Chapter 43: Padwalking
The southern lowlands were warmer than the peaks and greener in a way that made the difference feel like stepping into another season. The road wound between fields still heavy with grain, golden on both sides, and the air smelt of soil and growing things instead of the sour mineral bite that haunted the mountain year-round. The sun had been up for two hours. The sky was high and clear and pale at the edges, faint with late summer.
Barjuchne walked and felt the change in herself before she had the words for it.
The sickness was gone. She’d noticed it first thing on waking; the grey, dull weight that had lived under her scales since the blizzard was simply absent now. Her inner heat sat right again, banked and ready in her chest the way it was supposed to. At some point during the morning she had glanced at her hand and seen the dark shine returned, the deep iridescence the cold had stripped away.
Whatever the ice had done to her, it had passed. Her illness was recovered, perhaps in no small part thanks to the regenerating properties of hydra blood.
They had been walking since dawn. The cloak still sat wrong on her shoulders, but she’d stopped noticing it. At least in the intermittent phases when it was dried out, until Veliah found a pond or a river to splash her in. This new body needed water; it needed constant hydration. That made a journey like this dangerous. Deserts were certainly out for her now as vacation destinations.
Barjuchne's legs sprang, much more spring-like in the locomotion of her steps. Her muscles felt just as powerful as in her wyvern form, but in a different way. It was like the minimums and maximums of her locomotions were further apart than they used to be. It was a rather comfortable way to walk, if not for the extremely soft, essentially padded soles of her semi-webbed feet.
Veliah walked ahead by half a step, which was how it had settled. She handled the practical things: how far they could go before they needed water, how to read the road markers, when to rest and when to push. Years of travel had baked the knowledge into her bones automatically and reliably.
A heron lifted from a flooded field to their left, its legs trailing behind it like an afterthought. Two farmers worked a distant row, bent over their tools. A stray dog crossed the road ahead, gave them a brief, evaluating look, and continued on its own business.
“There’s a town by the river's end,” Veliah said without turning. “We’ll hit it by midday. We can get proper food there again.”
Barjuchne nodded, though Veliah couldn’t see it. She watched the heron settle into the next rice field over, white against all that green. She allowed it to partake in the water of her domain. The bird started pecking into the water. One could imagine it to be a bow.
But perhaps that was just the dehydration talking.
Barjuchne stopped, dipping her face into the water of the rice paddy.
Maybe the heron had life figured out after all.
The cut happened crossing a rough section where the road had washed out and they had to climb the bank to get around it.
A thorn bush grew along the top of the slope. Barjuchne put her hand down to steady herself and caught the back of her forearm against a branch. The thorn opened a line in her scales, shallow but real, and a thin bead of blood welled up.
She looked at it.
The blood stopped. The line closed. It happened over a few seconds: the edges of the cut drawing together and sealing, the smooth, leathery scales smoothing back into place until nothing remained but a faint, fading mark.
She kept looking at the spot where it had been.
“What is it?” Veliah asked. She had stopped a few feet ahead and turned back.
“Nothing. Just checking out my cool healing blood,” Barjuchne said. "Thorn got me."
"Oh." Veliah came back down the slope and examined Barjuchne’s forearm, which showed nothing now. “You used to heal yourself with that holy breath,” she said. "This seems more convenient, I suppose."
Barjuchne flexed her hand. The arm felt normal. The damage along her back still ached when she moved wrong, which meant the fast healing had limits, but a thorn cut was clearly beneath whatever threshold it operated at.
“Well, hydras are famous for regeneration, right?” asked Veliah. She patted Barjuchne’s hand and then kept walking. “Seems fine to me.”
They moved on.
The river valley opened ahead of them and the land shifted.
The fields here were terraced, cut into the slopes in stepped rows that followed the contour of the valley walls. Water ran between them in narrow channels, fed from the river below, and the whole arrangement had the look of something maintained by many hands over many years. Small figures moved along the terraces in the distance, too far to see clearly.
A shrine stood at the road’s edge where it began to descend toward the valley floor. Old stone, a tiled roof patched in places. Barjuchne slowed as they passed it.
The shrine had been converted.
The original carvings were still visible on the lower sections, worn images of whatever spirit or god the shrine had first honoured. But the upper portion had been redone. A new figure sat carved into the apex stone: a winged shape with a long tail, painted black, with two chips of red glass set where the eyes would be. Offerings crowded the base. Flowers, mostly, and a few coins, and a small wooden carving of the same shape that someone had left with care.
This far south, even. It was a long way from the mountain. But the spirit of her reign had travelled even this far.
“Do you think that’s bad luck?” asked the dragon girl. “Taking over somebody else’s shrine?”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” replied Veliah bluntly. “You’re for sure cursed for that, plus some other things,” she replied, waving a hand and laughing to herself.
Barjuchne looked at the offerings: the red glass beads and the flowers someone had picked and brought here and left for a thing they had never seen.
Not able to stop herself, Barjuchne hastily took the prettiest of the beads, and they continued down into the valley.
It was meant for her, after all.
The town by the river was loud with midday trade.
Barjuchne bought bread from a stall, a flat round loaf with seeds pressed into the top, and ate it while she walked. It was good. Compared to the lavish food they have at home these days, it was nice to just... have a piece of bread.
They sat by the river to rest.
Boats moved on the water, flat-bottomed cargo vessels poled along by men who knew the current intimately. Children played at the bank’s edge, daring each other closer to the water and pulling back, shrieking. A woman did washing on a flat stone downstream, the rhythm of it steady and old.
“Life sure is… different down here,” Barjuchne said, feeling the warm air.
All of the pressure of her station was just sort of gone. Yes, she was desperate to go home because there was so much to do. But… it just felt calm out here. She wasn’t used to it.
“Not as warm,” said Veliah, cupping a hand of water and pouring it across her shoulders.
The hydra girl pondered for a while before looking at Veliah. “You think we should stop the whole ‘dungeon’ thing and just buy a farm instead?” asked Barjuchne.
“Uh, no?” replied Veliah sharply. “I’ve gotten used to being rich. You’d better not get any funny ideas about being poor,” replied the elf. "I'll leave you in a flash the second the money's gone."
“We could be rich farmers,” replied Barjuchne, lifting an eyebrow.
“That defeats the point of the lifestyle dream, doesn’t it?” Laughing, Veliah glanced at her. “You’ve never travelled much, have you?”
“No.”
“What did you do? Before we met?”
Barjuchne thought about it. “I didn’t travel much then either,” she replied.
Veliah almost smiled. She looked at the river instead.
The highwaymen made their mistake on the road south of the town, in a stretch where the trees crowded close on both sides and the cover was good.
There were three of them. They came out of the treeline ahead with the timing of men who did this regularly, two in front and one circling behind, weapons drawn and held with the casual confidence of people who had used them before. They saw what the road showed them. A stick of an elf and a weird lizardman in an ill-fitting cloak. Easy money. Dragon tributes were popular targets because of the value proposition.
“Bags down,” said the one in front. “Coin and anything that shines. Quick about it and nobody gets hurt.”
Veliah stopped walking. She looked at Barjuchne.
Barjuchne looked at the highwayman.
Without saying anything, she drew breath and exhaled at him, expecting fire.
What came out was ice.
A cone of it, white and crystalline. It struck the ground at the highwayman’s feet and froze a six-foot circle of the road solid. His boots locked in place in an instant, frost climbing his legs to the knee. He yelled and dropped his weapon, which stuck to the ice where it landed.
The other two highwaymen had stopped moving, too surprised to process what was happening.
She tried again, aiming this time at the tree beside the road, curious now. Lightning came out. A bright, branching line of it hit the trunk and split the bark in a long vertical seam, the crack of it loud enough to make the second highwayman flinch backward straight into a ditch.
She tried a third time.
Wind. A compressed line of it that knocked the third highwayman flat and sent leaves and road dust up in a spreading cloud.
The first highwayman was still frozen to the road, working frantically at the ice around his boots with both hands.
Finally, Barjuchne managed to breathe fire at the road in front of him. The ice melted. He fell forward into the slush, scrambled up, and ran. The other two were already running, one limping, the third still dust-covered and wild-eyed.
They were gone into the trees within seconds.
Barjuchne watched them go. She was privately delighted. She had not known she could do that. She kept her expression flat and turned back to Veliah.
Veliah looked at the frozen road, the split tree, the settling dust cloud, and the rapidly disappearing highwaymen.
“When did you learn to do that?” she asked. It was not really a question.
“Just now,” said Barjuchne.
Veliah looked at her for a moment longer. Then she stepped over the frozen patch of road and kept walking. “Let’s go before they come back with friends who haven’t been struck by lightning yet.”
Barjuchne followed and did not quite manage to keep the satisfaction off her face.
It was late.
They made camp that evening off the road, in a hollow between two low rises where a fire wouldn’t be visible from the path. Veliah handled the fire. Barjuchne sat with her back against a fallen log. The flask Veliah had been watering her with sat next to them, half empty.
Veliah sat down beside Barjuchne and rested against her.
She didn’t say anything else. Neither did Barjuchne. They watched the fire until it burnt low.
The bridge was gone.
They reached the river crossing two days later, late in the morning, and found the bridge broken in the middle, a full span of it collapsed into the water below. Storm damage, by the look of it, the wood splintered and the supports washed out. The river ran wide and fast beneath the gap, swollen from rain somewhere upstream.
Veliah stood at the edge of the broken span and looked at the water.
“I can’t swim that,” she said.
Barjuchne looked at the river.
The ocean had nearly killed her four days ago. The water had taken her down and held her there, and she had only come back because something in her had refused to stop. She remembered the cold of it and the weight of it and the way her body had failed in it.
As she looked at this river and felt none of that. With the Hydra evolution, she felt different about water. Cold water, especially.
Barjuchne walked down the bank to the water’s edge and put her hand in. The current pulled at it, strong, and she felt the strength of it and felt, alongside it, that the water was not her enemy. The opposite. Her body recognised it now in a way it had not before. The water moved against her hand and she understood the movement of it, the direction and the force, and knew she could move through it.
“I can carry you,” she said, confidently.
Veliah came down the bank. “Across that?”
Barjuchne held out her arms behind herself, gesturing for Veliah to step up.
Veliah looked at the river. Then at Barjuchne. Then she stepped forward and let Barjuchne lift her, one arm under her knees and one across her back, and held on around Barjuchne’s neck.
Barjuchne walked into the river.
The current hit her, and she set herself against it, and it did not move her the way it should have. She walked along the bottom where she could and swam where she couldn’t, and the whole time the water cooperated, parting around her and pushing where she wanted to be pushed.
A minute later, they came up the far bank with Veliah still dry above the waist. She set the elf down on solid ground and stood there dripping with smug pride.
They found the dead lizardman patrol a few hours past the river.
Two of them, off the road in a clearing. The bodies were recent, the blood not yet fully dried. Whatever had killed them had done it cleanly and fast, with weapons rather than claws or teeth, the wounds were precise and deliberate. Professional.
Barjuchne crouched beside them. These were hers. Patrol units she had set walking these roads. She didn't quite mourn their death; rather, she was fuming that someone took something that belonged to her. Their lives belonged to her, and they were stolen.
She couldn't forgive theft.
Veliah moved through the clearing’s edge and found the remnants of a camp. It had been abandoned in a hurry, but not before someone had tried to clear it. A few items remained. A broken arrow with strange fletching. A scrap of cloth with markings stitched into it. A cooking implement of unfamiliar make.
Veliah picked up the cloth and looked at the markings.
“This is eastern work,” said the elf. “Look. The stitching. The characters.” She turned it over to show Barjuchne. “I’ve seen trade goods from across the Eastern Sea. This is from there. Or someone from there.”
Barjuchne stood up from the bodies. Something moved in her chest, low and instinctive, the part of her that knew when she was being watched. She turned, scanning the treeline, the clearing’s edges, and the shadows under the canopy.
Something was there. Or had been. The instinct was certain even when her eyes found nothing.
The dragon moved fast, crossing the clearing and pushing into the trees in the direction the feeling came from, breath ready in her chest, fire or ice or whatever she reached for first.
There was nothing by the time she broke through the underbrush.
A bent fern. A pressed patch of ground where a foot might have been. A direction of travel, maybe, leading away through the undergrowth. But whoever had been watching them a second ago was gone now, and they had gone quietly and fast.
Barjuchne came back to the clearing.
“Someone was there,” she said. “They’re gone now.”
Veliah folded the cloth and put it in her pack. “We should keep moving.”
Barjuchne looked once more at the dead patrol.
“Adventurers?” asked Barjuchne.
“No. If adventurers had done this, they would have harvested the corpses," replied Veliah. She nodded her head, suggesting they should go. Whatever danger was here was likely still lurking nearby. "This was a targeted attack. But... I'm not really sure for what."
Barjuchne considered that and then shook her head. She pulled the dead lizardmen to the side of the road and started digging a hole in the soil.
"They're just some monsters," said Veliah after a moment, watching her start to dig a grave as she had once done before, a long time ago shortly after they first met.
Barjuchne glanced at Veliah for a second over her shoulder and then returned to digging. She mourned her lost, massive claws. But at least her new hands, partially webbed, were actually surprisingly efficient at shovelling out the soft soil of the land here.
"I am too, I guess," Barjuchne replied. "Depending on who you ask."
It was quiet for a while as Barjuchne worked. But then Veliah crouched down next to her after a minute, starting to help dig too.
They crested the rise on the fifth day, late in the afternoon, and the black mountain was there on the horizon.
It was distant, still. A day’s hard walking, maybe more. But it was unmistakable, the dark shape of it rising from the land with the obsidian peak catching the low sun. Home.
Barjuchne stopped in her tracks.
She had seen the lava-spewing mountain from above ten thousand times. But she had never seen it like this, from the ground, from a distance, after days of walking toward it with no certainty of when she would ever arrive alive. From here it looked small enough to hold in her hand.
Inside it, right now, her hoard was waiting. The gold and the eggs and the warm chambers. Rou-ya with her reports. Ei in the tunnels. Blibli somewhere she shouldn’t be. F.P. doing something that would need cleaning up.
All of it. Hers. Still there. Waiting.
Veliah stood beside Barjuchne and looked at the mountain on the horizon. “We made it,” she said. “Almost.”
“Almost.” Barjuchne looked at it a moment longer, then turned and looked at Veliah. There had been something gnawing at her for days now. “Why did you come back? When I fell into the ocean? That could have finally been your chance to escape me.”
Veliah stared at her in disbelief for a long time. “Are you stupid?” asked Veliah sharply. “How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not a prisoner? I just love you. We’re married, remember?” said the elf, sighing.
“...Oh,” replied Barjuchne, pleasantly surprised, looking back toward the mountain. "Nice."
That still was weird for her to process, somehow.
Veliah held her gaze for a moment. Then she looked back toward the mountain, and Barjuchne stared with her, the two of them standing on the rise in the late light with home in the distance and a day’s walk still between them and it.
“...Does it look that scary for everyone?” asked Barjuchne, staring at the jagged black obsidian fang that looked like it was tearing through the surface of the world.
“Yeah. Pretty sure,” replied Veliah, dryly.
“Huh,” replied the dragon. “I love you too,” she said, holding out a hand for Veliah. The elf took it. “Let’s go home.”