The Ascension

13: The gang reunites

 Aster wouldn't wake for days, in fact, but that period of time was utterly meaningless to her anyways. Technically, while she had simply spent two days in space, a few weeks had passed on her planet- sometime while she was who-knows-how-far away, on Seltiabah, some sort of time distortion had occurred. So the fact she was unconscious for a couple extra days didn't really matter.

She wasn't even aware of the couple weeks thing for a while anyways. She woke in the middle of a road, and though she saw frost on the ground, her first thought primarily concerned where she was. Obviously back on Daliis. Right? But if she was back home, where exactly had the gods placed her- Ikina knew exactly where she lived, after all.

She got up. Frost was uncommon in Baased, but that was primarily because there was little grass in the city. But if she was somewhere on the outskirts, well, there still shouldn't have been frost- it was late spring. Almost summer.

Her head was remarkably clear, and she turned about, taking in her surroundings. It was on an incline of brown mountain road, surrounded by clumps of frozen black grasses. On one side was an overhang looking down on a similar sort of valley. Nothing familiar, or manmade, could be seen.

But Ikina probably hadn't just tossed her somewhere random. She decided to walk down the mountain, figuring anything important would show itself eventually. A frigid wind picked up, and Aster hugged her uncovered shoulders- And then realized something.

She wasn't cold. She felt the wind, and understood its temperature. But it was like she wasn't present to feel it. Her whole body seemed to be an unremarkable room temperature of heat, and the wind did nothing to change that.

Few things could be counted on to be coincidence in her life anymore. Especially something as ridiculous as this- she absentmindedly felt the scabbed over mark where the needle had pierced her arm. Likely, resistance to cold was just a side effect of whatever the gods had done to her.

She continued down the mountain- really, the choice of direction was solely on the expectation it'd be more pleasant to walk down an incline than up. What she did not know was that, in all likelihood, she had been expected to go up- after all, just a little bit up the road, Laila was sitting.

There's an idea of likelihood to this only because it's near impossible to tell what Ikina was planning. Down the road was Senya and Wren, to tell the truth, and Ikina had promised to reunite Aster with them. But Laila was also there, waiting. Would it be incorrect a meeting had been anticipated?

Surely not by Laila herself, that can be said for sure. She was in her naturally invisible state, and dully using her omnipotence to observe the boys walk. She couldn't quite see so much as sense, and their general state was just a simple mark on a list of checks she had running constantly through her mind.

She wouldn't normally have bothered to watch over two humans like this- since she really didn't mind Senya trashing her altar, truthfully- except Silan had asked her to. And she couldn't really deny Silan this.

Bloodlines of the gods meant nothing, but Laila knew Wren was Silan's son. And it meant nothing. But if Silan bothered to talk to her about him, and ask that she watch him while he was out of his realm, well... She didn't want to let him down.

Laila and Silan were enemy gods, designed to be from creation. They even represented the binary opposition of the sexes. The land and the sea, the man and the woman- even their personalities, though faint, could be argued to opposites. Bright and cheery versus gruff and pessimistic.

But they did not actually hate each other. Oh sure, they hated each other's presence, as Ikina had surely wired some sort of biological sourness that both experienced when they saw each other face to face. But Laila actually was quite fond of Silan. After all these eons of knowing him, it was hard not to like him. Or at least, know him really pretty well. Enough to get attached.