Tiny Raven

Alessia drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain was a dull, throbbing constant, the damage deep. Every breath was a struggle, every movement sent pulses of agony through her.

By midday, she was afire with fever.

Odrian and Dionys did everything right—cleaning and stitching the wounds, keeping her warm and hydrated, making sure Stella was cared for and close by.

But already weakened by starvation, exhaustion, and her previous wound, Alessia’s body had had enough.

Her breaths came fast and shallow as she burned, tossing weakly despite Dionys’ steadying hands as he forced water between her lips. She babbled in her feverish ravings—half Tharon, half-Aurean—voiced fragments of pain and fear and loss spilling from her unbidden.

She cried for her mother, sounding young and afraid. A child again in her delirium.

She whined Dolos’ name, regretful for her hand in his death. Pleading with him to forgive her.

She begged Walus for mercy, repeating apologies like a chant.

Mostly, when her fingers scrabbled weakly at the blankets, she whispered Stella’s name like a prayer.

Askarion returned, grumbling about foolish warriors and stubborn women, to dose her with another draught of willow bark and feverfew.

Dionys didn’t leave her side—not even when the fever worsened, when her skin grew flushed and slick with sweat, when her delirious cries fractured the quiet of the tent. He propped her up carefully, her back against his chest, holding the cup of willow tea to her lips.

“Drink,” he murmured, firm—a command from someone used to being obeyed.

Her cracked lips parted weakly, choking down the medicine even as she whimpered against the taste.

Later, when she thrashes, whimpering Walus’ name in terror, Dionys’ arms tighten around her—not restraining, but grounding.

“No one’s taking her from you,” he growled, half to Alessia, half to whatever unseen demons haunted her fever dreams. “You hear me? Not him, not Nomaros. Nobody.”

Stella, wide-eyed and silent, clutched her mother’s limp hand like a lifeline. Dionys didn’t tell her to let go.

Askarion watched—grudging respect beneath his usual gruffness—before he pressed a damp cloth to Alessia’s forehead.

“She’s too damn stubborn to die,” he muttered.

Dionys didn’t argue, just shifting his grip—careful of her wounds—and waited.

Outside, the world moved on.

Inside, they held the line.

And Alessia burned.

─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─

Her fever broke slowly. Her cries and whimpers fading, her writhing calming, the heat of her cooling.

When she woke, she found herself sitting, reclined, with the warmth of another person behind her, their arms around her, as if trying to keep her anchored. Exhausted, she turned her head and was surprised to see Dionys there, leaning against a tent post, apparently asleep.

Alessia blinked, disoriented—half expecting that this was another fever dream. But no, his arm was solid around her ribs—careful of the wound—his breathing slow and even before she shifted.

Her throat burned. Her body felt hollowed out, wrung dry. But she felt alive.

Stella was curled against her hip, fast asleep, tiny fingers tangled in the fabric of the borrowed chiton Alessia wore. The little girl’s cheeks were tear-stained but peaceful.

Dionys stirred as she shifted, his grip tightening reflexively before he blinked himself awake. For a brief, unguarded moment—before his usual stoicism rushed back in—he looked relieved.

“Welcome back,” he muttered, voice graveled with exhaustion. He didn’t let go, didn’t explain why he was propping her up like human scaffolding instead of letting her lie flat.

(Maybe it was because the wound drained better upright. Maybe because every time she had slumped sideways in her delirium, she’d whimpered.)

A waterskin appeared in front of her face, held by Odrian, who she hadn’t noticed sitting nearby.

“Drink,” he ordered, voice rough and frayed beneath the briskness. “Slowly, or you’ll vomit, and Askarion will actually murder me for wasting his medicines.”

His free hand hovered near her elbow to catch her should she slide, but he didn’t touch, not yet.

There were shadows under his eyes, a dent in the dirt where he’d clearly been sitting vigil.

Alessia doesn’t remember much of the fever—just flashes of hands, voices, pain—but the evidence surrounds her.

They’d stayed.

Dionys shifts behind her, rolling his stiff shoulders.

“You cursed me in three languages,” he informed her flatly. “One of them I didn’t even recognize.”

“Huh,” Alessia said softly as she reached for the waterskin. “Weird, I only know two.” She paused as she straightened, “… Unless … did it sound like … really weird Tharon? Disjointed, like the words didn’t make sense together?” She paused again before switching to Tharon to ask, “‘Wasing of the it with the doing and sounding’?”

She wouldn’t even try to translate the question into Aurean faithfully.

Dionys stared at her blankly for a long, long moment before pinching the bridge of his nose. “Gods help me,” he said. A pause, and then grudgingly, “… Yes.”

Odrian, meanwhile, looked horrified.

“What in Hades’ name kind of Tharon dialect is that?” he demanded—half genuine confusion, half exaggerated affront. “Did you just rearrange the words at random? Is that how you actually speak? Am I the one who’s been saying it wrong this whole time—?”

Dionys kicked him in the shin. Hard.

“Water,” he reminded them both pointedly, nodding to the forgotten skin still in Odrian’s hand.

“It’s Ellun’s dockside slums street slang. We called it Mother Tongue,” Alessia said as she reached for the waterskin again. “Hasing the purpose to confuse it wasings.”

Dionys closed his eyes—just for a second—as if praying for strength.

“I refuse,” he declared to the tent at large, “to pretend that was a sentence.”

Alessia chuckled. “The first thing I asked was basically ‘Did it sound like this?’ The second was saying, ‘It’s confusing on purpose.’”

“No,” Dionys muttered, shaking his head like he was trying to dislodge the absurdity from his ears. “I’m done. I draw the line at cryptic fever riddles.” He shifted, carefully adjusting Alessia’s weight against him. “Next time, just cough like a normal person.”

There was no real irritation in the words—just a gruff sort of relief that she was awake to annoy him at all.

Odrian, though, studied her with keen interest—the same way he would examine a new battle tactic, or an unfamiliar weapon. “Ellun’s slums, you say…so a pidgin? Trade tongue?” His fingers tapped against his knee, already turning the puzzle over in his mind.

Alessia nodded. “More or less. It’s slang on top of various dialects layered onto sailor-speak and merchant pidgin, all shaken up in a barrel and left to ferment in the heat of the slums for however long.”

Odrian perked up—suddenly looking far too awake for a man who had been dead on his feet moments ago.

“So it’s a code.” His grin was all teeth. “Fascinating.”

“Why the fuck do you know thieves’ cant?” Dionys muttered—genuinely baffled now—as Stella stirred slightly against Alessia’s side before settling again.

His tone says ‘this is outrageous.’

His arms around Alessia said, ‘I will murder whoever made this necessary.’

“I learned it from another kid, a few years older than me,” Alessia said. “He picked it up by virtue of being a street rat.”

“You’ll have to teach me sometime,” Odrian said. Quieter, he added: “Might be useful.”

A joke.

A promise.

A silent acknowledgment that she would recover enough for ‘sometime’ to exist.

Alessia tilted her head before nodding, “I can teach you. Or…I can try.”

She had learned from Dolos, who had also taught her a version of rhyming slang, making her particular variant of Mother Tongue nearly incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know both.

Odrian’s grin sharpened. “Challenge accepted,” he declared—already eyeing her like she was a particularly tricky passage in a scroll. “And when I’m fluent, you’ll be the one suffering.”

He didn’t say ‘Stay alive long enough to teach me.’ The intensity in his gaze said it for him.

Dionys’ arm tightened around Alessia, just slightly, as his voice dropped to a low growl.

“How old were you?”

The question was a blade wrapped in silk.

Odrian had been too busy mentally dissecting the linguistic labyrinth Alessia had described, and he blinked at Dionys’ tone. Then he stiffened as he caught up.

His fingers twitched toward Alessia’s hand, stopping just short of contact. “You said another child taught you,” he said carefully. “Which implies you were…?”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The answer was in the too-old look in her eyes.

“Six, maybe seven,” Alessia said, her voice soft. “He couldn’t have been older than eleven.”

Dionys’ exhale was sharp, violent, through his nose. His grip on Alessia tightened—just for a heartbeat—before he forced himself to relax.

There was rage in that silence.

She’d been six.

Six years old and already fluent in a language born of desperation and stolen crusts. Already knowing how to hide, how to lie, how to survive.

He didn’t ask where her parents were. He didn’t need to—the answer was written in her scars.

Alessia swallowed hard, her eyes flickering away to focus on the tent wall. She didn’t elaborate—didn’t mention the years before Dolos, before thieves’ cant. The months spent darting between alleyways like a feral cat, surviving on theft and scraps of luck.

She didn’t explain that she had been one of the lucky ones, with a home to return to and a mother who cared.

Odrian’s fingers finally closed around hers—careful, deliberate—as if he could compress over a decade’s worth of stolen safety into a single touch.

His voice was deceptively light when he spoke again.

“So. Wasing the it. Teach me.”

Not a demand to tell him about the scars or the streets, just a request. Teach me the code: a distraction and an offering. A way to keep her here, present, instead of there.

And if his thumb stroked over her knuckles, well. That was between them and the setting sun.

Before Alessia could respond, Stella shifted again in her sleep, her tiny fingers tightening instinctively on Alessia’s clothing. The touch seemed to ground her, pulling her back from the edge of memory. She exhaled slowly, forcing the tension from her shoulders.

Stella blinked awake with sleep-mussed hair and whispered a quiet, hopeful, “Mama?”

“Hey, Starlight,” Alessia said.

Stella unfurled like a little flower reaching for the sun—pushing upright with sleep-clumsy hands to pat at Alessia’s cheeks, her collar, the bandages underneath the chiton. Checking, verifying. Her lower lip wobbled dangerously.

“You stayed.”

An accusation, a plea, a five-year-old’s fragile thank you.

Then she promptly burst into tears.

Dionys froze like a man who had just been handed a live asp. His grip on Alessia tightened just enough to scream his sheer panic before he locked eyes with Odrian—wordlessly demanding, ‘What do I do?!’

(Six years of siege warfare couldn’t prepare him for a single, sobbing child.)

Alessia let Stella cry for a moment, rubbing her back and whispering words of comfort, knowing the child needed the catharsis. Then, as Stella’s tears began to ease, she grinned mischievously.

“Odrian wants me to teach him Mother Tongue.”

The distraction worked—Stella’s tears screech to a halt as her head whips toward him, eyes wide and gleaming with mischief.

“You’ll be bad at it,” she informed him with devastating certainty, still hiccuping from crying.

There was snot on her face. She was radiant.

Dionys—still rigid with ‘What is happening?’—blinks at the sudden shift in mood.

“…Children are terrifying,” he muttered.

Odrian, delighted by both the insult and the distraction, pressed a dramatic hand to his chest. “Betrayal. From my own little ally!” He leaned in conspiratorially. “I’ll have you know I’m excellent at languages. Ask anyone. Anyone.”

(No one would corroborate it. He didn’t care.)

Alessia exhaled—half-laugh, half-relief—and ruffled Stella’s hair. “You wanna show him some?”

Stella lit up like a festival lantern—sniffling once more for good measure before clearing her throat with exaggerated gravitas.

“Uncle Ody,” she announced, pointing at him with all the solemnity of a queen bestowing a title, “is…a…” she paused, blinked, and then, with perfect comedic timing, “…goat cheese.”

It makes zero sense.

It’s also flawlessly delivered in the gnarled, rhythmic cant of Tharos’ slums.

Odrian gasped—genuinely delighted—and immediately turned his widest, most shit-eating grin toward Dionys. “Did you hear that? I’ve been blessed.”

He had no idea what it meant.

He would treasure it forever.

Dionys snorted—sharp and sudden—before immediately attempting to school his face back into stoic disapproval. (He failed.)

“You taught her this?” He asked, his voice flat but holding the faintest edge of something almost like admiration.

Alessia failed to hold back her own quiet, exhausted little giggle—until she realized exactly what Stella said.

‘Uncle?’

Stella hadn’t used that term before, and she couldn’t have learned it from Alessia’s example. She’d never referred to either of the kings that way.

More than that, she wasn’t sure what to do with the warmth that curled in her chest at the sound of it. So she didn’t do anything; instead, she let it sit there, quiet and unnamed.

For now, maybe forever.

“She came by it naturally, as far as I know,” Alessia explained. “I spent my free time talking to her in Aurean, not Mother Tongue. Then one day, about a year ago, she came up to me, called me an ‘empty-headed rabbit’, and demanded breakfast.”

She turned to Odrian with a devious smirk. “And I’ll teach you just enough so you’re stuck able to hear us mocking you, but not enough to fire back.”

“Empty-headed rabbit,” Dionys repeated—clearly committing the phrase to memory for future use. His smirk was vicious. “I’m starting to like this language.”

He paused before asking, “How do you say ‘stop licking rocks’?”

“Depends on the intent,” Alessia said with a tired, amused huff. “Polite, rude, ‘stop licking rocks or I’m telling your mother’…”

She paused, realizing she had fallen into teaching without meaning to.

Maybe she really was an empty-headed rabbit.

“The first step is you probably shouldn’t bother learning it. Outside of the slums, Mother Tongue doesn’t have much use. It has no consistent grammatical rules; it’s based entirely on context and cadence. It can’t be translated into Aurean because half of it is tonal shifts and sentence symmetry that just … doesn’t exist in Aurean.

“Like…’Wasing not the why of the wanting of the mawing of rocks’ technically translates to ‘Why do you want to lick rocks’ but it could mean anything from a fundamental question to ‘Stop licking rocks, you little weirdo.’”

Dionys looked deeply skeptical—like she had just explained that rain fell up—but Odrian was riveted.

“Symmetry,” the king echoed, as if it were the most fascinating tactical puzzle he had ever encountered. “So if I wanted to say ‘give me that honey cake or I’ll turn your hair green’—”

“No!” Stella interrupted, visibly alarmed. She smacked his arm with all the force of a vengeful sparrow. “Bad uncle!”

Alessia blinked—there it was again, ‘Uncle’, this time in Aurean—effortless and unthinking, as if she had always called him that.

She was too tired to hide her grin at Stella’s antics—or her quiet amusement at Odrian’s enthusiasm.

Then, in her own dialect of Mother Tongue, “Ey, listen, Comet. If th’man wants t’learn, let him suffer it proper—I’ll not have y’wastin’ yer time tryna hammer sense into a codfish.”

Stella giggled and smothered her face against Alessia’s side—clearly catching the gist, even if the exact words were lost in Alessia’s thick accent.

Dionys squinted at Alessia like she had just spoken in dolphin. “…Is that still Mother Tongue? Or did you just have a seizure?”

Alessia dropped her head back against Dionys’ shoulder, unable to help the exhausted but warm laugh that escaped her.

Something about all of it—Stella giggling, Odrian playing along, Dionys’ solid presence behind her—washed through her like a slow, golden tide. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt …

…Like she belonged.

…Like she was home.

“Mother Tongue,” she confirmed with a tired smirk. “Just … my version of it. Like I said, it all has to do with context and cadence.” She gestured vaguely around them, as though they were on Ellun’s streets. “Put three kids in a room and they’ll each walk out with a different version of Mother Tongue—Often incomprehensible to outsiders. Stella understood the gist of what I said, but she wouldn’t be able to tell you the exact meaning.”

“Mama called Uncle Ody a codfish!” Stella said, helpfully.

Odrian, alarmingly, looked enchanted by this. “A living language. Fluid, adaptable, perfect for spies.” His grin bordered on unholy. “We’re keeping it.”

Dionys pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re keeping the child,” he corrected, voice flat. “You are keeping the linguistic nightmare.”

“I like goat cheese,” Stella said—entirely unprompted—before flopping dramatically across Alessia’s lap with the air of someone who had decided the conversation had been won.

Alessia smiled down at her.

“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” she said with a nod.

Odrian didn’t bother hiding his laughter, his voice rough with exhaustion but bright with something dangerously close to joy.

“You,” he informed Stella solemnly, “are a menace.” The warmth in his eyes betrayed him. “She must get it from her mother.”

Alessia grinned at him, “We do our best.”

Dionys barked out a laugh. Short, sharp, and utterly unexpected. Then, as if startled by his own reaction, he glared at the tent wall as if it had personally offended him.

No one commented on it, but Odrian grinned as he filed the moment away for future blackmail. His eyes gleamed—just for a heartbeat—before he schooled his expression back into something appropriately wounded.

“Betrayal,” he declared, pressing a dramatic hand to his chest. “And after I personally guarded your bedside like a particularly handsome, sleep-deprived sentinel—”

He paused, glanced at Dionys, who was still pointedly avoiding eye contact, then flicked his gaze back to Alessia.

“Wait,” Odrian said after a quiet moment. “You just woke up from nearly dying, and your first instinct was to tease me about linguistics—?”

He sounded … impressed.

“No, my first instinct was to explain the weird rambling,” Alessia corrected. “My second instinct was to tease you about linguistics.”

Odrian’s grin widened, sharp and delighted.

“Gods, you’re perfect,” he murmured, so low only she (and maybe Dionys, who rolled his eyes but didn’t comment) could hear it.

Then, equally as soft, “Never change.”

“Don’t plan to,” Alessia said.

“Any other hidden talents we should know about?” Odrian asked.

Alessia considered the question before shooting him a wicked grin. “And ruin the surprise? If I tell you, they won’t be hidden anymore.”

“I loathe you,” Odrian informed her with the same tone one might use to compliment a particularly fine wine. He was beaming.

Dionys exhaled through his nose—something perilously close to a laugh hidden in the sound—but otherwise he remained stoically silent.

Officially, he was not amused.

Anyone who knew him would notice the way his grip on Alessia’s side loosened slightly—careful not to jostle her wound, but unmistakably for.

Stella looked like a cat who had just succeeded in breaking a very expensive amphora, yawned, and blinked sleepily before burying her face against Alessia’s hip again.

Things were normal. Things were safe.

Odrian rolled his eyes, but there was no real irritation behind it. Instead, he offered the waterskin again,

“Drink,” he insisted, softer now. “You lost more blood than you had to spare. And if you actually want to keep shocking us with your vast underworld dialect, you’ll need to stay upright long enough to do it.”

The jest is light, but his gaze lingered, checking for signs of dizziness or weakness, anything that might mean she was still in danger without admitting it.

He’d never say he spent the last day gnawing on his own worry like a dog with a bone. Some things were better left unsaid.

Dionys, meanwhile, remained steadfast behind her, his warmth solid and grounding. He didn’t say it, but his presence itself was a promise.

We’re here. You made it. Now stay.

And between the teasing, the care, the sheer stubborn refusal to let her slip away—Alessia realized something quiet and undeniable.

They fought for her.

She took the waterskin. Sipped.

And she breathed.

Odrian exhaled—long and slow—as she drank, some unbearable tension unspooling from his shoulders. His fingers twitched toward her before he thought better of it, settling for a smirk instead.

Then, because the moment was teetering dangerously close to sentiment, he flicked her forehead.

“If you’re quite done flirting with death,” he said after a quiet moment, “Maybe we can actually let you rest now.”

Dionys doesn’t flick her; he doesn’t tease. His arm, still braced around her, tightened briefly. Not enough to hurt, just enough to remind her: You’re here. With us. Safe.

Stella, already half-asleep and stubbornly clinging to Alessia’s side, mumbled something unintelligible.

Alessia winced at the flick, more out of mock offense than actual pain, but didn’t argue. She leaned back a little heavier against Dionys’ support—just enough to let him feel the weight of her exhaustion and her trust.

“Next time,” she murmured, amusement lacing her words through the rasp of thirst and fatigue, “I’ll try to schedule my near-death experiences at a more convenient time for you.”

Then, softer, so low she wasn’t sure Odrian would catch it, she murmured, “Thank you.”

(For the water. For caring. For helping her. For everything.)

Dionys heard it, his grip tightening another fraction—more acknowledgement than she’d ever get out loud—before he pointedly turned his head to stare at the tent wall like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

His thumb brushed once, absently, against her ribcage.

Odrian rolled his eyes dramatically, waving a hand as if swatting away her gratitude like an irritating fly.

“Spare me,” he groaned, voice thick with exaggerated disdain. Next, you’ll be weeping into my tunic and composing odes to my generosity.”

But his fingers brushed hers briefly as he took back the waterskin—a flicker of warmth from the contact, there and gone again before she could think to blink.

“I’ll make sure they’re all in Mother Tongue,” Alessia said, her words slurring slightly as her energy flagged again, but her grin remained bright and mischievous. “Jus’ t’be annoyin.”

Odrian gasped—clutching his chest like she had just lodged a knife in it—and whirled to Dionys,

“Did you hear that? Straight to threats! After all my kindness!” His voice was pure theatrics, and a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “This is how she repays us, Dionys. Vile street-slang odes.”

Dionys snorted—an inelegant, undignified sound. His grip on Alessia remained steady, but his stern facade wavered for just a moment.

“Tragic.”

With the faintest upward twitch of his lips—almost smirking—he added, “I’ll take first watch. You can suffer through the odes when she’s conscious enough to compose them properly.”

Alessia chuckled, snuggling closer to Dionys, mostly unconsciously.

“Y’make an unreasonably comfortable pillow, by the way,” she muttered as she fell back asleep. “Thassa compliment,” she added, in case it was in doubt.

Dionys stilled—like a statue carved from startled annoyance and reluctant fondness. His grip tightened just enough to let her know he was glaring at her, even if she couldn’t see it.

“I am not a pillow,” he informed the air above her head with grave dignity—as if addressing an invisible tribunal of utterly unimpressed judges. “You don’t just declare things like that without the proper paperwork. Protocol.”

A pause, then quieter and mostly to Odrian, “…Is this how all thieves are?”

Odrian—gleeful—opened his mouth to answer before closing it again with an audible click of his teeth, his eyes narrowing as he finally processed the phrasing.

Somewhere in the back of his mind is the quiet thought, Good. Rest.

“‘Unreasonably comfortable’,” he echoed, suddenly suspicious. “How many other pillows have you—? You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” He pointedly glared at Dionys. “You deal with her.”

Stella, still curled against Alessia’s side, blinked up at them both with big, suspicious eyes.

Dionys’ eye twitched. “I am. By throwing her into the Ashurak River.”

He didn’t. Not even a little bit.

In fact, he adjusted his arm to support her head better.

Odrian saw it. Dionys knew he saw it. The ensuing stare-off was legendary until Stella, half-asleep against Alessia’s him, mumbled, “…Uncle Dio’s the best pillow…”

The silence that followed was priceless.

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