When Enrique woke up, he looked out the window. The sky was dark. A soft pinging sound caught his attention. He looked over to his desk and was surprised to see a black phone lying there. The screen was lit.
It’s Vi’s. Did she forget it? The blankets were warm and comforting, but he threw off the sheets and got up. He picked up the phone, rubbing his eyes blearily. There was a notification.
Test 1 / 2
My Sessions are very important to me. Please don’t touch.
The rightmost, bottommost disc is:
Session number 200,383
Aurelius
Insert a disc into the player to see what it does.
He read the notification again. Then he re-read it, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things.
She tells me not to touch it, and then tells me how to use it?
Admittedly burning with curiosity, he walked into Vi’s room.
There was the massive rack of disks again, beside what appeared to be the disc player with a slit. The discs were arranged neatly in rows and columns. He went to the rightmost bottommost cubby. It had a small label. Number 200,383. There was a silver disc and a handwritten note below it. The disc had blue text saying “Aurelius” on it, and at the end of the word a drawing of a striped, dark blue heart.
He pulled out the note first, and read it silently:
Hey Aurelius,
Remember when we went to the balcony after the celebration? It was the first quiet night we’d had in a long time. The stars were out, and the sky was beautiful. I remember you told me how it reminded you of the kingdom, how each star was like someone we had protected. Big or small, bright or dark, they shine all the same. Each one matters. Together they make up constellations which can never be replaced.
That’s how I’ve always felt. I remember when you first came here, you didn’t think like that at all. A lot of what I said sounded like nonsense. You wanted to conquer this world without a care, to test limits, to break rules like you were playing a game you needed to win. But in the end, you had a little of me in you.
It’s been three years since you’ve been gone. I still miss you. Sometimes it hurts so much. These days when I look up, I think of you. We used to glow so bright together. I hope I can keep carrying your light.
Love,
Vi
Enrique put the note back, feeling a little embarrassed. That did sound personal. He took out the disc.
He found the player, which looked like a box with a slit and a screen, and put the disc in the slot. The disc slid in. The screen blinked to life with a flash of white light, and Enrique felt like he was being pulled in. Sights, sounds, smells, and sensations seemed to surround him, and then they fully immersed him.
----------------------------------------
Two swords clashed in the dark room, sending blue and black sparks into the air. Vi swung her blade repeatedly with cold fury, feeling a growing sense of panic as she sent Allblades’ assassin towards the wall.
Thirty percent. There’s no time.
She let the energy surge through her, but not overtake her. Twelve percent chance of a left feint, then one excess movement—there. She ruthlessly drove her sword through the man’s chest, allowing his sword to make a shallow cut across her cheek. The two combatant’s eyes met, the victor with eyes of silent rage, the loser with a satisfied smile. Her blade ripped through the last Shadow’s innards, spraying red blood against the walls.
Before the body even hit the ground, she was already moving, her body glowing with blue light as she channeled her magic. She blazed forwards and passed the other three Shadows she’d slaughtered without pausing.
Forty percent.
Please, don’t let it happen.
Her wounds were starting to heal on their own, the cut on her cheek repairing itself, but she ran through the pitch-black hallway. Her breath came out ragged. She felt pain shooting from a half-healed wound on her abdomen and a steady ache inside. Her head pounded but she ignored it.
Fifty percent.
A scene came to her mind, unbidden. In it, there were two men fighting. One had inhuman crimson eyes and black armor over a hooded cloak. He unsheathed weapons from an arsenal of sharp swords and knives strapped to his back and waist, slashing and stabbing, leaping between the walls. The other man had cold, determined blue eyes and stood his ground with a majestic silver-black cloak. He held an ice-blue sword, glowing intensely with a ring of icy energy that made his black hair fly in the wind. The clang of steel on steel rang out. There was an explosion of yellow.
The scene vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The ground shook violently and up ahead she could see the source of the shaking, a room with a locked door, flashing with vicious black light. The door was soundproof, but she heard in her mind screams of agony.
No. No!
“Aurelius! Aurelius!”
She pointed her sword at the door and the blade glowed, blasting out a series of blue beams from its tip. The door blew apart.
Sixty percent.
She rushed through the door. Inside, everything was pitch-black. The room had gone silent. It was the scene she had seen so many times before, in twenty-two different variations, with her Eye.
She knew what had happened. She felt it. The wounds on her body didn’t compare to the agony that ripped through her, as if her very soul had suddenly been torn in half.
Numbly, she stepped into the room. Her bright blue aura lit the walls. They were covered in blue-white frost, jutting out in transparent spikes and sheets, and red-black demonic flames, the remnants of chaos energy. There were two types of blood all over the walls and the ground. She recognized both. A horrid stench filled the air.
There had been a fight here. It had been short and brutal.
She walked to the center of the room and stopped. In front of her was a severed hand holding an ice-blue sword. The hand was dripping blood and missing three of its fingers.
A pool of red slowly flowed outwards, trickling around pieces of ice and flickering black flames. Lying a couple paces away was a foot without any toes. Then there was half a rib, slashed to ribbons. There was a dismembered forearm, gushing scarlet. On the right were the bloody remains of a stomach, spilling pink-yellow guts and intestines. Scattered about were fingers and toes. A leg looked like it had been sawed in half. There were scraps of cloth—she recognized it as an elegant, silver-black cloak—and the remains of shining blue armor on a slashed chest crudely pierced with gaping holes.
It wasn’t difficult to piece together the facts. They had fought, and despite her warning Aurelius had given Allblades one last chance, one final strike with the Light Bringer through his blade. Allblades, consumed with rage, had viciously hacked him apart.
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She spotted half a head in the corner, like refuse tossed aside, brain matter oozing out and protruding with bits of bone from the skull. She gazed into the corpse’s one blue pupil.
Tears filled Vi’s eyes. She felt them fall down her face as she stared in silence. She tried to speak, but her voice felt like it was caught in her throat.
She lowered herself onto the ground and lay down her sword. She picked up the severed hand, then the foot, and the half-destroyed rib, being careful not to let it fall apart. She gathered the body parts into a pile, feeling the cold flesh and the blood dripping in her bare hands, and sobbed silently.
Next was the forearm and stomach. She collected them, tried to retrieve as much of his innards as she could from the mess on the floor. She picked up his fingers, silently noting which digit, remembering how they had felt when she had held his hand. The right one. The middle. The pinkie. The left, where he had wanted a ring. She scooped up his toes as well. She picked up the head, and found the other half. Then she gently embraced whatever was left of his chest, lifting it up, recalling its warmth and how it felt when he had laughed, setting it carefully with the rest of the pile.
She used her own sword and some earth magic to dig a hole outside. Gavin—no, Allblades—was gone now, she knew that much. But even if the man had been the world’s most infamous assassin, he was badly injured. Aurelius had not gone down easily. It was a deep wound laced with magic and Gavin would not recover, even far off at the portals, hiding in the chaos lands. If he was lucky, he would be able to regain a fraction of his former strength in a decade.
Besides, there was a more pressing concern. The reinforcements were coming, too late to be of much use. She didn’t want them to see this. The citizens would lose heart, and if they did the kingdom would be in a state of immense danger. The two of them had accomplished the mission, saving the royal family, but the aftermath was also risky. There was a high likelihood it would lead to a downward spiral, undoing what they had worked so hard for.
She went back into the room and slowly, painstakingly hauled the pile of body parts into the hole she’d made. She let herself cry as she did it.
Finally, she filled the grave with dirt. She retrieved her own sword, and gently picked up Aurelius’s blade. She had pried it from his grasp, leaving the hand in the dirt. In life, he would never have allowed her to do so, but in death she knew he would have understood.
She heard footsteps in the distance. She looked at the unmarked grave, deciding what her last words to him should be. Nothing seemed adequate enough.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I love you, Aurelius.”
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Vi woke up. Her sky blue eyes were glowing with blue light as she stared up from her bed at the ceiling. After a moment, the light faded.
That dream again.
It wasn’t exactly a dream. It was a memory, really. She had expected it tonight, but that didn’t help with the pensive melancholy that filled her. Ten years since his death, and now the first day with a new partner.
She heard Enrique throwing up in the bathroom.
“Poor thing,” she murmured sympathetically. She got up, picked up a white towel, and walked towards him.
Enrique retched into the sink again. He trembled, unable to get the grotesque sight out of his mind. He hadn’t merely looked at it, but he’d felt the blood and guts and dirt running across his palms, smelled the revolting stench of gore and decay, hurt deep inside like he’d been Vi, like he’d been there himself. He’d seen bad things back home, sure. Stabbings, beatings. A few shootings. But nothing like this. What the h*** did I just see?!
“Your destiny,” Vi answered quietly behind him.
Enrique turned. The fox woman gently wiped his mouth with a towel. She looked into his eyes.
“I told you not to touch them. Those are my memories. I upload important ones to my discs.”
“I…I’m sorry.” He averted his gaze. He looked to the rack and felt a deepening sense of dread. At first, he wasn’t sure why. It was a sensation probing the edges of his mind, like a piece of a puzzle waiting to be fit in.
He walked to the player and pressed what he guessed was an eject button. The disc slid out. He put it back in its place.
Number 200,383. Aurelius.
He looked at the disc right before it. Number 200,382. Francisco.
He felt his heart thud in his chest. He walked shakily across the rack and tried to search the other discs.
Number 200,000. “Oberon” in black letters, with a big heart filled with a thick black marker. Like all the other discs, there was a note underneath. He knew Vi was standing silently behind him but he took out the note. He needed to know.
Obi!
You’re the best, you know that? I miss our time together. Even if everyone was always suspicious of us, we always had each other. I miss watching movies with you and buying you toys when you were smaller. I miss that gleam in your eyes whenever you had a new plan, and the way everything fell perfectly apart sometimes. I even miss the time we ran away from the king because of our counter-revolution.
Our League got seven new members today. We can make another Guild! I’m sure it’ll do good work, even if it’s still an underground movement.
I just wanted to let you know that you did it, in the end. The necro-virus. I got the antidote. We cured the cities. I want you to know that nothing we did was ever in vain. Even if history forgets or others twist the truth, I’ll never forget. You know I can’t.
Your partner,
Vi
The writing was quite cheery and positive, but he felt his stomach lurch at the confirmation. He put the note away. Vi had said nothing, watching him wordlessly. Quickly, he stepped over to the very top-left corner of the rack, and picked up the first disk. Session number 1. The disc had a single word written on it, “Thorin”, and was colored with a yellow heart. The note was like the others:
My dearest Thorin,
Hardly a few days go by without me thinking about you. I miss your laugh. I miss how you hated strawberry milk. I even miss your cocky smile at times. Beneath all that arrogance I could see a heart that wanted to protect the helpless and pursue justice, no matter the personal cost. You’ll always be my precious partner.
With love,
Vi
He put the note back, trembling. 200,383 discs. 200,383 notes. He turned to face Vi. “What’s the meaning of this?”
She stepped over. The poor boy looked overwhelmed. “Are you all right? Do you need a hug?”
She spread her arms out warmly, giving him a reassuring smile. He hesitated.
“You’re fifteen,” she said quietly. “You’re only a child. There’s nothing wrong with needing comfort.”
Maybe I should let her. I feel awful. When he spoke, words tumbled out, jumbled and confused. “No—I don’t—just tell me what’s going on.”
Vi lowered her arms, hiding her disappointment at the rejection. She put a tail around him and handed him a cup of water. “Let’s go back to your room.”
She guided him back to his bed and sat next to him. “Bonding is a lifelong commitment for Anima. It’s like marriage for humans, but about learning and caring for each other rather than romance. Most Anima have only one partner their whole lives.”
He took a sip from the cup. The image of Aurelius’s corpse stood out in his thoughts. She patted him on the head. He barely noticed.
“I’m the exception. I’m immortal. I appear to be under some sort of curse. Every single one of my partners has died a horrible, painful death. Usually heroic, but always horrible.”
Her eyes were filled with grief deeper than any ocean, sad and knowing. “I’ve seen it happen in some of the worst ways you can imagine. Eaten alive, burnt to death, tortured, sliced to pieces…the list goes on and on.”
She got off the bed and stood beside him. “Lie down,” she told him gently. He did so.
That’s why. She doesn’t want me to be a Hero.
“Yes. You’re right.”
Vi tucked him in with a blanket. Her eyes looked at him tenderly. “You’re next. The moment you decide to become a Hero is the moment your fate is sealed. I don’t want that to happen to you. But what I’ve learned over time is I don’t have a right to make my partner do anything. I’ll respect your decisions, and I’ll serve you the best I can. I hope you can do the same with others.”
She used a tail to set the cup beside the bed. “Anyways, you failed the first test.”
Despite everything he’d heard, Enrique couldn’t help but make an expression of dismay. “Aw, come on.”
Vi smiled at that. “Don’t feel bad. It was a hard test. Going through someone’s private things isn’t very heroic, is it?”
“What was I supposed to do?” he muttered.
“Don’t touch anything. Ask me in the morning. Something like that. Some way to show you can listen to instructions, trust me, and be patient.”
She paused. “If you can’t do that, your attitude will get you killed.”
She let that sink in. Then her face brightened and she gave him a cheerful smile. “Don’t worry, honey pie! I’ll give you another chance. Get some sleep and rest well, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. He drank some more water and closed his eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted.
“Good night.” She watched him for a little, then picked up her phone from his desk. As much as she wanted to stay with him, she had a few calls to make. She closed the door and went back to her room.
The beginning had come again.