Such a question as “what would you do” is easier than asking how to breathe.
It should be, if the lady’s chest wasn’t so tight.
Properly aiding others to “help” themselves, and improve things for yourself by exchange, is a mastered skill.
It’s as rudimentary as it is easy to demonstrate.
What her chest might be so tight over is the name that sounds distant but close; for, the way she barely hears it sounds as if uncountable brushes scrub away its meaning right before recognition.
Replacing her worries over that comes a stranger distraction she notices upon being unnerved only once: a sweeping, covering, and weighing heaviness all over like snow trapping her. She’s shocked by how the question deepens that freezing.
Before it disappears. “… A goddess… like that… exists?” Her whisper is deeper than her average joyful one. Full of distress at the start, and not at all composed because a goddess shouldn’t be imperfect. But, the enveloping chill about flaws lessens because of another’s indecisive waffling! “Why would you even hesitate!?” The lady almost spits! Forcing herself to relax, she strokes her shoulder blade to bring attention away from that. “… Begging you to love her, does she? A divine request you won’t obey?”
“Demanding, threatening mostly, not a request, but maybe lots of begging…? Sometimes, I think she’s about to cry when I don’t agree right away?
Well, she has cried before… and…”
“Have you denied her!?”
“I guess I have stopped talking to see what she’d do.” Innocently, but troubled by her situation when the lady cries that question, the priestess turns to stare back at the cursed ones before returning to the question with a dopey smile. “It’s always just… sad speaking to her when she gets that way. A lot of times, actually, I just roll my eyes and…?”
“… To have heaven wrapped around your finger held up to the sky…?”
“Heaven is so far away from where she is, actually…?”
The finger the lady scratches at her shoulder blade tears downward with frustration before she can stop feeling overwhelmed by these dismissals. “A goddess herself wants you before all others… and you throw that away? Isn’t that insane? Truly missing every lesson the world has ever tried to teach you about grasping when you can when the good fortunes rush by so quickly?”
“I don’t… understand?”
“A priestess meant to listen shouldn’t ignore!” The lady finally just clenches her fists, trying not to lift them like she wants to strangle anyone in particular while her heart is burning with anger! “If she would sacrifice everything else to please you, and you have so many who could gain so much by that… then…?
How – can – you – stop – responding!? Why wouldn’t you accept her even IF shes… moody?”
“… I…!?” Unsure of what the lady is even feeling, how she approaches conversation is usually unassuming; but the priestess keeps falling away from the sisterly closeness she’s been craving like the lady is about to collapse upon her? “… I don’t… hate her, mostly, but, I’d never, ever ask anything from her, unless…?”
“Even if you could have EVERYTHING? Just by yanking her along with a complaint? A bit of soft whining? Maybe even a small, innocent outright demand!?”
“She’s very… extreme…” The priestess stares downward while pressing her index fingertips together repeatedly. “Even if you’re really, very specific, what you say and what she hears are totally different truths. Your day will always become bad once she wakes up?”
The lady leans closer, the frustration inside warring with the numbing discomfort that she can’t figure out the source of.
“Just once, maybe even… twice!”
“Twice!?” Every word is finally heard and hung on to by the priestess when said loudly and firmly.
“If you need to try again, then yes, twice. Have you never considered with situations like hers that, just…?”
“Just?”
“Merrily playing along with her would suffice? Only long enough to get her to grant goodness for others, at least? Making her own opinion more like the wonderful… platitudes you might offer to entice her?” As close to terminal hubris as the lady is willing to tread, she lifts her palms with a lengthy shrug of her shoulders.
“… To fool someone for a joke is good fun… but…?” At the perfectly sane question, the priestess gags! “To -lie- to get something? For myself, and not even for good’s sake? I’ve… stretched the wind sometimes, but…?” For a woman to grow up without learning a single means of supplicating to, and then re-navigating towards a better tomorrow, another woman’s thoughts’ direction denies the most essential skill needed in life.
“Why?”
This alien lifeform from who knows where blinks twice, tilts her head, and then grimaces while mewling. “To live free, unburdened, is to be the wind, and the wind wouldn’t be free if it blew for such lifeless reasons.” A completely bizarre creature smacks her lips with dislike at the lady’s entire way of living.
“Every flower that stands obliviously higher will be strangled.”
The lady’s tone is sinister when narrowing her eyes at this attack against her esteem; and her “protege” flinches back at the self-proving wisdom. “You’re not lost. Don’t pretend you don’t feel crowded by all the weeds around you.” Stares with awe, and then horror when the lady’s sinuous movements draw the idiot’s gaze to her fingers snapping before the idiot’s face. “That. I don’t favor dumb looks and pretend purity, hah.” The lady laughs at the idea that this neophyte could be this innocent when pretense better explains.
“Living as if you’re better than the rest of them won’t last.”
“… I’m… I’m not…”
“You will, actually. Be the one screaming for the sunlight as it’s vanishing. Choked by all the weeds pulling down, down, down.”
What a waste.
This girl’s hubris is a child’s pride couched in humility.
“You’ll learn… the beauty of one doesn’t survive the ugliness of others without watering them. Pruning, too, when needed.” The lady lifts her unclenching hand to showcase her city once more. “From the cursed to the blessed, everything within this city thrives in SPITE of many former weeds. An endless throng of pests who just couldn’t grasp their dharmas and refused help in learning how to play correctly.”
It doesn’t even serve to explain in a roundabout way anymore, so the lady just growls.
“They needed me.” The moment is over for subtlety.
Remembering how desperately she’s needed in order to save everyone banishes the niggling doubts.
This blank-faced priestess that cannot even feel a little necessary dread when it’s needed is just another future victim.
Confusion so deep that she might drown with her next thoughtless words doesn’t halt the priestess from diving. “… Which city?”
Those words come with a poke at the lady’s ribs!
“A… home found only in the darkest forest of kin, perhaps? This great world tree?” An overly familiar closeness transforms the lady’s disappointment into ire because of its strangeness.
The lady glances around at the mention of a “tree”, then smiles haughtily. “There are no great trees where the air is so thin! Mind yourself not to pass out…”
“That makes sense for back then. Perhaps the city you speak of, one remembered… high up in Castile it is? Where we came from together?” Curious, and now with a soft and thoughtful smile still troubled, the priestess grabs a hold of both the lady’s hands!
“‘Castile’? What barbaric language is that from?” The lady can’t extricate her hands!
“Ah? Isn’t Petripolis your home town?”
“What…!?” About to lash out with rage, the lady shuts her mouth and hisses instead. “An absurd insult, too. Belittling its greatness as just a ‘rock city’.”
“I’m sorry! It’s how I know it by! I don’t mean to—!?”
“Certainly, cast the blame elsewhere. That is what you seem to do, isn’t it?” The lady whips her hands free finally. “Seeking enemies is always great humor if you lack for them. In your case, I WORRY that you have misunderstood the… difficulty if you’re angling to be…” She keeps batting away the priestess’ hands trying to grab back on.
“Mine.”
Coming loose with such fluidity as she pulls back, the lady examines the suddenly animated failure to pick out the sharpest flaws to turn into verbal daggers.
Mentally changed. No longer prepared to just toy with her.
“I don’t… I’d never think of you as an enemy, Cyrene!” The priestess’ astonished cry just makes the sharp heat deep down burn hotter!
“How close we must be in your strange view, for you to call me by anything other than my familial name? Ignoring a goddess and so you can be my intimate friend?”
“Intimate, I don’t know!?”
“Our dharmas don’t meet any more than function and politeness dictate.” To punctuate that, the lady turns her shoulder toward this wastrel…!
“But, Cyrene?”
Tears seem imminent when the mannerless priestess blinks often and holds her hands up before herself like she’s abandoned.
“… We’ve been together for almost a year.
Aren’t we friends, like you’ve always said?”
The mentioned time wells forth a sudden, extreme nausea.
“How aren’t we friends by now, even if I misunderstood…?”
“A… year?”
Suddenly, a shaking tremor brings the lady’s hands to her head, to feel her temples.
There’s no report of touch, though?
“I just… sent for you to replace…?”
This wasted rough gem’s waifish figure vibrates in the lady’s sight afterward. All of the colors spin as a kaleidoscope. Her skin, hair, and even her eyes shift perceptively through a maddening loop.
“▓▓▓▓▓?” The pest asks?
“Who…?”
Once the sensation of incongruity strikes, again that buzzing sound drills deeply…!
The mightiest city that she and her father have built upon the hill top swirls. Into a vertigo of equally disturbing colors surrounding her it is torn apart!
“▓▓▓▓▓, are you okay!?” Again, her faux care strips past the lady’s actual concerns!
“What are you asking about!?”
That five letter word hurts so much!
It doesn’t belong. It doesn’t fit! It’s only part of something greater!
Where its marring totality strikes completely, the numbing within is felt as a freezing chill that could crack her very bones.
She’ll break right before the entire world as she knows it is…!?
A tremendous weight tumbles off into the twilight and rainbow haze above.
Pure white stone is a beacon long missed. Where she’d even seen it in this godforsaken village of huge, dumbly unique trees is a mystery she can’t…?
“Still!?”
“What, Ave!?” Frustration has Still screaming before she even realizes it. “You don’t have to scream my name a few feet away!” When the snake-or-elf-or-goddess’-favorite-spoiled-child winces, Still sags as visibly as needed to convey exasperation. “Even having a private thought is too much? Ave, it feels like, just a bit too hurtful sometimes, that what we say doesn’t even seem like it registers with you.”
“…” The mute emerald luck charm just keeps squirming on her long tail, gazing at Still from many directions before tapping her chin with a confused expression. “… I… think I’m always listening?”
“But you still believe there’s nothing wrong after hearing a problem. A normal day for you is so much important information set aside as ‘unimportant’. You often seem like…” Still bats away Ave’s clingy hands yet again when the girl stops fidgeting.
Away from her, but also close to keep away the glaring elves sitting upon their treetop roofs, Still takes in how isolated the village is from even the darkness beyond it with a little condescension brewing within her thoughts. “Someone who learns everything… and then promptly ignores it for her own convenience. So that nobody would bother asking you. How does that sound?”
That condemnation that was only supposed to sting a bit across Ave’s cheek instead sends the girl recoiling further with shame. “… How… how have I done that?”
“It’s quite bad, that’s how it sounds? Ahhh, Ave.”
Still’s usually sober tactics turn aggressive when she notices the depth of the pain she’s uncovered!
“All you had to do was notice what the damn dog smelled like back then, and maybe you’d be less flighty.”
Into a turn walking back and a fanciful curl of her hands, Still dips a bit while naming the easiest example.
“Dog?”
“Was it really ‘kobold’ you were trying to say when you told Adris about your ‘first friend’?”
“Wha…? When? Ah, the story of how Kol and I met? It should be. I said…?”
“Forget the words!”
Still waves in front of the dunce’s face to shock her, then continues digging when the wannabe-elf shuts up and listens. “Remember the moment itself, not what you thought! How she blended in with the shadows, maybe? Against YOUR sight? How, do you wonder, is that even possible since it’s so… elvish? A smell as vile as hers without your tongue tasting it a mile away? But she smelled you?”
“… How Kol… found me, by smell when I didn’t find her first? I’ve… wondered. It’s possible she smelled me because the Castillo wanted her to, but I didn’t…?”
“Consider for just a teensy moment, then. The maze was shorter in the gardens back then. The shrub walls less thick. Scents are the one thing the gardens permit to travel. Along with the bees. And this metal-clad kobold… reflected no light as she burst upon you?”
“Ah, maybe, that’s true? Yes, she was like a monster…”
“Without a scent that stood out? But, there was one, wasn’t there? Think, please.”
“… It was heavy…? Not bad, but also not pleasant. Familiar. Underground… I smelled it there before here.”
“Of course, you’re used to its scent. Just as anyone who regularly reaches the Castillo’s garden’s east wing entrance would be. All they need to do is give up and go home. The path that leads along the house’s perimeter back to the main entrance and front gate, remember it? What would you smell there that you also would back then? What scent had you both grown used to long before meeting each other?”
“Kol had appeared like… a black demon!”
A great thought smashes its way into the blank-faced girl’s head, and she jolts upward with a sudden epiphany.
“Was it because soot covered her!? Yes, her armor and white fur was almost black. It smelled like…?”
“A rock that burns just as smokingly as her brain does, maybe?”
“… Ah…? Ahhhhhh!? She was… covered in coal!? So, she had gone into the kitchen to peek around, climbed back out and…!?”
“You named the brick ‘coal’. The end!” A pleasant smile across Still’s mask swipes away after the fairy tale ending. It’s a line of annoyance now. “Except… not, because instead of comprehending why and making our lives a thousand times richer, you had us BARTERING with that insane rock. So much coddling to get a ‘secret entrance’ from her that YOU could’ve just TOLD us about. Instead of having a footpad named ‘Coal’ who does whatever we want, all ‘yiis, please, masters’ and such, we settled for a four-foot-nothing albino battering ram named ‘Kol’. A born loser that won’t SHUT UP about how instrumental she was in us finally ‘hitting it big’.”
“… I never noticed…”
“No, you noticed!” Still’s finger bops that damned slender nose that gets stared at often by a particular companion.
“An immaterial shadow constantly ahead of its missing body. Refusing to speak up. Floating along, ‘happy’ that you notice nothing important.”
Ave can cry without whimpering? A useful thing to learn while proving Still’s point.
“Especially not about from where the light shining on you comes from. Never admitting why it feels warm when it definitely shouldn’t.”
Drinking in the growing sadness, there’s a pinpricking satisfaction in how the always ditzy girl keeps wiping away her eyes that are turning puffy, but never manages to recover in the long minute of contrition!
“If just for once you did what the gods wanted you to, I might feel prouder than ever to have you call me a friend.” Still shifts her weight at that idea that she baits with. Sadly, Ave doesn’t even stir to offer a hint as to what to say next. “People who have potential… letting others watch them waste it has always been a pet peeve of mine.”
An olive branch extended to Ave via Still’s opened and approaching hand is a good gesture; even if within, Still can’t explain the sheer enjoyment she’s getting from her established superiority.
“Aren’t gods indifferent to what you do with their blessings so long as you worship~?” It’s positively mind numbing, making it difficult to ponder anything other than continuing to melt Ave. “Why not just do what they want if they’re good, so that you can…?”
“Be-Be-CAUSE!”
The timid girl roars!
“If the gods were always right… then…!?” Still rips back her hand when the animated Ave grips it hard, the shock so unusual when crying keeps up with the anger bubbling so fiercely! “if I did what the gods told me to do…! I’d… have [banished] you the first time we met!” Biting hard, Ave’s anger isn’t directed at Still.
“Never… I’d never do something like that to someone that tries so hard not to hurt me…”
It’s a phantom pain that makes Ave the target of Still’s random, strong loathing. Ave cries now in a way that tingles Still’s insides.
Something like… shame, but directed outward, because…?
“Making this about me is mean, isn’t it?” Still hones a powerful weapon against any logic while moaning wryly. “If you had the power, it wouldn’t matter what my peculiarities are. Promises made, not delivered, that’s not my fault. You wouldn’t have to keep being disappointed with how each day ends if you’d live it wildly like we all do. If you’d…”
Still clenches her hands, staggers forward with the sharpest voice yet screaming out!
“Just — help — us — WIN!”
Pain is normal!
Always felt, no matter what!
“Destroy that…!” Still’s whole body rotates around with the most hated image!
“ANATHEMA.”
Disappointment, eternal, Still untwists from the rage.
“If you could wipe me out, as long as IT is next…”
If the hunger that is so deep within Still that she could never remove it were to be sated,
The chill cropping back up at her cheeks and neck jumps, too.
Wonders as she does at how searing light and ash is an insignificant price to pay!
“I’d smile the whole way to hell, Ave~.” And so her mask must be smiling, for Ave’s own countenance is pale with comprehension now of Still’s generous sacrifices for Zennia’s future.
“No… NO!”
But rejecting is always what this damn snake does! “I won’t…! I’ll never!” Rushing up so fast that she can’t even blink, clinging on around her breasts before falling to Still’s waist when she tries to jump out of this trap, Ave is a dead weight heavier than a gravestone!
“Get off!”
“I promise… the one thing I want to do… no, I will!”
“Will what!?”
“Still, I promised to myself then, absolutely, and to you now, that…!”
A promise itches!
Enrages Still like hardly ever anything else could conceivably try to!
“I’ll sav—!”
“DON’T PROMISE ME THAT!”
Ave falls down when the side of her head is slapped.
“Never that!”
A woeful social flop.
“NEVER to ME!” Still turns away!
Intentionally suffers the threat of annihilation she can taste with all her senses. Even the missing ones, they’re active now as ghosts that speak in whispers?
“I won’t hear it.”
This impossibly vacuous idiot, offering what can never be offered…
“Why? Saving… those we care about… it’s what everyone should do?” Ave stares up from the ground with incredulity. “Promising to save you… why can’t I?” The girl doesn’t even touch where she was hit on the side of her head! Doesn’t reject the violence she deserves, even if she should.
“… To… me…
You mustn’t…?”
Still wobbles while trying to think of why.
There’s a reason as ancient as… this world, a festering sort of truth of the soul that says you can’t make promises you won’t keep.
An earlier vertigo strikes again this undead that cannot feel it…?
“… You’re centuries too late to bother!” The reason why stays hidden, so she just screams the pain out as the obvious truth.
“Why? Would you… rather die forever than be human again?”
“I? What I want? Are you asking, or telling? I’m so very impressed how well you know me and him to let us know what we truly want!”
“Why Adris…?”
“Herooooooes! Heroes~. What a waste of potential to become that.” Still waves dismissively at that word even when her stomach seems to clench doing so. “Ave, with everything you’ve seen us do, are you going to serve yourself by thinking that heroes are what we are?”
“… We try to be…” Lost again, Ave stares behind Still, then upward. “We… try to do good…”
“A shame, that useless attempt.” Still clicks her heels. “A real shame to beat the bare skeleton of a dead horse~.” Still taps her mask, then shakes her head to match how Ave is shaking hers. “I bet you believe in ‘forgiveness’, too!”
“Of course? What’s past, no longer today, why should we be bound by…?”
“Ave, dear Ave, if ‘good’ actually exists, then it’d be something as naive and ineffectual as your belief in it.”
“… No, it’s not…”
“If anyone has been saved by us… then I promise you: it wasn’t a desire or function of anything called GOOD that did it.”
“… Adris is… Adris is… has saved us many times!”
Watching another girl fold up on herself in despair is always a treat.
Still just never found a motivation to see this particular emerald one succumb.
“… Good is in him, he always says he’s trying to…”
There’s a creeping unease as Ave retreats within, keeps mumbling to herself. For Still to be fooled is impossible; for Ave to be fooled is absolute.
Still’s discomfort, how her mesh seems to crawl with a need to kick Ave in her serpent behind and speak up must be a remnant of the last of Still’s humanity…
“What you think we’ve done that is ‘good’ is as far from that as we are from the stars. That’s why you like our thrilling journey, after all, because it’s everything you pretend you don’t enjoy, right~?”
Still flips her hand at Ave coquettishly, pretending it’s a secret that isn’t open.
“No… I don’t… want…?”
“To admit that you’ve noticed, but haven’t paid attention to the bad things being so fun? Ave, nevermind that. Just answer me this question, please.”
“… What?”
“When you think of your ‘best, worst mistake’, what comes to mind?”
When Ave’s fingers poke at her lips and her eyes go wide after Still’s seductive question, that tells everything without a single word.
“I bet you think you should just go tell him?”
“… Shouldn’t I apologize… tell him that…?”
Droning the question meekly, Ave flinches when Still starts giggling with her whole body shaking!
“Sure! Tell him quick, as fast as you can how you nearly stole everything from him. Magnanimous he’ll be. So amazed that everything he’s ever loved about himself was what you toyed with.”
That queasiness assaults again.
Green all over. Emerald to puke.
It’s just strange… the unbalancing feelings are like a sympathetic orchestra playing out within Still’s ears from Ave’s own heart’s music?
“Don’t ever tell anyone anything important, ever.” Still’s advice is useless to give, but nobility obliges freely!
“Shall I share my own absolutely awful mistake~?”
Ave’s distant despair refocuses upon Still. The girl hides her mouth with her hands, but teary eyes blink agreement.
“Words just won’t do. They never suffice. How I felt… about my perfect, terrible mistake was…!”
A deep coldness abates in the moment of remembering.
Back in the Castillo, at the first moment they’d touched and no illusions existed for a brief moment…!
A crime so terrible had made him rant.
Even when surrounded by comforting darkness, he’d resisted exulting at what sounded like his finest work.
Everything he felt… ROARED like a winter dam breaking…!
The deluge hit her so hard that she cared for the first time in so long.
Red!
Rivers of it! GUSHING!
The conceited?
Coughing, flaying, collapsing, crushing, and dissolving into the red and its pain!
The final vestiges of innocence trashed, shed like a torn skin!
Losing everything; gaining so much more.
Even if everything had to die to finally reach
— JUSTICE —
The price he whispered, almost cried about… while smiling just as she had…
The two of them holding each other without even the barest shred of familiarity or family outside of this one emotion…
“The most… sublime mistake… it was.”
For once, there’s no chill when the warmth of this private moment, never to be replicated elsewhere, tells Still once more the total worth of another’s heart!
Before their first real words together, they’d mingled so closely that they’d blurred.
“The worst I’ll ever make, I made that night~. It’s funny how you never forget even a bit of how awful you feel?”
A pure devil had laid there and she had accepted his existence. Together, they’d realized that “joy” was the appropriate response: not tears. Certainly not guilt!
It teases her unbeating heart so furiously that she wants to suddenly commit another mistake.
Then, her blades “itch”.
“… Still? What mistake did you…?”
“… Nevermind. It’s okay if you don’t understand.” Unable to grasp that blade without a reason, Still sighs. “You have your fantasies. I have mine. In yours, there’s a prince and a hero. I don’t share the same designs, unfortunately.”
There’s no further profit to be gained, so Still peers around to reach out with her senses.
The ever night’s darkness doesn’t seem so bad as of late, nor as deep. With vainest of hopes, she searches for vitality.
“I’ve never really had anyone to play with, so I’d like to enjoy some of my games before I have to get back to… [work].”
“Still, are you okay?”
Such a naive question, just like this girl’s naive good is! “If you think that I am acting strange, it’s only that you’ve never seen me acting normally~.”
“Normally? I see you all the time…?”
Finally!
A reason to drag it out!
“Why?”
The blades Still favors have already sung to demand this question.
Only two existences can make them sound so beautiful when flipped out. One deserves silver that poisons gold.
The other, though…?
“Ave, you lovable idiot. No matter how many times we talk, it doesn’t last a second with me. If between the [Anathema] and my blade was…”
A flame-bladed shortsword taps its razor point, then pushes a centimeter into Ave’s breasts.
The girl doesn’t even breathe, just glances down at the blackish streak of Vigor that wells up.
“… it’d already be through your heart. Not because I hate you: it’s just quicker~.”
The grim surety casts the great tree’s leafy skies into even darker shadows.
Rushing leaves are like a moan of comprehension!
When everyone hates Still, the world ceases being so big…
Like a comfortable glove that you can slip on. Returns to “normal” when nothing ever will be that word.
Ave stares at the tip resting on the bare skin of where her heart is.
Then, she looks up. Without a shred of fear.
“If… it would free you from undeath and… all your pain… I… um,” Just a wide, troubled smile. “I’ll probably shake, might cry, a lot, actually, but…!”
Ave holds the blade there with her slender fingertips pressing to its fuller.
Her lips scrunch up, then she exhales.
“I-I WON’T MOVE!”
She grits her teeth, this utterly suicidal girl that invites her to shove it forward.
“I’ll try not to, so…!”
No, begs her with crystal green, teary eyes…!?
“… Still?”
The blade rises as a gravemarker out of the flat, mossy floor they stand on. Both of them are staring at it by the time Still realizes she’s just wiggling empty fingers.
“Still?”
Nothing intervened.
It just… dropped.
“Are you…?”
“I hate… that you…!”
A porcelain mask is so tight!
So confining!
What she’s feeling… can feel nothing but this…!?
Still’s hands scratch at the mask, trying to find how to remove it!
“Never once think!”
That red sight only she sees in!
It’s burning so hotly!
“Never even… understand how much… you should…!?”
The flower keeps yammering even though Still’s heart and mind are closed off. Sharing what a mask should hide!
An uncrushable explosion of… [pride]!
Not for herself.
What she feels when staring at nothing, only looking within, is a terminal realization that is avoided by Still’s feet carrying her away from it.
“Ah… don’t, don’t go that way!”
Rather than face the world, the duelist chooses to chase death out in the inferno that this dark tree pretends it didn’t burst into a long time ago!
“I think after this they’re… ALL quite, VERY angry…”
“Who cares what they want~?”
In the opposite direction and exactly where told not to go, Still adjusts her steepled witch’s hat that is off kilter and passes directly beneath the rumbling boughs of the many hated trees.
All their dim yellow pinpricks hidden behind the leaves now are solely what tells Still that she’s being watched. She doesn’t even retrieve something that is missing.
Everything left here has been irrevocably soiled.
“But… we were…!? Still, I haven’t figured ou—!?”
“That’s too bad. I have places to be.”
“But… teaching me…?”
“Silly girl, I was never teaching you. It was…”
Turning over her shoulder to stare, Still isn’t sure what her mask shows now of her feelings; but, the stupid… elf jumps at the reveal, so it must be good!
“Only a chat~. Add this to your fantasy: ‘if the righteous would bow to his just throne, then a good wind, not bad, shall bear him up alone’. Wouldn’t that be dreamy~?”
“A… rhyme? About Adris? Alone? Why would he be…?”
“Because you’ll never prove him to be your ‘hero’ unless you leave him alone. You’re chasing your wind; he’s chasing his. For our sakes, remember?”
“Huh…!?”
Again this coward recoils, then lifts her hand toward Still.
“Your wind better not be late, right… hero?”
“Are you… sure you’re okay?”
“I — feel — quite entertained~!”
But not enough.
There’s so many exploding emotions now!
Something finally mixed up just right. The worries Still had she can hardly even recall when considering the vast vitality pulsing through the world tree.
It’s something much smaller that grabs her attention then. Two beacons of warmth different from the rest are conspicuous when she curls her index finger to her thumb and “peers” through her mask into this circle as her intuition whispers to her to do.
“There it is.”
Not too far! Barely a long jog.
A world composed of nothing but red and redder things must be how she’s always been supposed to navigate this labyrinth.
Whatever has been found lacking is something correctable with this pleasant fool, if Still believes the odd inclinations drawing her to him.
“My littlest mistake.”
Heroes? They’re not interesting as the alternative.
Toward the alternative, Still advances with the trees crushing in from all around.
“Still… they’re… very…!”
Beyond what disappoints can only be paradise.
The lady stops at the corner of the crossroads which leads either to the lake in the distance or the central market.
Her date for this evening must be…?
“Showing off, of course.”
She lifts her fingers into an airy dismissing wave.
A man who would die without the pleasure of being witnessed has only her as his worthy succor!
“Despite his fibs, he’s the one most faithful.” It is reverent to state that of that oddity’s wandering dharma. But the mild hubris that elevates within into a somewhat heretical respect of the divine turns elsewhere.
Her city is waiting for her every day, not just the man that she will make better.
Its beauty is as perfect as ever.
The lake is beautiful, if lonely.
The central market is busy, if stifling.
The hill is so full of potential…
And it all gleams white from being made with a rock that exists nowhere else in the entire world BUT here!
There’s just one out of place part of her day…
“Hmm?”
From nowhere, the silver-shod wooden weapons the many, many assassins raise are already thirsting for her heart.
The lady that should be frozen by terror at the dozen or so lethal bows, swords, chakrams, and unbelievably worse of thirsty edges instead grins. A girlishness she rarely shows finds humor in the death offered.
“Always more weeds.”
Those who dress as the ragged, emaciated cursed ones lean forward to become vultures before falling into flight, ready to consume her corpse.
A turbulent wind whips up! Never have these pathetic saps ever been brave enough to revolt. Not even when left to rot by necessity.
This random gale tears off a hat she wasn’t even aware she was wearing?
“Curious?”
Her word unleashes the maelstrom!
“HYEAAAAHH!?”
“G-G-GGREEEeeee—!?”
Or rather, the muscles that lunge to grab both the arrows, bows, and even worse as their white-hot rage chills into delectable terror.
“Hated… shadow…!”
One manages to scream an insult through the massive arms that clamp over.
Through opened windows and doors they’re yanked!
Cracking their backs against corners, their yellow eyes stare blindly ahead in horror before closing and disappearing from sight.
The deeper shadows that these wannabe assassins skulked in reveal as the favorite stomping grounds of the burly enforcers who favor only this lady. Each enforcer is faceless when working; handsome, because they are the perfect poisonous cure!
A few seconds is all it took.
Not even weapons remain when the enforcers mull about to dutifully scoop them up.
Efficient and expert, the shadows that are paid handsomely ripple with bare muscle beneath their loose white body wraps when they bow lightly and depart back whence they suddenly came.
“Like the shadows themselves.”
Even the lady hadn’t noticed them trailing her journey out into the city despite having them around constantly her whole life. That’s how good the help can actually be if motivated!
How sad, their refusal to serve her as immodestly as they would likely enjoy if allowed, though. The best of the worst men. Her father’s furious few!
When a subtle suggestion won’t sprout in someone’s mind, if flattery fails to turn them down a path, and even a veiled threat won’t prune the obstacle to beauty, it becomes necessary to rely on less subtle methods so that…
“All must comprehend, even if she didn’t. Nobody can stop the gods’ entertainment.”
Freed of the unpleasant hat that hides the sky she often stares up at, the lady also pulls back the strangely demure covering that restrains her soft burgundy curls.
Freedom with each step tastes better than any other day before this one!
“I’ve been fated to play as a devious clown my entire life… but, at least nobody ignores or kills a jester~.”
The stage ahead is quite larger than she remembered, but it is suitable.
In spite of how cold the brisk air that stirs is, it leaves the lady warmly energized to realize some new truth about her small world!