Epsilon Twilight
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4. Naming
🕑 Added 2024-09-08 12:04:31 +0000 UTC"Aughh…" Aloe groaned in pain and drowsiness by equal parts. "Augh, I feel like manure."
The petite woman stood up from the rock, stretching all her extremities, and cracking some others. Waking up was the worst thing she had done, a part of her still wished to be sleeping. Forever if possible.
"I'm alive, so that's something." She said as she peered around her high spot.
There were no traces of monsters nor footprints nearby, so she considered that a win, regardless of her sore body.
"How long have I slept?" Aloe yawned midway through the sentence. "It's around," she appraised the sun's low position, "six in the morning? Huh, old habits die hard, I guess." Her thoughts were cut as her stomach grumbled, manifesting its emptiness.
There wasn't much she could eat, and what there was, wasn't exactly glamorous, but it was high in energy. Cheese, dry meat, and pita got people far. But water got them further.
By now the water in her waterskins was hot and tasted rancid, but it brought her back to life. She still had two more waterskins with her, so at least she could cover a few days of travel before having to worry about dehydration.
"If I find a mountain, maybe I could climb it and find an oasis or something with acuity if I'm at the top." That was wishful thinking, but not a bad idea per se.
For now, Aloe decided to fixate on the cheese and pita section of her rations. Dry meat would last for long, so it was better to consume the food that went bad sooner.
"I couldn't have known it in the palace," she rambled to herself, "but sleeping with recovery does wonders to the body. I've run for a full day and slept outdoors and on top of a rock and… well, it could be better, but I feel rested. Without it, I would be crawling in pain."
She hated depending on vital arts this badly, but if she didn't, they would have most likely captured already. Dead or alive.
Before leaving the comfortable shadow of her rocky litter, Aloe made sure she had everything with herself, and after she wasn't justified with her paranoia, she – just in case – tightened everything in her person so nothing would fall.
She told herself that she wasn't overthinking it, that she was doing it only because with haste she moved at great speed and if she had a nasty fall, even if she wouldn't take much damage, many things would be sent flying around.
Once the sun threatened to fully come out from the horizon, Aloe took a deep breath and started running. Speed stance active.
The first steps were always the most dangerous. It was all about building cadence and momentum, once her body was running at high speeds, her mind could handle most things unconsciously.
Left, right. Left, right. Aloe repeated to herself as she made colossal strides unbefitting of her stature. The tempo was mandatory, Naila had taught her that.
And that person was now her enemy.
It always had been, but things considered, she didn't harbor much animosity towards the girl. She had lowered her edge when it mattered most, and even if it seemed like a small gesture, Aloe still remembered it. Naila wouldn't hesitate to kill her if given the chance, but the ex-scribe had the feeling that the sultanzade wouldn't go directly for the kill. Only eventually.
Any thought that wasn't directed to Jafar, Aya, or Fikali was invaluable to her. Misery was slowly killing her, so small distractions like those were a heavensent.
"Hmm, I don't have many Cure Grass pills remaining…" Aloe mussed after sitting down for a rest. "I know it's my fault. If I hadn't used them to grow the Blossomflame, he…" She hastily uncorked her waterskin and drank water to avoid puking. "What would have happened if I didn't? Would everything be al…"
Aloe stomped the ground and stood up, she was well aware that pondering about the past and what could have been was only a downward spiral that would make it worse.
She spoke from experience.
Running all day was a dreadful experience on its own, but monotony could be worse. Her saving grace was that every hour of travel was far faster than any convoy. A scout that switched mounts at every chance could certainly keep up and overtake her, but it was a bit difficult to find someone in the middle of the desert.
"Names, huh?" Aloe pondered as she rested on the shade of a rock. "I never gave name to some of the stances in my 'infusion-speak'."
That was a thorn that had been in her foot for long but only now she had the silence and boredom to confront the situation.
"What stances remain to be named? We have," she started counting with her fingers, "haste, recovery, glamour, toughness, acuity, and… subterfuge. Yeah, I ended up giving stealth that name, right."
The murderer lazily and heavily laid the back of her head to rest on a rock. If it wasn't because she was in the shade and donning recovery, she would have fainted a long time ago.
"That leaves me with agility, strength, and flowing," Aloe added after taking a sip of water. "How can I have gone this far without giving strength an infusion-name when it was the second internal infusion I discovered?"
Technically, strength was the name she had originally given it. It was only a coincidence that both infusion and stance shared the name. But that didn't sit well with Aloe. She wanted to disassociate with imperials and Nurture as much as possible.
"Hmm, what about fortitude?" She went over synonyms first. "Nah, it's too similar to toughness, same with tenacity. I need a more unique word… Courage? Nope. The infusion does motivate me," she drew nonsense with her finger on the sand, "but it's more about hotheadedness than anything else. That's not courage."
Time was cut short as the rest already approached the fifteen minutes – or an hour and a half taking into account the regeneration stance – so Aloe packed up and started running once again.
She preferred to keep an empty mind to focus on her tempo when she ran, so it wasn't until she stopped to rest an hour later that she kept thinking about the name.
"Brawn? Might?" She hummed in thought. "One seems too pretentious, the other almost makes me look stupid."
Aloe sighed and continued with her march; this time a five-minute rest was more than enough. She also got a few extra minutes each time she had to switch into recovery and then into haste, so even those five scamp minutes were more than they actually seemed.
"Potency!" The woman almost jumped in joy once she came up with a name she was satisfied with. It had only taken her the rest of the day, she had already set camp as the sun was disappearing already with the advent of twilight. "Yeah, it sounds very Infusion-like."
The cultivator puffed her chest out proudly after coming up with that name. If it weren't for these ramblings and nonsensical wastes of time, she would have lost it. And this was only the second day of her fugitive status.
Like yesternight, Aloe traveled for a while under the gaze of the twilight until she found a rocky formation that satisfied her. The most important part of the decision was having solid ground under her rather than protection against the sun or sandstorms, because whilst dangerous, borrowing monsters scared Aloe more than sand-laden winds.
Sleeping was as simple as donning recovery and lying down. Her body was too exhausted to stay up for longer.
"Ah…" Before she knew it, she had already woken up.
Some would curse the dreamless nights she was having, but Aloe couldn't help but praise them. It was infinitely better to wake up the moment she closed her eyes than to have a hint of a nightmare.
Her life was too much like one for them to also harass them in her moment of respite.
After a light breakfast, the murderer stood up and continued with her escape.
"What stances did remain?" She pondered on the first rest once drowsiness had cleared away from her mind. "Agility and flowing, right." The answer came to her a minute later. "That's quite a conundrum. I still don't know if the flowing stance is Infusion or a whole independent thing, and I haven't tried agility enough to give it a name…"
She kept mussing about those issues until the next rest.
"I can't give flowing a name yet, I need definitive proof that Infusion and flowing are different things or not first. But agility… meh, I guess I can give it a name."
Before randomly shooting synonyms, Aloe recalled what Fatima had told her about the stance, vaguely remembering how the sultanzade almost broke her hip again with a slip of the mind.
"Maybe I'll be able to train it now." Aloe mussed without the intention of training it.
Agility already looked like one of the most difficult stances, and as lethal as speed, but without the same benefits. The former scribe saw no real advantages of being extremely flexible.
"I really like dexterity as a name," she said on the next rest, "but I can't tell if it will be appropriate or not with my limited knowledge. Maybe ductility would be more accurate, but it sounds hooorrible…"
Aloe groaned and stood up, her head had started spinning from all the thinking and she still was on the run. Forgetting that could be lethal.
"I wish I could find a city soon if just to restock…" It was a dangerous proposition, but if she kept avoiding any marks of civilization – even if she hadn't done it on purpose – then she would end up dead sooner or later from attrition.
Her headaches were getting worse, to the point she thought it may be from the fatigue rather than her overthinking, so Aloe settled with dexterity if just to let the subject rest. She only hoped that her pain only soothed…
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