The Majors, Rebuild and Reunite (Book 3)

Chapter 17: Swear to Me

~Gemini~

The gravel crunched beneath our four pairs of feet and a set of talons.

Bubbles was currently getting the princess treatment, curled up on Violet's back and fast asleep between the crook in her neck and shoulder blades.

Sausage walked a little ahead of the rest of us, Waverly's spellbook still clutched tightly to his chest like if he even so much as loosened his grip it would disappear into the void. His shoulders hadn't relaxed since he had set eyes on the pages, his jaw tense.

For the hours we had walked, Sausage felt... distant. His expression was guarded, there was no more excitement at our revelation, just solemn resolution.

Had he seen something else? Another vision? Or was he just so focused on the task at hand that his body language had changed, as if he were a different person?

I quickened my pace, matching my strides to his. He wasn't much taller than I, but with his back straightened sharply, like a marionette stretched to its capacity, he seemed like a giant. I knew I shouldn't ask, I knew whatever mood he had fallen into was directly related to our discovery. But I had questions, concerns. What if there was something we were missing?

"Sausage," I began, leaning some of my weight onto my staff, which I was currently brandishing like a walking stick. "Can I talk to you?"

"Sure." He replied, with only the ghost of his usual peppy cheeriness. He hardly even glanced in my direction. "What's up?"

I frowned, but didn't comment on the overall... un-Sausageness so far in the interaction. "About the spell—" The tendon in the side of his neck visibly tensed, straining against his skin. "—it says strength of the caster, right?"

"Right." He said slowly.

"Do you think it just means it needs a powerful caster, or that it'll actually take the caster's strength? Like– kill them, take it."

There was a pause. A very long pause. Both our staffs fell in unison to hit the ground as we continued to walk, several feet ahead of Fwhip and Katherine, who were immersed in their own rather loud conversation involving sediments existing in the different terrain throughout the continent.

It was a difficult thing, telling what thoughts were racing through Sausage's brain. Unlike Fwhip, whose ideas I could predict as if the gears churning behind his eyes were on the outside of his skull (gears which desperately needed to be oiled), Sausage was much more complicated to speculate.

But I saw the surprise, the way he caught his lower lip between his teeth, biting back words, like he had expected anything but what I had asked him. And I saw the confusion, too. "I'm not sure." He finally answered after a moment. His hair looked white, for a moment, in the sunlight as he turned his head, the scraggly beard in desperate need of a shave grey along his jaw, all returning back to the deep, chocolate brown as soon as we stepped back into the shadow of the mountains rising around us. Except for those couple of wisps turned permanently and prematurely white. It struck me how much he seemed to have aged in the years since the Great Catastrophe, that we had been separated. I suppose we all had.

"We should do the spell together then—" I said quickly, before he could make another suggestion. "So if it goes wrong, with both our strength we'll have more time to back out if it tries—"

"We both know that if it goes south neither of us are backing out, Gem." Sausage's voice was solid, driven, as he delivered the short but true statement. His eyes didn't leave mine, that same determined sureness I had seen in them so many times engraved in the blue. A determination I had seen in them before his coronation, before he fell from the Sapphire Spire underneath Xornoth's control, when he told me to end it. Before we all dispersed from that one little clearing in the Derelict Forest, convinced that we wouldn't be returning alone.