Olivia sat on a stone, fidgeting with the ties of her traveling dress. While she had privately toyed with the cloak’s fasteners to change its shape before, this was the first time she had worn the makeshift dress with nothing else underneath it.

  Despite the sturdy nature of the magical cloth, it was soft against her skin, and it stayed cool even in the lingering warmth of the summer evening. More than that though, it was simply… comfortable. Right.

  Just like her new name. Olivia.

  It seemed so simple when Caden talked about it. The change was a minor thing, barely any different from the name Olivia had been given at birth, but it just… fit. Just like her cloak. It was good as a traveling garment, but wearing it as a dress felt great.

  Olivia sighed, staring at the cheery little fire. Caden had gone to check his snares, giving Olivia a few minutes to collect herself. She lifted a hand to her face and nearly flinched at the feeling of it. The hard lines, her prominent chin, the hint of stubble growing along her cheeks and chin despite having shaved just two days prior.

  “What am I doing?” Oliver asked himself out loud. Dress or no dress, this wasn’t him. He was a warrior, a knight-in-training, a former noble. He wasn’t Olivia, no matter how desperately he wanted to be. He was a man in a dress. He was ridiculous.

  One of his hands lifted to the collar of his dress, fingering at the loop that bound his cloak up, when a voice from behind froze him.

  “Please don’t do that, Olivia,” Caden asked.

  Oliver winced at the sound of the new name. What had changed? It felt so good just a second ago, so right, but now it was like sandpaper against his skin.

  “Why not?” he asked, his voice rough. A lump had rapidly formed in his throat.

  “Because. You’re trying to hide yourself. Trying to retreat. It’s natural–I did the same thing after my first boyfriend caught me being Caden.”

  The celestial slid around Oli’s back, taking a seat across the fire. His brilliant blue eyes were sharp, penetrating, and they made Olivia shiver a little.

  Caden was right. She was trying to once again flee the truth, to keep herself hidden in the mundane everyday of Oliver.

  “It’s hard,” Olivia whispered.

  “I know,” Caden said.

  “I’m not a girl. I just feel like one.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Oli. You are a girl, because you feel like one.”

  “A girl with stubble?” Olivia asked derisively.

  “Sure,” Caden replied with a casual shrug. “I’m a boy right now, and I don't have stubble, right?”

  “Well…” Olivia swallowed. “Th-that’s different.”

  “How?”

  “I… I don’t know! It just is!”

  Caden sighed. “I won’t pretend this is easy for anyone, Olivia. Genders are… hard. And weird. And confusing. But at a certain point, all you have to ask yourself is, what makes you feel comfortable?”

  “And what if I don’t know what that is?”

  Caden rolled his eyes. “Do you like wearing your dress?”

  “...Yes.”

  “Do you like me calling you Olivia?”

  Olivia couldn’t help the shy little smile that crept onto her face at the sound of the name. “I… I think so. Right now.”

  “Then there you go,” Caden said, his tone making it sound like it should've been obvious.

  “But… you’re you. You're celestial. You get it. To anyone else, I look like…”

  “A boy in a dress.” Caden nodded in understanding. “I get it. And I wish I had an easy answer for you. But I know what it’s like. Changing my clothes, my hair, it does more than make me feel comfortable with myself. It makes other people change how they look at me, too, and that helps sometimes.”

  “But some little tweaks aren’t enough to make me look like a girl!” Olivia said. She ground her teeth, frustrated once again with her own body.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Caden claimed. “I mean, Beryl was just as tall, and muscular, and…”

  The celestial trailed off at the reminder of their mutual friend and her uncertain fate.

  Olivia swallowed. She had never been on the best of terms with Beryl, but she had traveled and trained and fought alongside the warden recruit far too much to dismiss her concern for the brawny girl.

  And Caden did have a point. In fact…

  Olivia blinked as her concern over the warden reminded her of something else. Of signs she had noticed but not fully understood. Of delicate hints dropped by Adeline and the recruits themselves. “Farris.”

  “Hmm?” Caden asked.

  “Farris. She was a warden officer, Rose and Beryl’s mentor.”

  “Okay? And?”

  “She was eclipsed too. I’m pretty sure. Adeline, she tried to tell me but…”

  “But you were too stupid and caught up in your own feelings to realize what she was saying?”

  Olivia flushed. “Maybe. But Caden! She was… she!”

  Caden arched an eyebrow. “Want to elaborate?”

  “I wasn’t sure that she was eclipsed, not until now! She was… she was a little moony, but like, she looked like a woman! She had bre–” Olviia cut herself off, flushing as she realized what she was about to say.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Caden smiled widely at the near slip. “Curves?” he suggested.

  “Y-yeah. She had curves. She looked like a woman! So there must be some way I can do it too!”

  Caden nodded. “I mean… yeah. Magic is magic. I'd be more surprised if there wasn’t some way you can get your body changed.”

  Olivia took a deep breath, a smile fighting its way onto her face, growing broader with every second. Caden was right–in retrospect, it was all obvious, but Oli had just never thought about it.

  It felt good to think of herself as a girl, felt better to be spoken to like a girl. But, still… That there was some way to change her body, to make her outside match her inside…

  It helped.

  #

  A few hours later, Olivia and Caden sat around the fire. Full dark had fallen, and while Caden trimmed a couple rabbits he had managed to snare, Olivia had taken the chance to get dressed–in clothes that now felt a little too lunar and tight and uncomfortable. Still, at Caden’s urging, Olivia tried to keep thinking of herself as… well, herself. The squire tried to distract her brain from fixating on her gender by thinking about the roasted rabbit Caden had prepared for them.

  Trimming and cooking rabbits had proven to be a more… gruesome task than Olivia had imagined, and while they traveled, she had been quite willing to let Caden take that specific job. The celestial was far more proficient at it than Olivia was anyways, enough so that it was shocking that he had no gift to support their efforts.

  Olivia was forced to admit that Rose and Beryl had been right when they teased her about still being a noble, whether or not she had left her family behind. Caden had explained that he had been helping his mom hunt and cook food for most of his life, and treated the killing and trimming of birds and small animals as a chore no more distressing than making bread or chopping vegetables. He even kept a little pouch of dried herbs in his bag, which he sprinkled on the meat each night before cooking it, adding delicious flavor to the already savory meat.

  Oli, on the other hand, had always depended on the people around her. During her journey with Adeline to Correntry, they had stopped at an inn most nights, getting by on trail bread and dried fruit the couple nights they couldn’t. And on the Flax Road, Olivia had always been able to get a bowl of whatever Hugo or Harriet had cooking in the pot. She hadn’t realized just how deficient her skills were in the wilderness until she saw just how easily Caden was able to take care of the both of them.

  “I want to learn how to do some of this stuff,” Olivia told Caden.

  The celestial looked up from his own meal–rabbit on simple skewers–with obvious surprise. “What stuff?”

  “Catching and cooking food like this. Orienteering. Just… woodcraft. If I’m going to be a silver knight, I should learn to take care of myself on the road.”

  Caden shrugged, smiling in that easy way he had, regardless of gender. “Sure. You can help me trim dinner tomorrow.”

  Olivia tried to ignore the queasiness that thought inspired, but judging by the amusement on Caden’s face, she hadn’t done a great job.

  “How’s your rash doing?” Caden asked.

  “Better. That salve you made helped a lot.” Even if Olivia still wasn’t sure why oatmeal of all things helped with itchleaf.

  “We’ll keep it up. Give it a couple days of treatment, and your resilience should be enough to win through and heal it.”

  Olivia nodded slowly. “A couple days… will that be enough time?”

  “Probably. By this map, we’re about forty miles or so out from this back-up hideout of theirs. We could make it in a couple days if we pushed, but if we want to be able to fight when we get there, it’ll be closer to three days.”

  Alarm flashed through Olivia. “Three days? But by then…”

  “Egin will still be there,” Caden said confidently.

  “How do you know?”

  “You saw that group back there,” Caden told her. “You think they would’ve tried to get there as fast as possible?”

  Olivia pursed her lips. “Maybe… with Garret pushing them.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure he would’ve been super enthusiastic to get them to his boss and give up what little control he finally got to enjoy.”

  Olivia huffed. It was a fair point, but…

  “He’ll still be there,” Caden repeated confidently. “The real question is, can we take him?”

  Olivia arched an eyebrow. That wasn’t a sentiment she had expected from Caden. She had taken the wandering celestial to be something of an optimist.

  Like a young adventurer, Olivia mused. The same ones the Argent Order was based on.

  “You don’t think we can? We handled Garret and his group easily enough, and Aton too.” Even if that was more you than me, Olivia added silently.

  “But this is their leader. Strong enough to cow that same bandit clan, even without the losses they had taken in their attack. Strong enough that Aton feared challenging him for leadership. He could be an Initiate, for all we know.”

  “He’s not.” It was Olivia’s turn to be confident.

  “Oh?”

  “Initiate level totem gifts grant a summoning ability, based on the same animal as the gift. If this Egin could’ve called up an extra body in the caravan battle, he would’ve–it could’ve tilted the odds.”

  “Okay, that’s something,” Caden said. Still, he frowned. “But that’s assuming you’re right. We already know he’s not playing by the rules with his gifts, right?”

  Another decent point. Totem gifts, like those granted by ensouled items, were supposed to be limited to just one per person. They had to be paired with an archetype’s gift to advance further. If not for that limit, then if someone had the right resources, they could jump from Novice to Initiate, or higher, in a single day. It couldn’t be right.

  “I don’t know how he has two gifts,” Olivia said reluctantly, “but the logic still holds. He displayed the ability to manifest wings and claws, which are both normal Apprentice abilities for the gift of the raptor and the cat. He favored a bow–those gifts would give him a major coordination and awareness boost between them, so that lines up. Even if we don’t know how he has both gifts, his abilities are what I’d expect for either of them individually at Apprentice level.

  “And that means we can take him. Awareness and coordination make him a fearsome archer, and we’ll be unlikely to take him by surprise, but without speed or strength boons, he shouldn’t be an overwhelming threat in melee combat. He shouldn’t have much in the way of potency with those two gifts either, so Reinforced Defense should keep us safe.”

  “Especially with your new toy, right?” Caden asked, looking over at Oli’s pack and the biggest item she had taken before they left the bandit encampment.

  “That’s the plan,” Olivia agreed.

  “Okay. We should get to sleep then, get an early start tomorrow,” Caden suggested.

  Olivia nodded–then she paused. “Caden, I wanted to… uhm… y’know. Thank you. For everything.”

  “You’re welcome.” Olivia didn’t know how to react to the boy’s response. The blue-haired celestial didn’t grin, didn’t laugh, didn’t try to dismiss the gratitude or tease Olivia over the words. He took her gratitude seriously. That made it that much harder to keep talking.

  “But… look, when it’s not just us, when we’re around others again, that’s not… I’m not ready. Not yet.”

  Cadence frowned a little but nodded.

  “When we’re alone though…” Olivia’s voice cracked a little bit, and she looked down, embarrassed, as she continued. “It… might be okay. If you still want to call me Olivia.”

  “Okay,” Caden said, his voice quiet, gentle.

  “Really?”

  “Really. As long as I don’t think you’re trying to hide from yourself rather than from others. And one day…”

  “When I find Farris again,” Olivia said, trying to be firm, as much for herself as for Caden. She knew the celestial was right–if she let herself, she’d end up trying to just be Oliver, no matter how much better it felt to be Olivia. “Once I find her, and I find out how I can physically change, then… then I’ll come out about it. Okay?”

  Caden smiled, the expression a little sad. “Okay… I get it. Olivia.”

  I'm curious - would you be interested in joining a Wanderborn Discord if I set it up?