The Ascension

3: The boy thief

With the drama of Aster's death behind him, Wren only knew one thing for sure: at least he wasn't at risk of running out of food. The worry of sharing food had concerned him almost as much as the worry of having to share a sleeping bag. This was a venture meant for one. And... that was all. That was all he could think of.

Aster, meanwhile, could not stop thinking. Mostly because she had just woken up in a pile of blood next to the carcass of a wolf with a literally red pelt and her neck seemed to be cut wide open. She didn't want to touch it to find out, but the cold air of the plains chilled something very wet on her neck, and she definitely did remember a bite that went through her skin.

And standing up, she was very frustrated to find she was not the slightest bit disoriented. She should have died! There was no true method to live with injuries like hers, and yet she was alive, and even if Ikina was real, she still couldn't be alive. The science wasn't there. Her body couldn't just support a giant gaping wound without infection, vein failure, and blood loss. No god should be able to circumvent that sort of inevitability.

But she seemed fine, so she dusted her pants off- a useless effort at cleanliness considering her blood soaked status- and continued down the road.

Ikina had had no part in Aster's resurrection, actually, it was rather that they had ensured a prevention of her death. There was no point where she had been dead, to tell the truth. Wren had simply failed to find her pulse due to the unconnected nature of most of her veins at the time. But in this case, that did not mean she had died.

Maintaining someone who ought to be dead takes a great deal of energy, but on a planet like this, Ikina never had to worry. They had a surplus of power, and was able to feed Aster the needed energy without any hassle. Still, it would be a shame for the wounds to indefinite- they were deep and grisly, bone exposed on the shoulder, spine snapped around the neck and plenty of open veins. So they got to work healing Aster, a task accomplished without her notice for the first few hours.

Aster probably would never have noticed her body's miraculous repairing of itself if she hadn't found her way to a slow river- and there she could look down at her cuts, gashes and holes slowly fill themselves in.

There was a moment where Aster had to stand still and question herself, and a few seconds into that moment she even raised her hands into the air and stared at them. Was she invincible? Was she immortal? Was Wren as well?

She did not like the idea. Immortality, and longevity, frightened her immensely. It was like love- a goal unreachable, and deservedly so. She wanted to die, one day. How long would Ikina keep her like this?

She knew she needed to follow Wren, let him know she was alive, but she was seriously coated in blood. It had begun to dry in her hair, making it matted with soft and sticky balls. She took off her clothes to quickly bathe, stopping the moment she had scrubbed the blood off her skin with her hands. She kept away from her still slightly open wounds though, even if they didn't hurt when submerged in water.

Then she had to wait a half hour to dry off, and by then it was mid afternoon. The wolf had attacked last night. Wren had likely made some good distance by now.

Wren wasn't actually too far from Aster, though neither was aware of it. He found himself staying the night in an inn in a small mountain town named Noihan. He had planned to depart immediately the next morning- but found himself drawn to stay. Mostly because he really needed some money. Exaltation was supposed to be a spiritual quest, so money wasn't traditionally included- but if there were going to be monstrous wolves involved, he needed some funds to buy a real weapon. And pay the inn back.

The only real job he could find involved capturing a thief, a task he was in no way equipped to deal with, but luckily had solved itself with relative ease that morning.