The Wake of the Flood - Teratornis (2024)

Chapter 1: Bunker

Chapter Text

It was pure chance Aloy found the old bunker, half-buried in the heavily wooded hills above the coast.

It wasn't necessarily why she was here, but her actual reasons had all but dried up. She'd managed to scrounge up some vague leads, months ago, that she'd hoped would lead her to either Sylens, HEPHAESTUS, or a backup of GAIA. She'd been trying her best to follow them up, but so far she'd had no luck.

Sylens had long since made himself scarce. He had to know she'd be looking for him, and she'd never yet managed to get much of a leg up on him.

She'd had higher hopes for a backup of GAIA. There were cauldrons and cradles and all manner of scattered ruins of the Old Ones everywhere, and she'd thought surely, if she just found the right starting point, she'd be able to track down something concrete.

After a couple months of fruitless searching, her hopes and determination had waned. By the time she'd resorted to roving the countryside, hoping to chance upon some sort of evidence, she knew she had gotten to a point where she was just wandering to wander as much as anything else.

She wasn't opposed to that. This was land she hadn't seen before, new places with new sights, and she hadn't lost her interest in seeing more of the world. If anything, the more she saw the more she still wanted to see, especially once she'd heard some of Elisabet's logs. She had a perspective now that she'd lacked in those early days outside the Embrace, one she thought would drive her for the rest of her life.

She still felt like there was more work to do, though. She couldn't wander forever. She knew she should return to Meridian, to try to see if she could pick up any trails or rumors there, but turning around now felt like giving up.

The bunker, when she stumbled across it, sent a surge of hope through her that maybe she'd finally found something useful, something that might at least point her in the right direction.

She told herself not to get her hopes up. It probably wasn't anything related to GAIA at all, but its mere existence was reason enough for her to look deeper, as far as she was concerned. Her interest in exploring the ruins of the old ones had only grown with time, helped along by a healthy dose of spite for the Nora and their taboos. Maybe it would turn out to be merely an interesting place to explore, but that was enough for her to do exactly that.

The sealed door had been partially buried when she'd found it, and there weren't any other entrances. She'd spent some time looking before resigning herself to digging, but at least she didn't have to do it by hand. Tracking down a scrapper and overriding it to clear enough earth for her to open the place up had only taken a couple of hours, and it was still only mid afternoon when she stood before the now uncovered entrance.

The door hissed open when she commanded it to, the ancient metal and mechanics catching and jittering a little as it slid aside, and she drew a sharp breath at the swell of air that rushed past her and into the dark space beyond.

It didn't happen often, but she'd explored enough old bunkers like this one by now to know what that meant. She'd never forget, after how she'd found the Zero Dawn alphas.

This place had never been unsealed. Not since it had first closed, no doubt before Zero Dawn had gone into effect. The wear and tear of time hadn't managed to break through, and nobody had found this place in a thousand years.

She crept cautiously inside. It was just a hallway, at first, delving deep into the hillside before opening up into separate rooms. There was a room that was recognizable as a kitchen, and a space that she couldn't see any true purpose to at all, except perhaps as a communal gathering area. She found a couple of storage rooms, but there wasn't much in the way of useful materials there.

Most prominent was what appeared to be some sort of computing hub or station. Monitors and consoles lined the space, some of them still flickering in the view of her focus, with fragmented, mostly incomprehensible data.

It didn't take her long to find a series of personal logs.

A lot of them were degraded as well. Listening to them, she identified four different people who'd been working here, living here, at the end. What she could make out was scattered at best, but she listened and read them intently anyway.

The bunker had been a watching station for the Faro Swarm, she learned. Occasional mentions of Zero Dawn made her hope that there might be something useful here spike, but the more she heard, the less convinced she was. This place had been connected to Zero Dawn - or Enduring Victory, at any rate - but it seemed its sole purpose had been to track the movements of the Swarm.

Except it sounded like that hadn't worked out either. She wasn't sure exactly what had happened, but from what she could figure out, it seemed like some of their equipment had been destroyed. She had to piece together bits of different logs to work out that they'd been functionally blinded after that, unable to track the Swarm or relay information.

She suppressed a shiver. It wasn't a new story. She'd found logs like this in other places, accounts of people who'd been cut off, who knew what was coming for them. There was some hope in the log entries, for a little while, but the longer she listened the less of that she heard. By the time she'd gotten to the final few, there was only the resignation she'd found in so many other places.

Except in the last entry.

The last one was strange. The person who'd made it - Caleb Tate, according to the logs - was mostly absent from the other recordings. She'd found a few other entries he'd made, but they'd almost universally been formal and impersonal.

The date on this one was well after the date that had appeared on the last of the other logs. She still had to stop and think about how the Old Ones had calculated their dates, but by her reckoning, Caleb Tate's final log had been recorded at least a month after the final messages from the other three.

"The others are dead," it began, the voice rough and tired. "They have been for a while now. It's been months since our array was destroyed, so there hasn't been much. . . point, to this place, for some time. We couldn't track anything, and it was safer to cut off any signals after that. Minimize the chances of the Swarm finding us." There was a brief pause, a slow breath. "They figured it was only a matter of time, though. That it was between facing the Swarm and dying by inches, so they. . ." There was an unsteady sigh. "Well. I suppose I can't blame them."

The voice gave a low, weary chuckle, then sobered again. "I have to assume there's. . . nothing much left past our doorstep by now, as it were. Fifteen months, we were told, and we've passed that deadline. Somebody would have gotten in touch if anything had changed, and there was never much chance of that anyway. We all knew Zero Dawn was a long shot, whatever it was supposed to do." There was another low, dry chuckle. "Maybe there's more to it, maybe there's something I don't know. Probably. I have to hope there's a piece I'm missing, but-" the voice snorted derisively "There was never really a chance. Not with how things were going." There was a quiet sigh. "I always thought we had more time."

Aloy narrowed her eyes. What did he mean, that he'd thought they had more time? And if the others living here had chosen to end their lives, why hadn't he done the same? She couldn't imagine being stuck here alone like that.

"I can only hope that, if there is something more to Zero Dawn, that it's doing what it's supposed to," The voice went on after a brief pause. "No way to know at this point, I suppose. There's nothing much for it but to wait and see. Either the Swarm will find their way in here, at which point I'll only be so much biomass to them, or. . ."

There was a long silence, long enough that Aloy had to check and make sure the log was still playing.

"I'm going to disable the air filters tomorrow, I think." The voice eventually continued. "I don't much care to continue like this, and suffocation. . . well, it sure beats starvation or dehydration, or going mad of isolation. And, presumably, getting consumed by a swarm of hungry war machines." There was a weak chuckle, and for the first time, he sounded afraid. She heard him drag in a deep breath after a moment, though, before continuing. "If they don't find this place, though, and if somehow the world gets through this as anything other than a lifeless ball of rock. . ." Another, briefer pause, "Well, I'm not going anywhere, am I?"

There was a short silence, and then the log ended.

Aloy frowned. That had been. . . very strange. She'd heard a couple of logs with that kind of. . . acceptance, she supposed, but this one just felt different.

It almost felt like he expected to see the other side of it, if the Swarm didn't find this place, and clearly it hadn't.

She scoffed. That was ridiculous. It had been a thousand years since then.

Still, she made sure the log was saved and backed up, then went to explore the last few rooms.

It wasn't much. There was only what looked like a bathing room and toilets, some personal storage spaces, and two sleeping chambers with two beds apiece.

She found three of the bunker's residents sealed in one of the sleeping chambers. All three were laid out on the floor, side by side, with stiffened, crumbling cloth draped over them. She could see the shapes of their limbs, carefully arranged, and could even make out the vague outlines of mouths and eye sockets beneath the thin cloth.

The three Caleb's log had said died before that last recording. She couldn't imagine it, living holed up in here with three corpses, the bodies of people who'd probably been his friends, even if they had been sealed away in a separate room. Why, she wondered, had he done that? Why hadn't he died with them, like so many had chosen to do at that time?

She'd definitely come across enough records of people who'd made the same decision. Given what they'd been facing, she couldn't blame any of them.

She didn't touch them, didn't do more than look for a long minute before moving on, but there was something compelling and sorrowful about seeing these people, so long dead, laid out so deliberately by someone who'd clearly cared.

She went to check the last room, the second sleeping chamber, and stopped dead as soon as she set foot inside.

She'd expected to find the last body in here. It was the only place left he could have gone before he'd died, so it stood to reason. He was there, stretched out on one of the beds.

He was perfect. He looked alive.

He lay on his back, head turned a little toward the wall, one arm at his side and the other folded up so his hand rested on his stomach, his legs stretched out along a bunk that was a little too short for him. His clothes were as dry and stiff as the others, practically crumbling now that there was air again, but the body itself. . .

She stared, wide-eyed. He looked as if he were asleep. As if he'd just laid down a few minutes before to take a nap. He had pale skin, dark hair, a hawk's nose, and looked as if he could just wake up at any moment.

She stood frozen, still staring, her heart racing. This couldn't be possible. She'd visited far too many ancient places and seen far too many centuries-old corpses. She knew this wasn't possible.

She only moved when she realized, at long last, that he wasn't breathing. Perfect or not, he was actually dead.

She let out a slow trickle of a breath, edging forward, and warily pressed her fingertips to his neck just to be sure.

No pulse. Cold skin. He was dead, even if his skin was precisely the same texture as it would have been on a living human. There was no stiffness, no waxy feeling to it. He might have died only moments ago, instead of a thousand years, if it hadn't been for the film of dust over him.

She stared at him for a long few minutes, trying to figure it out. She briefly wondered if he'd somehow snuck in more recently, maybe even after she'd arrived. It was possible someone could have gotten around behind her, she supposed, but why would he have come in here just to lay down and die, if that was the case?

And the clothes he was wearing showed the age that the body didn't. The shape of him was sunken into the crumbling mattress. No, he'd been here the whole time. Somehow.

Why this man, and none of the others? What was preserving him so well? How did it work?

It frustrated her that she had no good way to find those answers. It made no sense. It bothered her.

Annoyed, she turned away at last, intent on looking around the rest of the room. She could already see there wasn't much, aside from the eerie corpse.

She was just turning back to the door when there was the sudden sound of a breathless gasp behind her, and then a bout of dry, rasping coughs.

Chapter 2: Millennium

Chapter Text

Instinct reacted before conscious thought, and she spun around and fell into a ready crouch, unslinging her spear in the same motion and aiming it toward the sound.

The sound of a dead man breathing.

He was trying, anyway. The eerily well-preserved corpse had rolled onto his side, and was alternating between gasping weakly and coughing helplessly, a sound that made her throat and chest hurt just to listen to.

But he was moving, and breathing, and alive, and he definitely hadn't been any of those things a minute before.

She tensed as the coughing finally subsided into harsh, gasping breaths. He'd opened his eyes to narrow slits - the fact that he still even had eyes was impossible - and one of his arms dangled off the bunk now. He didn't seem to be aware of her presence.

She edged forward a step, spear at the ready.

He definitely noticed her then. He twitched in surprise, lifting his head unsteadily and turning to face her, eyes squinted almost shut. He tracked her movement as she eased sideways, but from the way his gaze shifted and failed to focus on any specific point, it didn't seem to her as if he could see very well.

"What did you do? How did you just. . ." she said warily, unable to think of anything else to say or do.

He opened his mouth, trying to speak. All that came out was a harsh croak, though, and he descended into another fit of coughing. He slumped back to the mattress, wheezing helplessly, and after a minute weakly lifted a hand to mime drinking.

She supposed a man who'd been dead for a thousand years probably would be a little dehydrated.

She shook her head. That thought had a bit of a hysterical edge to it, and this was not any time to get hysterical. She had to know what the hell was going on here. She had to.

Cautiously, keeping the spear leveled with one hand, she reached for the canteen tied at her belt and tossed it to him. She felt a little bad when he failed to catch it and it struck him on the chin, but not enough to get any closer or to lower the spear.

He picked the canteen up clumsily, squinting as he fumbled to uncap it, her presence seemingly forgotten.

The first drink was a gulp that he sputtered around, setting off another round of coughing, but the second was slower, more careful. He alternated between taking careful sips and just lying there, eyes closed again, breathing harshly. That seemed to be getting easier for him as he drank, though.

Which was crazy. He shouldn't even be alive at all. There was no way he was lying there, drinking her water and, seemingly, recovering from being dead for centuries.

She kept struggling to find another explanation. There had to be something. He had to have found a way to get in here and seal it up again more recently, she told herself. Maybe he'd just been drugged or poisoned. Maybe. . .

None of it worked. She knew perfectly well that this place had been sealed and airless, and there was no way anyone could have snuck in any time recently and sealed it up again. If he hadn't been here the whole time there was no way his clothing and bedding could have aged to look as they did now.

What she was seeing now was impossible, though. How could a person come back to life, especially after so long? How could he lay there and drink her water like. . . like a normal man?

Finally he lowered the canteen, breathing slowly and carefully for a long minute. He moved almost experimentally, getting his arms under him and pushing himself unsteadily more upright. He peered at her somewhat dazedly as she tensed, seeming to really look at her this time even if it took his eyes a minute to focus.

"Is that a spear?" he finally croaked. He managed to sound incredulous.

She blinked, thrown by the unexpected question, and her mouth got ahead of her brain to respond. "What else would it be?"

He squinted at her. "Don't know," he muttered, and gave a couple of rasping coughs before grimacing faintly. "I can't see very well right now. You're sort of. . . one big blur, but that looks a lot like a spear, and if you're threatening me I'd like to be on the same page about it."

She stared blankly at him, mouth slightly open.

He shifted again, carefully moving his legs off the bed so he could sit on the edge of it. The mattress and blankets were crumbling to dust with his movement, as was his clothing, but he barely seemed to notice. He lifted the canteen to take another slow drink, then made a disappointed noise when he drained the last of the water, turning it upside down with a sigh.

He seemed awfully calm about having a spear pointed at his chest. But then, he seemed pretty calm about the fact that he'd been dead a minute ago, too. Maybe a spear wasn't all that impressive to someone who'd just come back to life.

She frowned, considering the situation, then lowered the spear slowly until the tip was pointed at the ground.

He watched her do it, then actually smiled at her, if a little vaguely.

She drew a slow breath of her own, disconcerted. A dead man was smiling at her. A dead man who'd come back to life, who'd just drunk all her water and was sitting there like nothing was wrong.

"You were dead," she said, wary, almost accusing.

The smile disappeared, and his still squinted eyes narrowed further. She could see him working through something, sorting things out in his head.

"And. . . who are you?" He finally said. She thought he was going for mild irritation, but to her he just sounded lost.

She supposed she could sympathize, on a theoretical level. How much was he aware of? How much could he remember?

That didn't mean she didn't still need answers. She shifted her grip on the spear, lifting it slightly as she frowned at him. "You were dead," she repeated forcefully.

His eyes flickered to the spear briefly, then back to her face, and he licked his lips uncertainly. "I don't suppose I'll be able to convince you that wasn't the case," he finally conceded.

She frowned, her mouth again getting ahead of her and responding without as much input from her brain as she might have liked. "It might be fun to see you try," she said bluntly.

He blinked, then gave a startled laugh that almost immediately descended into another fit of harsh coughing.

He had to just sit and breathe for a minute when the fit subsided, eyes closed again, but finally he raised his head once more. For a long minute he just stared at her, brow furrowed, then straightened unsteadily to look up and around at his surroundings.

She couldn't tell what he was thinking, but he looked upset. She couldn't really blame him for that, either. She shifted her weight, impatient as he looked back at her and swallowed.

"Yes," he said harshly at last, "Yes, I was dead. You're right." A pause "If I stand up are you going to stick me with that spear?"

She frowned, hand tightening on the spear's haft, and thought for a minute. "Would it do me any good?" she finally asked.

He'd lasted a thousand years in a sealed bunker. If that hadn't killed him, she wasn't sure a spear was going to do the trick.

He raised his eyebrows, and she could tell from his expression that he was working to control another bout of laughter. "Astute," he muttered at last, then sighed. "No, not for long anyway. Still, I prefer not to get myself gutted if I can avoid it. Hurts terribly, makes a huge mess."

She eyed him warily. Just who was this man? How common was it for him to come back from the dead, for him to speak that way about taking a spear to the belly? It could be an assumption, an extrapolation, but somehow she didn't think so.

That scared her. Honestly, everything about this scared her. This man was impossible. Everything about him was impossible. "How are you alive?" she asked him at last.

He didn't respond, instead holding onto the wall next to the bunk to keep himself steady as he tried to rise to his feet.

He didn't make it far. He managed to support himself against the wall for maybe a second, then slid back down to sit on the crumbling mattress again, breathing hard and shutting his eyes tightly. As she watched he hunched over, resting his elbows on his knees and pressing his forehead into his palms. He looked more than a little shaky, even curled inward like that.

It didn't surprise her, and honestly she was glad for it. She was already talking to a dead man. It might have just been a step too far if he'd been able to stand up and walk around already. It was kind of a relief to know that he was human enough to suffer this kind of weakness. She really hadn't been sure. She still wasn't sure just what he was.

She shifted her weight, slowly sliding her spear around so it was slung across her back again. "You're Caleb Tate, aren't you," she said flatly. It wasn't really even a question.

He looked up at her, frowning. "What makes you say that?"

"I heard your final log." she tapped her focus with a fingertip. He'd actually know what it was, if he really had been here since the time of the Old Ones.

He stared at her in silence for a minute, then straightened carefully and took another look around the room, brow furrowing.

"How did you get in here?" He asked, his tone harsh and strained. "Who are you? What's. . ." He stared at the door, hands flexing against his knees.

She could tell he had more to say, more questions, but after a moment he pressed his lips to a thin line and looked down at the floor.

She was patient for a minute, giving him some time to work through whatever was going on in his head, but her own questions burned. "How did you do that?" She asked at last, when she couldn't wait in silence any longer. "How did you. . . people can't just do that, and you're acting like it's normal."

He continued to stare at the floor for a long minute, long enough that she wasn't sure he was going to respond at all, and she wasn't sure what she'd do in that case. She wanted to demand answers, but there was only so far she could go with that before getting aggressive, and this man had done nothing to her. Whatever she wanted from him, she wouldn't hurt him for it.

At last he took a deep, shaky breath, looking up to watch her again. "I'll make you a deal," he said stiffly.

She frowned at him, but gestured for him to continue.

"You get me out of here, get me some food, some more water, maybe a change of clothes, keep me out of trouble for a bit. Do that, and I'll tell you about why I'm still alive."

"Done," she said before she'd even had a chance to think about it. She didn't need to think about it, she just had to know. And if all he wanted in return was some basic supplies and a little babysitting, well, that was a small price to pay for answers to the questions she had about this.

And honestly, she wasn't about to just leave him here. He couldn't even stand up, and the nearest settlement was more than a day's ride from here. He'd never make it on foot, even if he knew where to go. It would've been cruel and senseless to abandon him, even if she hadn't badly wanted answers.

If he was startled by her abruptness, he didn't show it. He just gave a stiff nod, reaching for the wall again and bracing himself to make another attempt at standing up. He hesitated for a long minute, though, then sighed and bowed his head. "I might need some help," he admitted "I'm not terribly steady at the moment, as I'm sure you've noticed."

She eyed him warily. She'd kept back, as much as the small room allowed, but he was right. Unsteady as he was, she doubted he'd make it to the door of this room, much less outside the bunker. She wasn't keen on getting close enough to a potentially dangerous stranger to touch, but his weakness wasn't feigned, and it'd be pretty stupid of him to try to cause her harm right now. Not when she was probably his only chance of getting out of here. Besides, she had agreed to help.

For his part, he seemed just as wary of her proximity as she stepped closer and pulled one of his arms around her shoulders, but the wariness was quickly joined by interest as he finally got a closer look at her. She could see his eyes moving over her outfit, her braids and gear, at least until he had to turn his attention to putting one foot in front of the other.

They made it as far as the door for the next sleeping chamber before he stopped, his weight dragging on her shoulders as he turned to stare into the room, eyes fixed on the three covered bodies.

None of them had managed his miraculous revival. All three were right where she'd left them, and he stared down at them in silence for a long minute.

Finally he turned away, though, and they started moving again.

They made their way slowly outside, awkwardly shuffling through the silent bunker. Their differences in height made the trip difficult, and he stumbled frequently. It frustrated her, but she couldn't really blame him. The fact that he could stand at all, even if he needed help, was as impossible as the rest of this.

He gasped faintly when they finally stepped out into fresh air and sunlight, shutting his eyes tightly and ducking his head. "Bright," he muttered under his breath.

She frowned, but pulled him along carefully, leading him to the shadier patch where she'd left her strider. The machine had been standing placidly, and lifted its head to gaze in their direction as they approached, shifting its feet.

At the sound of its motion, the dead man twitched and half opened his eyes, then made a strangled sound of alarm and yanked his arm free of Aloy's hold. He stumbled back a single step before his balance failed him, and landed hard on his back. "What the hell is that!" He exclaimed, dragging himself further away, eyes fixed on the strider in alarm.

Aloy blinked. "A strider?" she said, briefly baffled. It wasn't as if they were uncommon.

But then, he wouldn't know that, would he? He'd been sealed away since long before they'd even existed. Of course he wouldn't know what a strider was. Furthermore, she supposed the last machines he'd seen might well have been the ones that made up the Faro Swarm.

She sighed, rubbing her forehead. "Oh boy," she muttered to herself. This could get. . . complicated.

She bent down to grab his arm, tugging him back to his feet. "Look, it's mine, it's harmless, okay?" She told him, nodding toward it. "Just a common machine, they don't usually hurt people, and this one's under my control anyway."

He continued to stare at it blankly, but didn't resist again as she helped him closer. When they were near enough, he pulled away from her and took a stumbling step toward it, then had to catch himself against its neck and shoulder when his legs faltered. He clung there tensely for a minute, as if he expected it to do something other than just stand there. When it became apparent it was unbothered by his touch, he began to relax, brushing his fingertips tentatively over the metal and cord of its head.

His expression transformed almost immediately to one of fascination. "Incredible," he murmured. "Absolutely incredible. Is it for transportation? Why make it look and move like a horse? There are more efficient methods, faster methods."

She blinked, frowning, not understanding what he meant. "What's a horse?" She asked after a moment.

She wasn't prepared for the look of surprise and then dismay that passed over his face as he turned to stare at her. She shifted uncomfortably as he gazed at her in silence, then slowly lifted his eyes to stare out over the strider's back, out at the hills and the trees.

"I don't. . . recognize this," he said after a long silence. "I don't recognize any of this. It's. . . everything is different. Even the. . . even the hills. . ."

He took a slow breath, then another, closing his eyes for a moment. "How. . . how long. . ." He paused, swallowing, and opened his eyes again, even if it didn't seem like he was actually seeing anything. "Do you know how long it's been since. . . How long I've been. . ."

Aloy chewed her lip for a moment, reluctant to respond. She knew what he was asking. Even if he'd been prepared to face whatever fate was in store for him, according to the log she'd heard, was he really ready to hear just how long he'd been sealed away? Just how different the world was, from how it had been?

She tried to imagine it. Tried to think of it like going to sleep, only to wake up and find that everything she'd ever known was gone, and had been for centuries. That the world had ended, and what had replaced it was completely different from anything she'd ever known, ever seen before.

She couldn't picture that. Not really, not in any way that was more than intellectual, and that didn't come close to really understanding how that would feel.

She considered lying, giving a different time frame or telling him she just didn't know. Maybe it would be a kindness.

She wasn't very good at dishonesty, though, and generally didn't have the patience for it. And in his place, she wouldn't thank anyone who lied to her about something as big as this.

"About a thousand years," she finally told him quietly.

Chapter 3: Immortality

Chapter Text

For a moment, he was very still, eyes fixed and staring blankly out at the trees. She thought he was holding his breath.

He sat down abruptly.

It was more of a collapse, really. His legs simply stopped holding him, and he landed hard on the ground for the second time in about as many minutes. He continued to stare blankly, looking more than a little dazed.

"Well," he finally said weakly, "That's. . . a thousand years. That's. . . No wonder it all looks different."

Then he just sat there, gazing wide-eyed out at the landscape.

She waited for a minute, and sighed when it became apparent he wasn't going to move on his own any time soon. She went to the strider and dug through the bags she had slung over it, finding a backup waterskin and a packet of jerky and travel biscuits. She crouched next to him and shoved both unceremoniously into his hands, making him start. "Eat that," she said flatly. "Drink."

He did, somewhat mechanically at first, then with increasing focus as the need for food overcame the initial bout of shock. She doubted he was exactly over it - waking up after a thousand years didn't seem like the sort of thing a person just got over - but he was at least responsive.

Clothes were a slightly more difficult prospect. His own had almost entirely crumbled away by now, and while neither of them seemed terribly bothered by his nudity it was definitely cold enough that he was going to need something to wear. She had a spare tunic that, on her, was loose-fitting and went past her knees, as well as a kilt he could wear easily enough. On him, when he got himself together and put it on, the tunic was tight across the shoulders and barely reached his knees at all, but it was all she had on hand that would even come close to fitting. Getting him something better was going to have to be the first order of business.

She left him alone to dress and collect his thoughts a little, intent on the deep creek she'd seen a little ways down the hill that had appeared to contain a good population of fish. She didn't want to subsist on dry biscuits and jerky if she had the opportunity for something better, and it sort of seemed the least she could do for a guy who probably hadn't eaten anything in centuries.

She couldn't get her head around that. She still didn't understand how this could be real. He'd promised her answers, though. As soon as they'd both eaten, she'd have them.

She was gratified to see he already had a fire going when she got back, but he still seemed pretty out of it as she started the fish roasting. As much as she wanted to launch into an interrogation, she bit back the urge and let him keep his silence for now. She was burning with questions, and it became harder and harder to hold her tongue even as she tried to focus on getting the fish cooked, but he'd definitely had kind of a shock.

Of course, so had she, and she supposed it wasn't a bad idea to let herself sort of. . . digest that, a little. She could admit he probably had more to process than she did, but that didn't mean her worldview hadn't been casually upended today.

She'd seen a man come back to life. A man who'd been sealed in an airless bunker for a thousand years. Just the coming back to life part was impossible, and she'd give the world for it to be otherwise, but after so long. . .

There was no way it could happen, yet the evidence was sitting right in front of her.

She wondered distantly what Elisabet would have thought. She wondered about that a lot, these days, knowing as she did now who and what she truly was.

She managed to wait until he'd finished most of his fish. He seemed stronger by now, more coordinated, and he wasn't squinting at everything anymore. That felt just as impossible as everything else. How could he recover so quickly, from what had happened to him? He didn't exactly look healthy yet, but he was worlds away from the desiccated corpse he should have been.

She chewed her lip, working out how to start as she tossed her own fish bones into the fire.

"Your name is Caleb, right?" She began at last, deciding real introductions would at least be polite before she started digging into what she really wanted to know.

He was silent for a minute longer before he gave himself a slight shake, looking up at her warily. "Depends."

She frowned. "On what?"

"On whether or not a Hebrew name will get me lynched or enslaved these days."

She stared at him in confusion. "What's Hebrew?"

He blinked at her, then scoffed faintly. "I. . . see. Yes, my name is Caleb." He narrowed his eyes. "And you are. . . ?"

"Aloy."

He tilted his head slightly, apparently waiting, then sighed when she offered nothing further. "Interesting. Is that a common name these days?"

She shrugged. "I've never met anyone else who had it."

He looked as if he might ask something more, then stopped himself, lips thinning as he shifted his gaze to the fire.

"How did you survive?" she asked at last, eager to get into the real topic of this conversation. "You. . . came back to life. You were dead, I checked, and then you weren't."

He was silent for a long moment. "Are you working with anyone?" He asked quietly at last. "Any. . . any governments, or law enforcement, military. . ." He waved a hand vaguely.

She stared at him, confused again. "I'm a Nora brave, a thrush of the Hunter's Lodge, and I have the favor of the Sun King of the Carja," she said slowly. "Is that what you mean?"

It was his turn to stare, mouth hanging open slightly and eyes blank. "I. . . don't know," he finally said, sounding lost, and raked a hand through his hair before nodding to her strider. "Who designed that? Are you affiliated with them? It had to be a well-funded tech lab of some sort."

She gave her head a slow, baffled shake. They really weren't understanding each other here. "No, it was wild. I just overrode it."

His jaw worked, mouth opening and closing, and he looked more lost than ever. "Wild," he said weakly. "A wild robot that looks like a horse."

He covered his face with his hands and groaned softly.

"Look," Aloy said, the beginnings of annoyance working its way into her voice. "I don't know what you're asking me. But you said you'd tell me how you survived. I gave you food, I gave you water and clothes. Now tell me."

He lowered his hands, and this time when he looked at her, his expression had gone cold and hard. She felt her hackles rise at it.

Neither of them moved, but after a second he relaxed gradually and sighed again, looking distinctly unhappy. "I realize I can hardly enforce this, but I'd prefer you kept this to yourself, alright? It's. . . better that way. Safer."

She raised her eyebrows at that, but just shrugged. "I'm kind of a loner anyway."

He gave a crooked little smile, and seemed to reach some sort of decision.

"Right. Well, in that case."

He shifted a bit closer to the fire, adjusting himself to sit cross-legged, resting his hands on his knees.

"The short answer is I'm immortal."

Aloy frowned incredulously at that, and he gave a wry smile

"What, you don't believe it after that demonstration earlier? Hand me a knife or something."

She hesitated for a long moment, reluctant to give him a weapon. She didn't know him, didn't trust him, but the fact remained he'd be a fool to hurt her. He was still weak, and didn't know the first thing about the way things were now, but the wariness was automatic.

She still had her spear close at hand, though, and it wasn't like she wasn't perfectly capable of defending herself even without it. Finally, begrudgingly, she did as he asked.

He nodded in thanks, then unhesitatingly and unflinchingly carved a deep gash across the back of his forearm.

She made a strangled noise of surprise, half lurching forward in a reflexive move to stop him, but it was far too late for that. Blood was already streaming over his arm and hand, nearly black in the firelight.

He just smiled blandly at her, a slight pinch between his brows the only sign of pain, holding his arm out where it was well-lit by the fire and wouldn't drip on his borrowed clothes.

Gradually, before her eyes, the gash sealed itself until there was no sign it had ever been except for the streamers of blood.

He offered her the knife back, that bland smile still in place.

She took it warily, eyes fixed on his arm. "So the spear really wouldn't have done anything if I'd gutted you with it," she concluded, glancing at his face as she shifted back to the other side of the fire.

"Oh, it would have done something," he replied with a grimace. "It would have hurt a hell of a lot, and depending on how determined you were about it, I probably would have died." He paused for a moment before continuing carefully, "It just wouldn't have stuck."

She was silent as she processed that, wiping her knife clean and tossing one of the recently refilled canteens to Caleb so he could wash his arm off. "How long have you been like that?" she asked slowly.

He shrugged. "Long as I can remember."

She scowled at him, annoyed at his vagueness. If anything, she had more questions than ever now. How did it work? How had he gotten to be that way? Was he the only one like that? And what was he, even, that he could do this and be so. . . so used to it? So casual about it?

She rubbed her forehead, giving a frustrated sigh. "Are you human?" she asked at last, a little desperately.

He blinked, eyes bright. "Good question. Are we talking biologically or philosophically?"

She groaned, and he offered an innocent smile.

"You knew you were like this when you went into that bunker," she finally said slowly, switching to a new line of questioning. "You knew you'd survive. Or. . . come back."

He sobered, staring into the fire again. "Yes. . . and no," he said slowly. "If the Swarm had discovered me, I would have been just as dead as anyone else. Even an immortal can't survive being atomized and converted to fuel. Even if it didn't, though, I wasn't. . ."

He paused, lifting his head to gaze around at the trees, that lost sort of expression back on his face. "I didn't know if there would ever be a world to wake up to again. I thought. . . maybe there would be nothing left, ever. Maybe the Swarm would destroy so much that the earth would never recover."

"And you were just okay with that?" Aloy said incredulously.

He glanced back at her, grimacing. "No, of course I wasn't just okay with that," he snapped, and for a second grief and something that looked a lot like fear fought for control of his expression. "But what was I supposed to do about it? I've never been the sort to just accept oblivion. I wanted to live. This was my best chance. Don't think I didn't agonize over it for a long time before choosing to walk into that bunker."

He took a deep, slightly shaky breath, eyes distant.

"I suppose I got my wish," he muttered weakly at last. "This feels like one of those 'be careful what you wish for' lessons." He was quiet for a minute, and then looked up at her with that lost expression again. "What. . . happened? Humanity clearly survived, life clearly survived, but what happened? A thousand years. . . I know exactly how much the world can change in that time, but. . ." He glanced at the strider with a confused frown.

Aloy frowned as well, taking a slow breath. She didn't even know where to start with that. She was probably one of the only people in the world who'd even be able to give him a real answer, but it was going to take some time to explain. She didn't think she'd ever had to explain before. Sylens knew, but he'd been her unwanted guest when she'd been learning about this. She hadn't had to tell him anything he hadn't been privy to already. Anyone else she might tell. . .

They just didn't have the frame of reference to understand what she meant, what she was talking about. It occurred to her that Caleb actually did. He'd actually know what she was saying.

That didn't mean she knew how to embark on that conversation, and it would probably be hard for him to hear. To her, what had happened with the Faro Swarm and GAIA was ancient history. Impersonal, except for how it related to her recent struggles against HADES, and her more direct connection to GAIA and Elisabet.

For him, it would be all too personal. It was his world that had been destroyed.

And, before she even tried to get into that, she was getting hung up on one thing in particular he'd said. "What do you mean, you know exactly how much the world can change in a thousand years?" She said slowly.

He went still for a moment, then frowned at her. She couldn't tell if he didn't want to answer, or if he was upset at having his own question ignored, but he didn't look happy either way. For a minute, she didn't think he was going to respond.

Fine. She was prepared to bring up their deal again, if she had to, but in the end, it wasn't necessary.

"It means immortals don't age," Caleb finally said in a flat tone "It means I am over a thousand years old, even without counting my recent. . . hibernation. Once you've lived through a full millennium, the implications of being dead through one are a lot more. . . immediately obvious."

She gaped at him, struggling to process that. She knew a thousand years was a ridiculously long time. She could count them up, try to picture all the things that happened in one year multiplied by that time frame, but she simply couldn't get her mind around the fact that a person could actually be that old.

"But. . . that means. . ." She began weakly, "You saw. . . you've been around. . ."

"Long enough to live through more than one reshaping of the world," he said heavily. He looked on the verge of saying more, then hesitated. Twice, he did that, then at last gave his head a shake. "Explaining ancient history wasn't part of our deal."

Aloy scowled, frustrated. This was. . . it was more than she'd ever imagined. She'd tried to understand the Old Ones, to get her head around their customs, their practices, why they'd done the things they had and how the world had been then. She just. . . she had to know, and for once, those answers were within her grasp.

He wasn't wrong, though. He hadn't promised her anything like that, and she suspected explaining it all would be as hard for him as explaining what had happened the last thousand years would be for her.

She bit her tongue for a moment, warring with herself, then set the whole matter aside. She had the beginnings of an idea, but it could wait a minute, and she had another question first. One he had promised to answer, in a sense.

"You said immortals, plural," she pointed out slowly "You weren't the only one, were you?"

Surprise crossed his features, then uncertainty. "I. . . No, I'm not. There are a good few of us in the world. A tiny number compared to the mortal population, but. . ." He trailed off, swallowing, and raked a hand through his hair as he stared into space.

She looked away for a moment. "You knew others. Others like you."

He licked his lips and nodded, eyes still fixed ahead.

She kept her eyes focused on the fire. Had he thought, when he'd closed himself in that bunker, that others like him might survive? That he might still have friends alive, when he came out again?

Maybe he did. Maybe there really were others left, who'd managed to seal themselves away somewhere.

But he'd said even they wouldn't survive the Swarm, and humanity itself hadn't. It was only because of Zero Dawn that she - and the rest of humanity, the rest of life on earth - still existed at all. She didn't know the exact odds of another immortal surviving like he had, but she knew they had to be close to nonexistent. The odds of Caleb's survival in its own right were nearly impossible.

But he didn't know that. He didn't know what had happened to the world, to humanity. That none of it had survived.

She closed her eyes for a moment, rubbing her hand over her face.

She didn't want to tell him. Telling him how much time had passed had been hard enough, and she didn't know how to say that his friends were gone. That nothing had survived, that nothing of the world he knew remained. How was she supposed to tell someone that their world had been razed to the ground, and then rebuilt?

Her neck prickled, and she looked up to see him staring at her. "What is it?" he asked, harsh and almost desperate.

She took a slow breath, quietly bracing herself. "Humanity didn't survive," she said, her voice low and flat.

He frowned, shaking his head uncertainly.

She grimaced, looking away. "You were right, about what you said in your log. About Zero Dawn." She took a shaky breath. "It wasn't made to stop the swarm. Not fast enough to save anything, anyway. It was designed to crack and broadcast the deactivation codes, yeah, but. . . but there wasn't any time. It took decades to get the codes, it couldn't deactivate the Swarm before everything was gone."

She couldn't meet his eye, but she knew he was still staring at her. She didn't want to see his expression, and she couldn't begin to imagine how it felt to hear this. How would she feel, if someone were to turn up and tell her everything she knew had been wiped off the map?

"It wasn't to save anyone." She continued quietly."It was. . . it was a reset button. It was made to build a new world, once the Swarm was deactivated. Not to protect the one that already existed." She swallowed, toying with one of her braids for a moment before shaking her head. "I'm sorry. Everything was destroyed. There's. . . there's nothing left. "

For a long time, the only sound was the crackling of the fire.

Then Caleb stood and turned his back, walking away into the dark.

Chapter 4: Deal

Chapter Text

He didn't go far. Aloy could see him standing on the hill, just past the strider, and staring out across the landscape.

She didn't make any move to follow. They were strangers to each other. She didn't have any right to intrude, not after what she'd just told him.

Not when he'd learned the world he'd known was long since dead. That maybe he was the only piece of it left.

It had her thinking about HADES again, about what would have happened if she'd failed in stopping it.

It would have been the Swarm all over again, except worse. The Swarm's only motivation had been to sustain itself and replicate. HADES had purpose .

She supposed her only comfort in that scenario was that she would have been dead long before witnessing the destruction of the world. Helis and Eclipse would have seen to that, if HADES itself hadn't.

Caleb had seen it. He'd seen his world fall apart, even if he'd been. . . dead, or hibernating, or whatever he wanted to call it by the time the Swarm had wiped out the last vestiges of life. He'd probably been so hopeful, assuming the fact that she was here meant there was a chance something he recognized had survived. Culture, society, maybe even others like him. In his shoes, that's what she would have assumed. It seemed a lot more plausible than the idea of something like GAIA rebuilding the world and humanity from the ground up.

But here they were.

She jumped in alarm as she heard him give a wordless, furious cry, looking up from the fire in time to see him sink to his knees.

She looked away again, jaw clenched.

He came back not long after that, returning to his spot across the fire to sit down stiffly, staring into the flames. "It's all gone," he said harshly, and despite the flat tone, it sounded like a question to her.

She took a deep breath, then nodded. "Yeah. There was no way to stop the Swarm in time, so they made something that could rebuild after it had been deactivated."

He took a slow, deep breath, then another, hands flexing on his bent knees. "Zero Dawn," he said bluntly, then, "Terraforming?"

Aloy blinked, then nodded. "Yeah, pretty much. It didn't. . . I mean, some of it didn't go as planned, but we're here. People. Humanity. We're all over the place."

He finally looked at her, frowning. "Didn't go as planned how?"

She gave a frustrated sigh and shrugged. "Well, when the program created humans again, there was supposed to be an archive of. . . everything, basically. Everything humanity had learned. The APOLLO database. It was supposed to teach people about their history. Earth's history, everything that had happened before."

She took a slow breath, her own hands flexing. This still infuriated her, knowing how things could have been. Knowing what had been taken from them.

"Ted Faro," she spat at last, glaring into the flames.

"Oh, that jackass?" Caleb said from across the fire, sounding as angry as she was, "What else did he f*ck up?"

She gave a thin smile. If she'd been the one to wake up to an alien world a thousand years after watching the old one get destroyed, she'd be pretty pissed at the guy who'd been responsible, too.

She just wished it had stopped there.

"He purged it," she said harshly after a minute. "He had a breakdown. He thought. . . he thought all that information, all that knowledge, was a disease or something. He thought if humanity knew all that same stuff, they'd just destroy the world with it again. So he purged it. Completely."

Aloy wasn't sure she'd ever seen someone look quite so dangerously furious as Caleb did at that moment. He was rigid with tension, eyes wide and fire-bright. "He did what." He hissed at last, sounding as if he could barely choke the words out.

Aloy gave a grim nod. She briefly indulged in a fantasy of Faro being as immortal as Caleb, so she could gut him about a thousand times for what he'd done. From the way he was still radiating pure rage, she thought Caleb felt the same.

At last, he gave a wordless growl, raking his hands through his hair. She was incredibly tempted to echo him, even if this was old news for her.

"So what's left?" He finally snarled, looking up at her again, and this time she had to resist the urge to recoil. He looked dangerous, for a moment, dangerous and on the edge of violence. "What the hell is left now, hm?"

She felt a certain kinship with him over his fury at Faro's actions, but at those words she couldn't help but prickle defensively, as well. He sounded derisive, dismissive, and this was her world he was talking about. She'd been an outsider in most places for most of her life, but humanity had rebuilt. As frustrated as she was with people in general sometimes, they'd done amazing things. They'd come back from extinction without the help they were supposed to have, and they'd thrived.

"We are," she snapped, shoulders tensing. "The Nora and the Oseram and the Carja, and plenty of others. Thousands of people, okay? Maybe it's not your people, but we built a new world. We did that, and we had to do it without knowing a thing about the old world."

He looked startled. He stared at her for a moment, then took a slow breath and lifted a hand in a pacifying gesture.

"You're right," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, you're right. I know better than to. . ." He sighed and waved vaguely, then rubbed a hand over his face. "Sorry. I'm just. . . I. . ."

Her own defensive anger abruptly faded as well. Honestly, his reaction at the loss he'd experienced was justified. That wasn't something she could blame him for, even if she wasn't willing to let him direct his frustration at her.

He kept his hand over his face for a minute, then let out a shaky breath and tilted his head back to stare up at the sky through the trees. She could tell he was working through something, thinking hard, but she didn't ask. He had a lot to process.

"What were those. . . what you said, the Nora? You mentioned that before, is that a person?" He finally asked, sounding tired.

Aloy shook her head, her shoulders relaxing slightly. She hadn't realized just how tense she'd been, with the anger that had been radiating from Caleb, until they'd both had the chance to relax a little. "No, the Nora are a tribe. My tribe. Sort of. They're pretty small, compared to the Carja and the Oseram. They live in a valley, a long way southeast of here."

"And. . . those other two, Carja and Oseram. Tribes as well?"

Aloy shrugged and nodded. "Yeah. The Carja are a whole kingdom. They're close allies with the Oseram these days, but it hasn't always been like that. They all live to the east." She gave a wry little smile. "I'm a long way from home right now."

He returned the smile with a distracted one of his own, though there was little humor in the expression. He looked around again, eyes landing briefly on the strider before he turned back to her. She shifted a little uncomfortably as he looked her over thoroughly, frowning. It seemed for a minute as if he were about to say something, but then he subsided, looking away.

Finally, he ran a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath. "I don't even know where to begin," he said weakly, sounding as if he were speaking to himself more than to her. "I've lived through. . . I mean, the world changes. It can change a great deal in a short time. That's. . . fine. Expected. I'm used to that, but. . ."

He didn't necessarily have to finish the thought for her to understand what he was getting at, even if she couldn't know exactly how he felt. He didn't know anything about the world as it was now. There was no context for him, no frame of reference.

She wouldn't know where to start, either.

But it sounded as if he'd had to start over before, a time or two. This was probably a little more comprehensive than any prior time, but it seemed like this was something he had at least some level of experience with.

And the fact that he'd been around long enough to have that kind of experience still astonished her. She was fascinated, as much as she knew asking about his history right now would probably be in poor taste.

The idea she'd been turning over in the back of her mind solidified.

"New deal," she told him abruptly, and he looked around at her with an almost wary expression.

"Meaning?" he ventured cautiously.

She snorted, grimly amused by his uncertainty, even if the situation wasn't really funny at all. "I'll tell you everything I can about. . . now. About how things are now. The people, the customs, the machines. I'll show you, since I doubt either of us want to stick around here after tonight." She leaned forward, pointing at him. "In return, you tell me everything you can about the old world."

She watched as wariness and uncertainty and interest and something a little like hope warred on his face, but at last he settled into a small, sardonic smile. "You did get the over a thousand years old part, right?" he said with a touch of wryness. "That's an awful lot to tell."

She considered for a moment, then shrugged. "So we start with the recent stuff and work backwards, and I'll let you know if I get bored."

His smile turned slightly more sincere, and he gave a quiet chuckle. "Very well, Aloy. You've got yourself a deal."

Chapter 5: Admin

Chapter Text

Aloy woke with the sun the next morning and was surprised to find Caleb already up, crouched next to her strider and examining it with intense focus.

She sat up, watching him curiously, and he looked around at the movement. "This really is an incredible piece of machinery," he said, sounding impressed. "You ride it, right? You've got it set up to carry gear like a horse, and it's got a nice broad back. It even behaves like a horse." He tapped one of its legs with a fingertip, and to her surprise it lifted its foot and held it up placidly for him to handle as he would. "A well-trained horse, at that. Clearly it's not liable to wander during the night, you didn't tie it."

Aloy understood the words, mostly, but it only took a second to grasp that she just didn't have the context to follow what he was actually talking about. He'd used that word the day before, though. "What is a horse, anyway?" she asked, getting to her feet.

He sat back on his heels, looking a little lost again for a moment. "There's really no horses anymore?"

"How should I know," Aloy said, growing frustrated, "If I don't even know what one is?"

He sighed and gave a nod. "Fair point. Let me see if I can. . ."

He turned to the remains of their fire, picking through the ashes until he found a decently sturdy length of wood, gone to soot at the end. Then he was up again, making his way over to a nearby slab of relatively flat stone. As she watched, he began to sketch out a quick image.

It did look a little like the strider. The sketch was good, she could tell from it that the animal's legs would bend the same way as the strider's, the neck and head would move in a similar fashion, and the broad back would probably be as easy a place to sit as the machine's as well.

"It looks like. . . like a goat, sort of," she said after a minute.

"Yes!" He pointed at her with the charred stick, smiling. "You've still got goats? That's good. Useful animals, goats. But yes, not unlike that. Bigger, though. About the same as that machine of yours. What did you call it?"

"A strider."

"Apt. Yes. Similar size, sometimes taller and longer-legged. But then, yours probably doesn't have the health complications of horses, so that's a point in its favor. Anatomical disasters, are horses."

She gave her head a shake. She was eager to know this, but she hadn't quite realized the sheer volume of information he'd be able to provide, and this was just barely touching on one tiny part of the world as it had been.

"So people rode these horses?" she asked after a minute. That was what she really wanted to know about. "You've ridden them?"

He gave a distracted nod. "Oh yes. Humanity has a long and complex history with the horse. There were entire cultures built around horses. The Mongol people, they had one of the greatest empires the world has ever known, and they did it all from horseback. I spent about a thousand years practically living on horseback, myself." He smiled wryly. "You'd think I'd get sick of it by then, but I never really did."

He rubbed his chin, leaving a streak of soot across his jaw, and turned to gaze at the strider again. "I wonder how it compares," he murmured.

Aloy eyed him for a moment. Just how much more than a thousand years had he lived? He tossed that number out very casually, for that to be his entire lifespan. It sounded to her like he was maybe understating things a little.

She gave herself a shake. There would be plenty of time to ask about that, once they were on the road. She didn't think they were going to run out of conversation topics any time soon. "I'll override one for you, when we come across some." She told him after a moment, "They're all over the place. It'll make for faster travel, anyway."

He looked at her keenly. "Yes, you mentioned it was. . . wild. What on earth does that mean? How can a machine be wild?"

She chewed her lip, taking a deep breath, then gestured to their makeshift camp. "Help me break camp. I'll talk while we're working."

He did as she asked without complaint, and quickly enough, they were on the move, walking along slowly as the strider paced contentedly behind them.

"They're part of Zero Dawn," she explained "Part of GAIA."

He looked at her sharply. "Gaia? Like the Greek myth?"

Aloy stared blankly ahead for a second. "The what? What's Greek?"

For a second, he looked equally blank, and then sighed. "Right. I'll explain later. What's this about Zero Dawn? What. . ." He trailed off, making helpless gestures.

She snorted softly. She kind of felt the same way about it all sometimes. It was a lot to take in.

"Zero Dawn is GAIA," she explained slowly "GAIA is - was - an artificial intelligence, and a global terraforming system. She and her subroutines were designed first to brute-force and then broadcast the deactivation codes for the Faro Swarm, and second to. . . to fix the world, once they weren't a threat anymore."

She took a slow breath. She hadn't ever really been able to tell this story before, not all the way. The only other person she knew who'd really understood was Sylens, and that was a mess of a situation she didn't want to think about right now.

It felt strange to explain like this, to use all these words and descriptions that weren't any part of the world she'd grown up in. She'd gone over and over the data, though, again and again. It was honestly a relief to lay it out like this. She thought it might help settle things more logically in her own mind.

"It took decades for MINERVA - the subroutine created to find the deactivation codes - to succeed. There wasn't much left, by that point, but once the Faro Swarm was deactivated, GAIA and her other subroutines started. . . "

She paused, gesturing around at their surroundings.

"Two of the subroutines - AETHER and POSEIDON - detoxified what was left, and then ARTEMIS and DEMETER started restoring plants and animals." She was quiet for a moment. "It didn't work right, a couple of times. There was another subroutine called HADES that was designed to enact an extinction protocol, in the event of. . . of a non-viable biosphere, they called it. But eventually they got it right."

She was clenching her jaw, and made a conscious effort to relax it. Caleb was watching her with an entirely too perceptive expression, but he didn't ask about the tension he'd clearly spotted.

"When everything was ready, ELEUTHIA started. . . making more people, I suppose. There are these facilities, cradles, where humans were born and raised by her. APOLLO was supposed to take over after that, but. . ."

She was clenching her jaw again. So was Caleb, when she glanced at him, but he still didn't speak.

"ELEUTHIA kept them in the cradles for a long time. As long as she could, really, but without APOLLO everything that was supposed to happen next. . . didn't. It was disrupted, so these people just. . . just stayed there with ELEUTHIA. Eventually, the cradles ran out of food, and she released everybody when she couldn't take care of them anymore. After that, we just sort of. . ." She gestured broadly again.

Caleb chuckled. "Went forth and multiplied," he said wryly.

She nodded in agreement. "Yeah, pretty much. That was about six hundred years ago."

He gave a slow nod of his own. "Plenty of time to establish all manner of culture and society, I expect, especially if these original humans were well fed and taken care of by this subroutine. That would give them a hell of a leg up on survival."

She watched him from the corner of her eye. She supposed he'd have a very good idea of exactly what people could achieve in six hundred years.

More things to ask about, but later. She could finish explaining this first.

"The machines were originally part of GAIA, too," she went on, circling back to the original question. "There's way more than just the striders, and they've all got a purpose. They're the terraforming program in action, basically. Now, they maintain the biosphere, balance the ecosystem. Some of them are gatherers, acquiring and refining resources so the cauldrons - that's where they're made - can continue to produce them. Some of them map the land, locating resources and alerting other machines to problem areas. And, of course, they detoxify and actually do the terraforming."

Caleb was nodding along thoughtfully. He walked in silence for a time after she'd finished explaining, eyes distant, then glanced briefly back at the strider. "Do they all look like animals?"

She glanced back as well. "Yeah, mostly. I mean, they probably do, but a lot of them aren't like any animal I've ever seen. Some look like birds or crabs or lizards, I suppose, but I don't recognize a lot of the others." She frowned at him for a moment "I guess maybe you would. You obviously know at least one animal I don't."

He chuckled at that, then broke off abruptly and blinked before turning to stare at her almost suspiciously. "Wait, how on earth do you know all of this? Is this common knowledge? You've made it sound like humanity had to start from scratch."

"Oh." She made a face. "Oh boy. No, it's not common knowledge at all. That's. . . That's a long story."

One she hesitated to tell, honestly, but after a second it struck her that it was kind of silly to hesitate. It was personal, yeah, but a lot of her reluctance came again from the fact that nobody else had the background to really understand. She was sick of trying to explain and coming up hard against Nora superstition, or Carja preconceptions.

But Caleb wasn't any of those things. He was one of the Old Ones. She wouldn't need to reframe what she was trying to say for him to understand. Knowing that, it made her almost eager to explain.

"About twenty years ago, there was a. . . a problem, with GAIA," she began carefully. "Her subroutines became independent. Uncontrolled. HADES and HEPHAESTUS - that's the one that designs and builds the machines - became. . . well, HADES started planning to do what it was designed to do. Extinction protocol."

Caleb's eyebrows arched at that. "That. . . yes, that's a problem," he said slowly. "Is that still a problem?"

Aloy made a face. "HADES isn't. HEPHAESTUS is. It's been designing and building increasingly dangerous combat machines for years, starting a couple decades ago. Ones that actively hunt and kill humans. We called it the Derangement. Suddenly there were all these hostile machines nobody had seen before, and for a long time it just kept getting worse."

She paused, grim. That part at least was still a problem, one she needed to do something about.

"It can only produce them so quickly, though" She went on with a sigh "and it's been. . . weakened. I haven't been able to track down its prime location yet, or its core programming. It escaped the last time I tried."

"The last time you tried?" Caleb said sharply "What do you mean?"

"Getting to that," Aloy said resignedly. "GAIA couldn't keep HADES from reversing the terraforming without resorting to. . . extreme measures." She took a deep breath. "She self-destructed, basically. GAIA Prime self-destructed. I'm hoping there are copies of her somewhere, but-"

She paused, waving a hand and cutting herself off before taking a deep breath. "But before she self-destructed, she determined the best chance to keep HADES from eventually succeeding some other way was to. . . well, to clone the only person who'd had full admin control over the entire program."

She fell silent for a minute. She still wasn't sure how to feel about all of this. She'd come to terms with it, mostly, but it was still. . . complicated.

"It's you," Caleb said slowly from beside her "You're the admin."

"Yeah," she said dryly. "Yeah, that's me. Would've been nice if someone had been around to explain that. Instead, I get spat out of a cradle facility inside a mountain, and the tribe I end up with isn't too thrilled to have a mysterious baby suddenly appear in the midst of their most sacred place."

Caleb winced. "Ah. Yes. People have always been. . . quite reactive when it comes to the unexplained, especially when it conflicts with their faith in some way."

"Glad to know it's not just me," Aloy said with a wry twist of her mouth, and shook her head. "Anyway, it worked, in the end. I have admin access to everything. All the documentation, all the recordings that have survived. I've got it all." She tapped her focus. "And HADES isn't a problem anymore. I'll find HEPHAESTUS, too, and deal with it."

Caleb was peering at her with interest, and she frowned and raised her eyebrows as his silence dragged on awkwardly. "Who?" he finally said curiously. "Who was the original admin? Your. . . ah. . ."

"Ancestor?" Aloy supplied. It was as good a term as any. Calling Elisabet her mother still felt. . . weird. "Elisabet Sobeck."

Caleb gave a sharp laugh. "Oh, I thought you looked familiar."

She stopped dead, and he went on for a couple of steps before pausing as well and glancing back. Behind her, the strider bumped against her shoulder. "You knew her?" She croaked.

Caleb blinked, then looked abruptly regretful. "Ah. No, I didn't. I just saw her on the news sometimes, often enough to recognize her face."

She sighed and started walking again, suppressing bitter disappointment. She supposed that would have been too much to ask.

They walked in silence for a little while, and then, unexpectedly, Caleb chuckled. "You know, I thought you handled the immortality thing quite well," he commented mildly. "You get people who panic, people who try to kill you, call you a demon, and so on and so forth. You took it very much in stride." He chuckled again, glancing at her with a crooked smile. "I think I can see why. Your life is way crazier than mine."

That startled a laugh out of her too. "Yeah, it's been an experience," she agreed dryly.

Chapter 6: Origins

Chapter Text

They walked for another couple of hours before the trees opened up into patches of hilly grassland, and another couple after that before they came across the herd of striders she'd passed the last time she'd come through here. She was careful to stop Caleb at the treeline before they could get close enough to alarm the machines.

"They really are just. . . wild," he murmured, watching them with fascination. "Are they grazing?"

She shrugged and nodded. "Yeah, they do that. Resource acquisition, ecosystem maintenance, et cetera. Stay here, okay? I'll bring one back for you, but if they or that watcher see you, they'll either attack or run. They're not usually aggressive, but they can still be dangerous."

He looked at her sharply. "Watcher?" he said with an unexpectedly intense focus.

She raised her eyebrows, but gestured at the little machine patrolling through the grass. "Watcher," she said as his eyes followed her gesture. "They keep watch, patrol. They'll alert the striders if they see a threat."

He stared at the little machine for a moment, then gave his head a wondering shake. "Incredible. There are animals that form a sort of mutualistic relationship like that. One will keep watch, and alert the others when-"

"Sure, Caleb, just stay here, okay?" Aloy cut him off, herding him behind a tree. "Stay."

She shook her head and crept away along the treeline, aiming for a strider further out from the rest and near enough to the scrubby undergrowth that she could get close without trouble.

She wasn't actually sure Caleb would stay put, but she supposed if he did get his ribs kicked in by an angry strider, at least it wouldn't be that much of a problem for him.

He didn't move, thankfully, and it was only a minute's work to bring the new strider back to him. He stroked its head like it was a living thing, cooing to it affectionately, and she snorted. "I don't know if they much care about sweet talk."

"Let me have my rituals," he said cheerfully, and went around the side to swing up onto its back.

He did it much more easily than Aloy had, at first. It had taken her some time to get used to riding them, and she'd had more than one awkward - and sometimes failed - attempt to mount when she'd first been starting out. He looked like he'd been born to it.

He settled in place, shifting around curiously. "Mm, no spine, not like on a horse, anyway. Surprisingly comfortable." Experimentally, he nudged its sides with his heels, and gave a delighted little laugh when it plodded forward obligingly. "Oh, this is wonderful."

He settled his hands on his thighs, nudging it this way and that with his knees alone, and Aloy watched with bemusem*nt as he wove a loose circuit through the trees and then back to her side.

"You'll be pretty tired of it by the end of the day," she told him dryly, pulling herself up onto her own strider's back.

"Ah, never," he said contentedly. "I'm calling it Watt."

Aloy stared blankly at him, wondering if she should ask. Eventually she just shook her head and faced forward, nudging her own strider into motion.

Caleb followed as she led the way through the trees, giving the prairie behind them a wide berth. "How do you override them like that?" He asked curiously "I saw you do something with the butt of your spear."

"Oh," she said, touching the strap that held her spear in place. "It's a piece of tech pulled off one of the old Faro machines. HADES reactivated some of them, and there was one we called a corruptor. It could slave other machines to it, to control them. GAIA's machines." She carefully brought her spear around so he could see the tool she used. "I took that component from one of those. Figured out how to use it, and how to connect it to this." She tapped her focus.

He frowned, eyes distant. "Big insect-looking thing? Long tail, all curled over its back?" He lifted a hand and curled a finger up demonstratively.

She raised her eyebrows, but nodded.

He looked grim. "I remember seeing those on the news," he said quietly. "When they started being used in combat. And when it became clear they weren't under anyone's control anymore."

Aloy stared at the back of her strider's head, her hands tightening around her spear. The corruptors had been terrifying enough in the small numbers HADES had restored. Seeing them in large numbers, able to override any other robot or machine they came across. . .

She didn't want to imagine it, really.

"That's very handy, though," Caleb said, and when she looked up again, she caught him eyeing the device with interest. At her frown, he lifted his hands in a placating gesture. "I won't try to steal it from you. I wouldn't mind finding another, but I'm not exactly keen to seek out any of Faro's leftover machines." He eyed her focus as well for a moment. "I suppose those aren't easy to find these days, either."

She relaxed slightly and shrugged. "The Faro machines are dead now. They didn't survive after HADES was gone. And no, it's not easy to find a focus. I suppose you'd know how to use one, wouldn't you?"

He nodded. "Everyone had one, back before. . ." He trailed off, expression turning briefly grim, and he took a deep breath before continuing. "Useful things, though I admit I. . . altered mine, somewhat. It had some features I wasn't really a fan of, but I'm pretty good with computers." He gave a smug little smile. "I certainly wouldn't mind getting my hands on another, though, since I expect the government oversight and privacy violations are less of a problem these days."

She frowned at that, not really following much of what he was talking about this time, but there was at least one part of it she could comment on. "I could probably find you a focus," she said slowly.

He glanced at her, eyebrows raised, and she sighed.

"There was this. . . cult," she began slowly, "Eclipse. They were a faction that broke off from the Carja after the death of the last Sun King, who. . ."

She trailed off at his blank expression. Right, he wouldn't have any idea what she was talking about.

"Okay, short version. HADES had a cult working for it, and it was able to provide them with focuses. They're disbanded now, and mostly either dead or on the run, but I know where their home base is. I bet they have a few extras stored there." She paused for a moment "It's a long way from here, though."

He just shrugged, fixing her with a wry look. "Yes, because I have so many important places to be."

Aloy snorted at that. "Yeah, I can't say I've got anywhere specific to go right now, either. Guess that's as good a destination as any."

That was probably a couple months of travel from here, but her reasons for coming out this way had proven totally fruitless so far. If she was lucky, maybe she'd find some clue on the way back. If not. . . well, Meridian was as good a place as any to start looking again.

And it wasn't like they didn't have plenty to talk about on the way. There was one thing in particular she was curious about now, after what he'd said about the Faro Swarm.

"You said last night that the Swarm would have killed you," she said slowly, uncaring of the shift in topic. "Permanently?"

His expression turned immediately wary. "Yes," he said after a moment, drawing the word out into a long hiss. "It would have. It's hard to heal from being broken down to component parts, as it were."

She nodded. "So you can die. For real die, not just. . . whatever it is you do that you come back from."

"It's still death," he said with a shrug. "Temporary or not, it is death. I'm not completely sure why we come back." He frowned, brow furrowing for a moment. "We've got a. . . an energy. A force that keeps us going. Heals us, brings us back. Under the right circ*mstances, it can look - and feel - like lightning. We call it a quickening. As to how it works, though, I've no idea." He smirked, making her narrow her eyes doubtfully. "And I hope understandably I'm not keen on studying the mechanics any more in depth than I have to." He paused, taking a slow breath. "But yes, we can die permanently."

"How? How else? The Faro Swarm was kind of a recent complication, compared to your lifetime."

He frowned, watching her sidelong. "Nuclear explosion would do it. Being dropped into a volcano, probably. Eventually."

She watched him back, eyes still narrowed. There was something else. She was sure there was something else. "That's not all, is it?"

He gave a thin, dangerous smile. "You'll forgive me if I'm not keen on telling you precisely how I can be killed."

She supposed she couldn't really argue with that. If their positions had been reversed, she'd probably keep that information to herself as well. She could have tried to invoke the original deal they'd made, her help for his information on immortality, but she didn't think it would really work in this case.

There was silence again for a while, then she heard Caleb take a slow breath. "It occurs to me there might not be any of us left," he said quietly.

Aloy glanced at him uncomfortably. She'd thought of that the night before, even if she hadn't mentioned it. He'd survived, and she supposed there was a chance others had survived the same way, but even if they had it would only be a handful of them at most.

"Maybe there are new immortals," Caleb continued distantly, breaking through her thoughts. "It's possible, I suppose. A whole new population of us." He gave a slow blink, and a small, uneven smile crossed his face. "Wouldn't that be something?"

Aloy blinked as well, then frowned hard at him. "Wait," she said slowly "Aren't you. . . I mean. . . what do you mean? Wouldn't there need to be people like you around in order to. . . uh, make more people like you?"

He stared at her for a minute, then began laughing so hard he almost fell off his strider.

She just sighed, rolling her eyes skyward. She had no idea why what she'd said was so funny, but she imagined he'd get around to answering her eventually.

He finally got the laughter under control, straightening from where he'd hunched over his strider's neck. He dragged in a deep breath, still grinning. "Ah, no, it doesn't work like that," he finally managed. "I'm sorry, you had no way to know. Just the way you asked-"

He paused, chuckling again, and shook his head.

"Nobody's actually sure where we come from," he explained, his mirth fading gradually. "We're foundlings, always. No parents." He glanced at her, the last of his humor gone. "Something you can relate to, I believe."

She wrinkled her nose at that. Yeah, she definitely could. "So you all just turn up somewhere? It sounds like you are actually children at first. I mean, you wouldn't be foundlings if you just. . . appeared as you are now."

He gave a snort of laughter. "No, we're babies like anyone else. We're actually functionally mortal, until we die for the first time, unless it's to old age or disease. We grow up like normal people, age the normal way, get hurt and get sick, and so on. After dying for the first time, we stop aging, and heal the way you saw."

She gave a slow nod, turning that over in her head. "That sounds like. . . that sounds like it could get pretty complicated."

"Hah. Yes, it does. A lot of us don't have the best childhoods. We end up in foster care or orphanages, living on the streets or in the wilds, or depending on when and where, as indentures or slaves. The lucky ones get adopted into families or clans or monasteries or something. But of course, coming back from the dead down the line tends to upend a person's life on a rather fundamental level."

Aloy took a minute to try to imagine what the Nora would do if they witnessed someone return from the dead. Or how a Nora who returned from the dead themself might react. "Yeah, like I said, complicated," she snorted after a moment, drawing a smirk from him. "So what happened to you?"

The smirk vanished, and he blinked. "What?"

"I mean, did you have a family or something? What happened when you first died?"

He blinked again, looking abruptly uncertain, and she bit the inside of her cheek. Given what he'd just told her about all this, she supposed a lot of that period of his life might have been pretty traumatic, and maybe not something he'd want to talk about.

"Sorry," she began awkwardly. "I didn't mean. . . you don't have to say."

A small smile returned to his face, and he shrugged. "No, it's fine, it's just. . ." He considered for a second, then shook his head. "I don't remember, is the thing. Not really."

She opened her mouth for a moment, then gave herself a shake. "You don't remember how you died?"

He looked surprised at her vehemence. "I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm really bloody old," he said dryly. "My memory's not what it used to be."

She sighed and rolled her eyes at his obvious sarcasm.

He laughed. "Seriously, though, I don't. It was a very, very long time ago, and I've died a lot of times since then." He sobered again, tapping a knuckle against the strider's shoulder and staring down at the back of its head for a minute. "I'm just. . . after this, after humanity - life - functionally went extinct, I'm not sure if there will be more of my kind, since I'm not entirely certain where we come from to begin with." He frowned down at the strider's neck. "Maybe that's it for us. Maybe it's just me now."

Aloy was quiet. She could sympathize with at least some of that, as well. She'd spent a lot of time not knowing where she'd come from, how she'd just appeared the way she had. She'd spent her whole life chasing that answer.

But there had been an answer, as bizarre as it was. She knew where she'd come from now. From the sound of it, Caleb wasn't bothered by his unknown origins for his own sake, but when it applied to an entire people. . .

She looked over at him, wondering if she should make some attempt at consolation, at comfort, that he could be the last of his people. She was surprised when, instead of the expected grief, she found him wearing a curious, thoughtful expression.

"What is it?" She asked warily.

He glanced at her, raising his eyebrows slightly. "Hm? Oh, nothing, just. . . wondering. Wondering what to expect."

He didn't seem as upset as she might have thought, and she wasn't really sure what to do with that. "Do you think we'll find more like you?" She asked uncertainly.

He gave a small, annoyingly enigmatic smile. "I suppose we'll find out, won't we?"

Chapter 7: Relic

Chapter Text

They made it to the village Aloy had remembered from a couple days prior by the next afternoon. She'd been aiming for it, hoping to pick up some supplies and some more appropriate clothes for Caleb.

He stopped his strider partway down the slope of the hill they'd been traversing, staring with a frown at the little streamers of smoke below them. "What's the economic structure like these days?" he asked seriously. "Barter? Socialism? The dreaded resurgence of late-stage capitalism?"

She stopped her strider as well, twisting around to blink at him. "I don't know what socialism or capitalism are," she said slowly. "We barter, mostly. It's pretty common for people to trade for metal shards." She lifted the small pouch she had that contained just that, "Other machine parts, too, or some of the materials they produce. Chillwater, that sort of thing. You can usually trade pelts and meat, too. Just depends on what's needed."

He nodded, but he was still frowning. "Familiar enough," he said slowly. "Machine parts. Is there good business in salvage, then? And what's chillwater?"

She started moving again, and he followed. "Salvage, sure, and hunting. And chillwater's a liquid some of them produce and carry, it vaporizes in the air and freezes anything close by."

"Mm. Risky, but damn useful, if you're careful," he murmured, and she heard soft clicks as he drummed his fingers on the strider's shoulder. "You hunt them? The machines?"

She glanced back, surprised. "Of course. You can get a lot of useful parts out of them. They're good for utility, and construction and stuff. Good for armor and weapons. We use machine parts for everything. And with some of HEPHAESTUS' combat machines these days, there's not a lot of choice sometimes. They hunt us, so we hunt them."

He was quiet as they made their way down the hill and toward the village. "That would be interesting to see," he said at last, voice distant with thought.

She snorted. "You can help, the next time I need to hunt something. I'm getting a little low on shards, actually. Besides, you'll need to pay me back for getting you some clothes that actually fit." She smirked, glancing over at him as the path evened out and widened enough so he could ride beside her again. "You know how to use a bow? A spear?" She paused for a moment. "Did people from your era use bows and spears at all?"

He blew out a short breath. "Which era?" He muttered wryly. "It's been some time for either for me, at any rate, but yes, I do."

She narrowed her eyes. "How much time is 'some time'?"

He smirked as well. "Depends, are we counting my thousand-year hibernation or not?"

She rolled her eyes.

"I don't suppose swords are an option," he went on mildly. "I'm much better with swords."

She raised her eyebrows at him. "In Meridian, maybe, or The Claim, but not a place like this. They'll trade us a bow and spear, and maybe a knife, but they probably won't have swords."

He just shrugged. "I can work with that. What's Meridian?"

"The holy city of the Carja," she explained absently, "The seat of the Sun King. I've heard it's the biggest city in the world. Not sure I believe that, but it's a lot bigger than any other city or town I've ever seen. It's sort of the center of that whole region. Lots of craftsmen, lots of trade."

Caleb made a thoughtful humming noise, eyes fixed ahead. "Well, that sounds like the place to be," he said with a shrug "Good a place as any to start a new life. We're headed in that direction?"

Aloy nodded. "Yeah, it's south and east of here."

"Mm. I'll look forward to seeing it, then."

She only nodded, eyes fixed on the nearest structures as they got to the edge of town. People had seen them coming down the hill, and, unsurprisingly, remembered her.

She was used to that. People remembered her pretty much everywhere she went, even in places where word of the 'machine girl' hadn't yet reached. People tended to recall a woman riding around on a strider, and this place was no different. She wasn't surprised when they were just as fascinated with Caleb, given that he rode another strider himself now.

She'd been a little worried about how he'd take exposure to this village, with how different it and its people must have been to the world he'd come from, and she hadn't been sure how interested he'd be in interacting. Once he'd had a few minutes to get acclimatized, though, he proved to be cheerfully friendly, and perfectly polite and amenable to everyone who spoke to him.

He turned out to be an expert at bartering, too, and managed to get both a set of warm clothes and all the tools and supplies Aloy had wanted for more of a bargain than she would have managed on her own. She'd never much had the patience for haggling, and Caleb seemed to actively enjoy it. She had to admit she was a little impressed, especially given his lack of familiarity with the culture and value of certain items.

She noticed, however, that he never actually told them anything conclusive about himself. Not even his name. That was impressive as well, but she supposed he had a lot of practice keeping secrets.

They made camp a couple hours beyond the village that night, and Caleb changed quickly into the new clothes. Then he disappeared for a little while to a stream a short ways from camp to wash the borrowed ones, hanging them carefully near the fire to dry when he returned. Aside from a murmured thanks for the loan, though, he was very quiet as they set about preparing a meal.

When he still hadn't said anything by the time they were cleaning up and getting ready to sleep, she decided it was worth at least trying to ask about. "What're you thinking?"

He glanced at her, but didn't pretend there wasn't something, even if he didn't answer right away.

"Just. . . processing, I think," he said at last, shifting around to sit cross-legged, idly turning the new knife he'd acquired over in his hands. "The way everything is now. The fact that this isn't a world I entirely recognize anymore."

He gazed sightlessly in the direction of the village. "I'll adapt," he went on quietly. "I always adapt. I've done it many times before, and this will be the same, in the end. But this is. . ." He paused, shaking his head slowly. "I haven't ever seen the world so thoroughly remade as this, though there were times I believed that I had. It's been a very long time since I've had to. . . to begin again, so completely." He gave a thin smile, staring down at his hands, and the knife.

She didn't know how to respond to that. She knew loss, she knew hardship, but she had no way of knowing what it was like to lose the entire world. She'd spent so long trying to break free of the world she knew, and then there had been times during the disaster with HADES that the Nora and their culture had balanced on the edge of destruction, and she'd realized perhaps for the first time what she truly stood to lose.

But they were still there. They'd survived. She could return home, whenever she wished, despite her complicated feelings towards the Nora. And even if they had been wiped out, the rest of the world had still been there.

Seeing this made her shudder to think how it would have been if HADES actually had succeeded.

But then, if it had, she wouldn't have survived it. HADES and Helis would have made sure of that. She wouldn't have been left behind like Caleb was, a wandering relic of a world that didn't exist anymore.

He stared blankly into the fire. "I've seen. . . disasters, the sorts of horrors that destroyed entire cities, entire civilizations," he went on, speaking almost tonelessly. "Earthquakes and volcanoes. Armies that left behind nothing but blood and waste. But even then, there was always something left. Pieces of culture and history survive, people survive. And this time. . ."

He gave his head a small shake.

"The world is just. . . gone. All of it. Cultures, histories, religions. . . all of it, lost." He paused, giving a slightly bitter laugh. "I dedicated a good portion of my life to preserving what history I could - my own and others'. I always thought it was important for those stories to exist somewhere, somehow. I had journals, you know. Hundreds of journals. I'd been working on digitizing them, as well as making additional physical copies. But I'm betting very little of that survived. I never expected I'd have to protect it all against something like the Swarm, and now. . ." he took a slow, uneven breath. "Now, I really might be all that's left."

He was silent for a long minute, then gave an odd little laugh and shook his head.

"All the history of humanity, inside one person. I'm a walking record of everything we were, or the closest thing it's possible to get now." He rubbed his forehead. "Damn. I need to start writing again."

She leaned forward, intrigued. "You kept journals? For how long?"

He focused on her, staring blankly for a moment before giving a small, unexpected smile. "Most of my life," he said quietly. "Not as regularly, for some of it, but I did always try to fill in the gaps, later." He was quiet for a moment, looking into the fire again. "It seems I have an awful lot of gaps to fill in, now."

She watched him intently, her curiosity growing. "Will you tell me about them?"

He looked up again, surprised, and narrowed his eyes slightly. "Perhaps," he said, his tone holding an edge of guardedness. "Within reason. That is the deal, isn't it?" He gave another thin smile, glancing past her and staring vaguely into the distance. "Maybe you can even help a little, when I start a new one. I'm going to need help, I think, at least until I get the world figured out again."

He sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knee and his chin in his palm in a position that didn't look at all comfortable. "I suppose it probably won't be as difficult as all that. That town back there, it's not as if it was unrecognizable. That village could have been any one of a hundred I passed through in my relative youth." He smiled distantly "People will be people, no matter the era."

Aloy followed his gaze, though they were out of sight of the town from here. "Yeah, I guess you're right about that," she said with a wry sort of smile. They always were, no matter how far she traveled.

She supposed it was comforting, in a way, to know that held true of a distance through time, as well. That maybe the world wasn't so unrecognizable now after all.

Chapter 8: Climb

Chapter Text

Aloy wouldn't have called what they did as they traveled chatting, exactly. It was more like dueling rounds of questioning, pointed demands for information that went on until one or the other of them decided enough was enough and started asking some questions of their own.

It was fun, honestly, and challenging, and absolutely fascinating. Caleb knew how to ask the sort of questions that made her really think about how things were in the world that she knew, really consider why things worked the way they did. His responses to what she asked about the world as it had been - and occasionally about immortality - were comprehensive and in-depth, and usually revealed frustratingly little detail about himself and his own history. She was sure there was a lot he was leaving out, but then she wasn't exactly telling him everything about herself, either. Even with those missing pieces, there was more than enough to keep her interested.

That was how it went the next few days. Aloy kept half an eye on their route, glad she had this region mapped out already, and quietly took them along a very deliberate path. She could have warned Caleb why, she supposed, but she really wanted to see how he reacted without knowing in advance what they were coming up on.

She tried very hard not to grin too obviously to herself as they rounded a rocky bluff, early one afternoon, and came out from under the trees into a wide, shallow valley. It was a beautiful view, green and scattered with flowers, with a small stream cutting through the grass, but it wasn't any more spectacular than any other, similar landscape.

Except, of course, for the tallneck that paced a slow circuit around it.

Caleb's current tale cut off mid-sentence, whatever he'd been saying apparently forgotten as he stared at the massive machine. "Oh, what is that?" he breathed as his strider drifted to a stop.

Aloy grinned openly now. She'd been looking forward to this. "It's called a tallneck," she told him, watching his reaction. He didn't disappoint, staring at the machine in wide-eyed wonder.

"It's immense," he murmured, leaning forward intently. "What does it do?"

Aloy's grin turned a little sly. "You'll see," she said with a laugh, "You want to go climb it?"

He turned sharply to look at her, and matched her grin. "Oh, absolutely," he said with feeling.

She laughed and gave her strider a kick, sending it into a full gallop. He was close on her heels, bending low over the machine's neck and giving a whoop of laughter at the speed.

They slowed to a trot at the tallneck's feet, the rattling vibration of its steps thrumming through her. It walked on, oblivious to their presence. "It can be a little hard to get up on one. I usually try to get onto its back from a tree or a ridge or something," she told him, and nodded to a bluff up ahead "That would be a good spot."

"Do you do this often?" He called as they picked up speed once more, trying to beat the tallneck to the bluff.

She didn't answer until they'd reached it, throwing themselves from the striders' backs and waiting tensely for the tallneck to get close. "There, see, you can grab it right there," she pointed out, "And yeah, I do this all the time." She flashed another brief grin. "You'll see."

She had to admit, she was having a lot of fun showing this to somebody who'd never seen anything like it before.

They leaped, when the tallneck was close. She wasn't used to most people being quite as daring as she was in such matters. Some, sure, but not many. Caleb didn't hesitate even a second, though, flinging himself at the tallneck and grabbing hold of the bar she'd indicated without a moment's pause.

She supposed if he knew the fall wouldn't hurt him, he didn't have much reason to hesitate. It was still such a strange thing to consider, the possibilities his immortality granted him.

They climbed, though it quickly became apparent it wasn't going to be an easy journey to the top for Caleb. He'd recovered from being dead for so long more quickly and readily than she could have dreamed, or he wouldn't even have been able to stand up after the amount of time he'd been in that bunker. It was clear enough that he hadn't quite been prepared for something as strenuous as climbing a moving machine the size of a tallneck, though.

She had to grab hold of him to haul him up onto the top of it when they finally got there. He sprawled flat on his back and panted for a long couple of minutes, fingers digging into whatever ridges or irregularities he could find in the metal. "Oh, this feels like the world's worst sailing ship," he muttered, eyes shut tight. "I hate sailing ships."

She stood by his head, amused, riding the rhythm of the machine's steps easily. "You gonna live?"

"Oh, ha ha," he groaned, squinting up at her with a grimace. "Very funny. Move." He prodded her ankle, then very carefully rolled over and pushed himself to his knees, arms spread for balance. It took him a minute before he seemed steady enough to look up, but she could see his expression change at the spectacular view. From here they could see rolling woodlands spreading out toward the distant coast, high banks of clouds building up above the unseen ocean. In the other direction, the lone, snow-capped peak of a single mountain loomed high above the trees.

"Damn," he muttered, and rose cautiously to his feet. "I can see why you do this."

She grinned, moving to the middle of the platform. "There's more, at least for me." She unslung her spear, and then after a moment's hesitation, removed her focus and handed it to him.

He raised his eyebrows, but took it and set it in place, watching expectantly as she overrode the tallneck. She heard him gasp faintly at the holographic map the focus let him see, and smiled as he lifted his head to stare out across the landscape. "Oh, fascinating," he murmured, "Different. . . different types of machine, different. . ." He trailed off, turning in a slow, careful circle to see what the focus had to show him.

Finally, he faced her again, gesturing down at the tallneck. "It maps the area, and coordinates the other machines?"

She gave a nod, gratified that he'd put it together so quickly. "Yep. It notes obstacles and issues, pinpoints signals and electronic signatures, necessary resources, damaged machines. . . So on. Then it sends that information to other machines in its range. And to me." She tapped the side of her head where her focus usually sat.

He took one last look around, then sighed and handed the focus back to her with a touch of reluctance. "I'll definitely have to take you up on that offer for one of these, if you do know where to find a working one," he said as she fixed it back in place, then smiled wryly. "I imagine we'll have to make a third deal of some sort for that."

She snorted. She didn't really have any use for the old Eclipse focuses, if she was right and they could find working ones at the deserted base, but the offer of a third deal with someone like Caleb was something she'd be stupid to turn down, if it did come to that.

"Maybe. But for now. . ." She gestured down at the tallneck. "Does this one look like some kind of animal? I always wondered, it's so much bigger than anything we've got here."

He laughed, still gazing out across the valley "Yes, it's a little like something called a giraffe. They live in Africa, or what used to be Africa. It's a very long way from here, though. The other side of the world, literally."

He glanced down at the disc-like head beneath their feet, tapping his toe against it. "They aren't nearly this big, though. About twenty feet, I think. A little more than three times my height. Not anywhere close to this." He stared out at the landscape with a thoughtful frown for a moment, then gave himself a small shake. "They have sort of geometric brown spots, and these funny little horns." He held his hands up next to his head, sticking his fingers up in an approximation that made Aloy snort with laughter.

He laughed as well, dropping his hands back to his sides and gazing around again. Slowly, his smile began to fade.

"Ah, how do we get down?" He eventually asked.

Aloy grinned, unslinging the rope from her belt.

"How do you feel about rappelling?"

Chapter 9: Hunt

Chapter Text

The first time they hunted a machine, it wasn't really intentional.

She'd been telling him more about the process, the techniques and the tricks involved, after he'd asked again. It was easy to see the influence of the practice in any town or outpost they stopped through, even if she hadn't ever thought about it much before. So many machine parts were used in construction, in weapons and armor, in craftwork and art, so many of the substances they produced and carried used in aspects of everyday life. The practice of hunting them was so commonplace that it wasn't something she'd ever thought of as unusual.

But to Caleb, it was probably the strangest aspect of life now. Such machines hadn't existed for the vast majority of his life, and even when something like them had, there would have been no cause to hunt them. A person would have been considered out of their mind to do so, he explained with some bemusem*nt, especially if they'd attempted it with something like a bow or a spear.

It was the way of life today, though, and once he was aware of that, he set to learning about the practice as readily as he worked to learn about everything else.

They didn't make any attempt to approach anything more dangerous than striders and grazers, and carefully kept a reasonable distance even from those. Even if they weren't typically aggressive, neither of them much wanted to get caught in a stampede by accidentally startling a herd. She did her best to point out the weak points of the machines they did see, though, explaining as best she could how to disable them, cripple them, how to do the most damage quickly before they could retaliate.

She explained what she could of the larger, more deadly machines, as well, to warn him as much as anything. She wasn't sure if even the most dangerous machines would be able to kill him outright - she still wasn't clear on how badly damaged he'd need to be to die permanently - but they'd definitely be able to maim him. She had her doubts that even Caleb could regrow missing limbs, and plenty of the machines out there were more than capable of taking an arm or a leg off pretty easily.

He seemed entirely prepared to take her seriously, especially once they'd seen a few more machines at a distance. Glinthawks and scrappers were as common here as they were everywhere, and he'd warily eyed the pair of tramplers they'd seen at one point, cautious even if they were far enough away for the machines to appear as no more than insect-sized dots in the valley below them. Once, they'd seen a stormbird circling out along the coastline, its size apparent even from such a distance.

As much as he was clearly interested in learning about them, Caleb did not seem terribly fond of the idea of actually trying to hunt them himself. "I've died in some very stupid ways trying to hunt regular animals," he told her dryly as they were discussing the practice. "I can't say I'm eager to experience new and equally stupid ways of dying to a giant pissed off machine, if I can avoid it."

She supposed she couldn't blame him for that. Even if dying to one of the machines wouldn't be permanent for him, she doubted it would be pleasant.

In the end, they didn't really get much of a choice.

An alert from the striders woke her close to dawn one morning, perhaps a few minutes before she would have roused on her own. She sat up and squinted around blearily, already reaching for her spear and bow as she noted that both striders had their heads turned away from camp, down the small hill they'd slept at the top of. She rolled to her feet and edged forward, watchful, freezing when she caught sight of a pair of scrappers ambling up the hill toward them.

For about a second she wondered if there would be time to run or hide, but the scrappers had already alerted on the striders and, as soon as she'd come into sight, on Aloy. She saw them focus, saw them shift a little to prowl up the hill toward her.

She hissed a curse. She might be able to get out of sight in time to confuse them, but they weren't going to give up now that they'd spotted her.

Clenching her teeth, she turned to wake Caleb, and almost jumped out of her skin to find him already up and crouched not three feet behind her, spear in hand. She hadn't even heard him stir. "Trouble?" he whispered.

She nodded stiffly. "Two scrappers. Close. They're coming to investigate whether we want them to or not. Get ready. Remember, the radar on their backs, their eyes, and-"

"The power cells, yes, I remember." He gave a tight smile of his own. "Not good terrain for archery. Spears?"

"Probably," Aloy agreed, pointing him to a low copse of leafy shrubs. "Get out of sight, and we'll try to take them by surprise. They're dangerous, but not very sturdy. One good hit will do it."

He nodded, fading back into the shrubs. She did the same on the other side of the little clearing they'd camped in, sending a signal to the striders to get out of the way. They hadn't moved yet on their own, but she knew they'd follow her lead and attack as soon as the scrappers turned hostile, and she didn't want to risk damaging them. She could repair them or find new striders if she had to, but it was better to avoid the risk at all, if possible.

They got out of the way, heading off into the trees. A minute later the two scrappers topped the hill, pacing slowly forward into their camp. She held her breath, clutching her spear, trying hard to focus only on the one nearest her. She wanted to see if she could spot Caleb, to make sure he was prepared for this, but she couldn't allow herself to be distracted. Letting her attention wander would be a good way to get hurt or killed, and unlike him, she wouldn't recover from it. She was just going to have to trust that he knew what he was doing.

She held her breath, waiting, biding her time. She knew the best places to strike, knew exactly how to effectively take a scrapper down, but waiting for the right moment always felt like forever.

She breathed out slowly as the scrapper prowled nearer, head swinging alertly back and forth. They knew she was close, and they wouldn't give up their search quickly. She would have preferred to avoid this conflict, or would have liked to be better prepared, at least, but at this point it would be best to just take care of them as quickly and quietly as possible. The parts would be good for trade whenever they next stopped, if nothing else.

She finished her slow exhale, her view filled with the metallic side of the scrapper as it moved past her, less than two feet away. She waited, waited until the right moment, and then lunged.

She knew just where to strike, just how to angle the spear to wedge between the plating on the scrapper's torso and its shoulder joint, to drive straight into its heart. She forced her spear deep, putting all her strength behind the strike and using the momentum to ride the machine to the ground. It sparked and seized for a moment, then went still.

That lingering sense of forever still hung over her as she looked across the camp, tearing her spear free to ready herself for the second scrapper, if it became necessary.

Caleb had moved almost as soon as she had. He went for its head, a more obvious weak spot than the gap between its leg and torso, and drove his spear directly into the machine's grinding jaws, clean through its head until she could see the spear tip protruding from where its head connected to its neck.

It wasn't an animal, though. Something like that would have killed anything living almost instantly, but the scrappers didn't function the same way. She saw its eyes go dull as he severed their connections to the heart, but the machine was still very much alive, and entirely too mobile. It made a hideous buzzing, screeching sort of sound, whipping its head wildly from side to side.

Caleb had the good sense to let go of the spear, rather than uselessly attempting to hang onto it, and that probably saved him from being dragged to the ground and trampled. He couldn't get out of the way fast enough as it thrashed back around, though, and the haft of the spear - still jutting from the scrapper's head - slammed into him with enough force to knock him bodily to the ground with a sharp cry. Aloy was almost certain she heard something crack, but it was hard to tell over the noises the scrapper was making.

She hissed a curse and darted forward, her own spear at the ready, only to be driven back by the scrapper's violent flailing. It was clawing at the spear sticking out of its face, moving so erratically she couldn't find a good opening. Normally they had a specific way they moved, a specific set of motions and attacks that made it possible to anticipate when the right moment to strike would be, but this one's wild thrashing made it hard to find that moment.

Finally it twisted away from her, leaving its flank exposed in a way she could take advantage of. She lunged forward, striking for where she knew the heart to be.

Not quite fast enough.

It spun back, lashing out blindly. She aborted her lunge as best she could, flinching back, and managed to avoid anything more than a glancing blow across the face from one of its front feet.

It was still enough to knock her badly off balance. She twisted with the blow as much as she could, stumbling to a knee and planting her spear to keep from being knocked over completely. She never stopped moving, spinning to face the machine again, to get her spear up before it attacked, but she was almost certain she wouldn't have the time.

It never got the chance to lunge. It looked like it was about to, but then there was a dull clatter and thump of noise, and one of its hind legs gave out completely. It squealed, trying to twist around toward whatever had struck it, entirely distracted from Aloy.

She didn't hesitate. The lunge she made this time was clumsy, but her spear still struck home at the junction of the scrapper's neck and shoulder, wedging apart the metal plates to either side and impacting the heart.

This one didn't go down as cleanly as the first. It collapsed, but its sparking and twitching lasted longer, and was violent enough that she stumbled back and carefully kept her distance until it had finally fallen still.

Only when it had did she dare look up and around.

Caleb stood across the fallen scrapper from her, eyeing it warily. "I made quite a mess of that, didn't I?" He said hoarsely after a minute.

She snorted, pacing slowly around the scrapper, pausing next to Caleb. His knife, she noted, seemed to be buried in the scrapper's hip. It had severed most of the wires running from its power cell on that side, and looked like it had jammed the machine's joint badly enough to disable the leg. "Did you just attack a scrapper with a knife?" She asked, incredulous and impressed at the same time. Even she wasn't brash enough to try that.

Caleb gave a strangled laugh that devolved almost immediately into a pained hiss, and she looked up sharply. He'd hunched his shoulders forward, and was carefully cradling his left arm against his stomach.

"You're hurt?" she asked, alarmed.

He made a face somewhere between a smile and a grimace. "Broke my arm pretty badly. Give it a minute." He glanced up, and his eyebrows rose. "Ah, you're bleeding, though."

She blinked and touched her face, fingers coming away bloodied from what seemed to be raw scrapes and cuts along the side of her cheek and forehead. It stung, her face throbbing where the scrapper had struck her, but she didn't think it was bad. "It's fine, a broken arm's a bigger worry," she said bluntly. "Sit down, I'll find something to splint it."

Caleb stared at her, visibly amused. She frowned, about to insist again he get off his feet and let her take a look. She knew, intellectually, that he healed quickly, but a broken arm was still a pretty serious wound.

He began to protest before she'd even started speaking, only to wince and give a faint gasp as a muffled but audible pop sounded from his arm.

He hesitated a second, then lifted his hand and flexed his fingers carefully, rotating his shoulder a couple of times. "Ah, there. See, it's fine. Now, perhaps you should sit down and let me have a look at those cuts? I've treated my share of wounds over the years."

She did as he asked without further protest, feeling vaguely disconcerted.

It was one thing, she was just now realizing, to understand that Caleb was capable of healing almost instantly. She'd seen it before, that first night.

It was entirely another to see it like this, to know that he'd been injured much more seriously, and that five minutes after the fact, he was just. . . fine. It was like he'd never been hurt at all. She knew that was how it worked, by his own admission and demonstration, but it felt surreal to be so pointedly reminded of what he was capable of.

Caleb made quick work of seeing to her cuts and scrapes, or as quick as possible given the necessity of starting a fire and boiling enough water to get them properly cleaned. Rost had taught her more than enough field medicine to take care of this herself, but especially given that the wounds were on her face it was frankly easier to let Caleb do it, and it was readily apparent that he knew what he was doing.

"So you're a healer even though you don't ever need a healer yourself?" she asked mildly as he finally deemed her properly tended to and ready to travel. This whole morning still felt surreal to her, and she was more amused by that dichotomy than she probably should have been.

"Just because I don't ever really need a healer doesn't mean it's not useful to know," he said dryly, splashing water over his hands to rinse away any lingering blood. "I've been a healer off and on for much of my life. If nothing else, it's a useful skill to barter with. Healing, herbology, medicine in general. . . for most of human history, those have been useful skills to trade on. I suspect they still are, no matter where you go."

He gave a shrug, starting to pack up his things. She rose slowly to her feet, moving to do the same with hers. She'd whistled the striders back to camp long since, and they were waiting as placidly as ever nearby.

"Given that a lot of the plant life is recognizable, humans are still humans, and boiled water is still boiled water, I suspect those skills still apply today," Caleb went on, leaning against his strider's shoulder. "Tell me I wouldn't be able to find shelter just about anywhere, if I walked into a town and proved I was a skilled healer."

She frowned at that, checking her gear absently. No, he wasn't wrong. The Nora wouldn't take him, but the Nora didn't take anyone. Anywhere else he went, though, he was right to assume he'd probably be able to trade those skills for supplies and lodging. It was a dangerous world, and skilled healers were valuable.

"I'm guessing that's not the only handy skill you've picked up," she said wryly, retrieving her knife and turning to eye the fallen scrappers.

He laughed. "Ah, no. You name it, I've probably done it."

She glanced at him with a grin. "I bet you haven't ever harvested machine parts from scrappers before."

He blinked, turning to stare at the scrappers himself, then peering at her knife with a frown. After a minute, he snorted and shook his head, retrieving his own knife again.

"I can't say fighting machines is something I'm eager to make a habit of," he said, gesturing at the dead scrappers with something like amused exasperation. "But you'd better show me how this is done."

Chapter 10: Cousin

Chapter Text

They encountered their first other immortal about a month into traveling together.

Aloy hadn't known how long Caleb would choose to stay with her, or how long she'd want the company, but parting ways wasn't something either of them had brought up yet, even if she wasn't really used to traveling with company for so long.

She was still enjoying their arrangement, and they certainly hadn't run out of things to talk about. If anything, she had more questions than she'd started out with, her curiosity only growing as he'd filled in details about the old world. There was just so much to know, and what she had already learned only made her want to know more.

History had gotten so much more expansive, with his presence, and she certainly hadn't gotten tired of hearing about it yet.

She suspected he felt the same way about this world, her world, especially given that learning what she had to teach was pretty immediately relevant to his continued existence. By now, he probably could have managed perfectly well on his own, but he seemed to prefer having something of a local guide in the world he'd found himself in.

They'd paused at a trading post along their route, and she couldn't help but muse on how easily he managed to fit in with the rest of the crowd despite his relatively limited experience with the details of the culture. She mostly left anything to do with trade and barter to him at this point, since he was both better at it and seemed to enjoy it a great deal more than she did.

He was cheerfully bartering with a vendor for a handsome leather satchel when he faltered abruptly, stiffening and glancing around. The vendor pounced into the opening he'd left, talking fast, driving their high price for the satchel hard.

To Aloy's surprise, Caleb took the offer without another word of protest, claiming his purchase quickly and backing away with a stiff nod. Normally, he'd barter until everybody was blue in the face, so this sudden change made her nervous.

She sidled up beside him as he continued to stare around warily. "What is it?"

"Another of my kind is here," he said tensely, and offered a strained smile. "I really wasn't sure there would be any others left, but it seems we have survived after all."

She frowned, glancing around herself and then back at him. He looked tense, wary, ready to fight or flee. She would have thought he'd be pleased about this.

And how the hell did he know there was another around?

"Isn't this a good thing?" She asked incredulously. "You thought you were alone, and you're not. Shouldn't you be happy about this?" He certainly didn't look happy. He looked ready to bolt.

"That remains to be seen," he murmured, then narrowed his eyes, staring through the trading post crowd.

Aloy followed his gaze, frowning slightly at the tall, dark-skinned woman who approached them. She looked like a trader, in a colorful tunic and skirt, her hair bound in numerous braids and tied with bells and bits of gleaming metal. She smiled as she drew near, raising a hand in greeting.

"I don't want any trouble," Caleb said coolly as she got close enough to hear, his hand resting near his knife.

She blinked, her expression of welcome faltering. "I. . . no trouble, cousin," she said uncertainly, lowering her hand. "I only wanted to offer greetings. Perhaps something to eat, or drink." She gestured doubtfully back the way she'd come, looking almost worried. "But I apologize, if. . ."

Caleb stared at her for a moment, guarded. Aloy still had no idea what was throwing him off so much about this situation, but he was clearly a little taken aback.

She sighed, elbowing him in the arm before stepping forward and bowing her head in greeting. "Thank you," she told the tall woman. "That would be great, we appreciate it."

The woman turned her gaze to Aloy, still looking doubtful and puzzled about Caleb's reaction. Her expression relaxed into a smile, but there was a touch of uncertainty in her eyes. "You're. . . friends? It's a pleasure to meet you, my name is Ara."

Aloy smiled at her. "Aloy. He's Caleb. Don't mind him, I'm sure he'll find his tongue eventually."

Caleb blinked at that, frowning at her, but the sarcasm she'd expected in response was not forthcoming. He only gave a silent nod, his shoulders relaxing in a way that looked a little forced to her.

She fell back to walk next to him as they followed Ara toward the edge of the trading post, frowning at him. "What is going on with you?" she demanded in an undertone. "Isn't this a good thing?"

His expression tightened. "Later," he muttered. "I'll explain later, alright? Let's just. . . see what she wants."

Aloy continued to frown at him, but didn't press. Whatever his problem was, it was something to do with immortality, and she'd known right from the start that wasn't a topic to be casually discussed where they could be overheard.

Ara led them to a colorful canopy erected on the outskirts of the trading post, the patterned fabric casting a tinted shadow over a blanket spread across the ground. Beside it were a couple of small carts loaded with goods, a tethered quartet of large goats, and a woman who looked a few years Ara's senior wrangling a pair of young children.

"My partner, Rahsi, and our children," Ara introduced proudly, and went to kiss the other woman's cheek briefly, murmuring to her quietly before gesturing Caleb and Aloy over to the canopy and the spread blanket beneath it. "She. . . ah, is aware of. . ." She began to explain, then paused to eye Aloy awkwardly.

Caleb gave a faint smile. "Don't worry, she knows," he said with a touch of dryness. Aloy was interested to see that he'd relaxed much more naturally once Ara had introduced her family, and sat without complaint when the woman did. Aloy just shook her head and joined them. "We can be candid here," Caleb added with a shrug.

"It's always awkward, trying to figure out who we can speak freely in front of," Ara said with amusem*nt. She leaned over to search through a small travel chest until she found an intricate heating element and kettle, adding water from a jug and tea leaves from a small pouch before putting the kettle on to warm. Aloy had only seen such contraptions a handful of times, usually boasted as the best in Oseram crafts.

"I do apologize if I startled you, or somehow offended you," Ara went on contritely as she placed three cups on a small tray before her. "That wasn't my intent, I only wanted to trade news. The usual custom around here, you know how it is, but if you're in a hurry. . ."

Caleb stared at her with a small, puzzled frown for a moment. Aloy cleared her throat, and he straightened abruptly, expression settling into something more relaxed. "No, no hurry," he said evenly. "And you didn't. . . well, you didn't offend, anyway. I admit I was a little startled."

He paused again for an awkwardly long moment. On any other occasion, Aloy might have jumped in to fill the silence with some sort of explanation, but she honestly had no idea what to say in this situation. She wasn't sure how much Caleb wanted to share about himself with this woman, even if she was an immortal like him. He seemed reluctant to give away too much, so Aloy thought it best to hold her own tongue until she was sure.

"I apologize," he finally said with a rueful smile, and just like that, his persona for the moment fell into place. Any obvious remaining tension disappeared. "I'm afraid I've been. . . well, I've been on my own for a very long time. I haven't seen much of society in many years, so please forgive me if I'm unaccustomed to. . . ah, this."

He waved vaguely at the canopy, the warming kettle, encompassing their entire situation.

Ara's brow furrowed with what looked like sympathy to Aloy. "Ah, yes, I understand," she said kindly. "Life for us can be. . . difficult, among the wrong sort of people. Have you encountered many others of our kind?"

Caleb again hesitated a second. "Not. . . for some time," he said almost cautiously, "And they were. . . rather less friendly than you."

Aloy frowned slightly. What did he mean by that?

Ara just nodded gravely, though, lifting the kettle and slowly pouring tea for all three of them before handing the cups around, followed quickly by a small box of fruit- and nut-laden biscuits. "I suppose perhaps you wouldn't be used to this, then." She offered with a smile. "For most of us, at least most I've met, I'm glad to tell you this is much more common than hostility," She gestured vaguely around them. "Our people, I've known many of us who travel widely, and see much. Exchanging news, developing relationships. . . it can only help us all." She paused, then shrugged. "Some keep to themselves, of course. Avoid or even attack others of us. I have many friends among our kind, though, especially along my family's trade routes."

Caleb was staring at her, his expression unreadable. Aloy watched him from the corner of her eye, sipping her tea and nibbling on a biscuit to prevent herself from asking him immediately what exactly was going through his mind right now.

"Don't worry too much," Ara said kindly, reaching over to pat Caleb's knee in a comforting gesture. "Especially if you're traveling south, most of us you're likely to encounter are the friendly sort. We're really terrible gossips a lot of the time, I'm afraid. You're sure to be dragged along for tea and an exchange of news if you run across more of us." She smiled and sipped her own tea, then looked them both over with a curious expression. "Where are you headed? How long have you two been traveling together?"

The conversation was easier after that, as it turned to discussions of the places they'd been, the things they'd seen. Caleb remained as vague as ever about a lot of it, but Aloy had more than enough stories to fill the space.

Ara had plenty of her own, too. Aloy learned that she was about seventy years old, and had been traveling all through this part of the world for most of that time. That almost hit Aloy harder than learning Caleb's age had, strangely. Caleb was so phenomenally old she couldn't even begin to process the number of years he'd been alive. It was something almost mystical that her brain had filed away as beyond her ken, something she'd never fully be able to comprehend.

She knew what a woman of seventy was supposed to look like, though, and Ara didn't look much older than Aloy was, herself. To see that was somehow almost stranger than all Caleb's centuries.

It was a pleasant afternoon. Aloy felt like she'd learned quite a bit, and they were both quiet for a time as they rode away from the trading post, processing the encounter.

She had some questions she needed to ask, though.

"What was that all about, when you first saw her?" she demanded, tilting her head back toward the trading post. "You looked like you expected her to attack you or something."

Caleb frowned, watching her silently for a minute. He'd been letting his hair grow, and it was getting just long enough to shadow his eyes now as he stared at her. She could tell there was some sort of internal debate going on.

"I did," he finally told her slowly, and sighed. "Maybe not right there in the road, but. . ." He pressed his lips together, narrowing his eyes. "I. . . confess I failed to tell you a detail or two about immortality. I wasn't sure. . . well."

She narrowed her own eyes. She couldn't say she was surprised, honestly. It wasn't like they'd even known each other when she'd first demanded information about this. She'd suspected he was keeping things from her, but she supposed she couldn't really have expected him to show all his cards at the time. She still very much wanted to know what he was talking about now, though.

He watched her expression and snorted softly. "You already know it's possible for us to die permanently, in particularly extreme circ*mstances." He began slowly, shifting his weight on the strider's back. "However, the most common way is by beheading."

She raised her eyebrows. He'd refrained from telling her that for a full month, and this seemed like an odd time to bring it up, after such an amiable meeting with one of his own kind. She watched him intently for a minute, then gestured for him to continue.

"The thing is," he went on almost delicately, staring ahead at the road, "The thing is, when one immortal beheads another, or happens to be close by when another immortal is killed, there's a. . . a transfer of energy, as one immortal absorbs the other's quickening. It looks something like a lightning storm. Sort of feels like one, too, and when that happens, the surviving immortal gets. . . gets strength, skills, memories. Information and power. Whether they want to or not," he added dryly.

She frowned at that, trying to imagine it. Not how it would look, exactly. Between the weather and the capabilities of some of the machines she'd fought, she could picture the effect he described well enough. She wondered, more, how it would feel. How would it be to have something like that shunted into you in such a way? And why did it work that way? That seemed like such a strange ability to possess.

She'd more or less gotten used to the idea of immortality by now. It had become almost normal, in a strange sort of way. Oh yes, Aloy of the Nora and her companion, the millennia-old immortal man from the ancient past. That was just how it was for now. She hadn't really expected to hear anything new about it that would surprise her, but this. . . This definitely did. It sounded alien, this capability.

"Somewhere along the line," Caleb went on slowly, interrupting her thoughts, "A. . . a belief, of a sort, arose. One that, more and more, was taken to be the bare truth." His tone had gone flat. "A belief that we were destined to fight one another to the death in single combat, and that in the end there would be only one of us left. That this one remaining immortal would possess the power of all the others, and would receive some. . . some grand prize." He scoffed faintly. "The Game, we called it."

He shook his head, grimacing. "I never really subscribed, as it were, and it wasn't always so. . . all-encompassing." He gave a vague wave. "It became so prevalent, though, so widely accepted as true. We had. . . it was common for older immortals to take on younger ones as students, and this school of thought gained so much ground, passed from teacher to student, that it became difficult to find an immortal who didn't believe it to be as irrefutable an aspect of our existence as our ability to heal."

He shifted restlessly, drumming his fingers against his strider's neck. "Between the extent of that belief and the transfer of power upon one immortal's death to another, it became. . . necessary, to defend oneself against others of our kind. Many took the Game very literally, making it their life's purpose to fight often and win. Many others saw it as an excuse to indulge their darker natures, to do as they pleased and never mind who they hurt in the name of gaining power. Either way, there were quite a few who actively hunted others of us. It was always dangerous to assume another was friendly. It was safer, almost always, not to trust another immortal."

She stared sightlessly ahead, frowning in consideration. The lightning storm beheadings, the transfer of memory and power, that sounded unbelievable to her, but the rest. . .

Honestly, she wished it was harder to believe than it was.

But she'd seen Eclipse. She'd seen what fanatical belief could do to people, how easy it was for just a few to turn others to their way of thinking. She knew how easy it was for people to take on dark, ugly beliefs, harmful and dangerous beliefs, even outside of what Eclipse had done. She'd seen the sort of violence and hardship that could result in, a lot more up close and personal than she would have preferred.

It was depressingly easy to believe what he was saying.

"So others of your kind, it was safer to avoid them," she said slowly. "Anyone you didn't know, they might just try to kill you."

He gave a thin smile. "Yes. Anyone unknown, anyone you were even a little unsure of, was a threat, and you could never truly be sure of anyone. You remember how I told you I'm better with swords than a spear? That's why. You carry one, you learn to use it, or you lose your head. That was how it was, for thousands of years."

"You did this too," Aloy said with a frown. "Hunted and fought other immortals for this power?"

Caleb snorted. "I try not to, no. Like I said, I never really subscribed, and it's been a long time since I've enjoyed fighting. Don't care for it, and I don't care for the risk. I'd rather not put my life on the line for something so. . . so stupid." He gave a short, humorless laugh, but sobered again quickly. "All I ever wanted was to live. Fighting risks that, so I do my best to avoid it as much as possible."

Aloy nodded slowly. She could see why Caleb had been worried, when they'd first encountered Ara. If he'd spent thousands of years living like that, assuming every other immortal was a threat, no wonder he'd been wary of her.

But Ara hadn't wanted a fight. She'd seemed confused by his wariness.

"That's not what happened back there, though," she pointed out, gesturing back the way they'd come.

A small, almost cautious smile crossed Caleb's face, and he glanced back as well with a thoughtful expression. "No," he agreed quietly. "No, it's not, is it?"

Chapter 11: Friendships

Chapter Text

Caleb was quiet for the rest of the day, even when they eventually stopped to camp for the night. Aloy suspected it would be one of those evenings where he didn't say another word unless she said something first.

Normally, that didn't bother her. Normally she'd let that stand, and she'd been content to let the both of them process things in silence for a while. She'd given it enough time at this point, though, and after their encounter with Ara, there were still a couple of matters that bothered her.

"You knew she was there," she said slowly as she built up a fire, glancing over to where Caleb was silently cutting wild onions, adding them to a small cooking pot. "Ara. You knew she was around. How?"

He glanced up, clearly distracted, but after a moment he gave a shrug. "We can feel each other's proximity," he said absently. "I expect it's something to do with our quickening. It's like an energy field of some variety that we can detect when one field encounters and reacts with another. That's my assumption of how it works, anyway."

Aloy blinked, frowning as she sat back on her heels. "How far does it go?" she asked curiously. "What does it feel like?"

He frowned as well, staring down at the onions in thought. "Range varies," he said with another shrug. "Seems to depend on the individuals involved, as far as I can tell, at least in part. As for what it feels like. . ." He mouthed silently for a minute, then sighed. "It's hard to describe. It's like a vibration up your spine and in your head, and a sort of prickling, like your hackles are up. But it's a noise, too, inside your skull. Sort of. . . a hum? A buzz?" He gave a helpless shrug. "I'm not sure how best to explain it. It's most noticeable when you first come within range of each other, and then it sort of fades to the background after that."

He gave himself a shake and tossed the last of the onions into the pot, along with a fistful of dry juneberries. "I have some theories about why we can do that, but nothing certain. With the prevalence of the Game, it was a common belief that it's meant as a warning. That's more or less what it ended up being, given the dangers presented in encountering other immortals. I usually try to make myself scarce whenever I feel it. Safer that way."

Aloy nodded slowly. Given what he'd told her earlier, that seemed pretty smart to her. She wasn't one to back down from a fight if one found her, but she was also pretty clear on the wisdom of keeping out of trouble when fighting wasn't necessary.

"You seemed to change your mind, when we met her family," She went on slowly, watching him across the fire.

He gave a wry smile, peeling open a pouch of pemmican and scraping a portion of it into the pot. "I haven't encountered many headhunters who willingly keep a family and children around," he said with a shrug. "There are exceptions, of course. Hunters of opportunity, people who will live more or less normal lives but happily challenge any other immortal who comes their way. But usually, if an immortal has settled down happily with a family, they're less interested in hunting."

He carefully set up a frame for the cooking pot, then placed it over the fire. "The fact that she was so ready to trust us with the knowledge that she has a family spoke volumes, as well." He paused on the edge of saying more, frowning as he searched for the words. "Families are. . . difficult, for us. What we are makes it complicated enough already, and the Game is a danger to anyone close to us. It's fairly common for an immortal's family to be threatened or used against them by hunters. I've had that happen to me, and I've seen it happen to others, many times. Once upon a time I was known to do it myself, in my younger, angrier days."

He shrugged and sighed, sitting back and stretching his legs out before him. "It's an effort for us to take that route, knowing the risks. Knowing our partners will grow old and we won't, knowing we won't be able to give them children."

Aloy blinked, frowning. "Wait, what do you mean? Can't give them children?"

Caleb blinked as well, eyes distant as he thought for a moment. "Hm, I thought I'd mentioned that. We can't have children. We're sterile, one and all."

Aloy glanced back the way they'd come. "So Ara's kids. . ."

"Adopted," Caleb shrugged. "Maybe her partner's children from a previous relationship. Doesn't make a difference, or at least it never did to me. Family is family. Blood relation, or lack thereof, doesn't change a thing when you've got people who matter to you."

Aloy couldn't help but smile at that. Given that her only blood relation was a woman who'd been dead for a thousand years, she could understand that. Rost had been her family.

She gave her head a slight shake. "So do immortals ever. . . get involved with each other?" she asked after a minute, turning her thoughts away from the grief that always accompanied reminders of Rost. "That would probably cut down on some of the complications, I would think."

He laughed, leaning forward to check the pot, lifting a long-handled spoon to give the contents a stir. "Sure we do. I've had immortal partners here and there, at least for a time. I've known a few married immortals. One couple I met had been together for about three hundred years by then. Fought like cats and dogs sometimes, they did, but they made it work. I try not to commit to anything like that, though. I find it easier, and safer, to sort of. . . come and go."

She nodded, frowning thoughtfully, trying to imagine how that would look. Coming and going was something she understood, and she had no desire to hold still for long these days, even if there were places and people she'd always return to. Trying to imagine that over the course of centuries was still a hard thing for her to wrap her head around, though. As was the idea of trying to have a family, given the complications it sounded like that would involve, even if everyone was aware of the stakes. "I suppose relationships with other immortals could also be just as dangerous as any other, huh?" She said slowly, "Given the. . . the hunting and fighting."

He gave a thin smile at that. "Yes, often more so. I certainly never trusted easily, even when it came to people I knew. You never know if somebody's going to be the same as you remember from the last time you met, and immortals do tend to bring an astonishing amount of baggage to a relationship." He stared into the fire for a moment, then sighed. "Even back then, though, there were plenty of us who weren't interested in the Game. Who just. . . tried to ignore it and live our lives. Even as much as I avoided others of my kind, there were enough of us of that mindset that I did manage to make some friends I could trust here and there." He paused again, for longer this time, "The sorts of friends you keep for centuries."

His expression had turned distant, and just a little sad, and he gave his head a slow shake. "It's strange, I spent so much of my life hiding, or running, keeping clear of others and keeping my head down. I'd sort of settled a bit more, in the decades before the Swarm. I had a handful of good friends, people I'd let closer than I had anyone else in a long time. I had a good life." He gave a rueful chuckle and shrugged. "Figures, doesn't it? I find myself something like a home and a family, and it all gets uprooted by the robot apocalypse."

Aloy watched him for a moment as he prodded listlessly at the flames with a stick. "They must've been pretty special people," she commented quietly.

He gave a small smile. "Oh yes. The one I met first. . . Joe. He was mortal, he died long before the Swarm became an issue, but I stayed in touch with his daughter and her family. I met others I cared about through him as well, in a roundabout sort of way. He was a good man, and a very good friend."

He leaned forward to check the pot again, stirring in a little water, but she suspected it was more of an excuse to give himself a minute to think than because it actually needed the attention.

"I'd been more or less out of the Game for a couple of centuries," he finally went on. "Hiding. I mostly managed to avoid others, for all that time, but trouble did find me eventually, as trouble does. Joe learned about it and sent a friend to my doorstep. He thought I was mortal at the time, though he knew about us. He thought I needed protection."

He smirked faintly, his expression distant. "Mac. Duncan Macleod, was the name of the man he sent to me. We became good friends." His smile turned wry. "We had our ups and downs, to say the least, but we were close, at the end." He closed his eyes for a moment, looking pained. "I don't know what happened to him. The last time we spoke was maybe a year before everything. . ."

Aloy looked away to stare into the fire as he drifted into silence. She was honestly pretty new to having real friends herself, all things considered, but she'd kill and die for the ones she had. The idea of losing them and just. . . not ever knowing what had happened like this chilled her.

"Do you think any of them might have made it? This Mac guy, or the others you knew?" she asked quietly after a moment. "Could they have survived, like you did?"

Caleb blew out a gust of breath, leaning back on his elbows and gazing upward through the treetops. "I don't know," he murmured, giving his head a shake. "Probably not, but I hope so. I hope somewhere in the world, somebody I called friend is still out there, living their life. Maybe someday I'll even find them." He gave a small smile, "I do have the time. And it sounds like there's not quite as much danger for my kind as there was before."

He gave a quiet little laugh, shaking his head again. "Many of my friends would have been thrilled about the way it seems things are around here, at least according to Ara. So many of us only ever just wanted to live our lives how we liked, without needing to defend ourselves at a moment's notice." He stared into space for a minute, lost in thought. "I suppose it might be different elsewhere. It probably is, there are probably places where immortals are at odds more often than not. Ara's experience isn't everyone's, but the fact that there's relative peace even in one part of the world. . ."

He trailed off, smiling vaguely up at the sky. "One of my friends nearly died advocating for peace among us, once. He was very young, and a damn fool about it, trying to just. . . quit fighting. Not surprising he wanted that, living as he'd had to, but he was incredibly lucky he didn't lose his head before he came to his senses."

He leaned forward, resting his elbows across his knees, expression turning somber. "With Mac, the killing and violence very nearly drove him mad a couple of times. He hated all the death, but he hated injustice more, and tended to throw himself at every worthy cause he ever laid eyes on." He was quiet for a moment, then gave a soft, sad little laugh. "Oh, we argued about that. All the time. I'd always tell him it was better to stay out of trouble, and he'd always go out of his way to find more trouble than I ever would have thought possible."

The brief smile faded, and he sighed. "He probably still would, even if headhunters and the Game truly aren't as much a problem now. I imagine worthy causes abound even today, and I'm sure he'd find one or another to get involved with. To experience life free of the Game, though. . ." He hesitated, then gave his head a slow shake. "I would have liked to see that, I think. To see my friends free of it, even beyond experiencing it for myself."

They were both quiet again for a minute after that. He checked the pot again, scraping the sides of it with the spoon. She watched him, wondering. Wondering again what it would be like to wake up one day and discover the whole world was gone, that nobody she'd known would be at her side for whatever came next.

"Maybe some of them did make it," she said quietly, hoping for his sake that it might be true. "Maybe you will find them again."

She had a pretty good idea of how long those odds were. She imagined Caleb did, too. Maybe there were other immortals from his time who'd survived, but if there were, they'd be few and very far between, and unlikely to be anyone he'd known.

He gave a weary shrug, lifting the pot carefully off the fire. "There's always that chance," he said, his tone remote. "I would very much like that to be true, but. . ." He gave a wry twist of a smile, one that didn't contain much humor. "People die. That's the way the world has always been, and always will be." He gave a quiet sigh, spooning portions of their meal into bowls. "I wish they could have seen this world. I would have liked to see it with them. But if that cannot be, then it cannot be." He offered her a bowl, eyes distant. "No matter how much I would like for it to be otherwise."

Chapter 12: Connections

Chapter Text

"So, presumably," Caleb said conversationally as they set off the following morning, "Despite your. . . unusual origins, you did not come into this world knowing how to kill cultists and genocidal AIs and giant animal-shaped robots."

Aloy blinked at that lead-in, turning to stare at him incredulously. Where was he going with this?

He smiled blandly at her. "You never talk about any of your friends or family," he said with a shrug. "You're an exceptionally skilled woman, I expect you must've learned it all somewhere."

She blinked again, considering that, but he wasn't wrong.

They'd sort of avoided personal topics in general, until last night. She hadn't wanted to ask him directly about anything too personal, given that - to phrase it bluntly - all of his friends were dead. Last night had been the first time he'd ever spoken about any of the people he'd been close to, more than in passing. It was certainly the first time she'd heard any names.

As for herself. . .

Well, some of it was difficult to think about. Difficult to talk about. But she supposed, in the end, she was just new to the idea of having friends at all. She was still getting used to the thought that she did have friends, that there were a lot of people she could rely on when she needed them, or just spend time with as she liked.

It was still kind of a novel experience for her, after the way she'd grown up. It wasn't as if she'd really had anyone to talk to, other than Rost. She'd never had to discuss her personal life with anyone, because he'd known everything about her. Caleb hadn't asked her directly about this before, and she hadn't really cared to share her personal life with someone who was basically a stranger. He wasn't a stranger anymore, though, and after the conversation last night, it seemed a natural enough question.

"I understand that it might be a difficult topic," Caleb added when she hadn't responded after a minute. "Not everybody has the best experiences regarding friends and family. Curiosity withdrawn, if you like."

He was gazing idly around when she glanced at him again, apparently content to drop the topic as if he'd never mentioned it.

She chewed her lip for a moment, considering.

Was it strange to trade personal stories for personal stories? Trade of information was what their relationship had been built on, initially, so she supposed it wasn't all that odd in their situation.

Maybe, given the transactional nature of their relationship at first, it was somewhat stranger that Caleb had become her friend as well. He had, though. They would have parted ways long before now if there weren't some amount of mutual respect and liking between them.

"No, it's alright," she finally said with a slight smirk, amused by her own thoughts. "I'm just pretty new to having friends at all."

He glanced at her, raising his eyebrows, and she snorted.

"The man who taught me most of what I know was named Rost," she said, sobering slightly. "Remember when I told you the Nora weren't all that thrilled I spontaneously appeared in their sacred mountain as a baby?" At his nod, she rolled her eyes upward. "They made me an outcast for that. When you're outcast, the tribe's not allowed to acknowledge you. We all still live in the same valley, but anyone who's not an outcast can't talk to you, can't communicate with you at all. Technically, you're not even supposed to talk to other outcasts." She was quiet for a moment. "Not exactly a great environment for making friends."

Caleb was staring at her, brow furrowed. "And. . . I'm sorry, you were how old when they did this?"

She made a face. "Oh, I was an infant, I don't even remember it," she said bluntly, then sighed, bowing her head for a moment. "Rost was an outcast, too. They weren't quite cruel enough to just toss me out in the cold, I guess that was a step too far. They gave me to Rost to raise."

"How very compassionate of them," Caleb said in a dry tone.

Aloy smirked. "Yeah, they're great about that. He wasn't my father, but he was as close to it as I could have. He was a warrior, and a hunter. He taught me everything he could about how to survive. How to be the best." She gave a sigh, staring ahead down the road. "He was also about the only person I talked to, until just a couple of years ago. Outcasts would talk to each other sometimes, and there was a merchant or two who'd break taboo to trade with us, but that was really about it. I didn't really make friends until after I won the right to rejoin the Nora, and then I left the Embrace not long after that."

Caleb was watching her intently. "Well, I guess that explains why you don't talk about the Nora much," he said dryly after a moment, earning a snort of laughter from her. "This Rost, the way you talk, it sounds like he's. . . ?"

Her brief humor faded, and she sighed. "Dead," she said grimly. "He died for me, protecting me from Helis. The leader of the Eclipse," she explained quickly at his puzzled expression. "Helis came hunting for me when HADES saw me through one of its minions and determined I was a threat."

They rode in heavy silence for a minute. "A lot of people died that day," Aloy finally went on grimly, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. "Eclipse didn't just attack me, they attacked the entire tribe. There was a ceremony that day, and a celebration, and they came in and. . ."

She made a sharp, cutting gesture, clenching her teeth. That had been her first introduction to that level of violence, and it had been her first taste of loss. "I'd met a girl the night before," she went on distantly. "Vala. This ceremony was going to let me join the Nora again. I wouldn't be an outcast anymore, and a lot of people didn't like that. Vala didn't care, though. She thought they were idiots. She seemed glad to have me there." She swallowed and sighed, staring at the back of her strider's head. "She died in the attack, along with Rost. She and a lot of others."

Caleb winced, his own eyes fixed on the road ahead.

She sighed and gave a shrug. "It's why I left the Embrace, actually. So I could hunt Helis and the Eclipse for what they'd done. I don't know if I ever would have gone beyond that valley, if they hadn't come." She paused for a moment, thinking back, then gave a thin smile. "I met Vala's brother Varl, chasing after them. We're still friends. He helped me hunt them, and he helped against HADES, too. And honestly-"

She broke off, frowning slightly as she tried to sort out her thoughts. That day had been horrible, the worst day of her life, and she wished it had never come to that. She had enough distance now, though, to put it in context. To think of what it meant for the path her life had taken.

"Rost, the day before that, he taught me. . ." She began, and then paused for a moment. "The last thing he taught me was. . . was how to use everything else he'd taught me to help people, even if there's a cost. He taught me how to fight for more than just myself. To use what I know, what I can do, on behalf of others."

She frowned to herself, trying to remember everything he'd said that night, before the Proving. "I didn't care much, before that, since he was the only person I knew who'd ever done much for me, but he was right. If he'd never given me that lesson, I don't know where I'd be now. I've been able to help a lot of people, and since then they've been there for me, too." She glanced over at Caleb with a smile. "Knowing how to fight for people has made me some good friends. In a lot of places, actually."

Caleb chuckled. "It's good to have connections. It's good to know you've always got someplace to turn, in troubled times."

She nodded ruefully at that. "Yeah, it's. . . come in pretty handy a couple of times. I definitely wouldn't have been able to destroy HADES without help, without Varl and. . . a lot of others. I was pretty lucky, honestly." She gave her head a slow shake. "My friend Erend was the first person I ever met who wasn't Nora. He's the captain of Avad's vanguard. If I hadn't ended up with him and Avad as friends, I don't think we would have been able to pull it off. HADES had an army of machines, in the end. It wasn't something I could have handled on my own."

Caleb frowned slightly, eyes narrowed. "Hang on, Avad. That sounds familiar, you've mentioned that name before. Who is he?"

She blinked, frowning distantly and thinking back to past conversations. They'd spent a lot of time discussing different tribes and cultures around where she was from, and given their size and power, the Carja had come up frequently. She'd definitely mentioned Avad's name, given how integral he was to current politics and relations. It was impossible to talk about any of her homeland's recent history without mentioning him. She hadn't purposefully misled Caleb over how well she knew Avad, but it occurred to her she'd never explicitly mentioned that she knew him personally.

But now. . .

"Oh," she said casually, smirking, "Sun King Avad."

Caleb peered at her for a long minute, eyes narrowed. "Sun King Avad," he said slowly. "The leader of probably the most powerful kingdom in the region. The guy who, you told me, committed a violent coup to end a generation of slaughter and slavery, and proceeded to usher in the beginnings of an entirely unprecedented age of peace. That Sun King Avad?"

She continued to smirk at him. "That's the one."

"He's your friend. He and the captain of his vanguard?"

"Yup."

He continued to stare at her, eyes narrowed, then scoffed and shook his head. "When I said it was good to be connected, that's a little more comprehensive than I was imagining," he told her dryly.

She laughed at that. "Yeah. It's been. . . weird. I mean, it's not like I set out to be friends with a king or anything. I didn't even really know what a king was when I first met him. I went from knowing one person in the world to being friends with the kind of guy who has to run a whole nation."

She stared into the distance for a minute. It was still bizarre to her, the sort of connections she'd made with people almost by accident. "It's surreal, knowing the kind of resources he can call up if he needs to." She went on with a shrug, "The kind of resources he has called up, because of things I said or did."

It almost made her dizzy sometimes, to think about where she'd come from compared to where she was now. She'd never planned on any of this, but she supposed at this point she was, as Caleb had said, connected.

She snorted to herself and shook her head. "I can introduce you if you want, when we get to Meridian," she offered with a shrug.

"Oh, no thank you," Caleb said abruptly, wrinkling his nose. "That's a lot more attention than I want. I already get more than I'd like by virtue of traveling with you." It was his turn to smirk. "You think I haven't noticed that you're not exactly a nobody yourself? People know who you are everywhere we go."

Aloy scoffed and rolled her eyes upward, but she couldn't deny the accuracy of the statement. "Yeah, if only they'd bother learning my name," she said dryly. "But no, it's machine girl this, machine girl that." She eyed him with amusem*nt. "People will know you too, now. They won't forget a man riding through on a strider any more than they'll forget me."

"Yes, but I'm not also making a habit of saving the world," he countered wryly. "That does make a difference." He hesitated a moment, then scoffed and shook his head. "Somehow, I keep befriending the world-saving variety. It's like there's a specific strain of you people, you hero types, that I just cannot seem to avoid. It's bad for my health, all that running around and taking on causes and whatnot."

He was grinning, despite the apparent exasperation. She returned it with a grin of her own.

"And you attract each other like flies to a carcass," he went on, really warming to his complaints now. "You have one selfless hero type who always goes looking for trouble, and there's bound to be more. It's like you coordinate it or something, it's uncanny." He gave his head a rueful shake.

Aloy nodded along. "That so?" She said, the corner of her mouth twitching.

He gave a long sigh. "You cannot tell me the rest of your friends aren't exactly the same sort. Constantly getting into trouble, fighting the good fight. . . You've certainly told me enough about the Sun King, he seems just the type. A real do-gooder, that one, and I'm betting he's not the only one like that you hang around with."

She stifled a laugh. The funniest part was, he wasn't wrong. Now that she thought about it, her friends did tend to get into all kinds of trouble.

"Yeah, that's fair," she told him with a shrug and a nod. "You're right. But if that's how it is. . ." She glanced at him, grinning slyly. "Then what does that make you?"

His long, put-upon sigh and exasperated eye-roll made her crow with laughter.

Chapter 13: Ambush

Chapter Text

They were getting close to Carja lands when trouble found them.

They had forewarning, at least. A merchant Aloy recognized from a couple of past trades flagged her down as they passed through a small marketplace, making their way over when she slowed and raised her eyebrows. "Someone looking for you, machine girl," they told her breathlessly.

That statement alone was concerning. Friends and allies she might have had, but in her experience if somebody was actively seeking her out like this, they didn't have good intentions. "Oh," she said tonelessly. "Who?"

The merchant shrugged. "Didn't catch a name. Big fellow. Carja armor, red mantle." Their hands sketched out details of appearance, tracing the approximation of a cloak and mantle. "Odd jewelry. Some polished metal, looked like brass, maybe. All these little round things strung together."

Aloy had to focus for a moment on keeping her reaction to herself, taking a slow, deep breath.

Eclipse.

There were still some of them wandering around, she knew that. If they'd been any closer to Meridian, he probably would have had to take more care to hide what he was. That distinctive appearance would have gotten him captured or killed pretty quickly, anywhere Avad's soldiers might have spotted him. They were far enough out, though, to be beyond the reach of Carja soldiers.

Meaning whatever dregs of Eclipse had lasted - and she knew more than a few of them had escaped and were still floating around somewhere - likely thought they could act with impunity here.

If one of them was looking for her, she was positive he wanted her dead. She doubted it would be just him, as well. To her dismay, Eclipse generally knew the value of operating as a group. She didn't doubt a lone cultist would wait to make a move against her until he had backup. They wouldn't much care about collateral damage, either.

She muttered a curse and thanked the merchant, looking around to find Caleb.

He'd been chatting with a vendor, trading a handful of shards for a couple of skewers of heavily seasoned roast meat and vegetables. His expression as he wandered over and handed her one told her he'd seen the exchange. "Doesn't look like good news," he commented mildly, before delicately pulling a slice of pepper from his skewer with his teeth.

Aloy shook her head grimly. "Sounds like there's some leftover Eclipse around," she told him quietly, starting toward the edge of the little marketplace with purpose. "One of them was looking for me. That means they'll probably be trying to kill me at the first opportunity."

He nodded slowly, continuing to pick at his skewer as he followed her. "What's the plan, then?"

She sighed and shrugged. "Keep moving. If we can get into Carja territory before they find us, it would be stupid for them to follow." She took a bite from her own skewer, chewing thoughtfully. "I'm hoping maybe they'll head further west or north looking for me, and we'll miss them completely."

Caleb was quiet for a moment. "I'm not used to being quite that lucky," he finally said wryly. "But here's hoping."

It wasn't much of a surprise that they weren't that lucky.

She should have expected them to lie in wait, to guess she'd come back this way and take their chances on laying an ambush, but she didn't see it coming.

Caleb did, about a second before the attack happened. Aloy's only alert that something was wrong was when he rode up beside her and shoved her bodily from her strider's back.

She landed hard, breathless and vaguely stunned as the wind was knocked out of her, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Caleb landed hard next to her a second later, and she twisted around to demand an explanation, only to freeze in alarm.

He had an arrow sticking out of his chest. He clutched at it weakly, making a horrible rasping sound.

Another arrow clanged off the armored shoulder of his strider, making the machine rear and bolt, followed almost immediately by her own. Aloy swore and got her feet under her, staying low and grabbing Caleb to drag him as fast as she could behind a ridge of rock.

Once they had some cover, she bent to look at the arrow. It was low on his ribcage, and whatever it had hit was making him weakly cough blood.

She took a slow breath. Her hands felt cold, her head and chest too hot, and jittery, frantic energy coursed through her.

That was fine. She could deal with that. She dealt with it all the time.

She slung her bow around from where it had rested on her back, setting an arrow to the string and activating her focus to pinpoint their attackers. She couldn't see anything more detailed than the outlines the focus showed her - five, arrayed around the sides of the gully she and Caleb had been riding through - and she couldn't be absolutely sure this was Eclipse and not just some band of robbers, but she was pretty certain.

And one of them, it turned out, had a focus of his own, confirming her assumption. She could see the marker coming up in her view, and swore. That meant he could see her as clearly as she could see him, and act accordingly. He'd have to be her priority.

Assuming she could even make it out from behind her current cover. It was enough if she stayed crouched and didn't move around much, but it wasn't a good spot to shoot from. When she dared to lift her head above cover, several arrows streaked her way, and she barely managed to get off a single shot of her own.

She looked around frantically, but there was nowhere she could go without exposing herself to their fire. If she could just make it out of the little gully, she'd have a chance, but there was no way she'd be able to do it without getting shot full of arrows.

And she couldn't leave Caleb defenseless. Beside her, his labored, rattling breaths were a harrowing distraction.

He was dying. She had to get him out of here now, or he would die from this. If they could just make it back to that homestead they'd passed a couple of hours prior, maybe there would be a healer who could save him, but they had to get out of here first, and. . .

It took her what was, in retrospect, an embarrassingly long time to see the problem with her logic.

When she finally did realize it she blinked, cursed to herself, and dropped her bow so she could grab the arrow in Caleb's chest. Everything she'd ever learned about wounds like this dictated that the arrow stay put until a real healer could see to it. Removing it just killed the victim faster.

But that wasn't exactly a problem for Caleb, and in her single-minded focus on the attack, she'd forgotten that detail.

She ripped the arrow free, wincing as he convulsed. Blood poured from the wound, and only a minute passed before Caleb went horribly, utterly still, eyes half open and fixed.

Aloy felt like her heart stopped. Intellectually, she knew he'd come back. She'd seen it once before, at the bunker. He'd told her repeatedly that was how it worked. She'd seen the way he healed. She understood that it would be fine.

But she had also just watched a friend die.

She swallowed hard, ducking down against the ridge of rock as another arrow ricocheted off the top of it, trembling. She'd just watched her friend die, and what if he didn't come back? What if it didn't work like he'd explained this time?

Then he gave a gurgling gasp, eyes snapping fully open, and she almost fell over in shock.

It took him a minute to catch his breath, and when he did he shot her a baleful look. "Thank you," he said peevishly, pushing himself to his knees and ducking in against the rock next to her.

"It's not my fault I'm not used to people being able to come back from the dead," she snapped back furiously, but she was grinning now. Relief and no small amount of wonder at what she'd just seen made her giddy, despite the still dire situation.

He pressed himself to the ridge of rock, retrieving his bow from his back and carefully nocking an arrow before peering cautiously over the top of their cover. He let out a yelp and was forced to duck back almost immediately as an arrow nearly took out his eye.

"Hm, not ideal," he muttered.

Aloy grimaced in agreement and pulled her focus free, handing it over to him. "Take a look, then give it back."

He fixed it in place immediately, his eyes darting rapidly between the positions of their enemies as the focus highlighted them, then handed it back as she'd asked. "Five. Alright. Not insurmountable, especially since they likely think I'm not a factor in this fight anymore."

"Maybe, but one of them has a focus, too," Aloy said bluntly, peering toward the one in question. "He'll be able to tell that you're on your feet again."

"Does he," Caleb murmured with interest. "We'll just have to do something about that, won't we."

He glanced around at the gully they'd found themselves in, frowning in thought.

"No good place to climb up without getting shot," Aloy pointed out grimly. "They've got us pinned, and it's only a matter of time before they decide to circle around behind us." She glared in the direction of the cultist with the focus, watching the shapes of the others from the corners of her eyes. They didn't have long before the Eclipse would think to surround them.

"And clearly emerging from behind cover for long enough to take a shot or two of our own isn't going to work," Caleb murmured with a scowl. "We might as well paint giant targets on our foreheads." He chewed his lip for a moment, and they both ducked lower as another arrow shattered against the rock, spraying off bits of grit.

Aloy watched his distracted expression, frowning. "What are you thinking?" She finally said when the silence stretched on. "You've got some sort of plan."

He groaned faintly, pressing his forehead against the rock. "I mean, yes, I do, but I'm trying very hard to think of a different one."

Aloy frowned. "Why? We probably don't have a lot of time here, and if they manage to hit me, I'm not going to recover from it. We need to deal with this."

"Yes, I know," he snapped. He glared at her for a moment, then sighed and rubbed his forehead. "My current plan involves drawing their fire. I can probably make enough of a spectacle of myself - and hopefully enough of a threat - to make them focus on me. You'd probably have a chance to get up out of this gully and out of sight, if I can distract them." He took a slow, ragged breath. "I would really prefer to avoid getting shot again, though. They can't kill me permanently, but that's not an experience I particularly enjoy."

Aloy shivered. She'd already watched him die once today. She didn't want to see it again, and it wasn't as if she was the one at the most risk.

Or maybe she was. After all, he'd come back if they shot him full of arrows. It would only take one to kill her forever.

She didn't want to ask him to do that any more than he wanted to do it. Looking around again, though, she couldn't see a better way either. They were pinned down here. If either of them moved from behind their cover, they'd likely be taken down in seconds. Even if he did distract them, it wasn't a sure thing that she'd be able to make it out of the line of fire fast enough.

But they were sitting ducks here, and it was only a matter of time before. . .

Her eyes snapped to movement from a couple of the Eclipse, crouched low and creeping along the top edge of the gully to get around behind them.

"We're out of time," she said bluntly, eyes tracking the two Eclipse as they drew closer. "They're trying to flank us. Now's probably the best time, while they're focused on moving."

He muttered a curse, lifting his head long enough to take a quick look around and ducking back again as another arrow flew overhead. He pointed a short way down the gully, gesturing at what looked like a dry seasonal stream bed winding up the side of it. "Can you get up top that way?"

Aloy nodded. The stream bed was a decent path up, and was close enough that she had a good chance of making it, as long as the Eclipse were distracted. "Yeah, and that'll put me right in front of those two coming toward us, as long as we move fast. I can take them by surprise."

He nodded, giving a thin smile, and got his feet carefully positioned under him. "Okay. Have the other three moved?"

She glanced around. "Two haven't, one of them has shifted further that way." She pointed out where he'd taken up a new position.

Caleb nodded again, gripping his bow tightly. "Alright. Get moving as soon as I'm out in the open. I think I'll be able to get at least a shot or two off before they take me down, hopefully more. I'll keep moving as long as I can, make it harder for them. Maybe I'll even get lucky and hit a couple."

He snorted softly, but his expression was grim as he looked at her again, taking a deep breath. "Aloy, they are going to kill me again." He told her gravely. "Don't take too long, and be careful . I need you around to come pull the arrows out after, yes?"

She swallowed at that, not really wanting to think about it, but took a deep breath and nodded.

"Right," she muttered, bracing herself, and flashed him a tight grin. "I'll try not to keep you waiting."

He gave a hint of a crooked smile and took another deep breath, then bounded from behind their cover with his bow drawn.

Aloy spun and sprinted toward the stream bed, moving as fast as she could. It was time to end this.

Chapter 14: Aftermath

Chapter Text

An hour or so later, Aloy sat on the bank of a small creek and stoked the fire with a frown as Caleb crouched by the edge of the water, attempting to wash blood from his tunic.

He'd stripped to underclothes, and even from here she could see his skin pimpling with gooseflesh in the cool evening air and cold water. He'd washed most of the blood off of himself, and seemed entirely focused on the tunic now.

Aside from the frustration of cleaning up, though, it was like he'd already forgotten about what had happened. He didn't seem the least bit bothered by the fact that he'd been killed today, more than once, and painfully.

It was eerie and unsettling to her, that his skin was completely unmarked. She'd seen the wounds, she'd seen how bad they'd been. She'd watched him heal before, but never from anything like this. The broken arm after they'd fought the scrappers had been minor by comparison, and the rest had been nothing more than the usual cuts and scrapes a person picked up in day-to-day life.

It was different, when it was deep, fatal arrow wounds. When it was something she knew with utter certainty that nobody could recover from.

They'd shot him four more times before she'd been able to get to the last of them. He'd managed to keep moving longer than she'd hoped, long enough for her to scramble up the stream bed and reach the lip of the gully without a hitch. He'd even managed to kill one of the Eclipse himself with a well-aimed shot, before they'd finally brought him down.

She'd taken care of the rest. The two who'd been trying to flank them hadn't been prepared for her sudden appearance, and the surprise had frozen them long enough for her to kill one before he even managed to react. The other had put up a fight, but not a long one.

After that, she'd targeted the one with the focus, the apparent leader of the group. He'd been co*cky, and not as skilled a fighter as she'd feared. He hadn't been expecting his ambush to fail the way it had, and he hadn't been prepared to face her directly.

The last one had run. She'd let him go. Maybe he'd be back, but she wouldn't have bet on it, and she had other concerns.

Caleb had been a bloody mess when she'd gotten back to him. He'd been so still, so silent, obviously dead when she reached him, and she'd felt her stomach churn in dread all over again. Even knowing he'd come back, it was a horrible sight.

It was worse when he'd revived, screaming, as she tried to pull one of the arrows from his stomach.

He'd died once more, bleeding everywhere, and her hands had shaken badly as she'd removed the rest of the arrows and tossed them aside. The wait for him to revive again had felt like an eternity, and she'd been badly worried when he'd been shaky and listless after coming back.

Drinking and eating something had fixed that, at least. It made sense. Coming back from the dead had to take a lot of energy.

And now he was behaving like it had never happened.

She couldn't get it out of her head.

He slogged out of the water, kicking sand from his bare feet with a grimace, and laid the tunic out on a flat rock to dry. "Not sure how salvageable that is," he muttered, crouching by the fire and chafing his hands up and down his arms. "That's one thing I do miss about the twenty-first century, being able to just walk down to a shop and buy a new shirt whenever I wanted. Immortality can be hard on clothing."

She didn't say anything, just frowned and poked the fire with a stick.

He settled cross-legged onto his bedroll, watching her with a frown of his own. "What is it?"

She gave her head a slow shake. "I didn't realize it would be like that," she said at last. "It's stupid that I didn't. I've seen enough people get hurt and die, I know what it looks like. But I didn't expect it to be like that when you came back. I didn't. . ."

She made a helpless gesture, not sure how to explain. It just hadn't been what she'd expected, and she had to admit, it had scared her. It was just so different, seeing it like she had today. Completely different from just hearing about it, and completely different from that first time, in the bunker.

This time, she'd seen him die. She'd seen the wounds, and she knew what arrow wounds did to a person. She knew how painful they were, how absolutely deadly they were.

And he'd gone and done it willingly. He'd let that happen to make sure she didn't get hurt. And it still disturbed her that he didn't seem bothered by it at all.

"You're acting like it's nothing," she went on flatly.

He shrugged. "It is nothing."

She closed her eyes, scoffing disbelievingly.

Across the fire, she heard him sigh. "I've tried to explain this before, and I've never had much success," he muttered, "But you get to a point where you are so used to it, so accustomed to the idea that even injuries like those today won't be anything more than a temporary inconvenience. It's like. . . it's like when you make arrows, or repair a machine." He gestured vaguely toward the striders, long since retrieved and as content as ever to stand placidly by now that the danger was past. "I've seen you slip and cut or scrape your hands doing that. You barely think about it. It's just one of those things you have to risk to live the way you do." He paused again, frowning thoughtfully. "It becomes nothing more than a calculation. A trade of what can be accomplished for the price of a little pain. And it is just pain. It passes."

She shivered. "You were screaming."

He shrugged again. "Yeah, people do that. I won't downplay how much it hurt, and I'm certainly not fond of it, but this was. . ." He trailed off helplessly. "This wasn't really a concern, compared to many of my other experiences. Arrows aren't a true risk to me, and I had someone on hand who could be trusted to come remove them when the time came. Even if distracting them like that hadn't worked, and you'd died, I would have eventually been able to pull those arrows out myself, and then gone on my way. I'm relieved that's not how it went, and It wasn't fun, but at least for my part, there was never much to worry about."

She just stared at him, and he sighed.

"I have been burned alive, Aloy," he murmured. "I have been flayed. Tortured. Raped. Enslaved. I have been wounded and abused and killed in just about every conceivable fashion, sans beheading. In some of those cases, there was no quick or easy escape. No one to help me. Just endless suffering."

He grimaced, raking a hand through his hair. He was still letting it grow, and it curled damply over his forehead and against his neck now. "I have been in situations where there was no escape, where I had nothing to look forward to but more of the same. After you survive something like that, a decade of torment, two decades, a century. . . A few arrows just don't mean that much anymore."

She stared into the fire. She'd thought plenty about all the things he was capable of because of his immortality, all the things he could achieve because he didn't have to worry about getting hurt or killed. Today had been a pointed demonstration of that.

But she hadn't really considered the sorts of things he could be forced to endure, in the wrong sort of circ*mstances. And the things he was describing. . .

She shivered. She got it, on an intellectual level, but she couldn't truly understand. She never would, not really. Not this.

She liked Caleb. He'd become a friend. She enjoyed his company, enjoyed learning from him, and she thought they were alike in many ways. In that moment, though, she felt like they were so jarringly, impossibly different. So much of what he was had been much less real, until today, and she was having a lot more trouble than she liked processing that.

And she was still viscerally disturbed by the memory of seeing a friend dead, and then not dead anymore, and by how ugly it had been. "I wasn't expecting it to be so. . . messy," she finally muttered, annoyed at herself. As if death would be any less so because it was temporary.

He shrugged, shaking his blanket loose of the tight roll it was folded into and wrapping it around his shoulders. "That's not really uncommon. People hear someone can come back from the dead and assume it's going to be some transcendent thing, something awe-inspiring, when really it's just as horrible and disturbing as any other death."

She nodded slowly. "Does coming back like that hurt?"

Another shrug. "It's not usually comfortable. Our nature as something fundamentally human is a little at war with our nature as immortals, at that point. It's easier if you haven't been dead as long. The heart remembers how to beat, and blood remembers how to flow. The longer you're dead, the worse it is. Your body doesn't really know how to be alive again for a minute, and waiting for it to figure that out isn't. . . pleasant."

She furrowed her brow thoughtfully, thinking back to that day at the bunker. It had taken him a while to come back, even after he'd had oxygen again. She hadn't realized it at the time, but now she had something to compare it to.

Both times, though, he'd been pretty weak after the fact. "It takes a lot of energy, doesn't it? Coming back like that. It takes a lot out of you."

He shrugged. "Depends. Depends on how long you've been dead, on how violent the death, how many times you've died. Three times in as many minutes starts to really drain a guy, and it's worse with something like arrows. The body's trying to heal those wounds the whole time, and can't, so it does tend to burn through one's reserves."

Aloy frowned, staring into the fire. However matter-of-factly he spoke about it, she still didn't find any of this comfortable. "Can't say I much like anybody dying for me," she muttered unhappily, "Even if it is temporary."

Caleb looked up at her sharply, his demeanor softening slightly. "Ah," he said gently, giving a small nod. "Yeah, I can see that." He adjusted his blanket around his shoulders, then gave a sigh and a shrug."I didn't see that we had all that many options, though. I'm sure between the two of us, we could have come up with something better if we'd had the time, but we were in rather short supply of that, as well."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Look, I'm not eager to revisit that scenario, but we both got through it in one piece. One of us could get shot full of arrows and walk away. The other couldn't. It's as simple as that. I generally prefer to keep the people I like alive, and if I have to jump in front of a few arrows to do it, then so be it. Not the first time I've been shot on behalf of a friend."

She thought about that for a moment, then managed a crooked smile. "You'll have to forgive me if I don't return that specific favor, if I can help it."

"And undo all my hard work keeping you minimally perforated? Don't even think about it."

That got a rueful laugh from her. She was just going to have to be okay with this, she decided. There wasn't really anything else she could do. He was right, anyway. Of all the ways that encounter could have gone, it had ended as well as they could have hoped. They were both alive and unhurt, they were close enough to the borders of Carja land that they probably wouldn't have any further issues, and there were a handful fewer Eclipse in the world for her to worry about.

She blinked and straightened abruptly, reminded of one more worthwhile detail. "Oh, right," she muttered, digging into the pouch at her belt.

Aloy hadn't forgotten Caleb's desire for a working focus, or the fact that the Eclipse leader had one. It had been almost reflexive to grab it off his body. She'd meant to give it to Caleb before now, but after finding him shot full of arrows like she had, the matter had been driven from her mind by more immediate issues.

Now, she pulled the focus carefully out of her pouch, holding it up where he could see before tossing it to him.

"Oh, brilliant," he muttered, catching it awkwardly before holding it up and looking it over, then affixing it carefully in place. "That will certainly make life easier. Thanks."

She nodded. "No third deal needed," she said with a wry smile. "I think you kinda covered that today."

Chapter 15: Journals

Chapter Text

There wasn't much conversation the next day. Aloy was wary, watchful for any other potential ambushes, and a little nervous that there might be more Eclipse lurking around. She'd relax more once they hit Carja lands.

Caleb, on the other hand, spent a few hours frowning to himself and, as far as she could tell, fiddling with the display of his focus. He seemed too distracted to spend much time speaking, though she could tell he was also staying more or less aware of their surroundings.

She didn't mind the quiet. She was still processing everything that had happened during the ambush. She felt better after getting some rest, but the events during the attack had still shaken her, and given her plenty to think about.

That afternoon, though, Caleb started muttering to himself under his breath, almost non-stop. She caught snatches of what he said from time to time, but it didn't sound like he was speaking any language she understood. His eyes moved like he was reading, but without any way to see what he was looking at, she could only guess at what was going on.

"Okay, what are you doing?" she finally asked with a sigh, when the sun was getting low enough for her to start looking for a place to camp. "You've been muttering like that for hours."

Caleb cut off whatever he'd been saying, blinking and focusing on her. "Writing," he said absently.

She blinked and frowned, then straightened. "Your journals?" She asked abruptly.

She hadn't forgotten what he'd told her about keeping journals and records of his life. He'd mentioned them a few more times as they'd traveled, mostly to lament the fact that he didn't have the materials to keep up with them now. He'd acquired a small wax tablet and stylus at one of the larger markets they'd passed through, and she'd seen him take notes on it a few times, but it wasn't exactly suitable for anything longer than a couple lines of text. Paper was rare and expensive, and delicate and heavy enough that he'd opted against traveling with it, for now.

With the focus, though, he could record whatever he wanted. Of course he was writing, now that he had the chance to do so without restriction. He'd said himself that there were a lot of gaps to fill in.

He gave a nod, shifting focus again, his eyes flicking back and forth as he appeared to read over what he'd written. "Yes. I have an awful lot of catching up to do, at this point."

He paused for a moment, staring into the distance. "It's hard to know where to start, honestly. I'm afraid my tendency to chronicle current events fell by the wayside a little during the Swarm. I had intended to keep up with it better once I was in that bunker, but. . . ah, well, it was difficult to muster up the motivation at that point, I'm afraid."

He gave a small sigh and a shrug, and Aloy set her mouth in a grim line. She could barely imagine how that must have felt, being locked up in there and knowing the end of the world was coming. She didn't think she would have been all that motivated to do much, either.

"And, of course, my colleagues weren't aware of my nature," Caleb went on with another shrug. "I wasn't keen on telling them. Best not to make records that they might find and wonder about, while we were all stuck in there." He grimaced faintly, running a hand through his hair. "In any case, I'd like to get it all written down, so to speak, while the memory's still relatively fresh."

Aloy raised her eyebrows at that. The idea of something that had happened a thousand years ago being 'relatively fresh' still threw her off, no matter how accustomed she'd become to Caleb referring to time in terms of centuries and millennia instead of years or decades. She had to remind herself, too, that he'd been dead for most of that time. To him, she supposed, the days of the Swarm probably still felt pretty recent.

"And that's not even getting into the fact that I need to make up for the loss of most, if not all, of my old chronicles as well," Caleb continued unhappily. "I kept multiple copies of everything, as much as I could. Physical and digital. Given everything that's happened, though, I can't imagine most of it's not destroyed or corrupted, assuming any of my old caches even still exist."

He gave a long sigh, drumming his fingers on the strider's neck. " Thousands of years of records, gone. I mean, it's not really the first time, even just for my personal chronicles, but that loss of that kind of history. . ." His jaw tightened, and he gave his head a hard shake. "There's so much I want to have documentation of. So many people or places or things that might as well not have existed at all at this point, if not for that documentation. It's hard to even know where to start with that, knowing how much time and loss I've got to make up for now."

His expression was grim as he stared ahead. "I suppose it's not like I don't have the time," he eventually went on with a touch of bitterness. "I'll have to see if I can track down any of my old caches at some point. There's at least a chance some of them might have survived, I suppose. Until then, though, there's an awful lot to record."

He was similarly distracted by his writing for the rest of the evening, and into the following day. Once again, though, Aloy was content with the relative quiet.

This time, she found herself contemplating what might come next for the two of them. She wasn't sure exactly what Caleb would want to do after they reached Meridian, but she got the feeling he'd have matters of his own he'd like to pursue. He didn't really need her guidance anymore, he hadn't for some time, but they hadn't spoken of parting ways yet, either.

Perhaps he'd want to go wander the world, seeing more of the rest of it and looking for his caches of journals. She toyed briefly with the idea of asking to come along, but she had obligations of her own, things she both needed and wanted to do. She hoped she'd be able to pick up some rumor of Sylens in Meridian, some new lead on where he might have gone or what he might be doing, or some hint of where she might find backups of GAIA. That was still the goal, and something she hadn't given up on yet, even if her luck so far hadn't exactly been great.

It would be strange, she thought, to part ways. They hadn't been traveling together long, in the grand scheme of things, but she'd gotten used to the company.

It had to end sometime, though, and she suspected Meridian was where they would part. Caleb had a whole life to figure out, and she had her own tasks to pursue.

They'd passed into Carja lands at last when Caleb began to consult her on his intensive journaling, as well. She remembered, vaguely, his mention of asking her for help when it came to his journals, and he apparently hadn't been kidding about that. He seemed intent on going back over as many details as possible with her of both the history that she had lived through, and what she knew of what had happened since humanity had reentered the world.

They spent their time on that as they continued through the dry lands northwest of Meridian, passing briefly within sight of Sunfall before angling south, across the dusty, rocky lands there. At the pace they were going, they were only a couple of days out now.

"This is Lake Powell," Caleb said slowly when they reached the cliffs overlooking the Daybrink, staring out over the water for a long minute. "It's strange, so much of the world has changed enough as to be unrecognizable, but then there's something like this, that's barely changed at all." He gave a small smile. "I'm glad the Swarm wasn't so destructive as to ruin this place."

Aloy shrugged. "It's called the Daybrink now," she said, nodding down at the water. "There are a lot of natural landmarks that are still pretty much the same, I think, and some of the ruins are still recognizable." They'd seen a few, during their travels, though most of what they'd come across hadn't been more than bare, rusted support beams and crumbled walls. "I've been to lots, and seen some old images and recordings from a few places that still match up."

"Oh?" Caleb eyed her with interest. "Do you have those saved?"

She grinned and nodded.

She transferred the images and data she had saved over to him. With those new files available, he returned to muttering vaguely to himself as he looked through what she'd offered.

"It looks like there's a lot of surprisingly well preserved places left, actually," He eventually said, eyes unfocused as he looked through the files. "Lake Powell, of course. Goblin Valley, the Arches. . . ah, Yellowstone." He paused. "The Denver stadium? Really? That thing looked like it was always on the verge of collapse even when it was new. Some of the things that survive. . ." He scoffed, smiling wryly. "Well, the fact that there is still so much that's at least somewhat recognizable, even just in this area, does give me hope for what else might have lasted elsewhere."

Now that he'd mentioned it, Aloy was curious, too. She'd always been inclined to explore the ruins of the Old Ones anyway. It was intriguing to think what sort of ruins there might be elsewhere in the world, if she ended up traveling far enough. Maybe someday she'd make that journey.

There were occasional ferries across the Daybrink now, since the defeat of the Eclipse and Avad's attempts to reintegrate the Shadow Carja. Aloy suggested taking one, as probably the fastest way to Meridian, but she wasn't really keen on the idea herself. The striders tended to make people nervous if she brought one with her, and a ferry wasn't really the best place for one. She was relieved when Caleb seemed equally dubious.

"Taking a strider onto a boat sounds like more trouble than it's worth," he said bluntly. "And I hate the water anyway."

It would only add a day or so to their trip for them to go around to an easier crossing, and it wasn't as if they were in any sort of hurry.

They crossed the water where the river narrowed and turned shallow, then cut through the Sun Furrows and down across the Cleft. Their first view of Meridian wasn't quite the same as hers had been, when she'd traveled there after leaving the Embrace. They were further north than the road she'd first approached on, but it was a similar view to what she remembered. She couldn't help but recall that first time she'd come around the hill to see it, perched gracefully on top of its butte.

She wasn't surprised that Caleb halted his strider as they came within sight of the vast, lush valley and of Meridian on its high cliffs, and just stared for a while.

"It's spectacular," he murmured at last, raking his hair back with a hand and shading his eyes against the sun. "This is. . . I remember cities like this from when I was young. I mean, not exactly, obviously, but not unlike it, in many ways." He paused, and laughed quietly. "It's like. . . the way the world is now, it's something like traveling back and forward in time simultaneously. The customs, the cultures, the construction and typical technology. . . So much of it is like it was thousands of years ago. So much of it is almost like the world I lived in as a young man, relatively speaking. It's all so close to familiar. And then you have this."

He slapped his strider's shoulder.

"I am riding a robot horse," he announced with a slightly bemused shake of his head. "I am riding a robot horse, carrying a spear and a bow with which I hunt rabbits, and also other robots, wearing hand-woven clothing and painstakingly tanned, hand-sewn leather boots. Paper is expensive enough to be a luxury item, but I have a miniaturized computer with a holographic interface that I can wear like a piece of jewelry." He gave an incredulous laugh, then squinted and tilted his head with a frown. "What on earth is that?"

Aloy followed his gaze, shading her own eyes, but she wasn't surprised to see he meant the Spire. The odd, geometric tower still drew her eye as well, any time she saw it. Even with all she'd seen and done, it was such an incongruous structure, with its black metal and hard edges.

"They call it the Spire here, it's sacred to the Carja," she explained, nudging her strider into motion again and glancing over at Caleb as he followed suit. "They say the first Sun King followed its shadow to where he founded Meridian. They bury their kings there, now, on that mesa."

He glanced at her, raising an eyebrow, wearing an expression that told her he was looking for a slightly more comprehensive answer for the odd structure. That wasn't a shock, she supposed given how jarringly incongruous it was.

She smirked. "It's actually a broadcast tower for GAIA. MINERVA, really. It was the origin of the signal for the Swarm's shutdown code, after MINERVA cracked it."

"Ah," Caleb said, eyeing the structure speculatively. "So. . . a little important then."

"Yeah, just a little," Aloy said with a snort.

Chapter 16: Meridian

Chapter Text

They left their striders near the trail leading up to the city, unwilling to try to ride or lead them into the crowds of Meridian. They drew some looks, as usual, but Aloy had spent enough time here in the past that she was mostly a known entity. She was no longer surprised when people she'd never met before pointed at her and the striders, waved to her, and sometimes even called out greetings.

It was a little exasperating, but she was used to it by now. She was still the only person she knew of - other than Caleb, now, and Sylens, but she wasn't counting him - who rode around on machines. After everything that had happened with HADES and Eclipse, and the rumors that had no doubt been flying around since then, it wasn't really a shock that people recognized her.

She ignored it, for the most part. Once they weren't actually standing next to the striders, they'd be just another pair of travelers in the crowd. Caleb seemed merely amused, at least until they got to the bridge that would take them across to Meridian. After that, he was entirely focused on the city.

The bridge leading into the city was full of the usual bustle, people streaming back and forth across it, and attentive guards kept watch over the milling crowd. Aloy kept half an eye on where they were going and half on Caleb, not wanting to lose him in the press. She was familiar enough at this point with his tendency to wander off toward things that caught his interest. He did so now, angling over to the bridge's railing and leaning over to peer down at the tidy village spread below.

"Don't fall," she teased, leaning against the railing next to him. "You might live, but you'd cause quite a sensation."

He snorted, pushing back from the railing and turning to squint up at the city, shading his eyes with a hand. "This place is impressive," he said, starting forward again. "Though it looks like it's got some holes in it." He nodded toward a pitted patch of wall on the edge of the city, still blackened with spots of char.

Aloy grimaced. "Yeah. That's where HADES' machines attacked last year, trying to get to the Spire. It planned to take both by force, with Eclipse's help, and then send out a broadcast of its own to wake the rest of the Faro Swarm again."

Caleb gave a grim nod of his own. She'd told him parts of the story before, of course, but it was different to stand here in the city, and to see the damage HADES had caused. It certainly served to dampen her own mood a little, that visible reminder of what had happened, and of what had almost happened. She knew that battle could easily have gone much worse than it had.

"Well, it looks like they're making good progress on repairs, anyway," Caleb went on absently, still peering at the damage. "Not easy, in a place like this. Just transporting the raw materials and getting them up here has to be an undertaking. I expect they probably use those lifts 'round the other side of the butte for some of it? Depending on where they're quarrying the stone, anyway." he tapped his chin absently, gazing in the general direction of the lifts. "I wonder if they built the lifts before they built the city, or if they relied on an early version of the bridge to transport materials. Some of the structures at the bottom of the valley are probably older than what's up here, they would have needed a base to work from, I imagine, and then-"

He broke off as they finally passed through the gates into the city proper, tilting his head for a moment to listen.

"Oh, they're singing," he said softly.

Aloy looked up and around as well, smiling faintly. No matter her mixed feelings about the bloody history of the Sun-Priests and some of their more bigoted policies, she couldn't deny their music was beautiful. "Yeah, it's the Sun-Priests," she said with a nod, pointing in the general direction of the temple. "Up there. They sing praises to the sun a few times a day. You can go up and listen, if you want."

He gave a slow nod, looking as if he was seriously considering the idea. "You don't want to," he guessed, making it a statement.

She snorted softly, "No. Avad's working on changing some things, but the Carja are pretty patriarchal. Meaning, no women in the priesthood. They get a little weird about it when I turn up and wander around their temple." She shrugged, unbothered. She didn't much want to associate with the priests, anyway. "Besides, I have a couple things I want to do, now that we're here. I'll come find you later."

Caleb sighed faintly. "Such a delightful recurring trend, misogyny," he mused absently. "But yes, that sounds fine, I'd like the chance to explore a little. I'll meet you at the lower village in a few hours, perhaps? I'd like to have a look around there as well."

They parted ways, and she wandered idly through the streets. She wanted to check in with Erend and Avad eventually, and perhaps Talanah as well, but it was the middle of the day, and the city was bustling. Given her friends' positions, she suspected she might have to wait a while to get the chance to see them. They would be busy, and she had no problem waiting for a while, and simply taking in the sights. Meridian was still novel to her, given where she'd grown up.

Honestly, she was a little relieved to have the time to herself. She needed to think, and to figure out what to tell her friends about her recent adventures. She didn't like the idea of lying to them about Caleb, about the nature of his existence and that of people like him. Immortality was kind of a big deal, but It didn't take a genius to see the danger involved in revealing that secret, even to people she liked and trusted. She liked and trusted Caleb now as well, and one of the first things he'd asked was that she keep his immortality to herself. The last thing she wanted to do was worry Erend or Avad over a group of people that had, in fairness, mostly been minding their own business for centuries. She could see how possession of that knowledge could turn messy in a big hurry.

For now she would keep it to herself, she decided, but she wasn't sure how she felt about it. She didn't want to keep secrets from her friends, but she didn't want to put anyone in danger, either. It was easy to see why immortals kept their existence a secret, and she had no desire to endanger any of them. Not when they were simply living their lives. It would be all too easy for that secret to make it to the ears of people who would abuse that knowledge, no matter how much she trusted anyone she might tell.

Either way, she wanted some time to sort out how much she wanted to reveal, if anything, before she saw them again.

There were plenty of less fraught things she wanted to do first, anyway. She wanted to see if any of the people she traded with regularly were around, and if they had anything new and interesting. She wanted to catch up on local word and news. Most of all, she wanted to ask around about any news of Sylens, and any hints at where she might once again begin her search for him or a backup of GAIA.

Hunting for information like that was a long game, unfortunately. She hated it, but there was nothing to do but put out what feelers she could and be patient. Eventually, she had to hope she'd catch some rumor, or somebody who'd seen or heard something would come find her. She wasn't sure she expected that, but stranger things had happened.

All told, it was good to be back in Meridian. She did track down a couple of the traders she knew, and was at least able to swap a few stories. It was good to be back someplace so familiar, and once again, she found herself wondering what might come after this.

She still hadn't talked about that with Caleb, but she still had the sense that this was probably where they parted ways.

She turned the idea over in her head, debating with herself how she felt about it. He was certainly perfectly capable of navigating the world on his own at this point, and as informative and handy as he was to have around, she certainly didn't need him there. Still, she had to admit it had been nice to travel with someone for a while, and it had been incredible to learn so much about the world as it had been. The topics of conversation were endless, and she felt like she'd gained so much knowledge over the last couple of months.

She would miss that, she decided, if they were to go their own ways. She would miss the company, and she'd miss the stories and information.

But at the same time, she was ready to be on her own again, too. She was feeling restless, feeling ready to travel at her own pace, take on her own challenges, and pursue the goals she needed to without worrying about someone else. Caleb had been interested in her life, her goals, in the things that had happened in her world, but there were still things she hadn't told him and didn't plan to tell him. He had his own life to live, anyway, and she didn't think he had any intention of tying himself more thoroughly to her personal pursuits.

No, she was willing to bet he'd be just as interested in making his own way now as she was. He had a whole new world to explore, and new cultures to discover even among his own kind. She certainly didn't begrudge him that. In his position, she'd be eager to get started, eager to see what she could make of a whole new world, a whole new society.

Their goals were not the same, now that they'd reached Meridian. It was strange to consider, but not bad. She suspected that, after this, he would likely join the ranks of trusted friends she would always be glad to see, even if she didn't see them often.

Dusk was approaching when she made her way down to the lower village and eventually found Caleb again, sitting on a woven mat with a slight man who looked to be about fifty. They were deep in some sort of discussion, an array of mostly-eaten food on a platter between them, and neither seemed to notice her until she was practically on top of them.

Finally Caleb looked up, grinning at her, and gestured at the open space next to him. "My friend Aloy," he told the other man, who was peering at her owlishly. "She knows."

It took her a moment to realize this man was another immortal. She hadn't really thought about it, but Meridian was a big place, and a busy one. It was no surprise there was at least one other here. There were probably more.

The conversation was already coming to a close, from the sound of it, and soon enough, they were saying their goodbyes. Caleb rose and dusted himself off, his expression distant and intent.

"He's been traveling around these parts for almost three hundred years," he told Aloy quietly as they went to find someplace to stay for the night. "He told me a lot about the history of this place. The Carja, the surrounding lands, all of it."

Aloy raised her eyebrows, glancing back after the other immortal. That would be an interesting story to hear, from someone who'd been there to see so much of it. She'd only seen the aftermath of the mad Sun King's rule, of the Red Raids, and that was only scratching the surface. If she was honest, her knowledge of anything before that was patchwork and theoretical at best.

They walked in thoughtful silence for a little while, up until Aloy angled off toward a traveler's rest near the edge of the lower village that she'd stayed at before. Caleb seemed to be lost enough in his own thoughts that he didn't notice she'd changed direction until she swung back to get his attention.

He blinked, looking vaguely apologetic, and turned quickly to follow her. "Sorry. Distracted."

She narrowed her eyes. "What else did he tell you? You've got something on your mind."

Caleb smiled wryly at her, unsurprised by the question, but sobered again quickly. "Given the amount of time he's spent traveling the last couple of centuries," he began almost delicately, "And the sort of customs my kind now seem to recognize, at least in this area, it seems he's familiar with most of the other immortals in the vicinity."

Aloy raised her eyebrows. That made sense, given the customs she'd witnessed, and what Ara and now this other immortal had said.

"There aren't all that many of us, but there's still a fair few." Caleb went on slowly "There's a. . . a community of us, almost. Loose, I think, from the sound of it, but. . ." He took a slow breath. "But it's so different from how it was before. Not that we didn't have a community of sorts back then, a lot of us were friends or at least acquaintances, despite everything, but it just feels different now. There's no. . . no fear, no automatic wariness. No expectations that we'll be hunting one another."

He rubbed his hands over his mouth for a moment, looking caught somewhere between excitement and apprehension.

"It's more than I could have believed," he murmured. "I never even bothered to dream of an end to it before, it was useless to imagine, but this is. . . we've got a clean slate, along with the rest of humanity. Ara told us, but I didn't really. . ."

He trailed off, but Aloy thought she understood. After living under the threat of death from his own kind for so long, realizing that threat was essentially gone had to seem too good to be true.

He took a slow breath, swallowing once. "He also knew about a couple of immortals that are older than he is," he went on quietly, "Who'd been around a lot longer. Before Meridian, maybe." He was silent for a moment. "How long ago did you say humanity. . . returned?"

"About six hundred years," Aloy replied. She remembered the dates from the recordings of the ELEUTHIA cradle, when the newly-reborn humanity had first emerged into the world.

Caleb released a slow breath. "Six hundred years," he whispered. "That's probably the oldest an immortal could be now. Unless. . ."

He closed his mouth, lips thinning.

Aloy frowned, walking in silence for a minute. "You think someone else might have survived? That there's someone here from before?"

Caleb was quiet for a second, then sighed and bowed his head. "Ah, no, not really," he said wearily. "The likelihood of that. . ." He sighed again. "No, I don't. But it was nice to wonder, for a minute." He gave a hollow little laugh. "It's probably for the best. Best our old customs die with the old world. I like these new customs better, anyway."

There was a lull in the conversation as they arranged for a place to sleep at the traveler's rest, and for dinner for the both of them. "Are you going to go looking for them?" Aloy asked once they were settled and eating.

Caleb was quiet for a moment, picking absently at his food. "I. . . think I am," he finally said, with an air of confession. "Time was, I never would have willingly sought out other immortals. Not ones I didn't know, anyway. But. . . this is truly a new world. I want to know more. I want to see." He stared blankly ahead for a moment, then took a deep breath. "He told me of someone close by, living in Brightmarket. That's. . ."

"North," Aloy told him, "Not far at all."

He smiled distantly. "He said this is one of the old ones, one who's been here far longer than he has. Mahled, he said his name was. I think perhaps I'll start there."

She was quiet, taking a few minutes to work her way thoughtfully through her meal. "Do you want me to come along?" She asked at last.

He blinked and turned to look at her, watching her speculatively for a long moment. "You don't have to," he told her quietly. "You're home now."

She shrugged, a little taken aback by hearing him call this place her home, but she supposed in a lot of ways, it was. "It's not far, like I said," she told him. "Wouldn't mind visiting again. Wouldn't mind meeting this Mahled guy."

It was still strange to think about parting company. Caleb had a direction now, though, seeking the others who lived nearby, learning about his own people's culture and customs all over again.

And she had her life, her home, as he'd said. She had more friends she wanted to see, and her own goals she still intended to pursue.

She thought perhaps it was time, for both of them.

Just one more trip, first.

"I'd like that," Caleb said quietly. "I think I'd like that a lot."

Chapter 17: Mahled

Chapter Text

Brightmarket lived up to its name. The sky was cloudless, and sunlight reflected brilliantly off the Daybrink. It was hot, and oppressively humid, but with the breeze coming off the water and the shade of the lush trees, it wasn't unbearable.

Caleb was. . . nervous. Aloy hadn't ever seen him nervous like this. He'd been cautious before, going into new towns, new settlements or trading posts, but this was new.

It was honestly kind of endearing.

"I guess living a couple thousand years doesn't necessarily make it easier to meet new people sometimes, huh?" She teased him as they wandered into the town.

He eyed her balefully, but a smile tugged at his lips. "Admittedly, these are unusual circ*mstances, even for me," he told her with a shrug.

She supposed that was true enough.

They didn't really have a plan. Caleb didn't have a description to work with, and even if he had, it probably still wouldn't have narrowed things down much. Brightmarket wasn't all that big, though, despite how busy it usually was, and in the end they opted to simply wander until Caleb felt another immortal.

They found him by the pier. Aloy could tell when they got close enough for Caleb to sense it. He stiffened, then blinked and took a slow breath, making a visible effort to relax as he looked around.

"How do you know which one it is, when you see another immortal?" Aloy asked curiously as he gazed slowly around, frowning.

"It's. . . I don't know, I just do. I just. . ." He trailed off, his frown deepening, and she moved to follow as he drifted toward the pier, eyes on the dark-haired man overseeing the movement of a handful of large crates. Aloy could see him starting to look around as well, clearly aware of the proximity, but there was little of Caleb's initial tension about him.

He was about Caleb's height, skin tanned and hair a warm dark brown in the bright sunlight, cropped relatively short as was often the style among the Carja. He didn't turn around right away, clearly content to finish what he was doing first. He gave some last instructions she couldn't hear to the workers, then turned at last when they were about fifteen feet away.

She heard Caleb give a ragged gasp.

"That. . . can't be. You can't be. . ." He stuttered.

She'd never heard him stutter like that. When she looked at him in surprise, some mix of wrenching grief and terrible hope twisted his expression.

The man facing them - Mahled, she assumed - covered his mouth with a hand. "Methos?" he said, barely loud enough to reach them.

Beside her, Caleb made a stunned, choked sound, stumbling forward a step before sinking to his knees.

The other immortal stared at him, wide-eyed, and drifted forward a step himself. "Methos," he said again, his voice cracking. He closed the distance between them as if in a daze, oblivious to everything else.

Then he dropped to his knees as well, reaching out to pull Caleb into a crushingly tight embrace, whispering that same word over and over again.

Caleb returned the embrace, arms folding tight around Mahled, fingers digging into his back like he never wanted to let go, and buried his face against the other immortal's shoulder. He was half laughing, a high, almost hysterical sound, shoulders shaking with it, and between ragged breaths Aloy could make out words.

"You're alive," he gasped, again and again. "Duncan, you're alive, you're alive."

Chapter 18: Reunion

Chapter Text

"I was working with refugees in Canada."

The sun was setting. Mahled had brought them to a small home on the outskirts of Brightmarket, and they sat on his patio, facing the river.

"They were coming in from Alaska. Even Russia and China, sometimes. We were trying to find places for them all, but there was never enough room. Or enough food, enough medical supplies, enough. . . anything."

Caleb and Mahled had been oblivious to anything but their reunion, and it hadn't taken long for them to start drawing attention. Aloy hadn't really wanted to interrupt, but she wasn't sure just how much of a spectacle they wanted to make. Eventually she'd cleared her throat pointedly to get their attention, and given Caleb a nudge.

"There was an attack one day. We thought it was the Swarm, even though they weren't supposed to be anywhere near us yet. It turned out it was some desperate band of deserters who'd managed to stockpile some serious military gear. They probably didn't have enough food or medical supplies either, and saw us as an easy target."

They had at least noticed the attention they were drawing, then. Mahled had dragged the both of them to their feet, stammering out a vague, halting excuse about an old friend he'd thought was dead. Aloy had done her best to back him up, despite not knowing the first thing about him. It helped, she imagined, that this story wasn't anything new in the wake of the Red Raids. The bystanders hadn't had any reason to question anything.

Caleb hadn't said a word. He'd just stared, completely uncaring of the curious crowd.

"They had enough firepower to bring down the mountainside. I don't know where they got it, I didn't have a chance to get a good look at whatever they were using. They buried half the refugees, though. Probably half the supplies they wanted, too. Not that it mattered in the end, I suppose."

She'd managed to herd them off the pier once the bystanders had begun to clear away, and Mahled had scraped together enough composure to bring them here. He'd seemed stunned, but the act of playing host appeared to steady him a little. He'd somewhat fumblingly put together a plate of fruit and flatbread, and brought them out to the patio.

Caleb had remained silent, staring unerringly and almost suspiciously at the other immortal, as if he still couldn't believe he was here.

"I was buried as well. I don't know what happened after that. I. . . spent a long time reviving and dying again, but I couldn't move. Eventually, I think I stopped reviving, for a. . . I don't know exactly how long."

Mahled had appeared almost surprised at Aloy's presence when she'd joined them on the patio, like he'd barely noticed she'd been there before. He'd been reflexively courteous, introducing himself and offering her something to eat from the plate he'd put together after a slightly dazed glance at Caleb. If he still seemed thoroughly distracted, she couldn't blame him for that. This situation, she expected, would be like if she turned around to find Rost standing behind her, alive and well.

"I suppose plant growth and erosion must've worn away enough of the landslide for me to revive again, eventually. I could actually move a little, then. I died. . . many more times, but after a while I managed to dig myself out. That was about five hundred years ago."

Caleb had almost warily told Aloy who they were really talking to, to confirm what she'd suspected already: that this was the friend he'd told her about before, Duncan MacLeod. He'd barely finished telling her that before he'd rounded on the other immortal, demanding to know how.

"I think I must have wandered, for a while, alone. I'm not sure how long. I don't remember much of that time. Some people found me eventually, got me back on my feet, and I stayed with them for years after that. I had to see what was going on in the rest of the world, though. It was a shock, to realize how changed everything was, how much had been destroyed. Everything from before was just. . . gone, or in ruins. Nobody remembered, nobody knew a thing about what had happened. All these new societies were beginning to emerge by then, though, all over the place. I traveled everywhere I could, just. . . learning. Seeing."

They sat side by side, almost close enough to touch. Caleb had barely looked away from Mahled - MacLeod - this whole time, staring at him with an intent, focused sort of expression that had not wavered as the other immortal had told his story.

"I didn't find any more of us, not for a long time. I thought maybe I was the last, that all the rest had been killed by the Swarm, and there would never be any more of us again." He gave a small, bitter laugh. "Hell of a way to be the One."

Aloy sat across the small fire pit from them now, listening and watching. She'd offered her name, when Caleb had introduced them, but she hadn't spoken much since, more interested in hearing what MacLeod had to say. For his part, he seemed to have forgotten about her again, but she couldn't blame him for that, either.

"But then. . . then I came across one. She was young, only about fifty. She didn't know what she was, not. . . not the way we understood it before. She hadn't met another of us, not yet. She called herself a protector, and she called me one, too. She saw it as a blessing, a gift to let her keep her people safe."

A part of Aloy felt a little like she was intruding here, knowing she fundamentally couldn't understand what this reunion had to mean for the two of them after the journeys they'd both endured to arrive here. She hoped she never would understand that, honestly. She didn't ever want to be in that position.

"I started finding others, after that. They were all so young. They all had their own ideas about what we were, and most of them. . . most were happy to see me. Most were excited to know there were others like them. There was no hostility, no conflict, at least not by virtue of our immortality." He paused in his quiet recount of what he'd been through. "No Game."

He looked up at Caleb, who had not stopped staring intently at him.

"Some of them have died, there have been wars and battles, and it happens. Events still bring us into conflict with one another, and some of the machines can kill even one of us pretty easily. I've not heard of any one of us hunting others as we did before, though. Not in five hundred years." He took a slow, unsteady breath. "But I also thought I was alone. I thought none of us possibly could have survived the Swarm. I don't know how. . . how anything survived it, to be honest."

Caleb glanced at Aloy across the fire, offering a wry smirk. He seemed tired to her, after the events of the day, but more or less recovered from his shock. She imagined he would be informing MacLeod of all he'd learned from her as soon as he had the chance.

"How did you survive, Methos?" MacLeod asked quietly.

Aloy frowned, leaning forward. He'd used that name at the pier, too. "Why do you call him that?" She asked before she could stop herself.

MacLeod blinked at her, once again seeming almost surprised at her presence. Now he stared at her, really looking for perhaps the first time since they'd arrived, then glanced back at Caleb again with an uncomfortable expression.

"It's alright," Caleb told him quietly. "She knows me as Caleb, is all. But. . . Well, I suppose it doesn't matter now, does it? Nobody knows who Methos is anymore. I could probably use that name openly, if I really wanted to."

Aloy's frown deepened. "What does that mean?"

Caleb gave a quiet laugh, straightening up and shaking his head in amusem*nt. "Methos is my name," he said with a shrug. "As close to a true name as I have. I didn't really use it much before the Swarm, not for centuries. Only a very few people ever knew who I really was. Safer that way."

Aloy glanced between the two of them, brow furrowed. "Safer? Why?"

Caleb opened his mouth, then closed it, glancing at MacLeod with an amused expression.

MacLeod let out a quiet sigh. "Methos is the eldest of us," he said quietly "The oldest of all immortals. You. . . do you know about the Game? Our challenges?"

He frowned at Aloy, who nodded. "Yeah. He told me. One-on-one combat, beheadings, big lightning storms."

MacLeod gave a faint smile and nodded. "Yes. Being the eldest made him a tempting target in the Game. The name Methos was almost a myth by the time I met him, though. Nobody had a face to put to the name. Some people didn't even think he actually existed. He'd done a very good job of hiding."

He nudged Caleb with an elbow, still smiling slightly.

Aloy gave a slow nod, understanding now. "You pretended you were someone else, used different names so nobody would hunt you." She paused for a moment, frowning to herself. It made sense to her, after the amount of time she'd spent at the Hunter's Lodge and her familiarity with that sort of attitude, the draw to hunt the biggest, most dangerous, most prestigious machines. Given what Caleb had told her about the immortals' Game, it didn't shock her that someone like him would have hunters coming out of the woodwork to challenge him. "You did say you avoided fighting if you could." She added with a wry smile.

Caleb nodded. "Yes. I stopped actually using the name Methos a couple thousand years before Mac and I met. I wasn't the eldest then, not for another few centuries, but I had made some enemies. It was safer to just. . . be someone else."

Some sort of odd look passed between them at that, and Aloy watched them with a frown. She could guess there was a much longer story there. She was tempted to ask, but she felt like they'd delved enough into difficult histories for the day.

"Do you want me to call you that?" she asked after a minute.

Caleb shrugged. "If you like, I suppose. Caleb's probably easier, though, and it's what you've been calling me for months."

MacLeod was frowning slightly at her again, watching her closely. "I've heard of you," he said quietly. "You're the machine rider, right? You stopped that business last year, with the-"

He broke off, shuddering. Caleb looked surprised, reaching out to rest a hand on his shoulder with a concerned expression, and MacLeod smiled wanly.

"There was an attack last year. A revival of some of the Faro machines. The scarabs, mostly, and a few of those enormous ones, the khopesh. They-" He shuddered again. "It was like the Swarm all over again. I'd seen enough of what they could do before, and I thought. . ."

Aloy shivered herself, suddenly understanding his abrupt terror. They'd both been there, in the days of the Swarm, but Caleb had never talked about it like he'd been on the front lines, seeing the destruction the machines were causing. As she understood it, he'd gone into the bunker before he'd had a chance to truly witness that.

It was only a guess, but it sounded like MacLeod had seen more, and had gotten a better look at the Swarm's capabilities. He must have thought the world was ending all over again.

MacLeod took a careful breath, and his shoulders relaxed again. "Anyway, rumor has it you were involved in putting a stop to that." He said to Aloy at last. "Thank you. How did. . ." He gestured between the two of them, curious.

They exchanged a glance, and Caleb slowly began to tell their story.

It was well after dark when they finished the tale, when MacLeod ran out of questions for them, and for a long time after that all three of them just stared into the fire in silence.

"I'm glad," MacLeod finally said wearily. "I'm glad it was. . . peaceful, for you, as much as it could be. I'm glad you had someone to help." He looked up at Aloy with a warm smile.

Caleb was leaning against his shoulder now, and didn't reply for a long time. "I'm sorry you didn't," he finally said softly.

MacLeod leaned into him a little. "It doesn't matter," he murmured with a shake of his head. "We're here now. We're not alone."

Chapter 19: Parting

Chapter Text

They all stayed in MacLeod's little house that night, Aloy and Caleb on bedrolls on the floor. She debated leaving, finding someplace else to stay in town, but neither one of them would hear of it, and she didn't push the suggestion very hard.

She was up before the sun, making her way quietly outside to sit on the edge of the patio and watch the sky over the hills lighten with the dawn, and to consider again what came next.

It had been clear to her that Caleb would likely be staying here. He'd barely been more than arm's length from MacLeod since they'd first encountered one another, and she was happy for him. Happy he'd found his friend, happy he'd found a way of life that he couldn't have imagined, once.

But that meant this truly was the end, for their journey together. It had been a strange trip, and she'd learned things that she wasn't sure she would ever completely understand. She was glad for the experience, though, for the friendship and for all she had discovered. She was pleased to have been a teacher, as well, to have been able to play guide to this world Caleb had found himself in.

She thought the world looked different to her, now, with everything she'd learned and everything she'd taught. Both of those aspects of her journey with Caleb had given her a different perspective, and had made her look at parts of her life more closely than she would have before. She was surprisingly eager to set off again, to revisit old places, to see new ones. The world seemed so much bigger than it had before, in many ways.

It was a quiet morning, a peaceful one. It was much cooler than it had been the afternoon before, but she could tell it was going to warm up quickly. She still marveled at the heat, sometimes, after the much colder mountains where she'd grown up. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to return there for a little while.

She heard a small noise behind her shortly after the sun began to emerge over the hills, and glanced back to find Caleb padding out onto the patio. He settled beside her with a sigh, stretching his legs out and propping himself up on braced arms.

"You're staying," Aloy said quietly after a moment.

Caleb nodded. "Yes. For the moment, at least. I never imagined. . . never dreamed. . ." He paused, then gave a faint laugh and shook his head wonderingly. "This is a gift. I imagine by week's end, we will be bickering and sniping at each other like always, but that's. . . well, that's who we are."

She nodded, unsurprised. She was. . . sad, a little, but she was used to that. She had a surprising number of friends now, in a lot of places. It was always a little sad to leave, but that made it all the more wonderful to come back, and she always did seem to come back, too.

"Aloy," Caleb said quietly, and she turned to look at him.

He offered his hand, palm up, and she smiled and took it. He closed his fingers over hers, giving a gentle squeeze.

"Thank you." He told her quietly, "Thank you for everything."

She didn't respond for a moment, then squeezed his hand back before reclaiming her own. "Likewise," she said with a smile. "It's been an experience."

He laughed at that.

She lingered until late morning, but she didn't want to overstay her welcome, and she wanted to get back to Meridian before it got to be too late in the day. When she departed, Caleb and MacLeod walked her to the edge of town.

The striders hadn't gone anywhere. They'd wandered away from the road a bit, but remained placidly waiting, despite the many hours they'd been left unattended.

MacLeod's eyes widened slightly at the sight of them. "Oh god, you've got one too," he said to Caleb, who grinned, patting his strider on the head and making affectionate noises at it. He'd never stopped doing that, though Aloy remained convinced the striders really didn't care.

"Yes, I've named it Watt," Caleb said proudly.

MacLeod blinked, then rubbed the spot between his eyes, looking pained. "Methos. . ."

Caleb's grin widened. "Don't worry, I can't override them like she does," he said with amusem*nt, nodding to Aloy. "I won't bring home a robot dinosaur or anything, as exciting as that would be. But this one's mine. The people here will just have to get used to it, because I'm keeping it."

MacLeod just shook his head, looking both fond and exasperated.

They led the striders back to the road, and there they paused again, all hesitant to say a final goodbye.

"Well," Aloy finally said, breaking the slightly awkward silence that had settled over them. "I guess I'm off. Good to meet you, Mahled," she said to MacLeod with a nod, opting to use the name he went by here. She wasn't sure what the protocol on that was, but it seemed prudent.

He nodded as well, glancing at Caleb for a minute before taking a step forward and offering his hand. Like Caleb, he squeezed her fingers when she obliged him. "Thank you," he said quietly "And I look forward to meeting again, someday."

She nodded, smiling at him. She didn't really know him, not after one night, but he was important to Caleb, and he seemed like a good man. She'd look forward to that, too.

Caleb took a step forward then, resting his hands on her shoulders. "I already said it, but thank you again," he murmured. "I might never have revived without you. I might never have-" He glanced back at MacLeod with a smile.

He hesitated a second, then shifted his hands to cup her face with both and leaned in to kiss her forehead lightly, then pulled her into an abrupt, fierce hug.

She laughed, hugging him back tightly before prodding him in the ribs to get him to let go. He gave a chuckle of his own, backing away and watching her swing up onto her strider.

"If you ever need anything," he called to her, "Anything a couple of guys with a few thousand years of experience between them can help with. . ." He let the sentence hang, grinning.

"I know where to find you," Aloy called back, raising a hand in farewell.

Then she wheeled her strider around, shifting her weight to make it rear before sending it leaping into a sprint.

Caleb's laughter seemed to follow her a good ways down the road, and she didn't stop smiling for a long time after that.