[1] WEEPING MONK // you're not what I was looking for

25| Where Fates Collide {Part Two}

Ari worries for Lancelot's fate and questions the new magic in her grasp

They walked and at most trotted through the early morning so as to avoid travelling too far in perhaps the wrong direction. It would not be helpful if they had to circle back on themselves too many times. Ari sighed as they stopped in the forest to let the horses nibble at some tufts of longer grass. There had been no snow since they had been at the camp so now the ground was just muddied and wet, dirtying their boots the more that they walked.

"They can't be much further," she said, sounding as exasperated as Lancelot's still aching body felt.

"If they are smart, they should have marked out directions by now," Lancelot pondered aloud, the Fey would have been here for long enough to do so.

"You mean those twig things that we saw?" Squirrel asked, looking up to them. He couldn't wait for the day where he was tall enough so that his neck didn't have to bend this way just to see these unnaturally tall Fey's faces. Lancelot and Ari both nodded but they weren't looking at him, their eyes scanning through the forest.

"Is that how you found Fey?" Squirrel asked, pointing his question at the former Paladin as he circled in front of him.

"Sometimes," Lancelot answered vaguely.

"Who taught you to read them?" Ari wondered, looking over to Lancelot. She hadn't been entirely surprised that he knew how to read the Fey markings, but the reason for why he did hadn't exactly put her at ease, being a former murderer to their kind and all.

"Nobody," Lancelot replied with a tilt of his head. He glanced back to Ari leaning against an old tree casually but her expression was anything but casual, an eyebrow cocked high above her fiery eyes as she waited for further explanation. Lancelot wet over his broken lip before expanding on his meaning,

"The markers have patterns. Learn the patterns, and you learn to read the direction." It had taken a while, but Lancelot learned from his mistakes and eventually worked out how to distinguish direction, distance and even what kind of place that the markers where alerting whoever was reading them to.

"Like those," Squirrel pointed up between the trees.

The adults' faces both followed to where the boy was indicating. Ari frowned as she pushed with her shoulder off of the tree and stepped closer to the boy. Her face changed to a look of honest surprise at the child's find.

"Squirrel, I might just knight you sooner than I had planned," she confessed jokingly, reaching back to take hold of her horse.

Squirrel smirked at her as Ari started to walk towards the Fey markers he had found, "I wouldn't object to that." He stepped in line beside Ari as they wound through the trees.

"I would," Lancelot muttered under his breath, not loud enough for any of them to hear as Ari and the boy walked towards what Squirrel had found far back from the trail behind the trees. He was still protective of the child, not wanting him to grow up too quickly like Lancelot had been forced to do. He didn't believe that Ari would actually do as she had said, she wouldn't willingly put a child so young as him into the dangers, namely fighting their enemies, that being a knight would bring.