The fire was small, Lucius always built them that way. Just enough for warmth, but not too much visibility. An old habit that had slowly become a part of him.
They had to make camp in a shallow depression off the road, two large stones providing natural cover on the north side, the tree line close enough to retreat into if the night produced reasons to retreat.
Valeria had approved the location without saying so, which meant she walked the perimeter twice before sitting down.
They ate in the usual silence. The road had given them eighteen kilometers today, the terrain climbing steadily as the foothills made themselves known in the gradient, and the tiredness in all three of them was the honest kind that came from travelling the distance.
The fire settled into coals, but nobody moved to sleep.
Valeria was the one who broke the silence first.
She was looking at the fire when she spoke, not at him, her voice arriving at its usual unhurried pace. "Why do you hate them so much?"
Lucius looked up. "The gods?"
"You killed one, and now you’re hunting more." She turned a small stone over in her fingers without looking at it. "That’s not ambition. That’s something else."
The fire crackled between them.
He was quiet for a moment, not because he didn’t know the answer but because there were two answers and only one of them was for saying out loud.
The one he kept inside was the one that mattered most. The body he’d been given when he arrived in this world hadn’t been empty, it had been occupied, briefly, by someone already leaving it.
A young man from Fallen Crest, dying in the wreckage of everything his life had been, with something unfinished sitting in his chest that he hadn’t been able to carry any further.
Lucius had inherited the shell and the weight both. What that weight was, specifically, he didn’t share it. It wasn’t his to share. It was the one thing in this world that belonged entirely to the person who had asked it of him, wordlessly, in the moment of transfer.
He kept that part at the back of his mind.
"Fallen Crest Village," he said instead.
Seraphine looked at him. Valeria’s hand stilled on the stone.
"It’s gone now, and was already gone before I got there, really just the remains of it left, the kind of empty that tells you something used to be there before." He looked at the fire.
"The drought did it, as obvious as it is, it’s not natural. The drought came from divine tribute going wrong, or divine indifference, or both, the kind where the land just stops because something above it stopped caring whether it kept going."
He paused.
"I saw broken earth, dried up rivers. Buildings still standing with everything inside them right where people left it when they ran or died." He turned his cup in his hands. "Children’s things still on the shelves. That kind of empty."
The fire gave them a small sound as he spoke.
"I walked through it for a day before I understood what I was walking through." He looked at the coals. "Once I understood, I couldn’t stop understanding it."
Valeria said nothing. She set the stone down.
Seraphine was looking at her hands in her lap. Something had shifted in her face, just a settling of something that had been held careful and was being held slightly differently now.
"My family was in a drought too," she said.
Her voice was even. The evenness of it cost something, he could hear that, but she maintained it.
"Different villages, same cause. Divine tribute imbalance in the region, the land drying up while the shrines kept collecting." She turned her cup slowly.
"They died. All of them. I survived because a Church relief team came through and pulled out whoever was still breathing." A pause. "I was twelve back then."
She looked at the fire.
"They took me in. Educated me. Made me a priestess." Another pause, this one with more weight in it. "And then one day I asked why we were supposed to keep worshipping a god whose tribute system had just killed my entire family and half the region with them."
She said it without anger in her tone. Her tone rather carried a different voice in it, like a certain form of emotion Lucius couldn’t place.
"They branded me heretic the same week. Painted me in black and put me outside the city walls before the month was out." She looked at her hands. "My family died in the drought. The Church gave me a new family and then took that away too, for asking a question any reasonable person would ask."
The fire moved between them, low and steady.
Lucius looked at her, but she didn’t look back, she sat still watching her hands, but her jaw was set in the particular way it got when she was refusing to let something arrive that was trying to.
He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t be smaller than what she had just put down.
The silence held for a while.
Then Valeria spoke.
She was still looking at the fire, her elbows on her knees, the stone she’d been turning sitting forgotten beside her boot.
"I was born without it," she said. "Spiritual energy, divine resonance. Whatever they call it, I never had any of it." She said it the way she said most things, flat and without decoration.
"In a village that measured worth by your relationship to the divine, that made me nothing. Less than nothing. Something to be pitied or avoided, depending on who you spoke to."
A pause.
"The gods never touched me. Never blessed me, never claimed me, never decided I was worth the attention." She looked at the fire. "I used to think that was the worst thing. Growing up with that." Something shifted in her expression, brief and contained. "Now I think it was the only honest thing they ever did for me."
She picked the stone back up, and turned it once again.
"They ignored me my entire life and it turns out that was the right decision for both of us." The ghost of something moved at the corner of her mouth and was gone. "I should probably thank them for it."
Lucius looked at her.
She looked back at him, steady and unreadable as always, and then looked back at the fire.
The three of them sat with that for a while. The coals breathed their quiet heat outward into the night air and the dark around the camp held its usual patient silence and nobody moved to sleep for a long time.
There was nothing particularly comfortable about what they had each said. No resolution in it, no shared conclusion that made the weight of any of it lighter. Just three people sitting around a fire having said true things, which was its own kind of rare.
Lucius fed the last small branch into the coals.
The fire took it without comment.