Every now and then, Theora’s mind ca loose from sleep. It was never too clear to her how much ti had passed. A few hours maybe, or days. Perhaps weeks?
Sotis, she felt so disoriented, it felt like it had to be months.
And every ti she woke up, a different kind of feeling overwheld her, as if taking turns to torture her.
On so days, she felt bad about her Main Quest. On others, she felt bad about Dema. About how she was trapped again, and about how Theora could free them both, but didn’t. And then, she felt bad that if she were to free them, it might cause bad side effects to the surrounding area.
Whenever she was awake, Theora tried to steer her mind away from all of these thoughts and focus on the prison they were in. Rembering the soft whirls of energy she had felt when she first touched the field. Sensing the power flowing through it, and judging its decline. Thinking about the logistics of it — what kind of skill might have created it, what kind of affinities it would absorb or be weak to… She made a long list in her head, identifying the seal’s properties through thought alone.
But it took a lot of ti, and a lot of observation, and she was tired, and happened to nap away by accident every few minutes.
“This ain’t cool,” Dema grumbled one day, after about six years.
Theora opened one of her eyes, wearily. It was winter. A thin coat of snow rested on her body like a blanket.
Their prison was small, but weather and outside forces like winds still reached them. It was unclear to Theora whether this was an extension of the illusion or if the cage was perable; they never actually saw people or animals here, so so form of separation still existed. There was still a lot of analysing left to do.
“Are you done thinking, then?” she asked. “I thought you wouldn’t mind waiting.”
“I don’t mind the waiting!” Dema whined. “But this is— gah!” She made a gesture like ripping sothing from her face. “You’re angry with ! I can feel it. And I’ve no clue what I did wrong!”
“I’m not angry with you,” Theora mumbled.
“Then why? You’re gonna spend your life like this? Look, I’ll be all fine and dandy, but soon, you’re gonna be an old woman! Throwing away all our ti together.”
“So you still haven’t noticed,” Theora replied in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Haven’t noticed what? You keep saying this!”
“Hmph,” Theora puffed.
Dema’s eyes went wide. Suddenly, she started to scramble all around herself. “Oh my. Oh my, where is — there!” She pulled out a wrinkled sheet of paper and her pen. “New top one cutest thing,” she whispered as she wrote sothing down. “Oh my, these happen when you’re sleepy, huh?”
“Lowers my filters and defences,” Theora muttered.
Dema nodded. “Why, that also sounds like sothing you wouldn’t say when awake. New weakness of yours, heh.” Again, she beca busy making more notes. “I already have three. Getting worried?”
“If that makes you happy.”
“Why, it sure would,” Dema smirked.
“Then I’m very worried, yes,” Theora mumbled, shifting her legs closer to herself, and rubbing her eye clumsily. Seeing that, Dema bit her lip and raised her brows like she’d just seen a puppy, and wrote down another note.
The days kept going by; sotis, the sun would dare peek between the mountain rifts, and Dema would throw most of her clothes away and lie down on the ground to capture as much sun on her skin as possible. During winters, she’d try to scrape up all of the little snow that fell, but she didn’t dare throw any balls at Theora that had been mixed with dirty soil.
To their left and their right, a decent amount of stone was accessible without leaving their cage, so she used her Skills to search through the rock. She found another fossil one day, which she couldn’t shut up about for weeks, calling the little horseshoe crab ‘Old Lass’ and talking to ‘her’ non-stop.
“You know,” she mused, “Fossils are great. They’re even older than I am. And one day, they’re gonna outlive , too. If you get your way, that is.”
She held her hand out over it, and let so of her blood gush out from beneath her finger nails, encasing the fossil in an oddly shaped, foamy red bubble. “I kinda wanna know,” she continued in a bit of a soft mumble, “If my blood and earth magic could bring sothing like this back alive. Would be so cool, right? Never worked, though.”
Theora humd in an acknowledging response. “Would probably need to be a Legendary Skill. But you have [Immortality] already, right?”
Dema sighed, and nodded. “Yeah. Big sha I can’t have two.”
Eventually, Dema gave up bringing Old Lass back alive, though it took her a few years.
“So,” Dema was saying one day. “How much ti has passed? Did you count?”
Theora opened her tired eyes. “Don’t need to count,” she replied, opening her quest dialogue.
Ti remaining: 38 years.
“Hm. A bit of ti has passed.”
“Aren’t you getting old? I feel like you must be.”
Theora pushed herself up from the ground, staring at Dema. “I can’t believe you.”
“What?”
“Do I look like I’m getting old?” She crawled closer to her, face on full display. In a voice as calm as a sea brooding with movent beneath, she said, “In fact, how do you think this works? You are the Ancient Evil, who has been walking over the planet for thousands of years. And I get stronger than you in, what, twenty years of training? Is that what you were thinking? Did you not question this at all?”
Dema just shrugged and shook her head in confusion. “I thought you just had a broken cheat Class or sothing.”
Theora’s mouth gaped for a mont, then she closed it again. “We t over 60 years ago, Dema.”
“Yeah, I know it’s been long!” Her eyes flared up with an orange glow. “And that’s exactly why—”
It was at that mont that the cogs in Dema’s head seed to finally click together. Staring at Theora, at last realising that she looked pretty much the sa as when they’d first t.
“Ah, damn,” she spluttered. “Wait. Oh, damn. Must have missed that sohow.”
“How?”
Dema threw her hands up. “I an — humans just age and pass so quickly! I didn’t… I didn’t look so closely. Makes sad when I do!”
“And yet you said you liked my sleeping face,” Theora said, rolling her eyes.
“Not a lie,” Dema replied, sounding rather serious. “Not a lie! I just— I didn’t look at the details, okay? I didn’t read the fine print. Gosh, damn. You are… Wait. Long-lived, or immortal?”
Theora looked into Dema’s amber eyes for a mont while she tried to co up with an accurate answer. “Neither, I suppose. But the important part is that you will not see die. No matter how long you keep ‘thinking’ or ‘scheming’. So stop worrying about , alright? I am a strong girl. Let make my own decisions about how I want to spend my life. If I want to sleep, please let sleep!”
“Alright, fine! Fine!” Dema sighed in resignation.
Upon seeing that, Theora felt bad. She took a step back in her head, and added, “If you want to wake up because you are bored, or because you are lonely, then I will be there for you.”
Dema started grinning. “Damn, alright! I get it. You could have just… told , you know!” She laughed. “Not that a few years an anything to , but damn, way to make a point!”
Theora averted her gaze. She wasn’t good at communication, she knew that. Well, and the fact that she was travelling with soone she was tasked to kill didn’t exactly help her with tackling such issues sincerely. Being vulnerable in front of the person you were going to murder? Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. No, avoiding problems and sleeping forever was preferable by a long shot.
When she managed to stop brooding in such thoughts, she looked back at Dema, who had gotten rather close to her, staring intently.
“What are you doing?” Theora asked, but didn’t shy away. Dema seed serious, her eyes wandering over Theora’s face with a weight she could almost feel on her skin.
“Reading the fine print,” Dema smirked.
Theora stayed steady with great effort, holding back a wince at these words. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from blushing slightly.
“Well, sure, do that, if you must,” she whispered. “I am an open book.”
“Oh, I absolutely must,” Dema said, the corners of her mouth curling up into an almost dangerous expression of mischief. “After all, that was your point. With trapping us in here. I see it now.”
“Huh? There was no point. I didn’t trap us.”
“Maybe not, but you refused to let us out! I was wondering why, and now I know!” Dema called her out with a victorious raise of an eyebrow. “Little rabbit was sulking. You were like, ‘Why doesn’t she look at ? I’m all lonely!’”
“That doesn't sound like at all,” Theora said, biting her lip.
“And then we got trapped here, and you thought, ‘Ha, now I have her all to myself, and she's gonna have to look at . She's gonna have to notice!’ Well, sorry for getting distracted with the Old Lass, but good news! Now I’m looking all at you.”
Theora shook her head, her heart beating a little quicker. “I don't think that's what I did.”
“Oh, it most definitely is!”
“I doubt it,” she mumbled.
“So, can you let us out of here now?”
Theora took a deep breath. “Sure, why not. If it ans you'll stop pestering with this…”
“Ha.” Dema put her hands on her hip, rising up. “That's what I thought. Your point is made, after all.”
“I don't think there was a point.”
“There most definitely was!”
Theora broke eye-contact, picking up her sword from next to where she’d slept, and took a deep breath in hopes of clearing away her tomato-red blush.
“[Obliterate],” she murmured, and with a single swing of her blade, the cage gave way.
“Huh?” Dema let out as she saw the particles of blue and rose-pink energy descend around them while the cube-shaped prison fell to pieces. “[Obliterate]? That a Skill of yours? Never heard of it before.”
“Yes.” She hadn’t ever spoken its na aloud before when using it around Dema. Doing so raised its strength, which was usually not needed, but Theora wanted to avoid a situation where an [Obliterate] got absorbed — even though that would have been very unlikely to happen.
Pretty much impossible, in fact, but she hadn’t beco the strongest person alive by taking unnecessary risks to look cooler.
“I wonder what kinda Class would grant a Skill like that… Wanna share so of your other Skills with too, while we’re at it? I’m very curious. Well, I already know you must have a Skill similar to my [Immortality], you made big efforts to prove that to , after all. Well done. But, what else?”
Theora didn’t answer. In fact, these questions just made her want to go back to sleep. She didn’t know how to respond in the first place, because she didn’t have an [Immortality]-related Skill at all, and even a Skill as versatile as [Obliterate] didn’t grant any effect like that. Her inability to die ca from a very different source, one that she really didn’t want to think about. And yet, now she was almost thinking about it, and it made her feel awful.
One day, she would have to do sothing about it.
For now, she just went on through the chasm, with Dema running a few steps in front of her, still busy with taking in all of Theora’s facial features.
If only the two of them could just keep going like this forever.
In fact, wouldn’t it be nice if after this entire ordeal in the dark mountains, a ray of sunlight could hit them for once? As they made their way out, Theora almost dared to hope.
Reviews
All reviews (0)