She did not speak to Homer about her dream or what’d gotten her to scream like so. It felt terrible, for sure, but if she told him that Death herself whisked her away to- gods, did Death take her to the realm of the gods?- to tell her that she could now kill people just by *wanting* it really hard? He’d leave her for sure, and she’d have to wander around alone…

  So, she made excuses. She was still stressed from the harpy attack and it must’ve haunted her dreams, she said. He bought it and didn’t ask questions. Or so she assumed. It was likely that Homer just let the sleeping dog lie. Old military men understand that some battles are not worth fighting over. The war will be won one day, and she’ll speak when she’s ready.

  And there’s plenty of time to get ready. Despite Homer’s earlier fears, the next few days of travel are surprisingly light. They’re harassed by harpies here and there, but a simple wave of his sword (and swinging around the cut head of a harpy from the first attack) gets them to back off without a fight, although the screeches cast down onto them are clearly explicit in nature. Harpy nguage relies on guttural sounds that humans do not quite understand, but the intent behind them is somewhat easy to decipher.

  And the intent here is to insult, to bemoan and to curse.

  The silence lets her think. She has some answers now; her curse (blessing?) comes from Death herself, and it’s not a transfusion of godsblood… Although she’s still not quite sure why she’s been cursed (blessed?) like this. Does her god hate her? Is this an act of spite, or a trial of faith? But she did not sound hateful. She sounded… Sad. Sad that her faithful was trying to figure out a way to remove the curse (blessing?) and all.

  The worst part about all this is that it’s making her question her divinity, her rock, her god. Death has always been an abstract for her. Death is death. It happens to everyone. Of course, she had a face and a body, and she existed physically, yet Maia never thought she’d- well, this journey was to meet her, of course, but-

  She just never thought she’d see her like that. Know that she was someone of interest. Someone unique. What should be religious euphoria is merely confusion and dread. Is this what animals feel like when they’re released into a rge city? Maybe- maybe she just hallucinated all of it… But that’d be the coward’s way out. Dreams were yet another aspect of death, and it’d all felt way too real.

  “Ought to be reaching the first big milestone of the trip soon, little miss.”

  Homer’s words broke her from her trance. They’d spoken sparsely for the st few days, avoiding the cloud game; Homer had decided their carelessness was why the harpies had gotten the jump earlier. Focusing on just keeping their eyes on the horizon they’d be in less danger of being surprised: It was clearly a matter of concern for him. She’d have found it sweet, if not for her deep thoughts.

  “The frontier town of Hawk’s Rest. Built into a very narrow passageway.” Homer lifts his hands and tents them in a triangle sort of shape, tips of his fingers connecting. “The ceiling is shut so thin the harpies can’t get in from above without being spotted instantly, and the two ways to go in or out of the passageway are heavily guarded. It’s the st stop for many people who want to try their luck with the Sawbones. Most of ‘em reach Hawk’s and decide to turn back after.”

  Why that is is left unclear. Maybe the few days of harrowing travel met by a warm bed and a meal convinced most travelers that life was worth living and that a death in the cws of shriekers wasn’t worth it. Or maybe Hawk’s Rest was so unwelcoming that it was merely the final nail in a long built coffin.

  “Have you ever been…?”Agh. Maia’s throat still felt hoarse and unused to speech even days after the ungodly screams she’d left out as she woke up from her rendezvous with Death. But at least she spoke again. She knew it’d feel better once she got used to speaking again.

  “Few times. When the Steel war ended and the Iskariots ascended, a few Steel loyalists holed up at Hawk’s. Last time I visited was to smoke ‘em out. Was a boring siege. They ran out of food and surrendered. Hawk’s has been quiet since then.” Homer strokes his chin, fingers idly sinking into the wiry hairs of his beard. “Was talk of the current Iskariot sending men so they could penetrate deeper into the Sawbones to start mining operations.”

  Local politics don’t really interest her, so she starts to filter out as she sinks back into her own thoughts. What was she going to do about Homer. She couldn’t live with the guilt if she ever accidentally killed him, but can she really just let him go? If she does, she won’t find a repcement! This journey is suicidal enough as is! She doesn’t have money to hire guards, and even if she did, she’d just get attached to them too and get even more depressed.

  … Maybe she could learn how to channel her curse (blessing?) in a productive way? Could she shoot weird death bsts from her palms if she concentrated hard enough? She didn’t really understand the limits of these powers yet, besides the vague implication that she could will things into dying. But- what about the birds that had died above her hovel? She didn’t even know they were there when they died, so how come they died? Maybe it was reted to her hunger, or- ugh. This was starting to hurt her head again.

  She doesn’t really make any further progress, and eventually even her worrywart covered brain finally gives up and lets her rex a little. Now that they’ve dipped deeper into the valley, she can appreciate the unique (to her, at least) aesthetic of the Sawbones. Dry, red rock makes up most of the ground here, little soil to be found. Apparently there were veins of gold, silver and other precious metals somewhere deep below, but the harpies and the arid nature of the Sawbones made mining expeditions rare and often fruitless.

  Mining operations from within Hawk’s Rest had proved their existence, though, and the protected nature of the settlement meant that deep tunnels from within it had slowly begun to breach into the veins under the mountains proper… But it’d take tens or hundreds of years at this rate for the humble colony to actually reach anything worth making a buzz about.

  Maybe she’d absorbed a bit more of all that political talk from Homer than she thought she had. She liked seeing him like this; it was clear that he had a lot of local knowledge from his war days. Lots of settled down buddies from the military in the area that he went to see often- actually, he sounded like he had plenty of free time and no roots.

  … She was smart enough to not outright ask “so why do you travel around like a bum all the time,” but she did ck the social graces enough to still *think* it. In the end her guilt about potentially killing him if she thinks about it too hard by accident prevents her from asking questions, but that doesn’t prevent her bug-eyed stare from nailing on him.

  “Something on my face, little miss?”

  “A-Ah, no. Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

  “Whatever you saw in that dream, little miss…” Oh, gods. This is the first time he’s *really* breaching the topic. She’s already preparing herself for an incoming interrogation. “... Don’t let it weigh on your mind too much. I’ve had plenty of dreams before. Bad ones. About memories through the war. And even beyond that. I know how important dreams like that can be. How they make even a big man like myself stumble. Dreams have meaning, but the only thing that matters in the real world is what you make of them. Guess that’s all I wanted to say. You’re a good little dy, little miss. I’m here for you ‘till we get to the capital.”

  His kindness is capped by a little smile. It’s not a very pretty one; Homer is chiseled from rock and brimstone and whatever boils deep within him, making him a craggy man even on his best days, but the sheer kindness radiating from it almost made her want to cry. She was a loner, a hermit- the st regur human contact she’d had had died with her parents some years ago, so she’d been utterly and completely alone for years.

  It’s so childish of her. He’s just being nice. He’s reying his own experiences to her, comparing them, trying to make her understand, that’s all. She can’t even give him a proper answer or thanks, she can only look away and meekly nod, doing her best to not burst into tears. Ughhh. The dream has made her so emotional, so weak and tired.

  But she does feel his hand ruffling her hair all of a sudden, patting it a few times, and then letting go as they walked the rest of the way towards Hawk’s Rest in comfortable silence. It felt like she found some modicum of peace here, although she couldn’t let her guard down: A stray thought could still bring great harm to those around her.

  Entering Hawk’s Rest is a simple process. You stop in front of the massive wood & metal gates, you wait for someone from the watch to notice you, they confirm you aren’t a harpy and you’re let in. The ck of security can be expined away by how the settlement is barely held together to begin with; the popution can be counted in the low hundreds, people come and go, and buildings within the ravine settlement are always trading hands.

  There were some familiar faces for Homer here and there. Fellow old men and women, dogs of war cut from their leashes and left to fend for themselves. She had no real thoughts or opinions on the lives of soldiers, but the more she listened and watched, the more she saw how all these lives had one connecting string- that of meaning only found in steel and blood- she began to realize that they’d all been failed by the same source.

  The end of sughter.

  Would she become like these people after she traveled to the godsblood capital and met with Death face to face in *this* world on *her* terms? Would she lose something fundamental from within herself, becoming a lost soul wandering this world?

  … Were these people even lost?They had clearly lost the pilr of their lives, but that hole didn’t need to stay empty. The more she watched them, be it at the gate, or at the inn where Homer gathered some six or seven old friends to drink with, or as they wandered the narrow, dusty streets-

  They’d found newfound support from among themselves, from their lives here, or in chasing new wars to fight. Homer was the greatest example of this; certainly his newfound goal would drive him to the grave, but he seemed to have accepted his death. So he found joy in it. When he told his old friends that he was going to head to the capital to fight and kill War, they all cheered and patted him on the back and bought him new rounds.

  Surely they all knew he would die. War was eternal. War was every man, woman and whatever lies outside of those designations. War mastered every weapon, every martial art, every strategy. War could not be killed by a mortal. Yet they cheered, they complimented, they bet on him.

  Maybe she too could find meaning like this. She might lose something fundamental, but she can always keep forging ahead. That’s the conclusion she came to as she sat there, oversized tankard of water in hand as she kept watching these representatives of a time gone by,

  forging herself some sort of peace of mind after days of turmoil.