"Yeah! Gardening is very intensive of attention and labour and then sometimes everything will die anyway for reasons you'd need to be superhuman to catch. Gods and figures of legend can garden without inexplicably dead plants, but I cannot. It's also a bit worse because I'm babying a smaller number of plants through a intrinsically risky scenario." 

"Do you ever wish you were a giant, with pitted skin made of stone or metal, that plants could grow all over your body and you would carry them with you everywhere you walked?"

"Oh I read about some warforged of the 10th generation doing that! It sounded pretty cool! Old warforged can do some pretty interesting things with their bodies, sometimes. I think it could be pretty interesting - maybe when I end up undead I'll try doing something like that."

"What type of undead are you thinking? I was under the impression that becoming a lich is really hard and most of the other ones have severe downsides."

"Becoming a lich *is* really hard, but that's the dream - when I get strong enough, I'm going to ask great-grandfather for his notes, he says he's figured out a way to do it more ethically. Otherwise ... realistically, the obvious answer is having one of my relatives reanimate me as a deathknight, which is simple enough. Main downside there is just the constant decay of your body and mind. Aunty, that is, one of great-grandfather's old travelling companions, has made a pretty good job of adjusting, she loves to mess with her body. So I do know the problems can be beaten. There's always being a ghoul or a vampire, but I don't think I'd find the hunger very enjoyable. There are lots of weirder options, but none of them have leapt out at me as particularly compelling. Being a morgh or a mummy or a barrow-wight or something would mostly just suck, you loose all your flexibility and the process fills you up with hostile instincts. I guess I could invent my own type of undead, people have done that, but I think plans for that should wait until after I've actually got some necromancy going. I've studied theory, but my soul isn't strong enough to sustain two casting systems at once yet..." 

She laughs.

"They're all such shitty forms of immortality. Still, arguably better than freezing people's heads. Oh, important question—are vampires sexy?"

"Depends a *lot* on the vampire. Some of them are supernaturally attractive, some of them have the approximate appearance of a porcupine that's been left to rot for a month, and there are examples of all of the range in between. A mix of their personal skills and the bloodline they're descended from. I think there's a small clan under the tower mostly hovering around 'tastefully preserved corpse of someone who starved to death'." 

"I think being a sexy vampire might be fun. As long as they don't get sexually transmitted diseases, which I think would make sense but then again, magic."

"Vampire metabolisms are a mess, I know they can be asymptomatically contagious for bloodborne diseases sometimes? So probably they're like that for sexually transmitted ones as well. Main problem aside from the hunger for a vampire is the long and slightly unpredictable list of weaknesses, and the fact that you're hooking yourself into an ancient mind-control-enforced hierarchy. You can dodge that last one if you're careful, but it's certainly a pretty big risk. I'm not actually sure the average vampire manages to extend their lifespan to a meaningful extent with the transformation. That's true of a lot of attempts at immortality, I think, actually? You either take a lot of risks and end up dying within a century anyway, or you don't and you end up living a profoundly limited life that doesn't achieve very much." 

"I retract my previous statement. Mind control is no fun at all and I want nothing to do with it."

The back-and-forth conversation continues incessantly over the new few days, Sida and Dyva comparing opinions on everything from geography to music to historical figures. 

Over the next week, intermittent snows continue, but never for long, with a warm afternoon or bout of rain always coming to preventing it building up too much. Several of Dyva's plants suffer frostburn; some are healed with spare magic, some are left to reduce down to roots and bulbs, and some just die. Overall, she considers it a success. 

Sida spends more time walking alongside the wagon than sitting on its bench, although she can't keep it up all day. Unfortunately, after more than a year spent mostly with her nose in books, her stamina isn't what it used to be.

When Tarka isn't sleeping (he sometimes does this, curling up in a nook inside the wagon, on no fixed schedule) she often sings. Sometimes songs from home, in canaanite no one but her understands, sometimes songs she learned in the city. She also composes (improvises, really) a few new ones. It's actually not very difficult to get your desired meter and rhyme scheme when you can draw upon words from... apparently all of the languages spoken on this planet? Well, the ones that are pronounceable enough to be sung, anyways.

One day, about a week and a half after setting out, the road passes through a stand of managed woodland where the land is too rough for rice-paddies, and a rustling in the bushes gives way to the terrible roar of a giant boar, maybe 5ft tall at the shoulder and possessed of razor-sharp tusks and tons of muscle. It charges at Sida walking alongside the cart. 

Ossa moves to intercept, taking the charge on his shield but being shoved back by the weight of the boar, only barely avoiding falling over entirely. 

"Ahhh it's a giant animal!"

Sida has, at Tarka's insistence, been casting Mage Armor on herself on a regular basis, so she has some protection. However, that boar is still much larger than her! She opens the arcane channels encoded onto her soul to trigger a reserve ritual, causing—

...a small flame to spring from her fingers, fly towards the boar, and crash against it's side, bursting into a ten-foot-wide fireball. This is rather less devastating than one might imagine.

Tarka jumps down from the wagon bench, runs up to the boar's other side, and slashes at it with his (kobold-sized) sword and knife. This has a greater effect.

The boar roars and squeals with pain, it's fur burned off in great patches by the flame, and rounds to try and crush Tarka into the ground with it's weight. 

Dyva also begins to cast, filling her own hands with fire, which she prepares to throw. 

Tarka makes for a small, fast-moving target. He is able to dodge the hooves bearing down on him.

Sida decides to try her crossbow, rushing to grab it off the wagon's bench, draw back the string, and load a bolt.

"I said you ought to carry that with you!"

"Yes, yes, you've made your point."

She aims, shoots, and misses.

"Fuck!"

Dyva finishes readying her handfuls of fire to throw, and misses her first throw. The second one hits the boar in the face, not exploding into a fireball but nonetheless causing the boar to further squeal in pain. 

Ossa has regained his balance, and goes for a stab deep into the flank of the boar. 

The boar dies, but while it is still noticing this, it takes out its pain with a swipe of its tusks at Tarka.