Still

They were four days from Kibou on foot. Rask had mapped the safest route --- wide berths around open ground, tree cover where possible, rest points at defensible positions. It was good work. Thorough. The kind of scouting that should have made the journey feel manageable.

It didn't.

The first day passed without incident. Then the second. By the third, the silence had stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like something else entirely. Demon territory this close to the frontline should have had presence --- scouts, stragglers, imps bleeding through from the advance lines. The job board in Kibou had been full of contracts to clear them. They were everywhere, right up until they weren't.

Nobody said it out loud. They all felt it.

They moved in a loose formation --- Freyja and Hayate at the front, Haruki and Izel in the middle, Lyra at the rear with an arrow already notched. Rask drifted above them, wings folded to reduce his silhouette against the sky. The roads deteriorated steadily the further they pushed --- cobblestone to packed dirt, packed dirt to overgrown track, overgrown track to nothing at all. Just Rask's markings and the quiet understanding that forward was the only direction available.

What had once been farmland stretched out on either side of them. Fields that might have been crops or pasture, now wild and tangled and reclaimed. Collapsed farmhouses appeared every few hours like punctuation --- three walls standing, roofs long gone, whatever families had lived there either fled or not. Haruki checked each one they stopped at. All empty. All the same.

On the second night, they made camp in the shell of a waystation --- a relay point for travellers that had clearly not been used in decades. Haruki took first watch while the others slept. He sat at the entrance with his rapier across his knees and looked out at the dark and thought about the silence.

It wasn't reassuring. It was a question he didn't have an answer to yet.

Rask landed at the edge of the camp on the third morning without warning, as was his habit. He looked at the map, then at the horizon.

"We're close" he said. "Half a day, maybe less."

"Any movement?" Haruki asked.

Rask paused for just a moment. "No."

Haruki looked at him. Rask looked back. Neither of them elaborated.

Izel, turning a piece of wood over in his hands at the far wall, spoke without looking up. "You'd think they'd have something out here. Scouts, at minimum."

"They do" said Rask quietly. "We just haven't found it yet."

The camp went still.

They broke it twenty minutes later and moved out without much conversation.

The third night they camped at the base of a long ridgeline Rask had marked as a favourable position --- elevated ground to the east, dense tree cover to the west, clear sightlines in both directions. Freyja took watch with Izel. The others settled in.

Hayate was sitting apart from the group, back against a tree, staring up at whatever sky was visible through the canopy, when Lyra came and sat down nearby. Not next to him exactly. Just near.

For a while neither of them said anything. The fire was low. The others were asleep or close to it.

"You're not tired?" Lyra asked.

"I am" said Hayate. "Can't switch it off."

Lyra pulled her knees up and rested her arms across them. "Kira?"

"Kira. The village. All of it." He paused. "You?"

"Same."

Another stretch of quiet. An easy one, which was not nothing given who they were.

"Can I ask you something?" Hayate said, still looking up.

"You're going to regardless."

He almost smiled. "When we first met. At the goblin camp. What did you actually think of us?"

Lyra considered it. "Honestly? I thought you were going to get yourselves killed within a week."

"And now?"

She glanced at him sideways. "I think you might make it to two."

He did smile then, properly, the kind he didn't always mean to. He looked at her and she was already looking elsewhere, which was probably deliberate.

"I'm glad we ran into you" he said. Simply. No armour around it, no aggression to hide behind. Just the words.

Lyra didn't answer immediately. When she did her voice was even, measured, the way it got when she was being careful. "Get some sleep, Hayate."

He looked back up at the canopy. "Yeah."

He didn't sleep for another hour. She stayed where she was the whole time, and neither of them mentioned it.

The fourth day Haruki walked beside Freyja for most of the afternoon, the two of them falling naturally to the middle of the formation together. At some point, without either of them planning it, the conversation had drifted from the mission to everything around it --- what Kibou had felt like walking in, whether the holy water would actually work, what Cecaelian food tasted like compared to human food.

At one point Freyja said something that made Haruki laugh --- a real one, surprised out of him --- and he shook his head and said "that is exactly the kind of thing my sister would have said."

Freyja looked at him. Something moved across her face that she didn't name.

"You had sisters?" she asked.

"Four" he said. The smile stayed but changed slightly. "Loud. All of them."

"I would have liked them" Freyja said.

"They would have liked you too" Haruki replied, and meant it plainly, the way he meant most things.

Freyja looked back at the road ahead. She didn't say anything else about it. But she filed it away somewhere careful, the way you do with things you don't fully understand yet.

Rask descended from above. "We're close" he said. "Just beyond that ridgeline."

Everyone stopped.

Ahead of them, just visible over the rise --- the outline of rooftops. Still. Dark. Silent.

The village.

Haruki looked at the others, then back at the ridge. "Stay close" he said quietly. "We don't know what's waiting on the other side."

They wait until sunrise before entering the village. Trying to look for an heirloom at night with lamps would only give away their position. They rest in the treeline and wait for the sun to come up.