Chương 27: Nutcracker?

"That's the last of them," Aria spoke and collapsed down in the sand, heaving. I followed her example as well, yanking away the burning torch and extinguishing it in the sand.

It had already been two days since we had decided to spend the next week in the desert, in hopes of waiting out the sandstorm, and from the last two days me and Aria have been regularly venturing out into the desert to hunt for some easy food to replenish our supplies.

Hunting has been easy so far; with the help of stormraven, we were easily able to locate and ambush our prey.

Today however unfortunately, we seemed to have stumbled upon a colony a sandweavers, resulting in us spending the last hour trying to exterminate them all.

"The sun is about to set, we should get moving if we want to make it to the hideout on time." Aria spoke after a couple of minutes of rest. She got up from the ground, dusted herself up a little bit and slowly began walking towards the sandweaver corpses.

Seeing her get to work, I stood up as well and got started on the pile in the opposite direction, putting the bodies into spatial storage one by one.

'Tonight's dinner was going to be horrible.' As it turns out, sandweavers were pretty edible once you removed their poisonous glands. The only problem, however, was that they tasted like wet garbage.

Seeing that our spatial storages could stop working at any moment we had decided to go through non canned stuff first, food that was more likely to be spoiled without the time dilation capabilities of the spatial storages. The part of this decision included eating what he had hunted the same day. Like this morning when we had been forced to swallow the wet slop.

My complaints were suddenly halted as I saw the the stormraven flew down from the sky and swiftly land on my shoulder, tilting his head to curiously look at the dead creatures.

Looking at the bird, I couldn't help but smile before rubbing his head; the bird once again cooed a little before dissolving into darkness.

"Maybe you should give them a name," Aria spoke from behind. Turning around, I saw her standing right behind me, holding the spatial storage in her hand. Seems like she had been done cleaning up her side of corpses.

"I have actually been thinking about one for a while now, but nothing good seems to come to mind."

I quickly finished putting the last one in the spatial storage and walked up to her.

"What names have you come up with?" Aria asked and both of us began walking towards the city walls in the distance.

"Flapjack, nutcracker, squakster," I spoke.

Aria looked at me with a deadpan expression. "Don't even bother telling me what you have come up for the duskwraith."

"I am not good at coming up with names, never have been." I protested.

"Maybe you are trying too hard; how about Stormfeather? It's a stormraven, after all?"

That was actually not a bad name, maybe a bit too fantastique, but if the stormraven liked it…

The tattoo on my arm suddenly moved, just like it had shaken when I suggested those names.

"He doesn't seem to like it," I told Aria, who shook her head.

"How about Primarch?"

It shook once again. This time, I was even a bit taken aback. Why was it so picky? Primarch was a good name.

The conversation continued like this, with Aria suggesting one name after another and stormraven simply denying it. And before we knew it, we were already standing outside our hideout.

Putting the conversation on hold, we entered inside, only to see Tess sitting at the corner of the room, trying to sew a makeshift backpack for us.

"You are back, what did you find today, hope it's not another group of sandweavers." Tess stood up from her seat and walked towards us, slightly stumbling on her wooden leg.

Tess had told us she had been feeling a lot better than before, so yesterday we had scavenged the nearby houses in the town and made her that makeshift wooden leg. Though from the looks of it she still needed some time to get used to it.

"Unfortunately no." Aria spoke up and emptied out a large pile of carcasses from her spatial storage.

Looking at the sandweavers Tess let out a defeated sigh, she then put the almost sewed bag on the side and began pulling out their legs one after another.

Another reason why we hated sandweavers so much was the amount of time it took one to prepare them. Their thin legs were the only edible part of their body, meaning that every meal consisted of us pulling out tens of sandweaver's legs before individually skinning them to extract out the cookable meat.

As Tess worked on our dinner, Aria and I sat by the fire, letting the warmth seep into our tired bones.

I summoned stormraven as well, the bird immediately walking and sitting down besides the fire.

"How about Verdance?" Aria ventured after a quiet moment, prompting the stormraven to let out a dismissive squawk.

"Gale?" she tried again.

Another stubborn shake of feathers.

"Claw?" Aria asked, sounding almost hopeful.

The stormraven's glare said it all.

"What are you two going on about?" Tess asked, glancing over while pulling apart the legs.

Deciding we needed a fresh perspective, we filled her in on our failed attempts to name the stormraven, prompting her to join our brainstorming.

"How about Captain Caw? Nugget? Nutcracker?" she suggested with a grin, making Aria chuckle. "That's the same name he suggested," Aria said, pointing at me with a smirk.

Soon enough, the three of us were firing off bird names in rapid succession—every suggestion met with a shake, a squawk, or an indignant fluffing of feathers from the stormraven.

The campfire flickered in the darkness, casting our faces in a warm glow as we huddled together, laughing and giving out names. In that little circle, surrounded by the quiet night, we savored the small moment of peace that had found its way to us.

Unfortunately, moments like these weren't meant to last for long in the gleaming wastes.