I lay Lilly to rest on her throne—I’d made a point to bring the little cushion for her, despite her assertions that she would never need it. It didn’t take up much space at all, and when I set her upon it, the cute little stretch and yawn she does is reward enough for my forethought. I gently place a little washcloth atop her. Lil’s never once complained about being cold to me, and I’d only ever seen her adjust her outfit away from this simple dress a few times. Never to adjust to the weather, though. Still, covered is better than uncovered, as far as I’m concerned.

  “So, do you think that’s going to be a problem?” Olly asks after wandering around collecting up all the gemstones into a pouch awkwardly. All told, he found a few dozen of them, which hopefully will be worth the effort in the end.

  “Lilly being unable to cast magic without passing out? Yeah. It is absolutely, without a doubt, going to happen at an inconvenient time that will cause problems. In fact, I would bet coin that she will be certain *only* to do so when it would.” I say with a smile. “It wouldn’t be fitting for her otherwise. She won’t be able to resist the urge to make a “noble sacrifice” to be swept off her feet by her friends when she saves us using the last threads of her magic.” I shrug and smirk at Olly, trying to indicate it being in good humor.

  I’m not really sure if he gets it, based on the look on his face at least. “Yeah, that was more or less what I was thinking, too. ” He pauses after the statement, looking around attentively at the clearing. “This doesn’t feel natural. This place, I mean. The sheer rock face, all the fallen trees angled towards the cliff and the exposed gems and ore.” He closes his eyes for a moment and I watch with curiosity.

  While Olly is more than happy to do whatever is asked of him and to ask questions freely, he seldom thinks to explain his thought processes and deductions on things. I’d been meaning to ask about it. I’m worried it might be fear we’d misunderstand him or something. While I muse, he opens his eyes again, looking off in the distance. He doesn’t say anything, though, so I decide now is a decent enough time.

  “What are you thinking about when you do that? You go real quiet for a little while, close your eyes, and then just open them and carry on more often than not.” I explain in an even tone, trying to keep any sense of judgement out of it. I really don’t want to have a repeat of the eating incident by inadvertently driving him away from the two of us. “It’s not an issue, to be clear. I just wonder what you’re thinking, is all.”

  He snaps back to reality and looks at me sheepishly, ruffling the back of his hair with a self-conscious air. “It’s hard to explain. I wouldn’t want to waste your time with it.” He looks away from me, taking a couple of steps. Anyone with a brain could tell he was dodging the question, but why?

  “Olly, we’re gonna be traveling together, and we all want to be here. We might as well continue getting to know one another as well as possible, yeah?” Reaching out with a hand, I gently grip his shoulder in a show of solidarity — I hope, at least.

  Predictably, though, he flinches, and I scold myself for not keeping it in mind. I remove my hand and back up a couple steps. More than a decade of being around someone as touchy-feely as Lilly has made me pretty open physically, I guess, and without any other people to gauge it off, maybe his response is a normal one?

  Olly seems to make an effort of relaxing and stretches a bit, craning his back and spreading his arms wide with a series of cracks. “It is hard to explain.” He states fairly flatly as he turns. “I have a lot of memories in my head. Every now and again, one of them comes to the front of my mind and I have to spend some time thinking it over—deciding if it’s actually mine or not.” Olly’s voice sounds so incredibly tired as he continues. “Like, just now. Why do I know this feels unnatural? I’ve never seen a place like this, and I have no real reason to feel any particular way about it. Let alone having such a specific feeling about it. Thinking on it more, I “remembered” a memory.”

  He goes to a nearby stump and sits, so I go and sit on the opposite side, back to back, figuring that he’ll have an easier time talking if he doesn’t have to look directly at me. “The memory is of me walking into a…mine, maybe a cave. Something like that. I travel deeper into it and I find a wall sparkling with gemstones and irregularly dense veins of ore striping the surface.” I hear his clothes shuffle and turn around to see him gesture at the nearby wall we’d been taking from. “This looks just like the wall in the memory. Nearly identical, even. Down to the white gems.”

  He pauses for a moment, so I hop in. “Could be a partially remembered memory. I know I’ve read that our minds will fill in blank spots in memories with similar ideas when we can’t think of something. I think it’s called déjà vu. Or something to that effect.”

  He listens but shakes his head. “I don’t think so. The memory is too clear. I’ve had dreams since waking up. They’re usually awful, admittedly, but they have the hazy quality I think you would expect from dreams.” Seemingly without thinking, he leans back and bumps against my tail unexpectedly, jumping with a little gasp. “Sorry. But, that being what it is, it makes me wonder. Are they my memories from…” He gestures to himself, “…before this happened? I have to stop and analyze each of these memories when I can. I can’t not. If I don’t, I feel like I’ll miss something important. A clue, something. But inevitably, as I pick apart the scenes of the dream, I realize inconsistencies that preclude it from being my own memory. In this most recent one, whoever it was had a much shorter stride than me and I realized towards the end that they were close to two feet shorter than me…”

  He trails off, but I get the impression there’s more he wants to say. “Why’d it take so long? That seems like the kind of thing you’d notice pretty quickly.” I probe, just trying to get the bottom of his concerns.

  “If it were a dream, I probably would have noticed earlier. But these things are memories, and ones I remember with nearly perfect recall.” There’s a long pause before Olly asks, softly, “In the dreams you have about your parents, do you remember them from child you’s perspective, or adult you’s perspective?”

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  Taken aback by the question, I have to think for a second. “I think it varies in the random ways that dreams tend to. My perspective often shifts throughout it. Not even remaining in “me” as often as not.” What he’s saying dawns on me. “I think I follow what you’re getting at. You don’t have any uncertainty in those memories. I couldn’t tell you specifically what I ate a month or a year ago, but I could give you a vague impression of it. You remember with that degree of clarity?”

  I hear him nod, “Exactly. I’m not “seeing someone else’s memory”. I’m seeing a nearly indistinguishable memory from my own until I pay attention to little details or until something I can’t make sense of or logically break down happens.”

  “What sort of things cause that?”

  He sucks in a deep breath, steeling himself. “Well. I died. In this one and plenty of other ones. Most of them, really.” I pause, processing that, but before I can say anything, he continues. “Almost all of these memories I recall are the final moments of someone’s life before they’re killed by…”

  Olly sits for a while taking measured breaths, and I’m at a loss for more than a minute before he continues., “…something like this.” He holds up his cursed arm, picking up where the last sentence left off, as though an entire minute of silence hadn’t passed. He chuckles coldly, “Luckily, that particular detail makes it pretty clear that it’s not my memory, as I’m fairly certain I’m still alive.”

  He holds the thought for a while. I know I should say something to comfort him, but what? “Sorry that you’re experiencing someone else’s death a few times a day. That really sucks!” doesn’t really cut it. I decide a question is safer than any kind of statement. “What about the others? You said it’s only most of them, right?” I pray that the other side of things has offered him some degree of relief.

  “Being the monster.”

  “Ah.” Why did I even ask? Of course, it’s the worst-case scenario.

  “Ayre, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, and it does help.” He adds after I’ve been silent a while. It’s almost infuriating. We’re sitting here dancing around what must just be a waking nightmare, and he’s worried about comforting me while I abjectly fail at comforting him.

  “Olly, level with me. Does this really help? Or am I making it worse by awkwardly fumbling my way through this? I know the adage of ‘it’s the thought that counts’, but I also know that sometimes those thoughts can wind up hurting.”

  The silence stretches long as he considers. While I know it’s not intentional, I struggle to see how he’s so comfortable with long silences in conversation. I’ll be as accommodating as possible, but still, it’s like we’re operating at different speeds entirely. “I think it does. Would I be better off if I just locked all of these thoughts in my head and let them make me more and more unstable as time went on as I struggle to separate my reality from someone else’s? I don’t think so.” He exhales deeply, and this time leans back, seemingly intentionally, maybe seeking support. I lean back into him, snaking my tail around and to his left side along his legs and out off the stump.

  “Well…let me know if it ever doesn’t. Or if you need something else from me. I’m no good at emotions—my own or anyone else’s. I’ll do anything I can, I just…might need help figuring out what that is.” I sigh as well, enjoying the constant pressure of leaning back against him.

  “As weird as it sounds, I think this is helping. The leaning thing, I mean.” He says as he settles his head back against my own, bumping against my horns very lightly.

  “Well, good. I can do this pretty well.” We sit there for a while quietly. Nothing but two people leaning on one another figuratively and literally, and the sounds of the forest. The soft tinkling rustle of metallic Ironbough leaves. Distant birdsong as the sun falls.

  Closing my eyes, I simply bask in it all, but my reverie is abruptly shattered when I feel a hand on my tail. I leap up with a start and spin around, tucking my tail behind my legs with a sharp yelp. “Hey — I, uh…please warn me if you’re going to touch my tail.” Olly looks back over his shoulder at me, looking about as embarrassed as I feel.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, sorry. You’d been flicking it against my leg for a little while, so I started focusing on it and was curious how it felt. Sorry. Sometimes little curiosities are just a bit overwhelming when they’re easily satisfied.”

  I feel a crimson tide rush to my face and have to turn around. “Just… I know it wasn’t on purpose, but it’s very sensitive.” Making the admission out loud makes me feel ten times more embarrassed, so I retreat from the situation with all haste. “I’m gonna go put up the tents the rest of the way. Do you want first or second watch?” I stride towards the fire pit I had begun earlier and set about stacking the logs in a box shape, like the frame of a house with no roof. It’s a great way to build a campfire to have it last through the night, as when the lowest levels burn fully, it drops the higher layers in one by one. It’s not the hottest way to set one up, but this time of year with it only barely getting below freezing, it suits well enough with a tent.

  “I’ll take the second watch. That way you can get more sleep.” He yawns, he’d been sleeping poorly the last two days, and seems exhausted during the day, but he’s not complained, so I can’t rightly tell him no. I decide to give him a few extra hours past midnight. I can buoy myself with Imbuements, but he can’t.

  “Sounds good to me.” I gesture at the smaller of the two tents. My wings and tail require the more spacious of the two tents, so he makes no complaint. Rather, he walks over to the bag with our provisions and awkwardly pulls out some jerky and traveling biscuits—more than he normally would, I note. Not more than is allowable, but actually taking his full portion for once. It’s odd, but not worth asking about. We’ve been walking all day, it’d be odd if he wasn’t more hungry than normal.

  He retreats to the tent, wishing me a good night and sliding into the little, gray, canvas tent. I move over to my own, hefting over a log to sit before the stacked campfire. I could use my striker…or…

  I take a deep breath, willing Ignia from the pair of gates in my vessel to offer up a few motes of power. They come readily, and I try to focus my mind to light exclusively the campfire wood with mundane fire. A simple Ignia spell, just shaped through the lens of draconic spellcasting. I exhale through tight lips, pursed as if to whistle, and a tiny focused jet of fire streams out of my mouth, snaking through the air before arriving at the fire and igniting the lowermost pieces of wood.

  Watching the flames with great pleasure, I relax. The area is painted in warm orange firelight, casting dancing shadows into the metal trees around us, glittering off their countless leaves in the collective colors of metals and gems. I’ve lived here my entire life, in this forest, and watching fire glinting off these trees never ceases to mesmerize me. Lilly says other forests aren’t like this one, and I’ve always been curious to actually see one.

  Thinking pleasant thoughts, I feel my thick tail twitching along with my heartbeat. I snake it around and hold it before me, gently caressing along with the grain of my scales. I cast a glance over at Olly, who has fallen asleep with no real delay. I murmur, “Nobody else has ever touched my tail before like that…” I flush a bit at the remembered sensation despite myself, “Who just touches someone else’s tail? Huh, Olly? No manners.”

  I settle in for the long and hopefully boring watch after moving Lilly near Olly’s tent to keep them both in one location to be easier to keep track of.