Paultin is sitting on the edge of the bench, practicing his letters, when his father enters the wagon. He’s cradling a small bundle tightly swaddled in cloth in his arms and it takes less than an instant for Paultin to decide that that is far more interesting that trying to remember which was ‘b’ goes and which way ‘d’ goes. He drops his pencil, which roles into the middle of his writing book, and points at the bundle.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Something very special that we need to take somewhere else,” his father says, closing the door behind him by hooking a foot around the edge to pull it closed without moving his arms.

As he moves further in after doing so, the bundle moves, like something inside of it is wriggling.

“Why’s it moving?” Paultin asks, shoving his letters book off of his lap with little care as to how it lands and scrambling across the bench to where his father is now standing, eyes sparkling with curiosity. “Is it something alive?”

He leans up onto his tiptoes and grabs his father’s shoulder, trying to lean over and look at what the bundle is. His father laughs, well used to his clambering, and simply adjusts his stance and grip so that he won’t drop the bundle and Paultin won’t fall off. The child in question simply takes advantage of this newfound stability to stick an arm down to try and move some of the cloth. His reach isn’t quite long enough, though, so he just ends up with one arm dangling down towards it.

The bundle wriggles again and then, to Paultin’s immense surprise and delight and his father’s amusement, a small hand works its way out of the cloth and knocks a loosely draped one out of the way, revealing a face.

It’s a baby, Paultin realises, staring downwards, mouth dropping open a little bit. It’s a little bigger than most babies and might actually be almost a toddler maybe but his first thought was baby so he’s going to call it a baby.

The baby is staring right back at him, eyes wide and mouth open in a little ‘o’ shape. There’s a mop of messy black hair on its head, really thick and starting to fall down by pointy ears, with two little horns poking out of it, and its skin is very pale and looks almost greyish. The eyes meeting his own and almost exactly mirroring his expression are almost solidly milky white.

The baby’s little ‘o’ of a mouth then splits into a wide shape that he thinks is what a smile looks like on a baby, makes a weird babbling ‘hcha’ noise, and wriggles even more, the one free hand flailing a bit. He can’t quite stop himself from grinning back.

And then the free hand shoots upwards and grabs one of his dangling fingers.

“…oh,” says Paultin, blinking down at the baby, who is staring straight at him and tugging on his finger a little bit “…hello,”

The grip on his finger tightens a little, and then the baby lets go. Its face starts to screw up a little bit and Paultin feels his father tense a little. He’s just about to ask what’s happening – is something wrong? – when the baby inhales deeply and starts to wail.

“Why does she always cry so much?” Paultin asks his mother, three days later. The baby is fast asleep, curled up under the blankets she arrived swaddled in, quiet for what seems to him to be almost the first time she started wailing when she got here. He has to be careful with swinging his legs while he sits on the stool, because if he kicks anything it’ll make a bang and wake her.

“Because it’s the best way she has to tell anyone when she needs things,” his mother replies in a whisper, giving him a quick gesture to lower his own volume, then submerging the cloth in her hand into the bowl of water she just warmed.

“Why?” Paultin asks, his whisper a little louder than hers because he hasn’t entirely figured out whispering yet. He has to stop swinging his legs when she crouches down in front of him so that he won’t accidentally kick her.

“Because she doesn’t know how to really talk yet,” she says, gently tipped his chin up and starting to dab at his face with the cloth.

“But she can talk!” he protests, forgetting his volume for a moment, making them both freeze and throw a glance to the side. The baby is still asleep, blessedly.

“She can talk,” he continues, back to whispering, tilting his head as she directs “I’ve heard her and so’ve you!”

The baby has held up grabby hands and demanded “up, up, up!” far too many times for him to think that she doesn’t know what sounds mean.

“She only knows a few words so far, Paultin,” she says, wiping at a particularly stubborn bit of muck a little bit harder, which feels weird.

“…so she’ll stop crying if she learns more words?”

She laughs, quietly, and gently wipes the last of the blood away from under his nose.

“We can but hope, Paultin,” she says, ruffling his hair with her free hand, then standing to walk back over to the bowl and rinse the cloth off.

He kicks his legs again now that she’s not in front of him and looks longingly to the door, mind already moving off of the subject at the lure of the light outside and the sound of other children laughing. They’re in a new place now which means new things to explore and he wants to be back out there.

“Can I go out again?” he asks, already leaning towards the door as though to bolt, seemingly closing the subject of the baby and crying.

“As long as you’re careful not to get another bloody nose,” his mother says, smiling softly.

He chirps out a promise and hops down from the stool, eager to get back to running around and exploring and playing pretend.

That night, both his parents watch in amusement as he puts object after object in front of the now-awake baby, forcefully pointing to each and repeating their name, over and over and over.

The baby watches with rapt attention, one hand shoved in her mouth, head mimicking the movement of his arms, and occasionally mimicking sounds.

It doesn’t really work.

“Where’re we going this time?” Paultin asks, trying to squeeze up on the seat at the front of the wagon with his mother. She chuckles fondly at his repeated failures and picks him up, settling him in her lap.

“Wherever the road takes us,” she says, letting him squirm up between her arms to hold the part of the reins that falls between where she’s holding them.

He tilts his head up as far as he can to try and look at her face without moving the rest of his body and sticks his tongue out.

“You always say that,” he says.

“It’s always true,” she replies, leaning over so that he can actually see her face and sticking her tongue out right back at him. He can’t quite help giggling.

Then he rolls his head from side to side slight, the closest to shaking his head that he can manage with it tilted back like it is. His hair rubs against her clothes and starts to go flyaway with static.

“I meant about the baby,” he says, blinking upwards “Where’re we taking her?”

“The City of Doors, though not just yet,” his mother replies.

“When then?” he asks.

“When she’s old enough that she’ll have a chance,” she replies, releasing the reins in one hand to ruffle his hair and then gently taking the part of the reins that he’s holding from his grip. “Inside with you now, sweetheart. We’ve got to head off soon,”

Paultin pouts but does as he’s told, slipping off of her lap and clambering to the ground.

About a week later, while they’ve all stopped for the night, Paultin’s voice trails off towards the end of a song he’s singing with his mother as he glances at the baby bouncing on his father’s knee, his brow furrowed in a way that almost looks comical on as young a face as his.

When his mother finishes the song and there is some quiet, he speaks up.

“Does she have a name?” he asks, head tilting to the side as he watches. He kinda misses being small enough to be bounced like that. It was fun.

“Only her birth family knows it, if she does,” his mother says, sounding a little sad.

Paultin’s furrowed brows become a thoughtful frown.

“We should give her a name then,” he says “We can’t just keep calling her ‘the baby’. Everyone should have a name,”

His parents exchange a glance and several head tilts, his mother also tossing a few quick hand signs that his father can’t return because he’s balancing a baby on his leg; an unspoken conversation that almost completely passes him by – he caught a few of the hand signs, but mostly just ‘he’ which doesn’t help much – and then his mother smiles at him.

“Okay,” she says, ruffling his hair despite squawking protests “Any ideas?”

“…no,” he admits. And then, face steeling into determination “But I’ll think of some!”

The baby is crying again and food hasn’t done anything and she doesn’t need changed and she isn’t tired and doesn’t seem to want to be sung to and it’s really starting to annoy him. It’s really hard to think about anything when a baby is crying and also he really wants to sleep.

He goes over to where his father is rocking her in his arms, singing a soft tune to try and calm her, his mother rubbing a temple and seemingly having given up on singing herself.

He leans over, points at her face, and goes “Stop it,” in his best Stern Voice.

The baby’s cries abruptly cut off with a sound vaguely like a hiccup and she stares at the finger in front of her face with slightly cross-eyed wonder. Then she follows the finger up the arm it belongs to and looks at his face. And then she giggles.

“Well, would you look at that,” his father says, almost sounding relieved beyond words. His mother just lets out a massive sigh, which sounds actually relieved beyond words.

Paultin, for his part, just looks at the pacified baby, looks at his hand, and then goes “…huh,”

He tells of this accomplishment quite proudly to the other children the next day. They’d all noticed the waxing and waning bags under his eyes ages ago and he’d gladly whinged to them when explaining why he had them – “The baby just won’t. stop. crying,” – so he feels very cool when they all ‘oooh’ appropriately in response to his having managed to calm her down, the ones with younger siblings especially.

He just kinda hopes it wasn’t a one-off thing. It’d be lame to get to boast about it and then never be able to do it again.

Eventually, he thinks of a good name.

He tugs on his father’s arm, getting him to crouch down. Paultin puts his hands gently on the sides of the baby’s face, looking her dead in the eyes. She doesn’t seem to particularly sense the gravitas that he’s going for, given the fact that she shoves a hand in her mouth and starts sucking on it.

“Your name is Strix now,” Paultin informs her, voice grave.

The newly christened Strix just keeps sucking on her hand, staring at his face. Then she reaches out the other hand and puts it on one side of his face, mirroring what he’s doing.

Then she pulls his hair.

Paultin has a feeling that he can’t call Strix a baby anymore, not even in his head, when he spots her trying to figure out walking, pulling herself along the bench with her tail flicking from side to side as though to help her keep her balance. He’s pretty sure that it’s too thin to actually help her with that but he’s also not the one with a tail, so he’s not sure if it’s doing anything for her or not.

She doesn’t manage to stay upright very long and starts crying – again – when she falls. He sighs and goes over to pat her on the shoulder and sing a song to make her stop.

Then he takes her hands and gets her back onto her feet.

“C’mon, you’ll figure it out,” he says “and I’ll be way better help than a bench,”

Once Strix figures out walking, she’s insatiably curious. Nothing is safe from her grabbing hands and newly discovered ability to open drawers. Most things she just assigns a name of her own to, rather than asking anyone what it’s called, which Paultin thinks is kind of adorable, though he won’t tell anyone that. A few times she almost falls, or does fall, into drawers trying to reach something at the very back that caught her attention, which Paultin thinks is hilarious , though he also won’t tell anyone that, because he’d probably get into trouble.

It becomes a lot less adorable and funny when she finds something that she really shouldn’t touch though.

“Don’t touch that!” he shrieks, swatting the puppet out of her grip and then pulling her all the way to the other side of the wagon, holding on tightly to stop her trying to go back over to it. Strix, as always, starts wailing.

The sounds draw his father inside in concern. He takes one look at the situation and seems to know exactly what happened. He picks up the effigy of Strahd and puts it away, this time in a drawer much higher up than Strix had managed to pull it out of that she definitely can’t reach, and sets about soothing the crying toddler and calming his panicking son.

“Strix, c’mon ,” he wheedles “You’re gonna be fine,”

She looks doubtful and shakes her head, making a whining sound as she does so. Her legs swing over the side of the wagon, her fingers clutching the edge of the step by the door that she’s sitting on.

“But you wanted to come outside,” he says, holding his arms up a little higher to try and coax her down “and you’re too little to get down on your own,”

She shakes her head again, harder this time.

“No,” she says “No, no, no,”

He sighs and lowers his arms.

“Okay, back inside then,” he says, conceding defeat and gesturing for her to move so that he can come back inside himself.

“No!”

He sighs again, louder and more exasperatedly this time.

“Make up your miiiiind!” he whines, dropping his head forwards so that his forehead clonk s against the side of the wagon, just next to the door that Strix is sitting in.

“Want out,” she insists, and then points at him “But no,”

“You’re not making any sense,” he continues whining, wishing he hadn’t been asked to watch her alone this afternoon. He can do it but she’s not making it easy.

Strix makes a noise that he’s pretty sure is her being exasperated at him not getting it, which is so not fair when she’s the one not making any sense.

Hands shove against his shoulder and he tilts his head to the side slightly, cracking open an eye to look at her.

“Move,” Strix demands, her expression something like a determined pout.

He sighs and takes a few steps back. She waves with both hands to indicate farther. He takes a few more. She nods sharply.

“Not too little,” she says, and then shoves herself off the side, landing in the mud on her hands and feet.

His first reaction is panic because if she got hurt on my watch I’m going to be in so much trouble! which only gets worse when Strix doesn’t immediately get up. The fact that she isn’t crying yet is maybe a good thing but now he’s scared that maybe she’s too hurt to cry-

Before he can do much more than get closer to check if she’s okay, though, she rockets up, her hands cradling a massive clump of mud, and declares “Bug!”

And then there’s a beetle at least the size of one of his eyeballs in his face.

“Cool,” he breathes, panic fading to a grin now that he knows she’s definitely okay “Are there more?”

“She’s a lot better at talking but she still cries a lot,” Paultin says to his mother that night, as a recently de-mudded Strix dozes off. He’s only recently clean himself and neither of them have any regrets about how muddy they got. They found a lot of cool bugs.

His mother laughs a little.

“Some people are just criers, I suppose,” she says in reply, ushering him towards his own bed. “She might grow out of it with more time,”

“She’s good at walking and running now too,” he says, fiddling with his covers.

“…yes, she is,” she says, starting to look a little worried, as though she can tell where this conversation is going.

He fiddles even more with his covers, bunching the blankets around his hands, and then, quietly but not whispering:

“We’re going to that City of Doors place soon, aren’t we?”

She sighs and then gently tugs the blankets out of his hands, rearranging them around him for sleep, and strokes the hair out of his face.

“Yes, we’ll be heading to Sigil soon,” she says.

Paultin nods, uncharacteristically sombre for his age. He’d expected the answer to be that.

“…I’m gonna miss her,” he confesses.

“I think we all will,” his mother replies, gently kissing his forehead. “But we’ve got time yet. And now is time for sleep,”

He wants to protest that he’s not tired yet, but his own massive yawn interrupts him.

The trip to Sigil seems to take both forever and no time at all. It’s like it drags on and on and on but is also over within a blink. It’s weird and he doesn’t like it.

But it isn’t until Strix is once again bundled up, almost like she was when his father first brought her back, though she’s bigger now and the way the fabric is wrapped is more like a weird poncho-cloak hybrid than swaddling, that it hits Paultin that this is really it. This is the end of her travelling with them. This is it over. They’ve brought her to where they needed to bring her and now she’ll be coming no further.

He’s not used to goodbyes being this permanent.

As his mother starts to leave the wagon, Strix in her arms, he realises that he’s forgotten something important.

“Wait!” he blurts, just as they step out the door.

He scrambles to a chest, digging through it until he comes back up with a quill and a bottle of ink. Then he dashes over to the door with them in hand and leans out. He pulls some of the cloth loose and lifts Strix’s arm up. The toddler just blinks at him curiously, while his mother smiles fondly when she realises what he’s doing.

Carefully, very, very carefully, far neater than he could’ve managed when his father first came home with a baby though still very scrawly, Paultin writes a series of letters on her arm.

S followed by T followed by R , oh-so-carefully the right way around, followed by I , somewhat messily dotted, followed by X.

“There,” Paultin says, satisfied with his work as he pulls back. “Now whoever she’s with after us will know what her name is,”

As they leave Sigil, the wagon feels a lot quieter and emptier.

“She’s gonna be okay, right?” Paultin asks, fiddling with the quill, running the soft parts of it over his fingers over and over. The question sounds incredibly loud, even though he’s only barely not whispering.

There’s a pause, a hesitation, and then an almost completely believable “Of course she is,”

He’s old enough to know that that might not be true but also young enough that he wants to believe everything he’s told, so he just nods and accepts it.

“D’you think we’ll ever see her again?” he asks.

“You never know,” is the reply that he gets, along with a ruffle of his hair “Maybe you will when you’re both older, if she decides to travel too, or if you come back to Sigil,”

He kicks his legs against the bench, looks thoughtful for a second, and then starts “If we do meet again when we’re older…”

He sucks a cheek between his teeth for a moment, as though deciding whether or not he should say what he’s about to say. Then he makes up his mind and grins as cheekily as he can.

“…I hope that she cries less by then,”