Who we leave behind

The sandstorm settled, and the Bastt Caravan resumed its course. Alvos had been understanding, albeit annoyed, about Danyar and me staying behind. But, he’d yet to pay us for our services, and when I offered to pay him back for the fruit and staying the night, he very courteously refused.

“I won’t lie, I didn’t expect there to be an attack of the blighted of that scale, but that’s what I hired the two of you for. You should have warned me back then that you weren’t up for the task… Ah, it’s on me for thrusting children into all of this…”

I hadn’t had the words at the time to explain to him that those hounds we’d fought had nothing to do with why I needed to leave, and now, as we were sat on the edge of a dune, watching as the Caravan curved around the field of hound corpses, while guards in their long blue uniforms patrolled it to chase away any scorpions, I didn’t have the words to explain it to Danyar either.

“Chiyo.”

The sky was a beautiful gradient that transitioned from bright yellow to a vibrant red, to a deep, dark blue behind us. Sparse clouds scattered the light, and the still advancing caravan created a seamline that joined both the two extremes. It was a photo-worthy moment, sure, but I didn’t understand why that was what my brain was focusing on right now.

“Chiyo Hara.”

“Where I’m from, we bury people in the ground when they pass,” I said. My tone was flat and distant. Tears wouldn’t come, no matter how much I thought that I should be crying.

Is it because I’d only known her for two days? But still, she was a person! She was a friend…

“Chiyo-”

“It’s a way to make them immortal, to put them in a place where they will be even a hundred years in the future. But here, with the sand, if the dune moves -” I gulped, realising that my voice was shaking.

“Chiyo,” Danyar put a hand on my shoulder, and I jerked up, startled. I knew he’d been here, but at the same time, I’d somehow forgotten. “You need to explain what’s going on. What happened while we were separated?”

I wiped my eyes, which were somehow dry, and got up, gesturing for Danayar to follow. He sighed, somewhat annoyed, as he did so.

I slid down the gentle rear-facing side of the dune before summoning my train.

Medina lay inside the living area of the locomotive, on the bed we’d just purchased. I had covered her with one of the duvets, and with the dimly tinted light filtered coming through the windows, it really looked like she was just sleeping.

“Who is that?” Danyar asked as soon as he entered. He rushed to the bed and grabbed Medina’s shoulders. He let her go almost immediately and lifted the blanket that’d been covering her.

I looked away, not wanting to see the wound I’d failed to heal.

“Who - Chiyo, what happened?” Danyar’s voice was now shaking too. I wasn’t in the right mindset to try to distinguish if it was from anger or because he, too, was upset.

“Some man, I don’t know. We were just talking, Medina and I, and the next moment…”

I gulped, covering my mouth with my hands, and fully looked away.

What good is any of this, the train, the gauntlets, really, if I can’t protect my friends?

“I’m sure you did the best you could,” Danyar said, putting a hand over my shoulder. His tone was more controlled now; he was really good at that.

“And the potions I had on me all shattered,” I gulped again, “And, and -”

I turned around, expecting for some unfathomable reason that once I’d lock eyes with Danyar, I’d be able to focus and explain the situation clearly and in chronological order.

Instead, I broke into tears.

Danyar coaxed me outside, and we sat under the railing of the locomotive. He’d wrapped his tail around me, giving me something to fidget with as I recounted the events.

There really wasn’t much to recount, and Danyar seemed to think the same, as he remained silent for a long while after I’d finished. We watched two crescent moons rise into the sky, and eventually I gathered enough composure to ask:

“How do you think she would have wanted to be buried?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Danyar shook his head in a soft, genuine motion. “Traditions vary from region to region, and from what you’ve told me, she could have even been from Dunjia. She's certainly young enough …” There was a long pause, as his words caught up to him. “To have been born here.”

He got up, stretched out his arms over his back, and continued talking as he headed into the locomotive.

“Some families will leave their deceased for three days inside the home, to give their spirits enough time to finish any unfinished tasks. In my family, we buried our elders in the water, sending them off in a loodtvae - that’s a kind of boat, to be reclaimed by the sea. I think,”

He knelt by Medina, just as I entered the locomotive.

“If you don’t know whom to return the body to, a pyre would be the most appropriate send-off for a fire elementalist like her. Some of them,” He chuckled, “The elementalists I mean, say that they were born by earth, water, fire, or air, and that is to what they will return; the pure energy at the start and end of all things.”

I joined him and put one hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to finish.

“My mother was an earth mage.” Was all Danyar added before getting up.

We rode away from the caravan, into the night.

We passed lights in the distance, perhaps the lanterns of some merchants that really ought to be more cautious about travelling alone, before finding a small grove.

Maybe it was the recent rain, but out of the five trees here, three were starting to grow little buds along their otherwise dried and rugged branches.

I punched down one of the dead ones, while Danyar wrapped Medina in the prettiest of the blankets we’d bought. He took off her jewellery and placed it over her chest, in one small pile. He explained it as a tradition most families in Asta practiced, to dissuade grave robbers.

“Do you have her bow?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t thought of picking it up at the time, and now it was no longer the time to go back.

We watched the flames pick up and engulf her. They rose up to the skies, drowning out the starlight, much like the moons when they were at their fullest. The flames flickered in repetitive yet distinctly different waves, and smoke rose in a thick grey column.

“Who else are you sending off today?” Danyar asked.

I let the fire crackle and fill in the silence, as I thought about an answer.

“Medina,” I replied. “But … everyone back home as well, I think. My mum, my uncles, my dad, Riko, Aoi, Masami, … I wonder how they buried me.”

Another long moment of nothing but the fire cracking and the wind softly whistling through the dried branches passed.

“What about you, Danyar?” I glanced up at him, realising that for him this must have meant something more too. “You’d never met Medina, yet you helped a lot.”

He frowned and twitched his lips, never quite forming a clear expression.

“I’d say I'm surprised,” He spoke. His voice was noticeably faster than usual, “But at this point, I'm really not. Most people would have assumed it’s because she and I are kin, you know,” He twitched his arm, in an unfinished movement, perhaps to gesture an equivalent to air quotations around ‘kin’. “Well, you don’t know, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked, Chiyo.” He paused and took a deep breath. “My mother. My two sisters. People whom I could never face again, even if they were alive, and not separated by whatever separates you from your family.”

“Why?” I genuinely didn’t understand his logic.

He sighed again, then ran his thumb over the tattoos under his eye, not taking his eyes off the pyre.

“I made mistakes in the past. A lot of them.”

I tried to interrupt, to tell him that surely his family would forgive him, or at least accept him despite those mistakes, but he continued, not leaving me the chance to speak.

“Mistakes that I myself would not forgive me for.”

“You need to be kinder to yourself,” I said, putting my hand around his shoulder.

He glanced at me before letting out a dry chuckle void of amusement and full of surprise, before covering his mouth with the back of his hand, and looking away.

The fire began to die down as the flames drew closer and closer to the ground with each passing minute.

“I’m going to fix it,” I spoke. “Alvos was right, people are scared of those monsters, and that’s making them scared of my friends. I’ll change it. I’m going to find whatever’s making those monsters go mad, the source of that blight, and I’ll deal with it, one way or another,” I raised my hand, shifting my leather glove into the metal gauntlet, then back.

Violence isn’t the answer, but I am pretty sure some giant mutated bug is at the centre of all this.

I looked up at Danyar.

He pressed a corner of his lips into a half-smile.

“They say the source of the blight is the Demon King himself. Are you going to kill him?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “Medina said he was helping, trying to save the people from the monsters. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but my gut tells me there's more to it,” I tapped my chest. “A person wouldn't just create this magical monster rabies. What would he gain from it? There must be more.”

Danyar nodded.

I expected him to talk me down, or out of this, because his expression was quite sceptical, but instead he said:

“The Demon King has built a new castle on the eastern shores of the Cieliese Sea. If you’re set on this, it might be worth paying him a visit.”