Fuyuko was not in a good mood.

First, she'd been woken up just before dawn by... whatever it was that Amrydor had been feeling. That was weird, and she still didn't know what had happened.

Then she hadn't been able to get back to sleep, and she did not like being up that early in the morning to begin with, so she'd grumpily made her way upstairs to eat a heavy breakfast to help her feel more settled. Then had to tell her parents that her morning was crappy and she needed to go back to sleep now.

Thankfully, they were understanding, and her morning hours were usually spent practicing stuff she'd already been taught anyway, when not doing something for the nexus. Getting more sleep wasn't going to mess with anyone else's schedule.

Getting up and eating had helped her get back to sleep, so now that she had woken back up, she did feel better than when she'd first crawled out of bed, but that didn't mean she felt great. Having her sleep interrupted that way was disruptive.

After that, she'd scrubbed her face with cold water to try to wake up a little more, then settled in with a book to wait. A quick check with Amrydor had let her know that there wasn't really enough time to go do anything, as he had already been heading back, but wanted to talk with Mordecai first. Then a while later, said he was taking a quick bath first.

At least her book was good, though she thought it might be aimed at someone younger than her. Young princess runs away to go work for a dragon because she didn't want to get married to some guy her family wanted her to marry. No romance stuff to deal with.

The least plausible part of it to Fuyuko was making a tasty-sounding dessert like that and not eating any of it at all. Hmm. Maybe she should see if her parents knew how to make this. She wasn't sure if setting it on fire with alcohol was really needed, or just for show. Maybe they could skip that part?

Fuyuko was enjoying her musings when she felt Amrydor's attention focus on her as he approached her door. Well, gentler than being interrupted by a knock. "Door's unlocked," she sent to him as she closed her book.

She got to her feet just before the door opened and Amrydor walked in. Fuyuko stared at him for a moment before pointing to a chair. "Sit down!" she said as she let herself pay more attention to their bond than she had been. It confirmed what her eyes told her: Amry was exhausted and had been forcing himself to stay awake. Maybe she should have pushed more when he said everything was fine; she'd been trying to not get involved since he clearly didn't want to talk about it.

Amrydor hesitated only a moment before he shrugged with a brief smile and obeyed. "As my princess wishes, of course."

Oh, she was going to strangle him.

Later.

"Amry," Fuyuko scolded, "I said I wanted to know what was going on, but I didn't say you had to rush here. You should have let me know you were this tired."

"It's fine," he said, waving off her concern. "It'll be easier to tell you now; then I can sleep until the caravan gets here, rather than trying to make sure I remember to talk to you later."

Fuyuko felt like she was beginning to understand why Shizuko had said that boys were stupid. "Fine, well you're here, so, tell me, I guess. Wait, no, food. Have you eaten?"

He gave a half-hearted nod, like his head was heavy. "Yeah, had a bunch of food with me already; I've been eating as I walked and stuff."

"Hmm." She frowned at him, then shook her head. "No, I don't think you've eaten enough. You still feel weak." Their bond might not let them talk to each other directly outside of the nexus, but it did have the advantage of letting them know how the other was doing. Unless, of course, you had some reason to be actively ignoring it.

"Maybe, but too tired right now. Let me just tell you what happened first, alright? I'll eat more when I wake up."

She nodded reluctantly, motioning for him to go on as she paced.

"Well, um, I have to ask you something first. Could you give a limited promise to not tell anyone? No one wants your parents to know, and your dad has already figured out enough that he seemed quite happy to pass on knowing more."

That made her worry more, but it wasn't a hard request either. "Alright. As long as it doesn't involve someone's health or safety or something like that, I promise I won't tell anyone, even my parents." That should give her enough leeway if she needed it, and he had only asked for a limited promise.

"Right, thank you. Um, so, it has to do with Klastoria, and she said to use my judgment when telling you what happened — it's your parents she really doesn't want to find out. Or most others; she just wasn't going to ask me to hide anything from you."

It took him a moment to find his next words, and Fuyuko could tell he was fighting his exhaustion to focus on what he was trying to tell her.

"Er, anyway, I've been trying to figure out more about my life and death sense, and she's a very different sort of life, so I wanted to examine her. That was fine, but she also wanted to test if she could control her reflexes and instincts when not paying attention since I was delving and didn't have the protections of a contractor. It sort of worked, but she also wound up, well, kind-of-like she had partially soaked into me. That was really weird. Then she tried to pull herself back out of me. That was kind of bad, and that was what woke you up."

"Bad?" Fuyuko asked as she briefly paused in her pacing. "Did she hurt you?"

"No, not like that. She, well, sheseepedout of my skin. Imagine sweating a lot, but the sweat is all oozy and is both pushing itself out from the inside and pulling itself out from the outside. But things got weirder after she finished separating herself from me; she said that she was missing part of her mass, and thought that I'd 'eaten' part of her. That turned out to be my armor, but we found that out later. So, um, this meant she was now really hungry, and was trying to fight the impulse to eat me. That's what she's most embarrassed about; she feels like she was betraying what the nexus wanted of her."

Fuyuko thought that Klastoria might have a point there, but, well, Fuyuko wasn't going to claim she was perfect either. She nodded to show she was listening, but kept her mouth shut; she didn't want to interrupt when he was struggling to get it all out.

"So, she figured out how to bind herself by offering me a challenge. I, um, won that challenge, which was how we figured out that my armor was what was eating her. Now my armor can do this." He rolled up his sleeve to show the living armor underneath, which suddenly became coated in thick ooze that formed and hardened into a thick section of plate armor made out of crystal. "And, well, this was from pulling in all of, er, her. Except for her core. I think she wants me to do something with her intact core, but I wouldn't feel right just treating it like materials or an item or something, and I certainly don't want to display it."

He had Klastoria's core? Intact? "Youkilledher?"

Amrydor flinched, then nodded with a sigh. "Yeah, that was the challenge. I needed to use my abilities to retrieve her core before dawn, or she would eat me. That was her out; her way of stopping herself from acting and to give me a chance. She wasn't resisting; the difficulty was because her core was deeper than it appeared. Her internal space is bigger than it looks."

That was just... Fuyuko shook her head, unable to find the words to express her thoughts. "Amry, that's crazy. Why did you accept her initial challenge to begin with? Being eaten by acid sounds like it'd be painful."

"Er, well, I wanted to increase the rewards I was getting."

She rolled her eyes at that, then paused and looked him suspiciously. Nothing she'd seen suggested that Amrydor was greedy like that, and his answer was sort of vague. "Why?"

"Um, well, I did get a gift for Gemeti."

The way he said that felt off; he wasn't telling her something still. "Amry—"

"Yuyu," he said, cutting her off, "please don't. I get to not tell you things occasionally, alright?"

His tone caused her to stop and think, and then she quickly became embarrassed. "Right, sorry. I don't need to know that. I was just worried, and, you know, got caught up in asking things." Which didn't mean she wasn't still curious about what else he'd gotten, but if he wanted her to know, he'd tell her.

"So," she continued, "that sounds like a lot. You sure you're alright?"

"Yeah, just tired."

Well, him saying that to her meant that he believed it; it didn't mean he couldn't be wrong. But she also wasn't going to badger him. "Well, I guess that's fine then. Um, so that thing you did with your armor, how much can you do with it? Can you make any armor you want over the leather?"

He laughed suddenly. "Klastoria had a similar expression when she asked me to demonstrate. I can do anything solid, and I can fake articulation, but I can't do things like chainmail, where it sort of has to be a bunch of individual parts. I can sort of fake that too though, with a kind of squishy layer that gives me the same amount of movement."

Anything solid? "Hmm, so does that mean you can make your armor all ornate and fancy? Oh, can you do things like spikes? Or maybe like blades on your forearms? What about shields? Wait, if you can do shields, can you do weapons? Wait, no, first, how did Klastoria ask you that? You'd just killed her." Which felt so weird to say.

"The challenge was right before dawn; she met me in the tunnel on the way to the river zone." He shook his head as he stood up. "At least she wasn't having trouble controlling herself anymore, but she also said she's really hoping I'll let her eat me some day. It's really kinda weird; she's possessive about it too, and said that she doesn't want anyone else to eat me. Well, except you, like you had first dibs on eating me or something."

While he was talking, he'd started testing all of her ideas, but he also looked really tired while he was doing so. That made her feel bad, but Amry seemed curious too.

"Wait, she thinks I would want to eat you?" Fuyuko asked while watching him test how much he could do with the shape of the crystal armor.

"Maybe? Er," he paused for a moment, looking uncertain, then said, "She also mentioned some stuff about Oni funerary rites."

Oh. Fuyuko sighed. "The luponi do that too. It was one of the things in a book they gave me, though they kind of talked around it. I think they didn't want to just say it, in case it upset me, but they also didn't want to hide anything. So it was stuff like 'partake of the fallen'."

Now it was her turn to hesitate before she admitted, "It doesn't bother me like I think it would most people. I mean, I don't really want to or anything, but I don't find it offensive either. And yeah, if I was at that sort of funeral, I don't think I'd have any problem with being a part of it." It wasn't something she actually wanted to talk about, but the topic was there now, and her only options were to tell the truth or somehow be evasive.

Fuyuko had been worried about how he'd react, but she could still feel his emotions over their bond, and there was no sense of revulsion or such. He just seemed thoughtful for a little while before he said, "I'm not sure I get it; I think I'd have a problem with being part of the ritual, but I don't have a problem with it happening, or even with you being a part of it."

Well, that had gone a lot better than she'd been dreading. Enough better that she actually had no idea what to say, so they stood there in silence for a moment as Amry finished testing her ideas, and added a few more variants like making a spiked shield.

It didn't take him much longer to finish checking her ideas. They all seemed to work, though he wasn't sure the weapons were a great idea. "It's pretty strong, but something like a spear seems like it would be brittle if it got hit from the side. And I don’t know if I can suck the broken-off material back in after, or if it will regrow like the rest of the armor. "

"Maybe," she said, pacing as she thought about all the possibilities, while Amrydor sat back down with a tired sigh. "But isn't the bad thing about spiky armor and stuff that it would get in the way? But you can just grow spikes any time you want. Or, say you block an attack and turn the weapon away, and now your fist is pointed at them. You can just suddenly grow one of those arm-blades rather than swing back around or something."

"Mm."

"Oh, wait, what about a helmet spike so you can headbutt a big monster? Or... Amry?" Fuyuko had turned back to face him, and he was slumped sort of oddly. Had he fallen asleep that fast? Checking on him made her sigh; now she felt really badly about asking him even more questions.

Well, now what was she going to do?

After some consideration, Fuyuko shrugged and grinned. He might be embarrassed, but she was pretty certain that he also wouldn't mind. She was just glad that there were no shoes allowed inside, so she didn't need to take off his boots or anything.

She picked him up and carried him over to her bed, placing him down on top of the covers. Then she went and got a separate blanket to throw over him; having him on her bed was one thing, under the covers was another.

Now she could grab some food and bring it back with 'watching over him' as an excuse, and then read her book until he woke up. Or until the caravan got here; she'd wake him up for that. But there was one thing she wanted to check first, just in case.

Fuyuko leaned in close to Amrydor and inhaled deeply through her nose, taking in his scent. Then she let it go gently, feeling relief. Klastoria's comment had made her worry for a little bit, but no, smelling Amrydor didn't make her want to chew on him.

She did like how he smelled; it made her feel warm and safe. So having his scent on her pillow would be nice. That was also something she had no intention of telling him. Though it also carried a hint of that graveyard serenity, which part of her brain did not like, but that was washed out by the amount of comfort she found in it.

Pleased, Fuyuko went off to get some snacks. She was even going to be nice and make sure there was enough so that he could have some when he woke up. And she could have some more too when he woke up.

Note: There was art on this chapter only available on the sites where I post.

PATREON:

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Early chapters, some excerpts and short stories, andmore art!