Nova had a dozen more questions but decided to save them for later or see if Beil had any answers. As she pulled the tunic over herself she let the blanket fall. It was just short of her knees and it felt awkwardly breezy. Interestingly, as soon as the tunic was on, a pair of pants hit her in the back of the head. She turned to see the old woman had rolled over and was mumbling that she had almost forgot before the snoring started up.
"I take it you're used to this," she asked the air and put them on with a bit of a struggle as she tried to get used to balancing on her new legs. When she looked up to find Beil was gone she ducked through the deer hide door outside to look for him. He sat on a bolder quietly staring at the horizon, deep in thought, and as he locked eyes with her he slowly stepped down and took a closer look at her face.
"Kinsoul indeed. She was unable to give me a human body, but you..." he trailed off. She felt a twinge of guilt.
"I don't even know what happened in there, or why I'm human again. I thought I was just getting my memories back."
He shook his head. "I would love to give you an explanation, but the only thing I can tell you is what I saw. From the moment her spell reached into your mind you started to spasm, knocked things off the table, hit me with your tail, and you were glowing so much we both left the hut as quickly as we could."
"What, did you think I was going to blow up or something," she asked half jokingly and half concerned.
"Partially." He clacked his beak and rubbed his head with his tallon.
Her smirk vanished and she hugged her elbows, tempted to curl in a coil but with this body it would be a strange fetal position so she remained standing.
"You mean you thought I might have blown up like a literal bomb?"
"No, not like a bomb, we feared that you would start to shatter and your soul would break free from your new body, which would cause a good deal of damage to the surrounding area."
"That's a bomb, Beil, with a soul involved."
He shrugged with his wings and looked her up and down before taking a deep breath. "When we came back inside once the light faded and it had grown quiet, you had grown legs and arms and the majority of your scales had dissipated into particles of light. We watched as your tail shrank into nothing, your face shifted into what it is now, you gained hair and teeth and you got bigger around but shorter in hight. You were also whimpering in pain and exertion so grandmother covered you and provided you with spirit energy to replace what you used to transform. This is most likely the reason she needed immediate rest once you regained consciousness."
Nova had listened carefully but it seemed like that was the end of it when he went quiet and was looking at her hair shifting in the breeze. She held up her hands, wiggling her fingers, and felt a huge sense of gratitude.
"You are incredibly powerful, Nova. Human form is hard to obtain, even with my strength and after so many years I have not managed it, and Nana told me she was unable to give me aid as my body was simply refusing to shift."
He was trying hard to achieve what she had simply had happen to her by chance. She reached over to him to touch his cheek. He flinched, relaxed under her hands, and let her stroke it with her thumb. It was her turn to comfort him. "I'm sorry, " she tried but he shook his head and lowered his eyes.
"You have no reason to apologize. It is not your doing. I am just relieved that you are safe."
She smiled sweetly, and she had lips so it felt right this time. "Thank you, Beil. If you hadn't brought me here I might not have lasted very long. And thank you for my name, and for sharing your story with me. All of it."
His eyes squinted in delight, those dark eyes she'd grown fond of. "You are very welcome."
"The question is," she said and turned towards the edge of the cliff, "after we are done fixing this place up, how do I get down? You can't carry me anymore."
"Ah. That is the question."
The old woman who Nova had come to learn was called Wanita was both a past Foster mother to three other lost souls, literally, and a grandmother to one of their children. Beil was one of her first, and she was proud of that.
All through the week she slept in that hut while they fixed her fence, weeded the gardens, patched up the walls and roof, and stocked up her wood pile probably too much. They started making up things to do, hunting and gathering, boiling water for cooking and cleaning, they were even considering canning vegetables for winter until she finay woke up on the sixth day, and thank goodness she did, they were really getting worried for her. She saw the huge amount of progress in only a week and, claiming that it was way more than the required payment, she gave them some of the money she'd saved up.
They had both tried to refuse, but one look at Nova's outfit and they relented. She needed proper clothes. She guided them to the hidden mountain pass that she had used to even get up here, which made the pair feel like fools for not thinking to look for one, and off they went.
After about a mile of walking, his tallons softly grazing the stone and her footsteps light slapping without any shoes, she thought of something.
"Beil?"
"Yes?
"You're seven hundred years old, yes?"
"Correct."
"How old is Wanita?"
"Nana is... you know, I never asked. She has been old since the day I met her."
"Wow... and Beil?"
"Yes, what is it?"
"Why do you act like a child sometimes?"
He looked at her, flabbergasted. "Pardon me, but who is the child here?"
"Technically I am almost twenty, unless of course my soul was on standby for longer than a few weeks."
"Your body looks twelve," he said as if that won him the conversation.
"Than the snake corpse I took over was twelve. Your point?"
"I forgot to take that into consideration."
"And so I'll ask again: if you are seven hundred years old, why do you act as if you're my age sometimes?"
He paused and they took a few more quiet steps before he spoke. "Most of the time I simply match your energy, it brings comfort to those who feel lost or alone, but other times I genuinely feel like a child."
"How is that possible?"
"Do you assume that after you become an adult you just drop all the habits you learned as a child? That you become desensitized to surprising things and know exactly what actions to take at any given moment?"
"Something like that," she admitted, "but I also thought it was when you become a parent that you grow up."
He chuckled and his beak clicked a few times. "That can happen, but from what I have seen there are children raising their children, some never seem to grow up."
"Almost like they don't want to," she asked, thinking back to high-school. Grown men who were supposed to be the teachers, the mature guides, were picking fights with literal children. She also thought back to that one entitled customer in her dad's ceramic shop that wanted either the prices to be dropped or for specific items to be made as quickly as a few hours with no understanding of how it works, and would even break things like a bratty little kid when they didn't get their way. "Yeah, I understand how that goes."
Beil shook his head. "So you too have seen your own examples of adult children. Time goes by and nothing ever changes. Still, I can excuse some of their behavior."
She looked at him in surprise. "How so?"
"To err is human. People make mistakes, and most do not realize they have even made them. When my patience snaps, when I feel talked down to by someone older or more powerful, when I talk with Nana, I feel like the naive boy that I used to be, but only for a moment. It honestly stopped really affecting me centuries ago; however," he said and his entire demeanor shifted to something she didn't know if she liked to see him become, "when I must protect someone or something important to me, when I am needed as a guide, when I absolutely need to be respected, or feared," he added with emphasis and looked her in the eye with a hardness that made her stop walking, "than I can flip the switch and become someone as far from childish as you can imagine."
She shuddered involuntarily and, with visible effort, his eyes softened again, but not as soft as they started. "Why choose to be that way only some of the time," she managed after she had recovered.
"That is not the life that brings me or others joy. I used to be that way constantly, angry with how broken the world is, tired of trying to set it straight. Cold, aloof, hard on everyone and myself. I was dangerous, unapproachable, and alone. All the regret, all the pain, it made me want to stop living.
"It took me nearly four hundred years to realized that if I continued living in such a way that I was going to cause more misery than I was trying to prevent. And even after all of that, I was still behaving with an immaturity that I was not aware of. Because I had closed my mind."
"By acting like a soldier?" That's what he sounded like, a soldier who was fighting the endless war that was himself.
"Exactly."
They turned the corner and followed the path down, stepping over narrow streams and jagged rocks, weaving around dried vines and thick underbrush to find the path again. She brushed the hair out of her face and took a deep breath through the nose, soaking in the scent of nature. She didn't notice but he was watching her carefully, taking in the view.
What she had failed to notice, even with the still pools of water around them to catch her reflection, was that she was an incredible beauty. Her skin was a soft white cream color, like she had never spent a day in the sun, but somehow she still had a very light dusting of freckles just on the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. One wouldn't notice them if they weren't standing close.
Her hair was thick, dark like cocoa with little streaks of gold in the sun, glimmering, and flowing with the air. Her lips were a soft pink and gently downturned, her eye brows were nearly straight over her eyes, which quite frankly were the most striking feature, like ice with an edge of black preventing them from melting away. He noted that they were the same color they had been when she was a snake and he was suddenly very fond of that feature in particular.
She finally noticed his gaze and blinked like she used to do before a radiant half grin caught her lips. "What," she chuckled lightly. His first instinct was to either look away or pick on her like the boy he used to be. His immediate follow up was logic.
"You look beautiful, is this what you used to look like before your soul transfer?"
He watched several emotions flick across her face. First a slight blush of embarrassment, then realization, then deep contemplation, and finally resolve as she looked up at him. He noted that he was still taller than her and for some reason that made him a little happy.
"No, I used to be tan, taller, more square faced, and with lighter hair. Why do you ask?" She had finished with a loaded question and he wheezed, making her scowl at him.
"So you were beautiful then as well? I used to look like a sundried tomatoe. Red faced and red hair, sure I had muscles but they were lean so the rest of the men around me always looked like professional body builders in comparison."
Her scowl shifted dramatically as she burst out laughing and he felt like he had done something right.
To him she was porcelain, delicate, sometimes to the point where he forgot she was rapidly becoming stronger, especially now that she had this body. An Ayakashi with a human body was almost always exceptionally powerful, especially when they achieve the transformation at a young age. He could not recall anyone ever managing to take on human form before fifty years old at the youngest, and that was almost five hundred years ago. And yet, here she was, brilliant in every way.
His eyes drifted back to her lips. He moved closer, his beak parting, wanting to--