Wren died on the way down, smashing his head against a falling boulder. Aster watched it happen, at least the skull smashing part, but due to her own descent she was unable to ration whether or not he was dead. She was too preoccupied with screaming.

And then she hit the lava, and screaming was no longer and issue because she was dead. Same went for Senya- quite luckily, both had hit the molten lava head-first, resulting in a lesser amount of suffering.

It still burned, and hurt, of course. But then they were dead, and pain was no longer a concern.

The heroes of a story were not allowed to die. Unfortunately, while they were busy elsewhere, Ikina had left his divine protection on a sort of auto-pilot. A direct link of pure essence, a stock that wouldn't be activated in case truly needed- and now, as they were all dead, was the time.

So truthfully, Aster, Wren and Senya never actually died. They almost did. Over and over again, their flesh burned and their eyes melted, teeth were blackened and hair sizzled. They screamed with mouths that were in the process of unhinging and healing in cycles of agony, and fire ran into their throats and their organs as they tried to move with limbs that were only occasionally attached.

In short, it was awful, and really, really terrible. Just the worst, even.

Ikina felt the metaphorical string of energy they had left to keep the kids alive tug at them, but now was a not a time they could attend to the matter. Even if the matter in question was burning through a suspicious amount of their energy.

In the end, the thing that stopped all those frankly disgusting things from harming Aster any further was not a god. It was the light in the sky- and the man that it belonged to.

Artemis had not done much more than make a game of the scene that had played out before him, watching between his dinners with relative interest. But when people started dying and regenerating without a senseless end, he sent a few orders to some of his inferiors and had Aster pulled out.

Traction beams did not make all that much scientific sense, at least to Aster, but that is essentially what pulled her out of a bout of torture so stressful to her still-reforming mind that she had almost already succeeded in forgetting it.

The beam was like sun, and it rose her slowly into an air like thick fog. Lava came with it too, thin blobs that burned her skin. Fatal wounds would heal, but non fatal scarring had begun to collect all over her body. Pink and black wounds that bled a thin pus coated her body by the time she stopped ascending.

And found herself on something metal.

The shock of her many deaths had one effect on her: she was tired. In pain, too, but mostly tired. Shaking, she curled up on the unfamiliar floor and stared at the open wounds on her fingers slowly heal until someone picked her up and carried her away over their shoulder.

Senya and Wren were left in the volcano.

Whatever had picked Aster up was not human. It had claws that dug, with the clear aim of being gentle, into her skin. And something that felt like fur brushed against her cheek. Her eyes were closed, or maybe they weren't, but she surely was retaining nothing she saw.

This place seemed alien, which was dumb, since aliens probably existed but had no reason to be hanging around her boring planet- but then again, she had just been lifted by an anti-gravity beam.

She was placed in a chair in front of someone, and in her blurry vision she thought she had an identity to place on him. He didn't seem alien. But she was still unconfident that her eyes were even open.

"Ug." A voice said, but it echoed in her still reforming ears. "Make her presentable first."

She was carried away again, and her vision slowly reformed in one of her eyes, revealing nothing. The floor was metal, and the hall was dark and narrow. Her neck was in too much pain to move, so this was all she saw. Lights embedded on a grey floor.

Then she was placed on her back in a room that was mostly white and caught the smallest glimpse of who had been carrying her- and yes, they did seem to have fur- before she was knocked out.

Back on the ground, or now, essentially under it, Ikina finally felt irritated enough with the dying boys' energy usage that they came to fish them out.

They did this in their human state, and the boys were left with a few moments- while Ikina traced their hands across wounds to seal them in a hurry- where they got a chance to feel utterly at odds with the god before them. It did not help they were both naked.

Both were also struck with the strange sensation of being healed, which seemed to feel like every cell in their bodies was alive and buzzing. And shock, naturally. But after all that emotional confusion, there was Ikina. A man in foreign clothes.

"Hm." Ikina said, or hummed, when they felt the boys were patched up to satisfaction. "Don't do that again or I'm revoking your immortality privileges."

"Excuse me, honored.. sky mother." Wren started saying, but immediately regretted when Ikina spun around with an air of impatience. "Uh. Why are you keeping us alive in the first place? Senya already freed Lailana, and..."

Senya shot Wren a strong look to remind him not to question things that save your life. Wren was too busy being intimidated by Ikina to notice.

Ikina's face was stern. "You want to die?"

"No!" Wren exclaimed immediately.

"Then don't be concerned. If you were interested in dying, I may have sat you down to explain why it matters to keep you two alive. If there's nothing to convince you of, I may as well... keep myself quiet."

"Okay." Wren said, shrugging. The previous statement had been the most acceptable thing Ikina had said yet, playing right into the annoying dichotomy of right and wrong he expected a god to play in.

"Are you going to heal these scars?" Senya asked, running a hand across his charred skin. Ikina had stopped the bleeding and closed the wounds shut, but the damage was done. Grooves, burns and discoloring covered the majority of his and Wren's bodies, the only clear spots being the ones Ikina had healed due to open wounds.

Truthfully, this was a lot of the body- areas like the nose and fingers had to be mostly reconstructed- but it left a lot of painless but odd markings. They were not natural burn wounds, and people would have had a hard time recognizing them as such.

"You're fine." Ikina said, then made a noise suspiciously like the beginning of a laugh. "They'll have to stay."

Senya furrowed his brow and Ikina disappeared.

"Where'd Aster go?" Wren wondered a minute later.

"I dunno." Senya glanced back the lava pit, perhaps expecting to hear some sort of submerged screaming from his forgotten ally. "Ikina may have taken her."

"Huh. Weird."

"What do we do now? I was sort of betting on dying after freeing Lailana."

"I guess head home? By the time I make it to the other mountain, Ae-ah, to wake Silanah, Lailana would have probably made a ton of new land. Flooding it again would probably just get settlers killed." Wren said. "I don't want to go home though."

"...I don't either."

"I guess we can just... travel around? If you're into that. Travel."

Senya almost laughed. "I'm literally always traveling. Same thing for three years. I'm about tired of it, but until someone forces a stop, I guess I'm always up for another bout of it."

"Do we have to pick a direction to head in, then? Or is it just a kind of going wherever?" Wren looked about at the cooling cave he and Senya were now semi-stranded in. They'd likely have to climb out through one of many tunnels and hope it wasn't caved in.

"I like to have a general destination. And then when I reach it, I find another one." Senya helped Wren climb up a boulder to reach one of the small tunnels. He had half a mind to see if could track down Wren's backpack, but that seemed slightly unlikely.

"So, where do we start?"

Senya climbed after Wren, and took a moment to look the other boy in the eyes. He had never traveled with anyone else before. He wasn't sure he would like it, but he was tied to Wren now, marked as 'semi-important' by the ruler of the gods.

"Stemale?" He offered, suddenly having a thought.

It was nearby. A good test run.