Chapter Text
“Easy as a pebble in a stream,” Aloy murmured, laying the last trap along the illuminated arrows of the Corruptor’s route. She crouched into the tall grass and got comfortable. The route was long and snaking, more complicated than a machine’s usual, which accounted for why the Nora hadn’t been able to predict its movements. She’d found it scuttling along upstream and tagged it, then backtracked and chosen this glade for its distance from other machines that the Corruptor could slave to its network.
She heard it approaching and readied the sling in her hands. She had done this enough now to have it down to a science – fire trap, then fire bombs, and once it regained its senses it would run right towards her and into a fire wire, where more bombs or arrows would do the trick.
The first part of the plan went off without a hitch – it spotted her after the second bomb, but by that time it was already flailing about as its skeleton burned. It recovered quicker than she anticipated, and jabbed at her with its stinger. She rolled out of the way, but now the angles were wrong, and it stepped over the wire instead of tripping it.
It fired a spread of its own fire bombs back at her, and she heard Shield-Weaver complain of the heat before she hopped out of the smouldering patches of grass, where she immediately had to leap over the sweeping arm of the Corruptor. She could still back it into the wire – she loaded and loosed bombs in quick succession, emptying her pouch. She could swear that Corruptors and their slaved machines were usually more flammable than this—
A spike of corruption shot from the Corruptor’s stinger, and she wasn’t quick enough on her feet to dodge it. It soaked through Shield-Weaver and her clothes, right to her skin, and made it burn. She had stumbled back from the impact, and was quickly losing the feeling in her arms and legs, steeping herself further in the splash of corruption that was writhing on the grass. She had been hit by corruption before, felt the irritation of it on her skin when she rammed her spear into a corrupted Watcher, but never with this intensity. She wanted to tear the skin off her bones.
“Aloy!”
“Finish it!”
“No!” she managed through gritted teeth, but Vala and Varl were already out of cover. Vala was lighting three fire arrows and loading them all onto her bow at once, and Varl was loosening the top of a canister of blaze, getting ready to throw it.
“Low!” he shouted, and the canister arced over Aloy’s head, smashing at the Corruptor’s feet. The machine’s lens shone red after flashing yellow briefly, identifying a new threat.
Vala loosed her arrows, and the blaze ignited, causing the Corruptor to flail and Aloy’s eyes to smart. She had sunk to her knees in the grass, the corruption leaping like giant fleas around her until it slowly faded and dispersed, leaving only the screaming numbness in her limbs behind. Before she knew it, Varl was at her side, his arm around her shoulder as he tried to bring her to her feet. She watched the Corruptor keel over, arms going limp.
“Aloy, are you okay?”
“I need that part,” she said, trying to step towards the machine carcass.
The needles of numbness renewed themselves, her leg buckled, and Varl said, “Okay,” as he was forced to take a knee with her. “There’ll be time for that. Are you injured?” He was clearly uncertain about Shield-Weaver – his hands had slipped beneath its barrier as it recharged, and it was beeping in her ear about the obstruction. She pressed her chest to pack it away.
Aloy fumbled with her belt, searching for the corruption antidote. She didn’t have many vials of it – she preferred to keep her distance from corrupted machines, and the itching usually wore off too quickly for her to even think of drinking the antidote. She unstoppered the bottle and felt the solution slide down her throat, trying not to taste it. Her head shivered at the bitterness that found its way to her tongue despite her efforts, but already the irritation on her arms was less. She scratched at the bandages on her arms until she found the end and started unwinding them.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” warned Vala, who was ignored.
Under the bandages, her skin was red and irritated. Shaky red lines were burned in up and down her arms, like the shifting tides of corruption over the land.
“It looks better,” Vala remarked to herself, as Aloy plopped down in the grass and held her arm in front of her eyes. Like she doubted it was real. Like it would fade in a few moments, with the cool rain against it. It didn’t.
“Better,” she echoed. She imagined the burns new, bloody and smoking. She felt her face, and looked to Vala with a fearful question. She wasn’t vain, and truth be told all of the comments about her looks were more exhausting than flattering, but… the idea that her face had changed. That it had changed without her wanting it to, not through paint or ink or piercing, scared her.
“You have a scar, here,” Vala indicated with her fingers flat against her cheek, covering her right cheekbone down to her jaw. “But you hit the snow after. It’s lighter there.”
It felt like a blow to her chest. She shook her head and tried not to let her breathing change, pushing herself to her feet on her spear and stumbling over to the Corruptor’s body. She stuck the point of her spear into the seam of the metalburned casing and pried it apart. The control node glowed blue close to its heart, and she tugged it out, pulling the wires with it. The insides spilled like guts on the grass, leaving the core and the heart behind.
She sat down on the Corruptor’s leg and rooted through her pack, searching for some robust lengths of wire to tie the node to her spear. Vala and Varl stood over her, exchanging a glance as she wrapped her arm back up.
“Aloy… are you alright?” Vala asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be getting back into the Embrace? You don’t want Dran ratting you out.”
“He’s basically family. We’ll work something out.” Vala replaced the pack on her shoulder with her bow, leaving the extra resources in Varl’s care. She gave her brother a glare that Aloy was sure meant something very specific, and then she turned and started to walk back towards the gate, which was still just about in sight. Aloy exhaled. She was safe in the Embrace. No Eclipse cultist with a Deathbringer gun in-hand was going to get to her now, not if she could help it.
Varl leaned to pick up the pack, and she held out a hand and shook her head, telling him it wasn’t necessary. “You can’t carry all of that by yourself,” he protested.
Aloy put her fingers to her mouth and whistled, and a few moments later she heard the clops of a Strider approaching the glade. Varl readied his spear, and she held out her hand again. “It’s alright. It’s with me.” She ran her hands over the glowing blue cables along its neck, and it shook its head, air venting out of its face with a hmph. She unscrewed the blaze canister from its port and started strapping her packs up. The machines she overrode hardly ever tried to return to their original functions, and having a blaze canister exposed in close contact with her other things was a recipe for disaster.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
She tapped the end of her spear where the override node lived. “The same thing that the Corruptors use to slave things to their network, I can use to make machines non-hostile to me. Not only that, but if anyone tries to touch my stuff without me there, they get trampled,” she smirked, remembering an altercation at Meridian Gate. She hoisted herself up on the Strider’s back and settled in. “Okay. Thanks for your help, Varl. You can go home, now.”
Just as she was about to jog the cables and dig her heels in to get going, he said, “No, wait.” She tugged the cables again and the Strider huffed unhappily at her conflicted instructions. “You can’t go alone. I’m supposed to take you—”
“I know the way to Devil’s Grief, and there isn’t room on this Strider for two. You’ll just slow me down. No offence,” she added.
“Struggling not to take offence,” he said flatly. “Look, you might think that since the Matriarchs made you a Seeker, you can do whatever you want. But a Seeker is supposed to help the tribe. Not blow us off. The War-Chief instructed me to conduct you safely to Devil’s Grief, and that’s what I’ll do.”
“I didn’t ask to be a Seeker,” she told him. “I’d have gone with or without their blessing.”
He frowned, and she felt a pang of regret. She felt an impulse rising to spur her Strider on and abandon this interaction, cut her losses with this dream-Varl who didn’t know her, who didn’t like her. What did it matter? As long as he was safe, and Vala was safe, and soon Sona would be safe and he’d have no reason to care that the outcast girl was a little mean, because everything else was right in the world.
She hopped off the Strider when the grazing machines came into view and crouched low. She whistled a lure call, and the closest Strider came to investigate until it was close enough for her to hold the override key to its face. When it glowed all blue again, she led it away, out of range of the hostile machines’ sensors. Her original Strider huffed again, and she said, “Don’t get jealous. This one’s for Varl.”
He did a double take. “You want me to ride that?” he asked, alarmed but in a low tone, as if worried that he was going to cause the Strider offence.
“What did you think I was getting it for?” Aloy said. He spread his palms, eyes wide, as if he couldn’t be expected to have had the faintest idea what she was doing anything for. She smiled and patted the Strider, “Don’t worry, it’s safe. And much faster than walking to Devil’s Grief on foot.”
She started to doubt that last assertion when she eventually persuaded Varl up onto his mount – although perfectly docile, his Strider didn’t appear particularly cooperative. Aloy coached him through it as best she could, telling him when he was pulling on the cables too hard or clutching its midriff too tightly with his feet, and confusing it. She explained to him the basics of when to lean forward and back, how to sit so that you didn’t ache too hard at the end of a ride, but every time he tried to bring the Strider to more than a trot, it skipped ‘canter’ and went straight for ‘gallop’, careening wildly out of control. Varl insisted his Strider was defective, but they swapped for about five minutes before he gave up that idea, and they switched back.
His Strider bucked, making him slide off its back and hit the ground with a thump. Aloy suppressed a laugh as he groaned in the mud. “How did you learn to do this?” Varl asked, when he took the hand she offered. “You never did it inside the Embrace. People would have talked about it.”
“It’s complicated,” she said.
He brushed some of the dirt off his behind. “At this rate, we probably have time for a long story,” he prompted. When she didn’t respond, he nodded at the sunset and said, “Actually, at this rate, we had better find somewhere to camp for the night. We’re not far from Mother’s Rise.”
“Mother’s Rise is in the wrong direction,” she objected. “We’re supposed to be heading north-east.”
He shook his head, “No, we’re not going through Devil’s Thirst. Stop trying to get rid of me, would you? We have to go around it to the north-west anyway. Mother’s Rise is practically on-route.”
She sighed, and as they set off at their trot that felt barely faster than walking, she said, “You’re lucky I like you, Varl.”
“This is how you talk to people you like?” he scoffed.
She didn't answer. She had been rude. Unnecessarily, selfishly. The kind of rude that made her snap when other people did it. They rode in silence for some time, skirting around the blue lights of the Grazer herd in the valley below Mother’s Rise. As the sky darkened and the orange glow of the village became more inviting, she said, “What would you say if I told you I was from the future, where the two of us are great friends?”
Varl was quiet for a moment. Then he said with a slight smile, “Ah, I’d say you were full of shit.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
They took their Striders up into Mother’s Rise. It was a little strange, but nobody barred them from entering, possibly partly due to Varl’s charm and the fact that he didn’t really seem to know how to get off his mount – it was the first time he’d come to a complete stop on purpose, she hadn’t had to teach him yet.
As he started negotiating a place for them to park their Striders and get some rest, explaining that he was escorting a Seeker to Devil’s Grief, Aloy found a quiet corner to dismount. She had hoped that her feet would be less sore after resting while they rode, but the pain returned almost instantly. She let the pain come out in grunts and winces and leaning heavily on the Strider’s back while no one was looking.
Most of the people here seemed to know Varl, and she recollected vaguely that Mother’s Rise was where young Braves usually stopped when they left the Embrace for the first time. They asked after Vala and his mother, and various other Braves who were presumably commonly found at the gates. A Brave with a patchy beard and two simple lines of paint under his eyes offered Varl his bed, and said he could probably convince his cousin to give up his for the Seeker, too.
When Varl led his Strider over to where she had left hers, she said, “We’re not sleeping here.”
“Yes, we are. I’m not going to let you charge into Devil’s Grief without proper rest, and neither of us are going to get it if we’re trying to defend a campfire from machines all night. We’re not in the Embrace anymore.”
“I can just as easily go on my own,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment, as if surprised she was bringing it up. “You won’t though.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m saying please,” he smiled sweetly. “Just let me do what’s been asked of me, okay? If I fail to protect you, I don’t just let down you, I also let down my mother and the entire tribe.”
“Fine.”
“We’ll leave at first light. I promise,” he said.
Varl’s friend fetched some meat he had been saving and stuck it over a spit, inviting him to take a seat. “You too, Seeker. I’d hardly be a good host if I didn’t offer to feed you as well.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said.
“I never said it was,” he smiled, “But you’re Nora now. And a friend of Varl’s, which makes you family. So take a seat.”
Reluctantly, she sat down and started warming her hands on the fire. “So is everyone in the Nora tribe related?” she said dryly, not meaning it as a remark that required answer.
However, Varl’s friend – Lon – began a long and involved explanation of exactly how he and Varl were related. The actual connection didn’t amount to much, since it was only their fathers that linked them, but the two of them had been in the same Proving year. They were taught together and played together as children, and thought of each other like brothers. In what she suspected was an attempt to ask her about being an outcast, he began telling a story about a cousin’s cousin who was outcast some years ago and seemingly decided to exile himself, abandoning the Sacred Lands to travel the Sundom with a band of killers who had also been outcast. There was a pause after he told her this, expecting her to contribute something.
“When everyone who loves you turns their back on you, you might not feel so kindly about the traditions they tried to teach you,” she said, because they were sounding a little disbelieving that this group would disavow the sacred rites of shunning by speaking to one another.
“But surely they know that they are forsaking All-Mother this way, and with it, all hope of ever being redeemed in her eyes,” Lon said.
“You know, I think they just can’t bring themselves to give a shit what All-Mother thinks, if she would let everyone who loves them turn them out.”
Lon didn’t try to talk to her again. Eventually, she got bored of being avoided and glanced at from a distance, so she asked him to show her where she was sleeping. He led her to the empty cot in one of the huts, and bid her a pleasant sleep with some awkwardness. The cot wasn’t particularly comfortable, which was fine, but the constant noise, even in a small settlement like Mother’s Rise, made it impossible to settle. Occasionally, she heard laughter from outside, and her petty irritation at Varl and Lon lingered for a while before she admitted to herself how childish it was.
Aloy didn’t think she would ever get comfortable, but eventually one of the many times she started out of slumber there was a significant shift in the atmosphere, suggesting that she had in fact fallen asleep. It was darker, and the main campfire had been reduced to embers outside. There were no candles lit inside the hut, and she heard Varl snort in his sleep in one of the other cots.
After her eyes had got used to the dark and her nose had time to parse out the different smells around her, she noticed that someone had left some of the meat for her, next to her cot, and she scarfed it down. She realised she had left her canteen with her Strider, and went to fetch it. The water was night-air cold, and refreshing. As she drank, she recognised some vaguely distressed noises coming from somewhere else in the village. Her sleepy mind had put it down to animal noises or the general ambience of civilisation, but now that she was properly paying attention, she thought it was definitely distress.
The hut at the opposite side of the village was still pouring light, and she was surprised when she teased open the door to feel warm air. Fia looked around from where she was crouched as Aloy closed the door behind her.
“I’m sorry. Did we wake you?” she said. She was dabbing the injured Brave’s forehead with a wet cloth, and he was groaning, only half-conscious.
“I’m a light sleeper,” she said. “Anything I can do?”
“Produce some dreamwillow from thin air?” she suggested, then sighed. “We’re running low, and the Brave I sent to fetch some from the emergency supplies says the caches are empty.”
She remembered this. A group of outcasts had taken the dreamwillow to care for their own wounded, leaving behind shards as the best payment they could manage without being allowed to talk to any merchants. But she couldn’t just charge up the mountain without any directions, or the tribe at large would start believing she had divine powers. More divine powers than they already thought she had. “Could I… forage some?”
Fia smiled at her. “Kind of you to offer, but it takes days of careful attention to brew, and I don’t think either of us have that kind of time.” She paused slightly before continuing, “There’s a herbalist living in the mountains north-west of here, Jun. He should have some. But…”
That’s what she was looking for. “Perfect. I’ll give him a visit.”
“It’s over half a day’s hike from here, and the road’s filled with dangerous machines. There’s no way—”
“I’ll be back before the sun’s up,” she promised, already backing out of the door.
When she got to the slope that the outcasts were fleeing down, she took out the Watchers before nocking a hardpoint arrow and loosing it at the Sawtooth’s leg. It collapsed, and she slid the remaining distance down the slope to stick her spear in its underbelly. The blue light faded from it, and since she was already there, she reached through the hole she had made and tried to pull out the heart. As she was scavenging from the machine, she heard boots crunching closer in the snow.
“You have our thanks, if the gratitude of outcasts means anything to you,” he said.
She looked up at him and said, “It does.” Before he could express his surprise, she said, “The Nora cast me out at birth. I don’t trouble myself with their laws. The best part about being a Seeker now is that if someone runs away from me yelling ‘stay away, motherless chuff!’ they’re the one who gets in trouble for it. Not me.”
“A Seeker,” he said. He looked like he was starting to regret talking to her instead of making a run for it with his takings. “I suppose you’re seeking dreamwillow.”
“I know you have people to look after too,” she said, using the Sawtooth’s chassis to get to her feet. “I don’t want to leave you with nothing. But there are others who need dreamwillow.”
He nodded. “Perhaps… we have more than we need. With everything going on in the Embrace – we panicked. I know outcasts aren’t supposed to talk, but we’d die if we didn’t protect one another. I…” He swallowed. “I shouldn’t ask this. You have more important things to do, I’m sure. But as a Seeker… you can venture into the forsaken places, can’t you? Like Devil’s Thirst?”
“Yes. Why?”
“My partner. Jom. A group of bandits slipped across the border while the War Party was occupied with defending the Embrace, and—well, they tried to rob us on the road, but when they realised we were outcasts with nothing, they took captives and went to find a place to build a camp among the ruins.”
“That’s what the dreamwillow was for, wasn’t it?”
“We really do have wounded,” he winced, “but for the excess, yes. I was going to try and barter with them for my friends’ release.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kurnst.”
“Never bargain with bandits, Kurnst. I’ll see what I can do about Jom.”
She returned to Jun, still nursing exaggerated wounds on his front step, and told him to take the recovered dreamwillow to Fia in Mother’s Rise. She almost had to chase him to get him on his way, but eventually she was left alone on the ridge. The sky was starting to become light again, but the sun was a long way from rising over the valley. In the distance, she could see the blinking lights of the Devil’s Thirst Tallneck, walking its circuit among the ruins. She checked her Focus, and it beeped at her that her storage space was low, encouraging her to enable Cloud Sharing. She didn’t think she had room on the device to store a map of even this corner of the Sacred Land. That was fine. With how unreliable her arm and leg muscles seemed to be lately, she didn’t like the prospect of dangling from the Tallneck’s spines very much.
But if she took her Strider and rode to the bandit camp on the far side of Devil’s Thirst – that wasn’t an activity that strained her much. There was a lot of waiting in tall grass and whistling, but it shouldn’t take too long. She’d probably be back in Mother’s Rise before Varl stopped snoring.
She crunched into the snow at the bottom of the last zipline down the hill and whistled for her Strider. Hopping onto its back, she rode north-east, avoiding the bulk of Devil’s Thirst and cutting directly to the ruin where the bandits made their camp.
As she drew closer, she dismounted, not wanting her Strider’s blue light to alert the lookouts of her presence. While watching the movements of the bandits and trying to memorise their routes, Aloy caught sight of a crouched shape creeping towards one of the lookouts, and when she turned ‘Focus Mode’ off, she recognised the full-body paints and tattoos of a Tenakth warrior as a blade was jammed into the lookout’s jaw and they were pushed off their perch, into the tall grass below. For a few minutes, she watched the warrior methodically pick through the bandits – and then he was spotted. He carved through all of the enemies he could see and then slid into cover while someone sounded the alarm.
The bandits searched, but didn’t find him. Aloy lost track of him multiple times, and had to open Focus Mode again to re-illuminate his silhouette. When the commotion died down, but much sooner than Aloy would have broken cover, he slipped out of hiding and towards the nearest patrolling bandit, impatient for the kill. As he crept up on his target, Aloy spotted a bandit archer in the ruins who was on the verge of seeing the attacker, and she swiftly nocked an arrow. She couldn’t hear from this distance, but her mind summoned with clarity the sound of the archer drawing a breath, and then dropping dead, an arrow through their eye. There weren’t many bandits remaining, so Aloy took a chance and stole into the camp, heading towards the captives.
Jom gasped when he saw her, and she shushed him. Not because he was in danger of giving her away, but because she was trying to keep track of the warrior with her ears, and didn’t want any distractions. As she helped the outcasts to their feet, she heard casual footsteps behind her, that suddenly ground to a halt.
“You’re not Nil,” he said.
“I agree,” said Aloy.
He grinned. “I didn’t know the Nora had their own bandit-killer.”
“They don’t,” she said, feeling a familiar scowl coming on. She could see why he and Nil were partners. “Don’t presume to know what I am.”
“My humblest apologies,” he said, in an elaborate bow that she was fairly sure was reserved for Carja royals. “But you did kill a bandit. And you wear Nora paint. It seemed fair enough to me. I’ll be going now,” he said wistfully. “No more blood left to spill on this battleground.”
“Nil wishes you wouldn’t run ahead so much,” she said, recalling his languid sigh when he discovered this his partner had got himself killed. That was about the range of emotion that Nil liked to express – though he’d probably scoff at a word like grief.
“Does he,” the warrior mused.
“If I were you, I’d head north. The Nora don’t take kindly to outlanders so close to the Sacred Land. Plus, I heard there’s more bandits at the edge of the Longroam.” She shrugged, “I’m sure Nil will sniff you out soon enough. All that blood on your teeth.”
“I don’t drink the blood of bandits,” he said. “Their stories aren’t worth telling.”
Aloy was still thinking of the Tenakth bandit-killer when Jom asked to speak with her, and she permitted him and his band to stay in the camp that the bandits had made out of the ruins. She told him that she would send Kurnst to him if she met him again while she was in the Sacred Land, and he thanked her over and over and over again.
She should have asked the bandit-killer his name.