Dawn followed Verita into the moonlit cabin, her heart still pounding after her time in the hold’s ominous darkness. Verita was right - the clicking of the door’s lock made her feel a bit safer. Maybe that was her mistake. She’d thought she knew what the elf was like. Dawn had seen her tease Foran before, in the woods, but the kiss she’d forced on Verita wasn’t anything like that. What did Verita mean when she said it was her fault?<br/><br/>Dawn cocked the head at the girl as she searched the cabinets. She was still covered in blood from the battle at the Aviari village, and Dawn guessed she didn’t look much different with her torn robes and tangled hair. They all looked like that, really. And they were losing themselves, too. To magic, to prophecy, to darkness...<br/><br/>Finally, she blinked. What Verita had put on the table definitely wasn’t rum. For one, it was green. While she didn’t know what it was called, the travelling merchants had always traded something that looked similar just before the Burning Festival. The adults drank quite a bit of it, and... they’d been<i>odd</i>.<br/><br/>“I hope it tastes nice,” Verita said. “I’ve never really drank anything besides the honeymead my father makes in the winter to keep the chill out of your bones. I do quite love the fuzzy warm feeling it gives you, so perhaps it could keep out the cold in our hearts for a while? Have you.. ever drank anything?”<br/><br/>Dawn gave a little nod. Verita seemed to be trying to find something normal after all the madness that had happened. She couldn’t say she didn’t feel the same. “A lot of different wines and meads. Ale, too, but I don’t much like that.” She paused. “Rum once or twice, I think. Different towns seem to have different drinks.” She spread her hands a bit. “I’ve never had...<i>this</i>, though,” she added.<br/><br/>She’d learned not to drink too much after the first time. People liked to use alcohol to try to take advantage of people. That probably didn’t matter so much here. With her magic mostly used up, and without many daggers left, it wasn’t like she could defend herself very well anyway.<br/><br/>She looked at the glass filled with the green<i>whatever</i>with something between caution and curiosity and tucked a loose strand of her dark hair behind an ear. She was so distracted by the green shadow it cast on the table that she almost didn’t notice Verita looking at her. Finally, she took the glass in her hand and tipped it into her mouth. She winced; it was so hot in her throat that it almost burned, and its heat spread quickly through her chest.<br/><br/>“You must feel like you wished you had gone the other way when you met us in the forest, don’t you? Where did you actually come from? I know so little about your last days... Everything seems so unreal, and nightmarish at the same time now...”<br/><br/>Dawn shook her head, and gave Verita a concerned look as she choked down the drink. “I don’t regret it,” she said at last, her grey eyes almost shining. It was hard to believe that she’d been drawn into everything by a fey attack. It had been Verita’s moans, of all things, that had called her. She felt heat rising inside of her, but she wasn’t sure if it was just the alcohol.<br/><br/>She averted her eyes. Verita had been through things no one should have to go through. Having to run away from her own village, almost being fed on by pixies, seeing countless people die around her, all because of some crazy prophecy. She’d changed, but she wasn’t broken.<br/><br/>She refilled her glass and downed it again.<br/><br/>“I don’t regret it at all,” Dawn repeated. “I’ve been on my own since the Vale was... destroyed by creatures like the ones we fought, years ago. They had that same kind of darkness about them, like a goosebumps and chills everywhere all at once. That’s why I could fight like that, back in the village. I... was still angry, after all this time, and I didn’t even know it.”<br/><br/>She paced closer to Verita, tilting her head slightly. “Until I found you that day, I was lost. I wandered from village to village with nowhere to go back to. I wandered for a long time. At first, I was just looking for a reason to<i>be</i>, I think. I learned a lot of things about the world and about people... not all of them were nice.”<br/><br/>Dawn was quiet for a long time. “Eventually, I just wanted something to change my mind about how horrible everything was. And... I think I got that, somehow.”<br/><br/>She’d gotten rather close to Verita as she talked. Even covered in muck as she was, Verita was still beautiful. She gently touched one of the feathers in Verita’s hair. “Verita, I...”<br/><br/>There was a knock on the door, and Dawn jumped. “Verita? Dawn? Either of you in there?” Donchen’s voice was unmistakable. Whatever Dawn had been about to say, she didn’t finish. She made her way over to the door and unlatched it, swinging it open for the small Vulpari. For a moment, it looked like there might be two of him, but she shook her head quickly and it went away.<br/><br/>“What’s... going on?” she asked, blinking.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>