The room is softly lit with dim light, casting a soothing glow throughout the space as the mild sound of a television reverberated.
In the centre of the room, a man sat on a comfortable couch. Despite the soft cushions and blankets, he was sitting uncomfortably with his head between his knees, eyes glued to the flat-screen of the TV, playing old cartoons.
The room was adorned with vintage decor, giving it a nostalgic and tiless feel. A bookshelf sits in one corner of the room, filled with classic novels. A cosy armchair was placed nearby, which seed to be missing a person to sit in.
The man's eyes sohow remained locked on the screen of the TV and vacant at the sa ti. Colourful lights flashed on his face, as laughter and cheers from different cartoon characters reverted throughout the room.
The man showed no reaction, not until he heard her voice.
"This is already the third ti we are watching this episode," the woman said, "can't we watch sothing else, Gale?"
Gale kept his eyes locked onto the screen of the television, though he was aware soone else was sitting alongside him on the cough, albeit in a more comfortable posture than him.
"Hehe, the little mouse is so cunning," the woman comnted, watching the cartoon, "the cat has no chance."
Gale kept his composure, trying to ignore her as his mind moved back to chaos.
"I don't think you like the show, right? Gale?"
Abruptly, the television was turned off and all the noise ceased from the room.
Gale turned his head to face the woman, his expression splitting, full of unbridled emotions.
"I watched you die," Gale said in a cracked voice. "I . . ."
The woman faced him, her expression was a cold mask, hardly resembling the woman he knew. The woman he fell in love with.
"Do you rember what I asked of you?" Saarya asked. ". . . On our second eting?"
Gale stared at her countenance as the surroundings shifted. He was sitting on the ground now, facing Saarya, in the old quarter of the underground mine of his slave days.
The imagery was exactly like the day Saarya accepted to teach him spirit arts, the exact day a little hope was kindled in his awful life.
"Why?" Gale growled.
Gale rembered what she asked of him at that ti, but Saarya reiterated now, reminding him again:
"You must not trust ."
Gale closed his face with his palms, pressing hard, bowing down onto the ground.
"Why?" he growled with the question again.
"Because I needed you," Saarya answered, "and I still need you, but you aren't ready."
Saarya looked at him with eyes that really seed alien and ancient to him.
"The ti is a bit earlier than I hoped to make this introduction," Saarya continued as she stood up. "But I'm sure, you won't disappoint . I have faith in you."
Gale growled at her, indignation growing as his eyes cracked into tears.
Saarya shook her head in disapproval, finding him breaking. "I always admired your intensity," she said, "your ability to recognise fact and reality, but you're disappointing now.
"You are still with the notion that all this is a lie. I am dead in this pit, trying to save you. But you wanted to believe , and I hope you still can, even though the wretched way I took. How I played you for all these years!"
"Why did you do it?" Gale asked, lifting his head to et her gaze, tears dripping down from his eyes.
The surroundings changed yet again, and Gale found himself sitting on the open veranda of Wang's Inn this ti. The sun was bright in the sky, flowers blossoming on the lawn, their fragrance filling his mind. But nothing brought him any joy or cald his restlessness.
A woman appeared next to him, sitting with her long legs free on the wooden floor. Her appearance has changed since the last ti, from the angelic beauty in human skin to a more earthy woman in her early years of adulthood. Sui.
"Will you believe if I say I have no other way?" Sui asked.
Gale locked eyes with her, recognising the unfamiliarity, but even still he wanted to believe her, wanted to do nothing but hold her in his embrace, for all the ti he missed her, remorse for her.
If only it was that easy.
"If only it is that easy," Sui said as if reading his mind. "Oh for your information, I can figure out a little of what you're thinking, even more so when you're broken down like this."
Gale closed his eyes and cald himself, or tried. He dived back to the night he first t her, when he was in pain and she helped her. The scene ca to his mind, and only now he figured out all that was a lie, a fabrication. It never took place.
"Well, I wouldn't call it a complete lie," Sui said. "That night and more, all that took place, in your dream."
That was why nobody knew of her presence. Saarya or Sui, nobody but him knew of her existence. And Gale simply thought she was hiding from powerful enemies. Well, she hinted so of it, and the rest was a piece of cake for his imagination.
"Love, adoration, belief, trust," Sui said, her voice lancholic, "even the best of us grew blind for them, and overlooked the common clues. Your weakness is being more compassionate towards mankind, especially towards the opposite sex."
Since the beginning, she had been manipulating him, since the day he was summoned to the wretched place. Gale wasn't even sure how much she was responsible for the summoning, for his misery.
"That is where you're wrong, Gale," Sui's voice ca to his mind as the surroundings shifted back to the underground mine again. However, it wasn't the rciless hotness that hit him this ti, but an alien coldness.
Gale appeared on the cold stone floor where the summoning took place. Sui reverted her look back to Saarya and stood beside him. She recreated past events, as a few black-cloaked figures appeared before him, screwing around with sothing that seed to resemble a smaller version of an arc reactor while thousands upon thousands of scripts were carved in the surroundings.
In the midst of the reactor was a complete jet-black matter that didn't seem to have any physical shape, and was more like a form of energy rising and collapsing, much like heartbeats.
"Humans," Saarya said in a condescending tone, peering at the lots who were screwing around with that thing. "They never learn. Even when they don't understand a thing about what they were experinting on, they never stopped tinkering with it. And others pay for their recklessness."
The next mont, the reactor activated as a suction force appeared in the middle of the room, along with a wide portal opening there.
A mangled corpse dropped onto the ground the next mont as the portal hole collapsed right after. The black-cloaked practitioner sent n to clean up, as the experint continued.
One after another, mangled corpses dropped onto the floor, none of them even twitching a little, their lives ceasing even before they could be summoned.
"They are smart enough to understand the law of equivalent exchange," Saarya continued, her voice full of scorn. "But their thick skull never stopped and thought most practitioners couldn't injure a spatial tear of that calibre, much less common people."
"What are they trying to do?" Gale found himself asking.
"What a monkey does when you leave it with a revolver," Saarya said as a thoughtful look appeared on her face. "But I guess a couple of them had so ideas of what they were doing and what all this could entail."
"What?"
"They were trying to summon and imprison a higher being, unaware the higher being has been looking right back at them all that ti. Mortal and their failings."
Saarya was talking with such a condescending tone as if she stood about all mortals and humans. As if she wasn't human at all.
"That's because I am not," she answered, reading his mind. She gestured at her figure. "This appearance? It's rely an illusion, see. . ."
As her voice trailed off, her appearance changed multiple tis, from Saarya to Sui, to so unfamiliar Elf, so dwarven woman, so other race he hardly recognised to revert to Saarya again.
"I guess this appearance you're most familiar with ," Saarya said, "and it also resembled my original appearance. Hmm, I don't know. . ." Saarya paused. "It has been so many years since I looked upon my face, I fear I won't recognise my own appearance.
"If you're curious, it was much like the child holding you on the mountain now, pure and angelic."
Her voice seed to hold hidden derision, but she changed the topic back to summoning before Gale could recognise anything.
"Recognise the truth," Saarya said. "I'm not the one who summoned you and plunged you into years-long misery. It was them."
She pointed towards the masked and cloaked figures, accusingly.
"They brought all this upon you and thousand others for their greed of power," she said. "While I rely tried to minimize the consequences of spatial tear onto your body."
Ti flowed quickly as corpse after corpse dropped on the floor and was cleaned until Gale found himself squirming on the ground.
At that ti, Gale was completely overwheld by the pain, so he didn't notice the black matter glistening in his left palm. But now he noticed. The Fate mark.
"I rely managed to save a few," Saarya's voice rang back and forth in the hall. "And chose one to guide. One who'd end all this suffering. All my suffering. . .
"That one is you."
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I guess this is still confusing for you to understand, don't worry, more explanation coming in the following chapters.
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