really sure what I was looking for. I guess I was just looking for somethin, anything, that could’ve helped in that moment.”

Vanja
Vanja nods, agreeing with Bax, and reaches over to brush the snow from his shoulder. She watches his face. His eye. Looking to ensure his eye follows her hand, and that his pupil contracts as he focuses on the movement. It all seems normal. No sign of concussion, then. Or shock.

He’s really just this tired?

Vanja grins at him as she pulls her hand back. “Really, Bax. Falling over?” She tosses her hair, and rolls her eyes, “if you’re so tired I’ll make you some tea. It’ll wake you right up.”

Vanja climbs to her feet, shaking the snow off of her leggings and busies herself at the fire. A small bundle of pine needles are already stewing, and Vanja pulls a few dried yellow flowers from a pouch at her waist and adds them to the pot of water, too.

“So was this the only strange dream you’ve had, recently? Or have there been others?”

Vanja doesn’t know much about dream-reading - that had been one of her mother’s skills, not her own, but Sav had mentioned that strange occurrences had more meaning, if they were repeated. If common things were found. Once was chance, she’d said, twice coincidence. It seemed important to know, then, if there was a pattern.

Vanja stirs the tea and takes the pot from the fire, sitting back down next to Bax before pouring the tea into her own horn mug, careful to avoid transferring any petals or pine needles. Over the top of the mug, she sprinkles a dried brown powder.

Vanja holds the mug out to Bax.

“Drink up. It’ll help wake you,” she says. “It’s just pine tea, and yarrow. Some of the last of the chaga mushroom, too, from the Isendel side,” Vanja smiles again, and cocks an eyebrow at Bax, “Or I could hit you again, if you like. Get your blood flowing, one way or another.”

Bax
Bax watches Vanja’s hand move back and forth in front of his face, wondering what she was doing. Did he have that much snow in his shoulders?

She offered to make tea, returning a moment later with a warm cup and questions about other dreams he’s had. He eyed the tea scrupulously as he let it warm his hands. He still didn’t like tea, but with how often Vanja forced him to drink it, he was slowly becoming accustomed to it at least.

He takes a sip of the concoction at Vanja’s insistence and immediately feels the warmth surge through him. Though not completely awake, he does feel more conscious of his surroundings.

“No punching please,” he remarks with a smile at her jesting threat.

“I’ve had other dreams, leading into the days before the transformation. Closer to nightmares really. Where I would kill the group as the yeti…but thinkin on it, I’m pretty certain those were caused by stress and stuff. Didn’t get much good sleep for a bit of time there,” he comments, awkwardly scratching at his chin.

“This is the only dream I can remember where something strange happened though. Where my dream was…I dunno, invaded, I guess? Is that the right word? How do you describe what happened?”

Vanja
Vanja feels a blush spreading across her cheeks again. “I wouldn’t say invaded! I was trying to heal you — to separate out the Yeti and remove it from you! An invasion is… it’s what the Swans are doing here in Jorung. It’s intentional. Harmful.”

She looks down at her tea, self consciously. Flustered by her own reflexive defensiveness. “I didn’t…slip into your dream on purpose, and I certainly didn’t mean any harm.”

“To me it felt like falling. Like losing my footing and being washed away somewhere else. It was a little like when the River came down and brought us all back to your cave, except the River didn’t just bring me to another different place. It was a different time, too, right? Because it was a dream you had already had.”

Vanja puts the pot of tea on the ground, sending a cloud of steam up from where the heat met snow. The bitterness of the tea was usually bracing, but now she felt it turned her stomach. She’d hoped Bax would have some deeper explanation for what had happened, but it seemed he was just as confused as she was.

“I don’t know,” she says, “I’ve been able to do more with my magic, here in Jorung - accessing deeper parts of the River - and it’s exciting, but it’s also a little frightening. I feel like I can’t control it. Like the River is rushing through me sometimes, and I can’t channel or direct it.”

Vanja nods to Bax, “It’s the same with you, though, right? When you discovered you could…” She motions with her right hand, and a small ribbon of riverlight appears. She closes her fist and snuffs out the light, then opens her left, revealing another shifting green light. “Disappear? Jump? What are you calling that new trick you can do.”

Bax
Bax notices Vanja’s discomfort as she explains herself and guilt washes through him. “Sorry! Sorry sorry. I know you didn’t invade my dream. I just - I literally can’t think of another word. It was weird. But I know you were only trying to help.”

She motions, a flash of green wisps appear and disappear in her hand. An example, but also a provocation. She wants Bax to try and explain his new ability.

“I haven’t really named it yet. ‘Jump’ sounds accurate though. It’s…an odd feeling. It ties into my other ability, where I focus in on an enemy. And if I think I can’t get to them quickly enough, I just kinda will myself to be at them.

“I’m not sure what it looks like when you guys see it, but for me it’s quick as a blink. I’ll see the target, focus hard on them, and then I’m there. It’s like…it’s like a dream I guess?” He pauses, thinking hard on how to explain this ability. One that he has only used three times so far. “No that’s not it…”

He holds his fingers to the bridge of his nose and shuts his eyes. It was proving difficult to think on this topic with his mind as frayed as it was, and the initial warmth of the tea could only push him so far. He ponders to think of the right words to describe the sensation. “Imagine that you stop existing for a moment,” he finally responds, pulling his hand from his face.

“No body, no soul, no existence. Nothing but…a single drive, a single thought, that keeps you hitched to the world. When I blink, I become that thought. That’s followed by a flash…? Or a sudden appearance of stars whizzing by me at an unimaginable speed. Then I exist again. Now next to my target.”

Vanja
Vanja listens closely to Bax’s description of his ability, the blink.

“It’s quick to see, too,” she says, “you’re not gone for any time. You just appear in the new place in that white mist.”

Vanja shakes her head and lets herself fall back onto the snow, flat on her back, staring up at the sky.

“And I’m jealous, too, that you’re able to control it. To pick the spot where you blink back in and know exactly what to do.”

She closes her eyes and takes a few slow breaths of the cold, sharp air, breathing in the smell of woodsmoke and distant pine, and the steam of the tea, abandoned near her feet.

“I still can’t figure out how to bring the River down again - whatever it was that I did to bring us all back from the ogre camp to your cave. And even if I could, I don’t know where we might end up.” Vanja lets out a breath, feeling it coalesce into fog above her face. “It would have been a useful thing. To be able to do yesterday.”

Vanja keeps her eyes closed as she talks. She usually felt comfortable around Bax, with the easy friendship based on their shared skills and those weeks ranging together in the woods, but she feels awkward now, talking about this. An uncomfortable, anxious twist forming in her stomach.

“I talked with Sav about it, a few days past. She seems to think that it might be connected to you somehow. That I was worried for you, after the battle with the ogres, and so the River brought us all to the cave, to your place.”

Bax
Vanja explains that she thinks her powers are somehow connected to Bax. Or at least that is Sav’s theory. Hearing this, Bax tiredly chuckles to himself before responding.

“That’s a cute idea isn’t it?” He asked with a cocked eyebrow. “But I don’t think that’s quite right. At least I don’t think that’s how it works with how you’ve explained your magic, the River, to me.”

He takes another sip of tea, withholding his remark at how gross he thinks all tea is. But there is little he can do to keep his body from shivering at the bitterness of the drink.

“I actually thinks it’s easier to understand your magic than my own. You’ve given yours a name and an image. Mine is just somethin I’ve trained myself to use, without understanding how it works or is accessed…like breathing! Got no idea how I do it. But somehow I just do.

”…I think you’re too focused on tryin to understand how you can use your magic. You should instead be learning how to navigate your magic. Hmm…hold on, maybe some kinda picture might help…?”

He picks up a stick from beside him and draws a wavy line horizontally in the snow in front of him, calling Vanja over to join him.

“Do you remember when we talked after you’d first used your magic to hurt someone in defense? We spent some time talking about it and decided that you had basically accessed depths of the River you’d never explored before.” He draws a line underneath the first line, angled away to display a deep pool or river. After Vanja takes a look over his simple diagram he wipes it away with his foot.

“So let’s move out from that idea,” he remarks, this time drawing a single vertical line in the snow. “Now imagine any river. They can stretch for miles with no changes whatsoever. But eventually, if you travel far enough along one, you’ll find a break.” He then draws a second line out from the center of the original. Then another farther up on the opposite side of the new line.

“I think what you should be doing is learning to look for and navigate these breaks, these branches, in the River. If you teach yourself to search for these branches, to ‘travel’ and access them, you may be able to better use your new abilities in time.”

Bax leans back against the log for support and turns to stare back at the fire. The tea wasn’t proving to be as effective as Vanja had promised and he could feel his eyes drooping again.

Vanja
Vanja hears Bax’s laugh - it’s a good sound to hear, after everything that happened yesterday - and his own interpretation of River magic.

Vanja sits up, ready to correct him, but Bax has already moved on, drawing a diagram in the snow.

Bax didn’t seem to understand that the River was more than a name and an image. It was a real, powerful, tangible thing. Vanja hadn’t named her power after the aurora - she pulled her power from it. That was what she had been taught, at least, in her father’s stories and her mother’s prayers. And it had seemed to be a true thing, then. Even in the stories, though, Vanja had never known of a runemaker traveling miles in an instant, or slipping into dreams from which the dreamer had already awoken.

For the first time since crossing the border into Jorung, Vanja finds herself thinking of her own home. Wishing she could slip into some dream of her own, where she could tell her young self to go to her house and ask her parents these things.

Vanja watches as Bax draws a second line in the diagram, reminding her of when they’d last spoken in Northgate, and he’d helped her rationalize the death she’d caused. He’d advised her then to not be afraid to use the deeper, darker depths of the River. But that was before she’d done it a second time, and then used the River to put light back in the body, creating a terrible, twisted thing. Vanja hadn’t used that spell since.

She nods in answer to Bax’s question, though. She remembers the conversation.

Bax draws a new line, now, a river branching off into streams and pools. Vanja listens as he explains his concept - that maybe she could learn to navigate the river, and explore the branches.

Bax sits back, done with his lesson, and Vanja can see the exhaustion overwhelming him again.

“It’s an interesting idea,” she says, retrieving her pot of tea, gone cold now. She drinks it anyway, and overturns the pot, letting the pine leaves and yarrow blooms fall onto the snow. “But I haven’t got any idea how to navigate the River.” She laughs, unkindly, at herself, “If I knew what I was doing maybe these new skills would actually prove useful.”

She looks over at Bax. His eye is shut, mug of tea loose in his hand. Vanja catches the mug before it falls, and claps Bax on the shoulder, jarring him awake again.

“Bax, I know you’re tired, but you can’t fall asleep without a shelter. You know better than that, all the traveling you did out here, alone. If you froze to death, it would just be embarrassing.” She laughs, again, genuinely this time, “And I might be getting more powerful, but I’m almost sure I can’t bring someone back from the dead.”

Vanja hesitates before rising, though, and on an impulse, takes Bax’s hand, and turns it palm side up. From the top of her boot, safely tucked in between the leather wraps, Vanja produces a small piece of charcoal. She glances up at Bax and smiles at the bemused expression on his face as she draws a small circle at the crook of his elbow, leading into a single long line down his forearm, finishing the motion with a flick of the charcoal. “This is a sleep thorn,” she says. “It will give you heavy sleep and sweet dreams.” Vanja finishes the rune with three short lines, crossing the longer one.

Vanja releases Bax’s hand and climbs to her feet, “I’ll go find Sav. See if she can make that magic shelter again, so you can go to sleep properly, without any unexpected visitors.”

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Alright, Bax