- and the both of them are, at least, together.

Somewhere else.

It's a forest, a lush and bright one full of flowers and plush moss and thick ivy, the trees old and thick with bark that's rough or peely or crumbling in gray or brown or white, and no sign of the snake.

The first thing Azi does is grab Ru's hand and stabilize her as they both stumble forward. Then she looks around, eyes very wide, stance taut in case of danger. These pillars around her—she is immensely confused and then sees they have plants growing off of them, and then realizes they're plants. She knows wood is supposed to come from plants like this that grow in the south. Have they somehow ended up in the south? She can't think of any kind of demon that can teleport people, but there are all kinds of strange things that hide in the mist.

Ru, of course, immediately drags Azi over to touch one of the... trees... even though Ru touching things was what got them into this mess.

The tree does not react to this in any way. It is indeed made of wood.

"Ru," says Azi, as Ru immediately begins trying to climb it.

"What? We'll be able to see farther. And we'll be safer if that thing comes back."

Azi sighs and reaches for a branch, then hesitates. "What if something lives up there, though?"

Ru squeals with delight. "Azi, come look at this flower!"

"Keep your voice down!" She looks around again. Who lives here? How do they feel about foreigners? And... if she and Ru are far enough from Dazha... does that mean they could be free?

There's no buildings in evidence. Though the visibility isn't great, because of the trees in all directions.

"We should go south, don't you think?" says Azi. "Away from Dazha."

Ru squints at the shadows. "I think it's that way?"

Azi squints too and nods. "Either we're going to die or this is a great stroke of luck. Probably the first one though. You idiot," she adds affectionately.

They walk the way they think is south, stopping frequently to examine odd plants.

There are a lot of plants and most of them are odd. They might want to decrease their confidence in the cardinal directions when they've been traveling for a while and the sun has not moved from its roughly 2pm position in the sky.

Azi assumes she's just misperceiving the flow of time, but Ru is constantly noticing things. "Wasn't it later when we left? Do you think it might have been a time demon as well as a space demon? There's an account the fourteenth year of the Second Sister of a man who appeared in Oummaj claiming allegiance to a Ma'goul emperor, and the philosopher Nou Baraj claims time is a circle, as can be seen by the rise and fall of the great dynasties, and it may be possible to commune with corresponding points on a past or future loop around the circle, but I don't think he thought you could actually go there, and I don't think his arguments were very good, honestly a lot of the Ma'su philosophers seem like they were kind of making stuff up by analogy, modern philosophy is much more informed by the empirical natural sciences but a lot of scholars feel that the field is still just making things up and should be retired if it isn't able to prove anything, but the modern philosophers say—do you think there's bees in there? I want to see a bee!" She sticks her head up a hole in a tree.

Azi drags her out. "Please stop looking for things that might hurt you. Do you happen to know what southern plants are edible?" Ru had once been a library slave. She'd taught herself to read and absorbed information like a sponge. The scholars hadn't liked that, so she'd been placed on the cooling line.

"I've read a lot on natural history of the south but it's hard to recognize plants from woodblock pictures, and I don't know where in the south we are, or when in the south we are, or even that we're in the south, maybe Dazha has just grown much warmer somehow, maybe they got way better at lava engineering like they're trying to do in the fields around Gash, though I don't know of anywhere in Dazha that has such sustained flat land at a high elevation which we must be at since there isn't any mist. But uhh if you see a plant with leaves that come to two points, and it has white berries, I think you can eat those. Or the nut of a tree with leaves like feathers. Or..." Ru lists about ten more plants from memory, none of which Azi has seen so far.

They keep walking. Do they find a source of water, or anything that looks edible?

There are lots of fruits and nuts and leaves and roots if they want to risk any of those!

And up ahead, the trees thin out and there's a lake.

They collect bits and pieces of things that might be edible. Azi tries one berry and Ru tries one nut, then they wait to see if they feel at all unwell. If not, they'll try a larger, but still cautious, serving.

It's odd to see a lake just naked like that, without a layer of ice on top. Azi's seen this before, but only near lava streams. They drink water and Azi spends some time experimenting with hollowing out fruit rinds to carry it in. They look for fish, but to Ru's great disappointment they don't see any.

They take a break. Azi feels like she ought to build a fire, but the temperature doesn't call for it. Later she may try and roast some of those roots, though.

"The sun still hasn't moved," says Ru. "Do you think..."

"I don't know what I think," says Azi. It is beginning to freak her out a bit, but she doesn't want Ru to know that. "Are you tired?"

"I think it's been long enough that we need to sleep. But the sun's still up. Do you think maybe the demon took us to a frozen moment in time? There's another philosopher, Aur Tolal, who says time is made up of connected singular moments like..."

"Let's find somewhere safe to rest," says Azi, interrupting in a slightly harsher tone than she meant to.

What are their options?

The nut is maybe not amazing raw but the berry is fine. Neither seems really filling.

There's lots of trees, and some trees have fallen down, and there are higher hillocks and lower divots in the ground, and it's sort of an open question what they might need to be safe from when they haven't seen so much as a gnat that can move on its own, but there's a shady soft looking spot under an overhanging bush over there.

Azi is insistent that they need to drag branches over to turn the spot into a slightly better-defended shelter, and she covers it with leaves as best she can, trying to make it look like an extension of the bush. Then they build a fire together—with wood! it feels stunningly wasteful— and try roasting the nuts and some of the roots. They eat mostly the nuts and berries which have been proven safe, and continue their food safety testing by each taking a single bite of a different kind of root.

Ru wants to keep discussing the metaphysics of their situation. Azi wants to keep discussing plans for survival. She's not afraid of death—she's lived through raids and plagues and starvation; it's background noise in her life—but it is a fact about the universe that it Must Not happen to Ru. Lava is hot, the sky is blue, Ru is not allowed to die.

She needs to be smart enough, strong enough, to uphold the laws of the universe and keep Ru safe. Right now she doesn't know how to do that, and she hates it with all her heart.

She insists they sleep in shifts. During hers, she watches Ru's chest rise and fall, and gazes warily through the branches, clutching a sharpened stick.

The nuts are much better roasted. The roots are not poisonous but don't taste very foody, sort of like taking a bite of wood or a sponge.

There are footsteps outside, when she's been keeping watch for about an hour.

Azi watches and tries not to breathe. She doesn't wake Ru up.

The footsteps are accompanied off and on by a humming tenor voice, and rustling noises as the person these things belong to picks various components of the shrubbery and trees.

At a couple points the footsteps are replaced with rapid wingbeats.

Azi tries to silently maneuver into a position where she can see.

It's a small man, with a set of four big dragonfly-esque wings and dayglo yellow hair, wearing rough-spun shorts and nothing else, filling a bag with leaves and some of the same fruits they were interested in.

Azi stays hidden, brow furrowed. She is pretty sure she would have heard about it if the people of the south had wings.

The noises wake Ru up. Azi quickly covers her mouth, but she's audibly rustled the leaves.

Their concealing branches are promptly pulled aside.

Azi tries to shove Ru behind her and brandishes the sharpened stick.

"Hello, hello," says Ru, in Dazhan first and then Shou Cti.

"Hello hello to you too," says the little winged man, blinking at the stick-brandishing. "What's all this about? I'm not going to hurt you. I'm Yellow, what are your names?"

"I'm Ru," says Ru immediately. "Where are we and when is it and what language are you speaking?"

Azi does not lower the stick.

"Hi, Ru... I'm not speaking any language. Tell me your friend's name."

"She's Azi."

"Who are you?" says Azi. There's something she doesn't like here. And it would make sense for a demon to take them somewhere there were other demons.

Yellow smiles. "Put down the stick."

Azi really really does not like this.

She puts down the stick. What the hell. Why did she put down the stick.

"Follow me," he adds, lifting off into the air and settling to the forest floor a ways away.

Azi grabs Ru's arm to hold her back from following him, and then finds that both of them are following him.

Her heart is pounding. "Ru," she says. "I don't... I can't..."

"Are you okay?"

"Something's wrong," she whispers. "I don't think we should follow him."

"Okay," says Ru, and they keep following him. Ru looks mystified.

"You see," whispers Azi. "Have you read of any kind of demon like this?"

"No..."

They reach Yellow.

Nah, he keeps ahead of them. "Don't whisper. Tell me what you were saying."

Azi and Ru trip over each other answering.

"We were saying something is wrong, and we don't think we should follow you, and we were trying to figure out what kind of demon you are—"

"Azi said Ru, I don't, I can't, and I asked Are you okay, and—"

"Shush," he says, targeting Azi and letting Ru continue.

Ru repeats the conversation word for word.

Azi takes the opportunity to open her mouth and curse Yellow out very creatively out in dead silence.

"Are you being rude?" Yellow asks Azi.

She feels no compulsion to answer, which is very interesting. Does it have to be phrased as an order?

She still can't talk, so she shakes her head and puts on her dumb innocent slave girl expression.

That seems, for the moment, to satisfy him. He leads them on through the forest, walking in the densest parts but taking off for short bursts of flight when he has room. They're going around the edge of the lake.

Ru and Azi follow. Azi sticks very close to Ru. Her mind is whirling.

It is very obviously a bad idea to try to hit him with a rock, so she just does it quietly to herself inside her head.

For some reason he doesn't seem at all worried that they will do this.

Eventually they reach a little house, more sized for someone his size than a human's, though they can duck in when he leads them through the door.

"Pick nicknames for yourselves," he commands.

Ru thinks for long enough that Yellow might start getting impatient, then says, “Pei”—her younger sister’s name.

Azi can’t talk.

"You may state your nickname," Yellow says to Azi after Ru's given hers.

“Faruinezu,” says Azi. It’s Shou Cti for “Do whatever you want”.

"I'm not going to pick for you, come up with a real nickname."

Damn. It was worth a try.

”Sha,” she says, because it’s the Dazhan prince’s informal name and this is hilarious.

"Okay. I've got another vassal, she's called Promise, but she's out for now. You'll share her room, work that out with her when she gets back. Don't leave the house without permission."

They each perform a full court obeisance—traditionally, among palace slaves, performed to the cadence of any of a large variety of insult songs. Then Azi points to her mouth, hoping for full permission to speak.

"Don't be rude, but you may speak."

“Thank you for your graciousness,” says Azi, performing a quarter bow. She didn’t need the command not to be rude; she’s passing her snark off undetected since she was captured at fourteen. “May I ask if there is anything we may eat. Also, if you would be so generous as to inform us as to where we are, as we are strangers in this land and arrived by accident.”

"You're in Fairyland, in my house. Promise is out foraging now, but you can have some of this in the meantime." He pulls some of the leaves he gathered out of his bag and puts them on the table.

“Thank you for your graciousness,” says Azi, and bows again. “May we have permission also to go to the lake for water and for hygiene?”

"Don't drink the lake water, you can pour yourself cups of water to drink from the pitcher there, Promise purifies it," he says, gesturing at a glass pitcher on a counter. "There's an aperture to the lake over there that doesn't involve leaving the house."

Damn. She’d been hoping he’d give permission to go to the lake, but forget to say they had to return from it.

More worryingly: “If you would be so gracious as to tell us, the water of the lake, does it cause disease?”

"...not as far as I know."

Okay, that’s a relief, and also a very clear non-answer. This guy is full of those. “Thank you for your graciousness.” She bows again, then does her best to become a silent piece of furniture. She’ll try and ask more questions to this Promise when she arrives, unless of course she turns out to be some other kind of horrible demon.

Ru continues the pretty credible furniture imitation she’s been doing, even though Azi knows she must be vibrating from the strain of not poking her head into every single cabinet.

"That room's mine," says Yellow, "don't go in it till I tell you to," and then he eats the nonleaf portion of his haul of forage.

Ru and Azi bow in acknowledgment and then continue their furniture impression. When he briefly looks away, their hands shoot forward in unison and grab leaves to shove in their mouths. They both have a deep instinct not to let the master see you got your hands on food, even if said master has given it to you.

They won’t do anything else until prompted, except play the strategy games the slaves have developed based on subtle gestures back and forth. Ru captures all of Azi’s fingers the first game, but Azi wins the next two.

Yellow retires to his room when he's done eating.

And then someone else lets herself in.

A startled Ru jumps up from poking her head into every single cabinet, hits her head on the low ceiling, and flips into a bow that smashes her forehead on a chair. Flustered, she stands up correctly this time and says, “Did you know that the Corrocan grass ant lives in complex colonies with multiple queens which may compete or collaborate in ways some scholars argue are analogous to human political relationships?”

”Hello,” Azi reminds her, and gives a quarter bow.

”Hello,” says Ru, and gives a slower, more careful bow.

"- did I know what - no, how would I know that, does it matter -" She sets down a heavy-looking sack of fruit on the table and starts unpacking.