The arrival of warmth and light was the casual signal that the campsite was finally in order, and Dex decided the messages could wait. They put their computer away and, at long last, did what they’d spent hours longing to do. They shed their dirty, sweat-soaked, forest-flecked clothes, set up the camp shower, turned the water on, and stepped into the spray.
“Gods around,” they moaned. Dried salt and accumulated trail dust veritably peeled from their skin, running in grubby spirals into the greywater catch. The clean water stung as it hit scrapes still healing, and soothed the constellations of insect bites Dex had been scratching despite their best efforts. The water pressure was nothing more than decent, and the temperature was only as hot as the wagon’s solar coating could coax from deep-forest sunlight, but even so, it felt to Dex like the finest luxury in the world. They leaned their head back, letting the water run through their hair as they stared at the sky above the trees. Stars were breaking through the pinkish-blue, and Motan’s curved stripes hung high, smiling reassuringly down at the moon Dex called home.
Mosscap stuck its head around the corner of the wagon. “Would you like me to make food while you bathe?” it asked.
“You really don’t have to,” Dex said. They were still warring with their personal discomfort over letting the robot do tasks of this sort, despite the fact that Mosscap loved few things more than learning how to use stuff.
“Of course I don’t have to,” Mosscap scoffed, clearly finding Dex’s reluctance on this front ridiculous. It held up a dehydrated pack of three-bean stew. “Would this be a good meal?” it asked.
“That…” Dex relented. “That would be perfect,” they said. “Thanks.”
Mosscap got the stove going, and Sibling Dex prayed silently to the god they’d devoted themself to. Praise Allalae for showers. Praise Allalae for sweet mint soap that lathered up thick as meringue. Praise Allalae for the tube of anti-itch cream they were going to slather themself with once they’d dried off. Praise Allalae for—
They pursed their lips, realizing they’d forgotten to fetch their towel before getting in the shower. They threw an eye toward the hook on the side of the wagon where it should have been hanging. To their surprise, the towel was there, right where it should be. Mosscap must’ve brought it, they thought, when it went to search the pantry.
Dex gave a small, grateful smile.
Praise Allalae for the company.
2
THE WOODLANDS
The trees the village was tucked within were deceptively young. They towered majestically over the road, taller than any building outside the City, their layered branches creating a dappled lace of sunlight. But the age of a Kesken pine was expressed not in height but width. The early years of saplings were spent exhausting every calorie sucked from both light and dirt on building themselves upward, trying to escape the shade of the lower forest for the brightness above. It was only after they’d spent years converting unfiltered sun into life-giving sugar that they began to expand horizontally, transforming into behemoths as the centuries drummed on. By their species’s standards, the trees in the place that Dex and Mosscap had entered were slim teenagers, less than two hundred years old.
There was only one reminder of the giants that had once stood in this forest （and would again, one day）。 Dex stopped the wagon and hopped off their bike as they approached the village’s namesake: an enormous stump, wide as a modest house, its spiring might cut clean away in the early days of the Factory Age, a time in which not much thought was given to spending twenty minutes on killing something that had taken a thousand years to grow. There was a shrine to Bosh placed before the stump, a stone pedestal with a carved sphere set on top. Small ribbons had been tied to it by countless passersby, their colors faded and fraying in the open air. Dex had ribbon in the wagon but did not fetch it. They merely capped their hand atop the mossy stone, and bowed their head in greeting and reverence.
Mosscap walked up behind them, observing. “May I ask why you do this, given that Bosh will not notice?” it asked.
“The shrine’s not for Bosh,” Sibling Dex said. “It’s for us. People, I mean. Bosh exists and does their work regardless of whether we pay attention. But if we do pay attention, we can connect to them. And when we do, we feel … well, you know. Whole.”
Mosscap nodded. “I feel that way with anything I observe in the wilds. And I suppose that’s why I don’t understand the need for this—no offense, I hope.”