Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

"Thank you," said Jenny quietly. She sank down to the ground and tucked her arms in under her legs.

"You drank too much too quickly," Vox noted.

She nodded.

"Did you say there could be a witch sustaining it?" I asked him. That was not news I wanted to hear today. I'd rather jump back in with the shades than meet a witch.

"Possible," he said. "I don't know. I haven't seen a Hunak in a long time."

He walked back over to the statue and touched the cracked finger again. "This concerns me more."

"Why did you help us?" I asked. "You have no idea who we are."

He looked back to me, his fingers still lingering on the stone. "You sought him out," he said. "You were injured, and you needed help. What else would I do?"

"Sought who out?" I demanded.

He looked at me like I'd grown a second head, then paused and refocused his gaze, as though I'd said the most bizarre thing in the world, and then he'd realised I was actually a fish, and wouldn't know the difference between toast and a tomato. "Him," he said, pointing at the kinstone.

"That's... not a person," I said cautiously, hoping we hadn't just been healed by a crazy person. "It's stone. It's not alive."

He let out a nostalgic laugh. "I suppose that depends on your definition of alive."

"Can we stop talking?" whispered Jenny.

I walked over to her and let my hand rest on her shoulder. She had moved her hands out from under her legs and was clenching her stomach in pain.

"She drank too much," said Vox. "She'll be fine. Best to give her something to eat, if you have anything."

"We lost all of our supplies," I said. "And our friend. Have you seen him? He's short, annoying, never stops talking, black hair..."

"I haven't seen anyone, no. Quite hard to, in that." He pointed out at the Hunak.

"I need to find him," I croaked. Even with the water Vox had given us, my throat hurt from the talking. "It matters."

"Many things matter, young one," he said.

I blinked at that. He couldn't have been much older than I was.

"You keep looking at the kinstone," cut in Jenny with a groan.

"Kinstone? Oh... yes, the finger." He was obsessing over it, his eyes constantly falling back to make sure it was still there, like he was worried some tiny crack would have it fall from the statue.

"It shouldn't have changed."

"They never change," I said.

"They do," said Vox. "Not very often, but they do. But a crack... this is something else."

I glanced over at Jenny. She was paying as much attention to him as she could muster, despite the pain. It looked to me like she was handling the shock of how much she drank, but the cramps would take awhile to fade.

She shot me a sideways glance, as if to say "Crazy person!"

"I need to find him," I repeated out loud.

"Yes, I'm sure you do," he mumbled, facing the kinstone.

The statues were just waymarkers, not objects of intense fascination. Strange figments of the world.

"We," I said, quite loudly and gesturing between myself and Jenny, "need to leave."

"Oh. Then go."

I sighed. "Hunak!"

"What do you expect me to do about it?" His voice was annoyingly calm, like a parent was asking me to just think for a few seconds about the situation. "I've given you water."

"You said you had a way to navigate Hunak," I said. "Help us!"

He turned back to face me, finally, and gave me a half-hearted smile. "No."

"What do you mean 'no'?" asked Jenny.

Vox placed his walking stick against the fallen tree and sat against its trunk. His chest heaved from a large breath. "I am sure your friend is important."

"But?" I snapped.

"It's Hunak. I can navigate myself. I cannot ferry you. We must wait until the darkness clears."

Some part of me wanted to punch him, but the part of my body that remembered the water he had given us stayed my hand. He'd saved us, one way or another.

"Xera," whispered Jenny, climbing over to me. She wasn't trying to hide her thoughts from Vox, but to keep her voice from hurting even more. "If you care about my thoughts on this, I think we should wait. Even if he can guide us through... I really don't want to be eaten alive."

She continued in my silence. "Either way, I'm staying."

I looked up. The sky was overcast. Not rain-worthy, but enough to cover up the eventual moon.

"Night isn't going to be very fun," I warned Vox. "We won't see a thing."

He knelt down beside us and wrapped his cloak over his front. "No," he said. "But then, that's how it normally goes when you close your eyes for the night. Try not to worry, dear ones. Nights never last very long."

"You never asked us for our names," said Jenny.

"Oh?" he wondered. "I suppose I didn't. It gets difficult, you know. I have so many names trapped up in here." He tapped his head. "Too many to remember. The space is all filled up."

She glared at him. "Jenny."

"Hm?"

"My name, you shithead. She's Xera. Remember them."

He chuckled. "If you insist."

We tried to keep talking to him, but Vox wasn't much of a talker. He didn't reveal anything about himself. He didn't say anything that gave away where he was from. All we could make out was that he had seen more kinstones than either of us, and was probably a bit older than he looked.

Instead, we talked. He was there, he listened, but it was a conversation between me and Jenny. I thought she'd be more engaged in making fun of Eskir, which I used as a distraction from his absence. She avoided mentioning him, I think for the same reasons as I wanted to talk about him.

He was the only hope I had in the world, and we left him alone in the dark.