Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 18: Homesick

When I finish my tale, Mari is silent for a long while. I can see she's struggling with her emotions, and I give her the time she needs. I can't imagine how I'd feel in her position.

The first question she asks surprises me still.

"No raid this time?" she asks. I pull up the Interface, just to make sure, but there's no indication that there will be a raid I shake my head.

"There shouldn't be one," I say. "It's my first time being here after the raids ended, though, so there might still be some kind of attack... but it shouldn't come with permanent consequences anymore."

"We lucky Tarin not dead." Mari's voice is flat, and she glances at her husband. Tarin is laid out on a proper bed instead of in the corner he usually sleeps in, and the slow rise and fall of his chest is reassuring. "Integrators not always kind."

"I'm well aware of that." And becoming more aware of it with every loop I live through. "Though Tarin didn't seem willing to talk about that."

Mari snorts. "Integrators always watching," she says easily, glancing once at her husband. "Not safe to speak. But husband still stuck in coma, so it not help him."

I wince slightly. Tarin had hinted, more than once, that the Integrators were watching. He'd walked circles around the topic. Mari is far more direct, and I can't help but worry that she'll be their next target though I suppose as long as they're not given the excuse...

"Is there anything you can tell me about them?" I ask her, and Mari shakes her head.

"Tarin knows more," she tells me. "He hide. Secrets. Knows if he speaks, Integrators come for him."

That's one more reason to wake him up. I wonder why the Integrators didn't just kill him, if that's the case, and Ahkelios' words come back to me unbidden.

"I don't think the Integrators have as much control over the Interface as they claim."

"I want to try something," I tell Mari. She narrows her eyes at me. There's a brief flicker of suspicion followed by a visible effort in pushing that suspicion away she's making a choice, and that choice is to trust me. It's both flattering and a little painful to see, all at once. If she only remembered...

...But there's no need to dwell on that.

I approach Tarin, looking at the old crow laying down on a bed of straw. He looks strangely at peace like this, but the Firmament buried within him tells a very different story.

It's not easy to tell from a distance, but now that I'm close, I can feel the way his Firmament rushes within him. It feels almost like it's fighting against the foreign Interface Firmament, pushing at it in waves before falling back and circling around to try again.

And the Interface Firmament itself... it's a small spark, but it's an incredible amount of power condensed into one small spark.

I try to memorize the exact state of his Firmament. I need to know if this is something that's going to continue between loops if I have a functionally infinite amount of time, or if Tarin is fighting off something that will eventually consume him, temporal loop be damned.

And then I reach out with Firmament Manipulation and touch the spark. My intent is to grab it and try to pull it out.

Instead, the moment I make contact, I'm overwhelmed.

It's like diving into an ocean of power. What I have is a speck compared to what the Interface's power contains, even in that single spark. I'm battered back instantly by a turbulent wave of raw power, and it manifests as a searing headache.

I stagger backward, staring at Tarin's sleeping body. Mari catches me like she's been waiting for it, like she knew this would happen.

Only one word comes to my mind.

"Shit."

I'm not going to be able to fix Tarin anytime soon.

Mari agrees. She doesn't have the same ability to sense Firmament as I do, but like Tarin, she's able to tell how strong someone else's Firmament is, and how stable it is. She sensed the abrupt spike when I tried to reach out, and the subsequent disarray my own Firmament was thrown into.

"You not strong enough," she told me bluntly, and while I want to argue with her, I can't. I've grown stronger, but not strong enough to beat the Interface.

Not yet.

"What should I do?" I ask her, and she sighs.

"We talk to doctor," she says bluntly. "Maybe she know, now that we know it Firmament problem. But... not easy. And you only one that can help. So... help. Please."

"I'm going to try," I say, my mouth a little dry. It's the first time I've seen Mari this vulnerable. She's allowed herself to open up to me before, but there's always been a certain boisterous confidence behind her now she's just worried about her husband.

"Next time you come," Mari tells me. "You not approach like that. Too suspicious. You tell me story, I help you. Okay?"

"What kind of story?" I ask.

"Story about courting rock," Mari says. She gives me a small grin for once, and produces a small stone; I catch my breath.

Courting rock is a bit of an understatement. It looks ordinary, but the stone is absolutely packed with Firmament Mari's own Firmament. The sheer force of energy makes me wonder how I didn't sense it before, but it's blind to my senses the moment she tucks it back into her feathers.

"One hundred twenty-six," Mari says, and I blink.

"What?"

"One hundred twenty-six days of Firmament in courting rock," she clarifies. "I not tell anyone. Not even Tarin. You tell me, I believe you. Okay?"

"Oh." I'm at a loss for words. That sounds like a lot of Firmament, not that I have any context for what the process would entail. "I'll remember that."

"You better." For the first time this loop, Mari gives me a small smile, though there's a slight sternness in her eyes. "Trialgoer hard to trust. But I choose to trust, yes? You not betray that trust."

"I will not," I say, nodding, and she suddenly wraps me in her wings. I flail for a moment before realizing it's a hug.

"Thank you," she says, and I quietly nod.

She seems relieved. Like she's just decided to trust me, and in the same moment decided that I'll succeed; it's not a level of faith or trust that I'm used to.

It feels, I decide, quite nice.

The doctor's words are... only marginally helpful. She tells me there's an herb that might be able to help stabilize any problems with Firmament. It's rare, she says, and it only grows when enough Firmament has concentrated in an area over time. The resulting plant is not entirely physical. They call it the Phantom Root.

I'm particularly suited to find it, in other words. It's outright dangerous to run into it, so the crows don't usually hunt for it themselves; the plant is a barely visible shimmer in the air even at its most powerful. Most of the time, it's a set of roots embedded in the ground, with Firmament stretching up and out and into the air. Physical contact with that Firmament is, if not fatal, extremely painful and debilitating.

The Phantom Roots are fine to eat, and apparently eating it helps to improve and stabilize Firmament. Of course it does.

"I didn't even know Firmament plants were possible." Ahkelios sounds absolutely awed when I tell him about it. He hops from foot to foot and rubs his hands together in a gesture that approximates glee, then stops, and a slight shadow crosses over his face. "At least, I don't think I did."

He cheers up again a second later. "What an incredible discovery this will be!"

I smile a little at that. We move on. I have a dinner to attend, because it occurs to me that I haven't had a good meal for days, Mari's soup nonwithstanding. Crow food isn't entirely compatible with human food and their dishes contain a few too many bugs for comfort.

To be honest, it's surprisingly delicious. The time for the raid comes and goes, and there's no alert and no one attacks; an invisible tension bleeds out of me, and I laugh and enjoy my time as much as I can with Tarin's coma hovering in my mind.

After the meal is over, I seclude myself a small distance from the village, and bring out Ahkelios again. I don't quite know how the crows will react to him, and I don't want to deal with the questions just yet.

"Do you have any suggestions?" I ask him.

"Hotspots," Ahkelios tells me. He sits himself on a log, picking a flower to chew on as I talk to him. I wonder if he can actually taste anything in his current state but he seems quite satisfied with the act, nonetheless. I'm glad Temporal Fragment allows him the small amount of agency he needs to interact with the world.

"Hotspots?" I ask, and he nods.

"It's a good thing you unlocked that part of the Interface," he says. "The Integrators like hiding rewards in hotspots. There's a good chance that herb is going to be in one of them."

"Have you seen anything like this before?" I ask, because I want to know if he's at least had to face anything similar. The little mantis screws his face up a bit as he thinks about it, and eventually just shakes his head.

"I can't remember," he says. "I can't remember a lot of things. I know things like this have happened to me. I know it's part of what made me give up. The Trials are... this particular Trial is an incredibly lonely one."

He gives me a small, sad smile, and I don't know what to say.

"But you'll find something!" he says. "The Integrators don't give out challenges without there also being a solution. They like doing that playing with your hope. If everything was hopeless, you'd give up way too quickly, so they make sure there's always a solution."

"Cruel," I say mildly, and Ahkelios just nods. I'm a little numb to the cruelty of the Integrators, at this point, and I've been in the loops for less than a week. The anger is still there, simmering beneath the surface, and I can call it up whenever I need to but for now, all I can think about is Tarin and Mari.

"You'll find something!" the little mantis tells me, trying to be encouraging. "Just look through the closest hotspots, and I'm willing to bet there's a dungeon or something you can find a cure in. Or something that will empower your Firmament Manipulation."

"Right," I say. I open up the map.

There are a total of three hotspots near the Cliffside Crows. One is halfway between this spot and the Fracture, which I'm sure I'm still not ready for; I'm suspecting the exit might be there, or if not the exit then something useful. The other two are considerably closer, one only a half-kilometer away from where I'm standing now.

I don't have any supplies. I don't know how long I'm going to spend at a hotspot, I don't know what a hotspot entails, and I don't want to let myself die early from thirst or something when I should be trying to make the most out of each loop.

I'll need to take a proper break eventually. I'm not an idiot; I know what happens to me if I work nonstop. I've done it before.

But not now. Not yet.

First, I'll need some supplies from the crows. Then I'll head over to this Hotspot, and see what exactly they're about.

I leave the Cliffside Crows with a small satchel full of waterskins and fruit. Mari actually looks worried about me, which is a pretty big change of attitude; I don't know what I've done to deserve her trust, exactly, but she seems to have functionally adopted me. She fusses over me for a few minutes before actually sending me on my way.

I won't lie; it actually feels kind of nice, to have someone care about me like that.

I summon Ahkelios to my shoulder as I walk towards the hotspot, and offer the little mantis a flower to chew on. He seems inordinately pleased with my selection, declaring it to be a 'suitable offering', and I can't help but laugh a bit at his antics. He's putting on an attitude, I suspect, specifically to cheer me up and damn it all, but it works.

The forest is loud around me. The chirping of insects and the soft, wailing cries of various forms of wildlife fills the air. The dirt crunches beneath my feet, strangely dry. The air feels humid and vaguely suffocating.

I realize not for the first time, and certainly not for the last exactly how alien Hestia is. It's easy enough to push to the back of my head when I'm fighting for my life, or working on solving the next problem, but in these moments where I have nothing to do but walk and think...

I can't help but miss home.

Not that my home's the most comfortable place, either. In some ways, this is an improvement. I allow myself a wry smile, pulling up the Interface map.

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