Calm

I know I whine on and on about the oppressive heat of the desert, but it IS relentless.
Seriously, I don't understand how people live here.

—

The victory at the way station was a brutal but clean affair, but it had lanced a boil of tension within our fellowship.
The path ahead was no less dangerous, but for the first time in a long time, the silence that accompanied our match was not heavy with unspoken grief or grim anticipation.
It was a comfortable, road-weary quiet.

We had truly become a unit, our disparate parts learning to move in a rather strange but oddly effective harmony.
Tulote and Cassandra, (pops and meemaw), often walked together, their conversations a low murmur of either shared history and strategic considerations.
Even though Cassandra was considerably younger than Tulote, she was still ancient compared to me and Xerta. I'm not so sure about the veiled knight, though.
SPEAKING OF, she usually remained ever-present but usually silent.
And I, more often than not, found myself falling into step beside Xerta.

The morning's conversation, as it typically was, turned to food.

"I confess," Tulote announced, "I would trade half the treasury of the Imperium for a properly roasted capon with a wine-and-herb reduction, the kind the Imperial chefs used to make for my father's feast days."

His “theatrical rumble” was comically overkill for that kind of topic.

Cassandra let out a light, musical laugh.

"You and your heavy human foods. My soul yearns for a moon-petal salad, harvested only under the light of a full moon, with a dressing of starlight dew and crushed shimmer-nuts. It's less a meal and more... a memory of what light tastes like.

"Sounds like what you'd feed a sick rabbit." Xerta mocked, wiping a sheen of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

"Give me a proper dwarven forge-stew. Chunks of cave-boar, fire-potatoes, iron-onions, all slow-cooked for three days in a cauldron of strong ale until it's thick enough for a hammer to stand up in. Puts hair on your chest and fire in your belly. Now THAT'S food."

They all looked at me.

"And you, Arda? What delicacy does the Hero from another world long for?" Cassandra asked.

I smiled, nostalgia working its magic.

"My wife... she used to make this amazing curried chicken. Nothing fancy. Just chicken, some potatoes, a few spices she'd get from a little shop in the market. But the smell of it would fill the whole house. The kids would come running the moment they caught a whiff. It tasted... like home."

My mention of family had settled a brief, thoughtful silence over the group.
I wouldn't really call it sad, though, it was more reflective.
In our own ways, we were all fighting for a home, whether it was a memory, an ideal, or a fortress filled with the four most important people in the universe.

We took our midday respite in the shade of a rare, towering rock formation that offered shelter from the tyrannical sun.
While Tulote, who seemed immune to the heat, used his Terra Flow to draw cool, damp air from a deep fissure in the rock, and Cassandra used her elven knowledge to find a patch of hardy desert berries.
I sat down with Xerta.
Our morning sparring sessions had become a fixture, and now, I found myself seeking her out for more than just combat lessons.

She was meticulously working on the edge of her hand-axe with a whetstone, her movements very precise.

"You make it look easy," I said, watching her.

"It's not easy. It's practiced," she corrected without looking up. "Anything worth doing is. Your sword work is getting better. You're not fighting the blade any more."

"Thanks to you," I said. "Could you... could you show me that? Properly? I feel like I'm just scraping metal, not sharpening it."

She looked up, her steel-grey eyes appraising me for a moment.
A flicker of something, perhaps pride, softened her usual hardness.

"Give it here," she grunted.

She took the Gladius Nobellus, holding the divine blade with the same no-nonsense reverence she'd give a well-made shovel.

"And give me your stone."

She sat beside me, our shoulders almost touching in the cool shade.

"Your problem is you're pushing too hard, and your angle is all over the place. You think sharpening is about taking metal off. It's not. It's about convincing the edge to be where it's supposed to be."

Her large, powerful hands, which I had seen crush demon skills, were now impossibly gentle as she guided my own, showing me the correct angle, the right amount of pressure.
Her fingers were warm and calloused against mine.

"See? A consistent angle. Let the stone do the work. Just guide it. Like you're stroking a cat. A very, very sharp cat."

I focused, trying to replicate her smooth, steady motion.
We worked in a comfortable silence, the rhythmic shing-shing-shing of stone on steel was almost meditative in its beat.
I was acutely aware of her presence beside me, of the scent of the forge and clean sweat that clung to her.
I admired her hands, not just for the raw strength they possessed, but for the incredible skill they held.
The skill of a maker, a creator.
It was a different kind of creation than my own, not of cosmic Order, but of practical, tangible things.
It felt honest, and real.

That evening, we five sat around a crackling campfire.
The stars here were a revelation, a brilliant, dense company of diamonds scattered on black velvet, so clear and bright they felt close enough to touch.

Tulote, in a rare moment of levity, was attempting to hum an old Imperial marching song. He was spectacularly off-key.

Xerta finally couldn't take it anymore. 

"By my ancestors' beards, you sound like a rock-grinder with a toothache, my lord."

Tulote stopped, looking genuinely offended.

"It is a classic of the Second Unification era!"

"It's a classic disaster," Xerta retorted.

She caught my eye and Cassandra's, and a rare, wide grin split her face.

"You want to hear a real song?"

"Please," Cassandra said, her own smile radiant. "Save our ears."

With a bit of theatrical grumbling, Xerta cleared her throat.
She did NOT have a singer's voice.
It was kind of like Mongolian throat singing.

She sang a dwarven mining song, a chanting tune about the darkness deep within the earth, the camaraderie of the pickaxe and the forge, and the joy of striking a vein of pure, uncorrupted Terracane.

When she finished, there was a moment of stunned, appreciative silence.

"That, was beautiful, Xerta. Truly." Cassandra said softly.

She then, in turn, offered a piece of her own culture.
She didn't sing, but recited an elven poem in the old tongue.
Her voice was like flowing water.
Even without understanding them, the meaning  was somehow clear.
It was a lament for the stars, a story of the long, lonely memory of her people, of watching the world change and fade while they remained.
It was filled with an old sadness, yet it was also infused with a deep love for the world she had watched for so long.

The two performances, one so earthy and full of heart, the other so ethereal and full of soul, hung in the air between us.

"Your turn, Arda," Tulote said.

I felt a pang of my own otherness.
I had no ancient songs of my people, no grand epics.
I had LULLABIES.
LULLABIES.

"I don't really have any songs of war or ancient histories," I said quietly.

"But... there was one I used to sing to my kids to get them to sleep."

And so in the heart of a dying, magical world, I sung...

.

.

.

Twinkle, twinkle little star.

When I finished, no one spoke for a long time.

"It is remarkable," Tulote finally said.

"A dwarven song of the earth. An elven poem of the stars. And a human lullaby from another world. All here, around a single fire."

He looked at each of us in turn, even the silent, masked form of the Veiled Knight.

"My parents dreamed of a united Imperium. They fought and died for a world where our people could live in harmony. They never could have imagined this."

A single, proud tear traced a path through the dust on his cheek,

"This... this is a fellowship they would have been proud of."

"We are..." Cassandra said, although only I could hear it.

“I know” I whispered back.

The Veiled Knight, who had remained perfectly still through the songs and stories, subtly shifted.
I watched as she tilted her masked head back, her unseen gaze fixed on a particular constellation in the night sky.
Her gauntleted hand slowly rose and traced a pattern on her own breastplate, a gesture of memory, of loss, of a love that transcended even death and demon hood.
It was a fleeting, heartbreakingly human moment that deepened the mystery around her even as it made her feel more real.

The fire crackled, its embers glowing in the vast, encroaching darkness.
We were a party of the broken and the lost.
But here, in the heart of the desert, we were not just a "band of brothers". We were a family.
And for the first time since I had left my children in the safety of the capital, I felt the sharp, aching loneliness in my chest ease, replaced by the warm feeling of friendship.

The final battle was coming, but tonight, we were at peace.