Edited by: tommyjl7
I woke up to Gisele purring like a cat right in my ear. She was half-awake, watching me from under partially closed eyelids.
- “Already up?” she asked with a sad expression.
- “On second thought, you can give me five more minutes.” I said falling back into the pillows.
Her weight on my chest which spread almost suffocating warmth which you can never get tired of was a divine feeling. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of staying like this forever.
With groans of irritations, we started to get up from the bed. Partially.
- “How are you feeling?” I asked quickly scanning her body with both appraisal and magic. There was almost no miasma left.
- “As good as newborn baby.” She said stretching her body
- “So you want to scream and kick to the sides?”
She chuckled
- “No. Quite the opposite. My body itches for some action…”
- “Gisele. At least wait till the night-time…” I got hit in the arm, painfully.
- “Do not flatter yourself. I mean my muscles. Uhhh, what would I give for something to rip and tear!”
- “After we are done here, we could move forward, leave Lanele at some inn and find our selfs some nice, cozy, deadly dungeon. Only you, me and pieces of flesh flying all over the place.”
I said with the tone of a lover promising the most ravishing and entrancing date.
- “Aww, sweetie, you surely know how to set the mood.” She gave me a playful wink “…That better be a promise… now, my turn, how are you feeling?”
- “Like a newborn baby.” I said.
- “Fresh and eager for action?”
- “No. I want to scream and kick to the sides.” I wasn’t lying, just the very idea of returning to the Evergreen made my stomach jump to my throat.
- “You are a big boy, you will somehow manage to…”
- “Gisele. Pardon me, as I don’t want to sound rude, but you have no idea what you are even talking about. It’s not just some kind of a headache you can ignore with a pint of beer. It’s like your whole existence if being torn apart in the place where time has no meaning. You have no idea if you suffered for a second or eon, and you have no idea if your suffering will last for a second or eon more.”
She froze for a second there, still half naked as she was in the middle of gearing up.
- “You are right. I don’t.” she said with a surprisingly soft tone
She walked towards me and hugs me tight from behind. Her still partly naked body spread another wave of heat through me.
- “If I can be any use to you… like… dunno… maybe you can transfer some of this pain to me… then I will gladly.”
- “I appreciate it, but as far as I know, there is no such technique that would allow it… But you can be there with me. At least you would carry my unconscious ass back to the inn.”
- “Sure. How long are you going to be… out there?”
- “Out there – time is irrelevant, but for you, a couple of seconds. I would just close my eyes, make a silly face and collapse.”
- “Ok. Ok…” she said more to herself than to me, it was clearly visible that she was bothered by something. I didn't mean to pry “… Zari…”
- “Yes?”
- “I just wanted to say… that I am proud of you. I am proud to be with you. Everything you do… Causing life-saving potions to be more affordable… I heard about the orphanage project, taking care of parent-less kids is such a wonderful deed… and now, saving the life of a stranger… I… Zari... You are the greatest person I have ever met.”
… And it made me feel bad. Dirty even. I started selling potions due to the fact that their quality was lower than those produced by the Guild, and guild reducing prices of their potions is just a mechanism of a market when a new strong rival appears in the field.
An orphanage is just a tool to wash blood money and maybe a mean to possess some talented kids to train for syndicate and company
And the only reason why I am helping this man is that you would yell at me otherwise!... I feel as if I am cheating her…
… but, as long as good things keep happening my motives are justified? Right? It is better to make good things in name of evil than bad things in name of purity? Right?
Someone! Please! Make her stop looking at me with those eyes!
Why from all possible types of woman I had to start dating a wanna-be world-saving hero!?
Maybe… just maybe… I would start doing some random good deeds? One good deed per day should be… Naaa. Nobody got time for that!
One good deed per week, that is…
… but then again, I am an adventurer, sometimes my travels take a week or more, making it impossible to meet my end of this self-bargain…
So. One per month!...
…Nah.The company won’t take care of itself…
Maybe I am looking at it from the wrong perspective? Maybe I will just refrain from my random acts of evilness?... No, that sounded as if I am some kind of villain, yet I am not kicking stray puppies, I am not stealing candies from kids, I am not being mean to elders…
… Fuck, I already am quite a decent person! So what that every now and then I order someone's assassination? Everyone with money does that! Fine.
I will stay the way I am – splendid and clever. And so very handsome!
And out of blue, I was hit painfully in the arm.
- “What the hell, Gisele!?” I yelled while holding my shoulder hissing with pain.
- “Hm? Oh, I am not sure myself. I thought you were thinking about something weird just now.” She quickly scanned my expression “… You did, right?” her face became angry and pouty
Great. Yandere 6th sense activated again.
- “The thing I was thinking about was how you are making me want to be a better person, if you can call it weird, I will agree with you right away.” I puffed my cheeks annoyed.
Hey! I didn’t lie!... I just did not say the whole truth.
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Later on, together with Gis and Lanele we entered the cellar, once again forcing Marie to stay away. I wanted to spare her seeing her loved one lifeless on the chair, sitting there like some kind of plant.
Just like before - I sat under the wall, relaxed my body, though my mind was screaming in terror begging me not to go behind the veil, I entered a meditative state, cleared my mind and left my body walking toward the rift.
I looked at my body for the last time. It was sitting there in the lotus position, though my head was lifted up with eyes opened wide you could see no pupils. My eyes were completely rolled back into skull showing white pool. I sighed with my spiritual form heavily before stepping through the rift. I was embraced by pain again.
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The priestess was inspecting life functions of the Oracle’s body. She noticed it before – his mana veins were strange, thicker, larger, located in much better places than normal. Usually, their structural location was completely random, sometimes more veins were located in a specific part of the body making those individuals more skilled with using either certain type of spells or casting them with certain limb better than the other. It was quite a common case – though she, as a person, had her right hand dominant – she used it to write, greet people or even use a weapon (she was forced to train using saber and staff, like most noble elf-females) she prefer casting spells with her left hand. Her mother was known to cast with her right hand… and left feet. Weird? No. Deadly? Yes. Imagine that you are preparing for someone to throw a ball of fire at you with her dominant hand, but in the same time that person is drawing a glyph with her leg on the ground. She would change the location during the battle several times, drawing more magical marks on the ground. If she would finish the five marks before being knocked down, the fight would be over.
But here? It is so… symmetrical… so perfect! Like a work of art, of a skilled artist, no natural process. Like a tree – with the main trunk in spine and brain, with branches spreading to arms and roots to legs. It looked like a second neural system.
Beautiful. Terrifying.
Right now, she was inspecting his brain functions. When his eyes rolled back into his school, the mana has been sucked from his whole body, traveling exactly to the brain, as if it wanted to reduced the damages. But what kind of damages…?
The answer came quickly. The mana veins around his brain started swelling almost shutting the brain inside its grasp, the mana started dancing like crazy, she could almost hear and feel the temperature raising, inside of his head and see his mana desperately trying to cool it down. It all happened so quickly, that she had no time to react. It happened within a second or two. She was about to yell, when Zariel’s eye went back to normal, he himself inhaled loudly, almost fighting for breath, before falling and vomiting to the side.
When Lanele realized what just happened, she quickly dropped on her knees next to the collapsed druid and started casting some lesser healing spell mostly to reduce confusion and bring minor comfort.
- “You wonderful person-you…” Zariel sighed while trying to relax, pressing his forehead against cold brick of the cellar “… just lemme stay like that for…eternity.” Another painful sigh.
He lost consciousness once again as his body demanded recovery.
Giselle, just as she promised, carried her lover to the inn and watched over him till he woke up.
For the next five days, this was their routine, with Zariel sleeping for about twenty hours a day, waking up only to eat, stretch his muscles and enter the spirit realm, after which he required a full eight or more hours of sleep, yet each time he returned, he looked bit paler than usual and the sly sparks in his eyes were slowly dying, replaced by confusion and pain.
Lanele started wondering – Zariel was crossing the veil in order to help Johann restored his human side… but what if Zari was losing his in the process?
Though each time they asked him what was his progress this time, he would proudly answer that
Until one day. Before entering the cellar he asked Marie for some object that Johann would feel a strong connection with. And she gave him her ring – a thing he gave her when he asked her to become his wife. The ring was simple made of silver with no additional gems nor ornament, yet was really well done and was assuredly worth quite a lot, at least for villagers. The ring was in his family for generations, with this ring his father asked the same question his mother, and before that his grandfather did same. When his mother died Johann was carrying this ring as a necklace on a copper thread. When he lost it during one of his journeys to the forest, he spent next three days looking for it, he even asked half of the village to help him looking, and because they were a small community where everyone helped one another, they somehow manage to find it…
… in his house. Under the carpet. Eh, Johann, you clumsy man.
But then, after entering the cellar. Zariel would force the ring into man’s hand before going once again into the land of Evergreen.
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After the agonizing experience, to which you can never get used to, I have once again breathed in the extremely cold and refreshing air of the afterlife-plane of existence.
I have learned to appear in the back forest, close to
I quickly headed toward the verge of the clearing, toward quite tall man sitting next to a small stream of water watching it lazily flow. He heard me coming, so he turned around. A huge smile appeared on his face when he recognize me.
- “Zariel!” he yelled.
Nice progress, right? From puppy to almost normal human being in mere four-five days!... five days my ass. Somehow, with every visit here I could spend more and more “time” here, so each time I closed my eyes I spent with him first hours, then days, then months or self-aware time. We have actually went through full-course rehabilitations here. I would give myself a medal of patience… cuz damn, I really wanted to tear his head off for the first few visits.
- “What’s up, champ?”
- “You are back!”
- “F’corse I am! I told you I would, have I ever lied to you?”
He shook his head.
- “I… I know… It’s just… Everyone here is so strange. Even Miss Aira. You are the only one like me here…”
- “I have told you why.”
- “I… I know. They are dead. We are alive. You sent me here to recover from traumatic experience…”
- “Yes, and this is our final meeting here…” his eyes widened in shock “… because I plan on taking you with me, back to the world of living…” his eyes widened even more, in even greater shock.
- “I… I am not sure if I am ready… You said that there is a woman waiting for me… but… I just.. don’t remember.”
- “Johann. I need you to do something for me. Will you?”
- “O-of course! I mean, if only I am able to…” he was a huge, almost colossal man. Taller than me, though that is nothing new, but also taller than Gisel, almost as big as Mrogul. He could easily be a volleyball player with his bloody 2 meters and 15-18 centimeter. Fuck him for that. When the sky would fall you will be the first one to die. Tsk.
- “I need you to stretch your arm… not this one, the other one. Good, now, open your palm. And now, imagine the most important thing in your life. Give it a shape. Imagine the whole universe concentrating on your palm. Imagine your essence, everything you were, you are, and will be. Now close your eyes… Good. And once again. Open. And see.”
When he opened his eyes, atop of his palm a single ring was lying.
- “I don’t understand. I… it is familiar but…”
- “Johann, I will now start speaking aloud names. Keep staring at the ring, no, keep staring INTO the ring. And try to connect the name to person, event, time, feeling… Here I go. Marie, Stephen, Agrez….”
I started naming all his friends and relatives, names I was given by Marie before I entered cellar. When I was done, I looked at the hunter waiting for his reaction.
- “S-sorry. I think, for a moment there… there was something… like a…”
- “Aching at the back of your mind? The wound you couldn’t scratch?”
- “Y-yeah.”
- “It’s ok. It was bound to happen. We will do this again. And again. And again. An Johann, by any means. Keep scratching. Try to break the wall.”
- “I am afraid, Zariel, you told me that bad things happened to me… I am not sure if I want to remember them. Tell me, can’t we go just like this? I… I am sure I can make new memories, start from the scratch start with…”
- “No, Johann. It is impossible, right now, you are just a spirit, your body is out there, like an empty vessel. If you would cross the veil, re-enter the world of the living, you will become just another wandering spirit. You need an anchor, a thread, something that will lure you back into your body.”
He swallowed his saliva with a loud gulp.
- “Very well… I trust you.”
- “Not a smart move, but I am grateful for it. Now… Marie, Stephen…”
I have no idea how many times I repeated those names. Yet each time I finished, a light of understanding appeared in his eyes. As a student during lectures when a teacher would mention a subject that was covered in some of the TV’s documentary.
Every now and then, we had a little victory. He would remind himself something, a single event. He would describe it to me, describe the people he saw, what was going on.
The wall of memories he was scratching was slowly crumbling into pieces.
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The door to cellar the Huntsman’s hut opened wide. Through them, Lanele would leave, behind her Gisele with Zariel hanging over her shoulder walked outside.
Seeing a witch in front of the hut girls smiled brightly.
- “Marie, I think there is someone who wants to talk with you…”
- “What do you m…”
Another person left the hut. A tall man in tattered clothes. He was very pale, very thin as he didn’t eat for the past few days, his skin had unhealthy violet aftercolor in a few places and he was covered in dirt.
He was weak, that much was clear, as he struggled standing still, yet when his almost dead-cold eyes fell on the Marie, he froze for a moment before running at her, picking her up off the ground into the air and started spinning while hugging her close.
Quite a lot of villagers gather around, they all cheered seeing their neighbor back.
Zariel, with rest of his strength, managed to raise his hand into the air, with his fingers shaped into “V” sign.
Though it looked comical, as his head was still hanging down, over Gisele shoulder.