Evrith's mood appeared to slowly improve after An-uxhwi's discussion with her, at least up to a point; she was not content, but contentment did not seem to be a regular feature of her personality, and at least she had moved past the point where she was dwelling endlessly on things.

She had, however, started following An-uxhwi around more closely. Doing so made her feel better, which was something she felt she badly needed, though she tried her best not to make it too strange an experience for him.

As she had predicted, Shyriath had, several vigils after their discussion about the figure in white, offered to accompany them.

“I get the impression,” he'd said, “that you may well need all the help you can get in this.” Since he'd been factually correct, Evrith had done her best not to be offended by his tone, which did not quite hide his skepticism about the entire endeavor.

And now, at last, they were on their way again. If nothing else, they were far more handsomely equipped this time around. Shyriath had slaughtered a large portion of his herd and dried the meat for provisions, and he had provided Evrith and An-uxhwi with sandy-colored cloaks like the one he wore.

“But once we get deeper in the mountains,” he said, as they hiked up the narrow path away from the cleft to the plateau above, “we will have to obtain clothing that's warmer, and which blends in better.”

“And I suppose you'd prefer to hunt and gather food on the way?” Evrith said from in front.

Shyriath shrugged. “It would allow us to save the dried meat for when it's needed. Water shouldn't be a problem once we start getting up out of the desert; there's more rain up there than down here.”

If An-uxhwi had felt Evrith's presence a burden, he gave not the slightest indication of it. He seemed to enjoy her presence on some inscrutable level - not quite in the way a father might enjoy the presence of a child, thus knowing them to be safe, not quite in the way of a fervent friendship, where the closeness implied joint activities.

Regardless, it was unmistakable, and that was perhaps all that mattered. An-uxhwi was xtauh; perhaps xtauh was the only variable one really needed to understand the bizarre idiosyncrasies of his manner.

Or perhaps it was just An-uxhwi, personally.

It was definitely the xtauh in An-uxhwi that found the idea of 'more rain' foreign - not difficult to comprehend in any way, simply strange enough to privately remark upon, like any one odd, once-in-a-lifetime astronomical constellation. But he knew that it would be better for his takmar friends.

It still felt strange that it was plural. Shyriath had gradually progressed from enemy over tolerated acquaintance to the loosest of friendships - but there was no mistake about it. An-uxhwi considered Shyriath a friend. Not to many rests ago, he would have laughed at the possibility.

He carried what he could - a bit more than his frame suggested, given the practise he'd gotten in the mines with hefting and carrying materials. He pondered the conversation as he tagged behind the takmar. If Evrith had been able to scry the metal deposits, perhaps she could also scry where they might get the most bountiful food?

But they were moving and the travel was putting his mind at ease.

“Gathering I can do,” Evrith replied to Shyriath, “but I'm bad at hunting anything I can't ambush.”

The green looked puzzled by this. “Can't you see what prey is going to do before it does it?”

“Yes,” Evrith said in sour tones. “But usually what I see is it getting away from me. I don't have the stamina or reflexes to chase things down.”

“How did you feed yourself, then?”

Evrith shrugged. “Ambushing. Gathering. Stealing, frequently.” She returned Shyriath's stare with a one of her own. “Don't give me that look. If it's steal or starve, I'll steal. Prescience is a great tool for thievery. It'll save us a lot of time later on if we can steal warmer clothes rather than having to make them out of furs or something.”

That potentially answered the other question An-uxhwi had been mulling on - how the clothes Shyriath mentioned they needed would best be made. Granted, like Shyriath, he would much rather they weren't taken from someone else who might need them, but as a fallback option it helped soothe his worries about the future.

Of course, Evrith wasn't discussing it as a fallback option - but discussing that could wait until they needed it. Circumstances might be different then. Sometimes, fate forced one's hand.

“I can assist with the hunt,” An-uxhwi offered. “Perhaps we might yet combine our skills and, in Evrith's part with foresight, in my part with agility, prove more successful than on each our own?” he mused.

“Fair enough,” Evrith replied. “I can find prey if the two of you can catch it.” She glanced ahead into the future. Prey there was, once the vegetation became more plentiful; but everyone else knew that, too. “But we'll have to be careful. There's a good number of takmar up there. Villages, male bands, a few large towns.”

“We won't be able to travel much on easy ground,” Shyriath acknowledged. “I can fool minds well enough to keep others from noticing faint noises, and in a pinch I can help move us underground, but staying away from people is likely to be our best bet.”

Evrith nodded absently, distracted by something she had caught a distant glimpse of. “Still… it may become necessary to pass near a settlement. We might want to be ready for that. …incidentally, are either of you familiar with… with something that makes you disappear when you touch it?”

“Disappear?” An-uxhwi echoed, quite automatically. “Become invisible? Or be removed from a place?” And then, realising it didn't matter: “In any case, no immediately familiarity that I can think of - is this something you can see?”

Evrith was hesitant to answer. She saw, yes, but what was she seeing? “…yes? Sometimes they seem to be books, but sometimes slabs of carved stone. But touching one in a certain place causes one to no longer be seen. I… I think it makes them not be there.”

Shyriath just tilted his muzzle in the negative, dubiously. “Never heard of such a thing,” he replied. “Books and stones that make one go… where?”

Evrith had no answer; she shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “But… they might be important. If we have a chance to see one, we may want to take it.”

“Oh,” An-uxhwi remarked, the greater detail painting a better picture in his mind's eye. “You must be seeing enchantments,” he informed, matter-of-factly, as if it couldn't possibly be anything else. “I cannot claim to have seen any in my lifetime, but as I understand it, they once used to be a somewhat frequent means of transportation amongst my people - stones in particular.”

The takmar, by the end of his statement, had halted and were staring at him in frank astonishment.

“Enchantment?” Shyriath asked. “Transportation?”

“I knew the xtauh could scribe things to produce… effects,” Evrith said, “but I didn't know they could use it to travel.” She looked wistful. “Someday, if I have the leisure, I'm going to spend some time looking back at that.”

“What kind of effects?” Shyriath asked intently. He looked at An-uxhwi. “Do you know how to do any of them?”

“Unfortunately, I don't, lest I might have used such tricks to leave the mines of my own accord,” An-uxhwi lamented, mildly. “I couldn't even tell you how far removed I am from those who possessed this knowledge directly. But it is fairly common knowledge that such enchantments exist, and I know just enough in abstract to recognise one when I see one - but this is hardly remarkable.”

Shyriath found himself disappointed. Aside from the possible usefulness of whatever 'effects' could be produced, he had never before heard of magic that could just be… carved, or written, or whatever, onto an object. He wondered if-

He glanced at Evrith, who was reluctantly bringing herself back to the present. “Do you know if just anybody can do this?”

“It's a learned skill,” she replied, “or skills, because it requires several. It isn't easy to master. But it's not like witch magic, if that's what you mean - there's no innate ability to use it or not.”

Shyriath was quite obviously humbled by the idea.

An-uxhwi nodded along with the small explanation - its complexity was, after all, why he could claim to recognise an enchantment, but not craft one himself. In that, it was to some degree like a stone bridge - an obvious landmark, but one would need an understanding of statics to construct a stable one.

The difference was that An-uxhwi was better-equipped to recognise the metaphorical bridge in the first place, but the general principle of asymmetric knowledge remained.

“If you don't mind my curiosity,” An-uxhwi mused aloud. “What more did you see that prompted this line of enquiry? Or who, rather, if something can be said about that, and when? Make no mistake, I doubt the knowledge how to make them would have died out, per se; yet new enchantments would still be somewhat exotic to me.”

Evrith just shrugged. “One of the towns up ahead - Oraa - has a house in it, where someone lives who has a stone slab and many of the books. I saw her using one to disappear somewhere.”

She cast her gaze in the general direction of the town, though it was many miles out of sight. “A book like that might be a useful thing to have, you know, if we can get one.”

Shyriath looked skeptical. “Would she give one to a Chosen?”

“Well, no. We'd have to steal it.”

The green sighed. “There you go with stealing again. It's not as if we need one.”

Evrith's face set into a stubborn expression. “Still, it's something to consider. And besides, if she has one that goes to the other side of the mountains, it could save us a lot of time and trouble.”

She refrained from saying aloud that it would be a very nice substitute for her own ability to travel between points without involving the intervening space. She could do it - she'd found that out the hard way, very long ago - but the single experience she'd had had been disastrous. This sounded like a much more reliable method.

“Of course, you would hardly have to steal it to travel with it,” An-uxhwi mused. “You could simply use it; indeed, by doing so, by its very design you would leave it where it was.”

This was, of course, presupposing that it led somewhere one wanted to go - but that was true if one wanted to steal it as well. The only situation in which stealing a book was a reasonable course of action was if one wanted to retain a means to escape from a situation quickly; however, if what one was escaping from was itself sapient, it could simply follow after.

An-uxhwi had a point. Evrith was not entirely happy that he had a point. Luckily, she had a counterargument.

“We wouldn't have to steal one to travel with it,” she replied reasonably, “but it would make it safer to do certain things with it. Like read it to see where it goes. Or use it somewhere hidden, so that it's less likely that we're followed.”

Shyriath's nostrils flared. “So you want to steal a book, take it away to some cave or something, read it, and if it happens to go somewhere useful, use it. And what if it doesn't go somewhere useful?”

“So we take a couple of them. One of them's bound to be of some use.”

An-uxhwi seemed sceptical about Evrith's reasons, although clearly not yet willing to accuse her of simply wanting an excuse to steal books. “I had the impression that judging how long people will be away from a location was a matter you are skilled at gauging. Are you concerned the skill might fail you in a crucial moment?”

Evrith traced a downward arc with her muzzle. “You'll recall, back in the mine, that I didn't realize that the overseer was removing you from my cell until only shortly before it occurred. Being able to foresee things doesn't always mean having much time or room to react to them; standing around in hostile ground is not something to be done unless one has no other choice.”

She glanced in the direction of Oraa again, and her expression hardened. “The more I consider this, the more I get the sense that it's important that we have some of those books. When we get closer to the town, I think I'm going to go retrieve some. If neither of you would rather be involved, that's fine - it might be easier to remain undetected by myself anyway. I can catch up with you afterwards.”

An-uxhwi didn't like Evrith's plan, in part for the reasons she considered it a good idea - after all, if dangers sometimes surprised her, they might surprise her in Oraa.

He had previously assumed the trouble was, both in getting caught for the mine in the first place and in the scenario she described, that she had not been looking for the dangers at the time, and that a careful approach could not be so foiled. But now she was implying that sometimes, even if one was looking for them, the dangers of past and future might find one ill-prepared, regardless.

“Separating seems like a potentially poor idea if you're concerned about unseen dangers,” An-uxhwi observed, his tone chiefly one of curiosity. “Is there a means for you to expand on this… sense? What reason draws you to them to such a degree?”

He sounded as though he wanted to weigh whether he could make himself accompany her to a theft. In his experience so far, Evrith usually had reasons for things, so it did not seem unreasonable to him that she had Seen something that made the acquisition of such a book pivotal for their continued survival.

“Only that the range of positive futures seems to be expanded,” Evrith replied, “if we have some of those books than if we don't.” Her voice was starting to betray a certain amount distress.

There were some questions about why the future looked the way it did that could not be immediately answered. Evrith knew this, and was used to it, but those who couldn't see it had a hard time trusting it. While she got no sense that this conversation would lead to a rift, it made her uncomfortable in its similarities to those she'd had with her brother.

He'd demanded - shouted, screamed sometimes - How do you know? It hadn't been enough for him to know the possibilities; he'd wanted to know the reasons, and far too often she hadn't been able to tell him, or what she'd told him failed to satisfy. The answer he'd really wanted escaped him: the one telling him why his life had been made a living Abyss, and how to escape it.

Now, as then, things would be much easier if they'd just listen to her and stop arguing.

An unsatisfying answer, but perhaps the best he was going to get out of her. “And what are the chances of success if you enter alone? What are the chances of success if I accompany you?” An-uxhwi asked, pursuing his curiosity about the matter in disregard for the trace amounts of distress in her voice, too absorbed in sorting out the hypotheticals to really notice.

“Or me, for that matter,” Shyriath added. He still looked profoundly skeptical, but Evrith sensed that he knew that trying to stop her from going when she was determined to go would be a difficult task.

She wasn't sure she wanted either of them along; one thief was harder to spot than two or three. But peering into the future, she didn't see that it made much difference. An-uxhwi knew how to minimize his chances of being spotted, and Shyriath could probably mislead anyone who couldn't be avoided.

Aloud she said, with a certain amount of reluctance, “I don't think it would hurt anything if the two of you came along.”

“Then let us try to obtain them together,” An-uxhwi relented. It was clear from his tone and body language that he didn't enjoy the prospect of stealing from anyone, but technically, it would be Evrith doing the stealing - he was simply along to do his sworn duty of protecting her, inasmuch as he was capable of doing.