Sayna's room was-- just a regular room, really. The woman seemed to be less tidy than the most, with clothes spread over various pieces of furniture, but then again, perhaps she had merely had a busy day. When patrons came, after all, they wanted to drink, and they wanted to do it immediately...
"Oh," Sayna smiled. "A trial by fire, then? That's the best thing that can happen to you, I think. You'll learn faster that way. When you teach a child to swim, you should just throw them in the water, too!" If the news of a child getting hurt by the poachers' trap meant something to her, then...
"Well," Cyreia smiled, her own fondness mirroring Remin's, "I am your uncultured soldier. Is it not my job to push your boundaries?" Except that she had never had to. Once again, it baffled her just how easily they had settled into their rhythm; even back when they had barely known each other...
Wait. Alistair had warned them against Sayna? The same Sayna who had offered them a place to stay without expecting much in return, despite them being complete strangers with a questionable sob story? Nothing about her seemed dangerous to Cyreia. Then again, did her perception really mean...
"... maybe we should leave him alone, then. At least until we have other options." If Cyreia had to, she would talk to Alistair, but there was no way this conversation wouldn't go poorly. Even Remin with her silver tongue hadn't managed to get much out of him! How was she supposed to do it? With...
"It isn't," Cyreia agreed, mostly because it was true. Panicking would have been a more natural reaction than the calm they both wore, actually, but that just wasn't their style. When you escaped from death on a semi-regular basis, it cured you from such reactions rather reliably. "But yes, at...
Cyreia, too, leaned into Remin's touch, and for a while, she felt completely calm. As if she was truly home, irrespective of her physical location. (Perhaps that was what home was about, really. Not about the place where you had happened to be born, but about this feeling; about knowing that...
Three days. Too little, probably, but still better than nothing; you could accomplish much in seventy two hours if you put your mind to it. Hell, Cyreia had seen the tides of many battles turn in a window of time that was much smaller. Still, the limit offered to her didn't exactly fill her with...
Of course they couldn't make those decisions; that would make things too simple, and they just never were. Although... this actually was pretty simple, wasn't it? She hadn't gotten the best of deals, but it was still something. Still a chance to save those children, and the fae as well. (They...
Cyreia just... stared at the fae, trapped somewhere between confusion and horror. She had understood from the very beginning that they were different from people - had different values at the very least - but surely they understood that children weren't interchangeable? That they weren't things...
Ah. Well, that was actually a very good question. Cyreia hadn't thought about it that much, mostly because she had been focused on the supernatural instead of the mundane, but-- yes, there had been something odd about the trap, now that she thought about it. That realization still hadn't...
Cyreia waited for something, anything to change, but... it didn't, thankfully. Perhaps this really had been some greeting ritual? Something completely harmless, just to prove your intentions weren't violent? Either way, when they told her to sit down, she did. At this point, such a small detail...
Well. If that was the fae's idea of friendliness, Cyreia didn't want to know how they'd express hostility. Hell, she had received threats less effective than this! It must have been the indirectness, really. The mind seemed to be designed to fill in the gaps, and it usually did so in the most...
Eating with the fae? Cyreia... wasn't sure whether she liked that. It seemed innocent enough, certainly, and the act itself really was when divorced of any context, but the context kind of mattered here. It always did. Who knew what this meant in the fae culture? It could have been a mere...
"An apple," Cyreia repeated, incredulous. Was the fae perhaps mocking her? Perhaps, but it was so tell what her strange companion thought; it was like-- like watching her own face reflected on a pond's surface, and all the tiny ripples and distortions made it impossible to read. (Why had her...
Mutt. The word made Cyreia wince. It was technically true, she supposed, though that didn't make it sound any kinder. If anything, it... actually gave it a cruel edge. When people called you names that weren't even remotely based in reality, it was hard to take them seriously; she knew she...
Cyreia didn't move. She was ready to do it at a moment's notice, ready to reach for her sword and do whatever she needed to do in order to protect herself, but she didn't spring to action just yet. In this context, acting too fast would have been a weakness; a proof of her fear. And since the...
Ah, there it was; the shift that was more felt than seen, more assumed than truly apparent. The shift she had expected without really knowing about it. Her heritage, perhaps? The one left to her by her blood? It must have been that, except that Cyreia didn't have the time to think about it. Not...
Despite not spending too much time in the forest yet, Cyreia couldn't help but think she may have been on a wild goose chase here. The place just looked some mundane! She hadn't expected to run into another god within the first five seconds, but she also hadn't expected to see-- well, nothing...
Before heading off for the forest, Cyreia stopped at Sayna's. She didn't necessarily believe she would run into the fae there, or even into the poachers, really, because poachers generally operated when other people were asleep, but she still wasn't going to enter the forest unarmed. That just...