[Stella]
Something struck Stella as strange.
She noticed it a short while after they resumed their journey. A heavy silence, the sort one tried to break out of with ill-told jests and tales. Stella wasn’t one for such approaches, so she instead analyzed it, taking no time to trace it back to the group’s youngest.
The tension between Jehona and Yonten was one Stella had long since gotten used to, finding it both exasperating and amusing. It was a mild tension, full of squabbles and childish retorts, far removed from the dangers of their quest and the uncertainty of their future.
It was never heavy, somber. It never had them ignoring each other's presence—not out of annoyance, but wariness.
Stella thought it had something to do with Jehona’s suspicions. Whatever those were. She tried to ask Jehona about them after leaving Aslan, only for Jehona to evade her questioning.
“I’ve been thinking,” William began, “we only know of three Gates’ whereabouts.”
Stella might not be the one to break the silence, but she had to support William’s valiant attempt. “West Gate at Aslan, North Gate at Nova, and East Gate at Mirror Island. Nothing about the South Gate.”
“The Gates didn’t appear at once, right?" William said. "There must be an order to their appearance.”
“We know the West Gate is the last, and according to Painter Ren from Cora Town, the East Gate was one of the two first. The other was the South Gate.” Stella straightened up in her seat at that, now more invested in the topic beyond its ability to bring human sounds to their wagon. “Didn’t the West Gate tell you a man in robes gave him the key? If that was the South Gate, then he must be working as a recruiter for Aldric. That’s why he has no set location.”
“That’s troubling,” William mused. “Vice-Captain Greco insisted on getting all the keys.”
Indeed. Perhaps that was the tactic Aldric designed: distracting the Kingdom with obtaining the keys, giving the illusion of victory when, in reality, nothing was changing.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” came Yonten’s voice, breaking Stella out of her bleak trail of thoughts. “Aldric wants the same thing we do.”
Of course. “The Wind Crystal.”
Yonten nodded. “We don’t need to bother looking. So long as we look like we have a shot at obtaining the Crystal, that South Gate will show himself.”
William sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I am.” Yonten turned to the side, to Jehona, and asked in taunting, “Oh, did I make myself more suspicious? Should I shut up?”
All Jehona did in response was turning away from him.
Stella gave Yonten a questioning look, and he smiled, incredibly insincere. “It’s nothing.”
Stella woke up to a laugh, faint when she first took note of it and growing louder—unrestrained and unhinged. It was followed by an explosive sound, the startle of it not yet fading before her world tilted sharply to the side, and with it her body, her head crashing into something—cargo, or the wagon itself? Someone neighed. No, that was probably Rolo, and it sounded frightened.
She barely discerned her companions’ voices against the loud ringing in her head. They spoke something of an attack, the need to put out the fire, and Rolo. Did Rolo catch fire?
When Stella finally gained enough wits about her, she opened her eyes to a sky in early dawn’s reddened pink, marred by a cloud of dark smoke rising from somewhere very close. Scrambling to full alert had three things coming to her immediate attention.
The first was that the wagon caught fire, the last of the flames now being extinguished by Yonten’s Elemental work.
The second was that the wagon lost its hind wheels to the aforementioned fire.
The last and most concerning was that the culprit was a flaming, laughing thing in the distance, and it moved towards them. Rapidly.
The closer it got, the clearer its flame-engulfed form became.
The hyena.
Someone took Stella's hand and dragged her away—Yonten. She looked back to see that both William and Jehona took off to different directions, leaving the hyena abandoned in the center.
It wasted no time to shift its attention to the slowest and easiest target.
“It’s after us!” Stella noted with alarm, slipping her hand out of Yonten’s hold to allow them more freedom to run.
Yonten conjured up a small fire ball, throwing it at the hyena. It managed to get its attention, distracting it while she and Yonten looked for anything to hide behind.
The closest thing was a boulder, but it was both close in distance and exposed in angle. Her burning lungs and trembling legs jumped at the chance, however, and it was her now that dragged Yonten to take cover under the boulder’s shadow.
She leaned her back against it, not trusting her legs to keep her upright. Her breathing came out strained, choked upon trying to take more than what her body could allow. She never ran so far and so fast in her life.
Yonten seemed to fare better, managing to control his breathing to come out as shallow pants, saying, “I have a plan.”
“Does it involve us getting barbecued?”
“No, but it does involve setting things on fire.” At her doubting gaze, he asked, “You have anything on you that can explode?”
Stella shook her head. “Anything useful is back at the wagon.”
“Stay here,” he told her. “I’ll go distract it out of the way. Then you’ll come out and run back to the wagon.”
“Run back?” Stella repeated with all the distress her dry throat could muster.
While Stella had a number of regrets in her life, the experiments she conducted on herself never had been one of them. Until this moment. Until their effects on her stamina unfolded in full, agonizing detail.
Stella was wheezing by the time she reached the wagon, her vision sparking white as she pushed herself into its tilted cart, searching blindly for her belongings until she hit upon something with their shape. That mission accomplished, it was time to run again.
Her body protested the mere thought of it, swaying to a fall the moment she got out of the wagon. It was only a steadying hold on her that prevented it. “Careful,” came Jehona’s voice, and Stella was never as relieved to hear someone’s voice as she was this moment.
Jehona shifted to hold Stella's arm over her shoulders. A blur filled Stella's sights a moment after, the wind cutting around her weightless form.
She blinked and the world came to a still. It was while Jehona was helping her to sit on the grass that she realized it. “You teleported me away?”
“Yes,” Jehona answered. “Sorry I was late. I looked for you all once I realized it wasn’t following me.”
“She found me first,” William said, alerting Stella to his presence. “I thought it would follow me, too.”
“You don’t need to apologize for that.” The hyena was smart. It knew where to put its efforts. They couldn’t be faulted for Stella's lack of physical prowess. Speaking of which… “Where’s Yonten? He said he had a plan.”
Jehona looked at the distance, then asked, “Does it involve him becoming the hyena’s breakfast?”
Before Stella could answer, Jehona was gone. She was back a few moments later, half-carrying a bewildered Yonten, and then letting go of him to fall into a heap on the ground.
“You could afford to be gentler,” he muttered, shaking flames off the edge of his coat. He noticed Stella’s presence and perked up. “You got your things?”
Stella nodded. “What’s your plan?”
The plan hinged on Stella acting as a bait.
On one hand, she wasn’t required to exert herself. On the other, she was to stand in her place and rely on Jehona and William to either distract the hyena whenever it got too close, or pushing Stella away from the fire balls the hyena would send her way.
“This is a bad plan,” Jehona declared, saving Stella yet again from a fiery doom.
“It’s brilliance in simplicity,” argued Yonten from… somewhere.
Yonten’s part was to cloak himself with Light energy, using it to appear as part of the scenery. He’d use that guise to form a circle around the hyena, made from a few flakes of the remains he collected mixed with a concoction of Stella’s making.
Stella couldn’t tell where Yonten was at the moment, or how far along he was with the circle. She hoped he was close, because the hyena seemed as if it started to catch onto something being amiss. It stopped chasing William to stand in place, turning its head in search. Its orange flames ebbed as it focused, bringing Stella’s attention to a peculiar mark on the its forehead.
“Now!” Yonten bellowed, appearing out of thin air, a wide distance across of her.
“Brace yourselves,” Jehona said, placing herself between Stella and William and yanking their arms behind her, blitzing past the hyena and Yonten.
Only Jehona stood when the dust settled. William tried and failed to get up, while Stella made do with plastering herself on the ground, straining her neck to Yonten's direction. She saw him holding up a fire ball over his hand, waiting.
The hyena was quick to the uptake, setting its sights on him. It left tracks of fire in its rush, but just before it reached too close, Yonten let the fire ball drop to the ground.
Yonten’s circle burst alight with rose-colored flames, rising up so high it formed a wall around the hyena. The hyena tried to push through it, only to stand stuck with half of its body out.
The rose flames merged with the orange. Together they flared brighter and brighter, and the hyena's eyes glowed an eerie white.
Stella wondered aloud, “What’s happening to it?”
“It’s trying to absorb the flames,” Yonten answered her.
“Wouldn’t that make it stronger?” William asked in turn.
"Not necessarily," Yonten replied, tensing in alarm when the hyena let out a piercing sound. “It’s close to its limit. Let’s clear the way.”
They barely managed to cross a decent distance before the hyena let out another sound, almost a scream, so loud Stella felt it reverberating in her chest, stealing a few beats from her heart.
The sound died out, swallowed up by another. An explosion. It blew them a farther distance than they crossed, flattening them on the ground in its wake.
It took a long while for Stella to hear anything past the ringing, William’s call faint and growing stronger with every passing moment, “Is everyone alright?”
Stella settled for a nod in answer, fixing her sights on the circle and the hyena trapped within it. What remained of it: a pit margined by a wall of black smoke.
“Maladies hang on a thin line of control,” Yonten said. “It’s easy for them to lose it. Expending or absorbing too much energy would spell their demise.”
“So that’s why…” Stella murmured.
A neigh came announcing Rolo’s arrival. It walked with a leisurely pace, dragging the mangled wagon behind it.
Jehona jumped to check on the horse, fussing over it. Would her companions think Stella to be jealous of the horse if she noted how it had the safest standing of them all?
Yonten pointed at the wagon. “Do we have anything to fix it with?”
William shook his head. “The damage is too severe. We’d need to buy a new one.”
Stella furiously sifted through what she remembered of her map, her heart sinking at the recollection of just where they stood. Days away from Sahdi Village.
Oblivious to her internal crisis, Yonten and William continued on talking, every word a knife at her throat.
“That means we can’t waste time, yes? We’ll be slow enough on our feet.”
“Let’s figure out how to move the wagon’s load with us first.”
Stella sighed, and the rhythm of her breathing came out stuttering.
