-Dream-

[A series of thoughts and vivid images that occur when sleeping.

In some cases, can be a method of viewing the future,

or events that are occurring in other locations.

The latter is a common happenstance for Half-Demons

under certain criteria.]

I woke up groggily, dull pain searing throughout my entire body. When I tried to move, I was pushed back down firmly. Through bleary eyes, I saw the long, red hair of Kared. “Don’t start moving around yet,” she ordered, “Your wounds are still healing. Don’t need you opening them again any time soon.” I gave a very small nod, barely noticeable, to tell her I understood.

As I sat there, my vision slowly unclouded, but my pain was ever-present. I became aware of the couch I was sitting on, and that Jarou was sitting next to me. He was still out cold though. I’m sure if my mind hadn’t felt so foggy, I would have panicked at the sheer amount of blood that stained his cloak, and the number of cuts and holes that were present in it. Slowly moving my head and my eyes, trying to not move too much, and trying not to think about the pain, I inspected myself.

I was certainly in better shape than Jarou was. My own cloak and shirt had several smaller cuts on it from when the Necromancer landed his various shallow cuts. Then my eyes drifted over to my blood-stained left arm. The memory of the dagger piercing through my entire arm flooded my mind without warning. A phantom pain and an immense headache seared through my body. Had I not been in so much pain, I may have screamed.

After calming down, I warily inspected my arm where I had been stabbed. Slowly, and painfully, moving my right arm towards the left. Touching where the dagger cut through sent waves of dull pain throughout my body. But I could tell it had been healing, if slowly. All the blood on my cloak had dried, so my hand didn’t get anything on it. Furthermore, peeling back the hole in the fabric revealed my arm itself was clean. I remembered that Kared had healed me, and even now you could see that my flesh didn’t match up with the rest quite right. It looked as though my skin had been stretched and pulled over the wound, then smoothly reconnected with the skin on the other side.

“It’ll heal back to normal with time,” She explained as she watched me gently inspect it, “It wouldn’t need to if I was better at healing. So, sorry about that.” I slowly shook my head. I wanted to say “It’s ok, don’t worry about it,” but I couldn’t get myself to speak. She simply offered me a small, apologetic smile from her seat across the small room.

The rest of the fight played out in my head. Kared was so much stronger than me. Her method of fighting, her magical prowess, the sheer fact that she can heal in general. All of it was incredible to me. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the back of the couch. I still have so much further to go, I thought as my consciousness drifted back into the realm of sleep.

—--

I awoke abruptly to the sounds of something crashing in the distance. Panicked, I looked around my surroundings. I wasn’t in the hotel room, but rather what seemed like a makeshift shack. I was laying in a ragged bed roll set on dirt, and there were several other people laying in similar bedding. From what I could tell they were all around the same age as me. I looked back down, and as long dark hair fell around my vision, I couldn’t help but notice my chest stuck out more than I was used to. Before I had time to really process the hair and chest differences, my body stood up and got out of the bed roll, seemingly on its own.

I - she? - walked over to the door of the shack, seemingly unbothered by how thin and small the poor excuse for a shirt she was wearing was, and that it was the only thing aside from undergarments she had on. As she reached for the door, she hesitated, as though she were scared of something. I couldn’t help but notice how scarred and dirty her hand - no, her entire arm, and probably her entire body - was. She finally mustered up the courage and opened the door.

Outside the shack looked like a campground, with another shack on the other side of the fire pit, and it looked like they were working on building a structure out of stone.

Suddenly visions of the burning village I saw in a dream a while back flooded my mind. She must have seen them too, or perhaps she was thinking of something else, but either way she shook her head as though to clear her mind.

There were two men, who’s eyes she avoided so I didn’t get to see their faces, who were rushing around in a panic.

“......?” she said… something, but my hearing was muffled and I couldn’t quite make it out.

“!!!!!” the one on the left seemed to shout at her angrily, before being calmed down by the one on the right. It seemed like the one on the right was distressed by the other being loud. Based on their hand gestures, it seemed like they were explaining something to her. They pointed at the shack as though to tell her to go back inside, and when she refused, the man on the left angrily walked over to her and slapped her, before picking her up. He then took her inside, practically threw her on top of her bed roll, and pulled something out of his coat pocket that I couldn’t quite see. Suddenly the feeling of cold metal pressing against skin shot through my legs, and when she tried to kick out, she couldn’t move them much if at all. The man then tied a rag around her mouth, and once again said something I couldn’t hear.

I could hear and feel her muffled sobs as she cried herself to sleep.

—--

When I awoke, my cheeks were stained by dried out tears. I pushed myself to sit up, finding someone had moved me to my bed. The light was on, and outside the sun was just beginning to set. In the other bed, Jarou was sitting on top of his bedding, legs crossed and eyes closed. He seemed relaxed yet focused.

I brought my hand up to hold my head, which was pulsing with pain. Aside from that and a very faint, dull pain where I had been stabbed, I felt pretty good. I inspected my arm and various wounds, gently putting pressure on them to test their sensitivity. The majority of them didn’t really hurt at all, but where I’d been stabbed sent a shockwave of pain through my entire arm. It had started to look more normal again as well, but still looked a little strange.

The sharp breath that I sucked in from the pain must have been louder than I thought, since Jarou snapped out of his meditation. “Oh, you’re awake, Kuro?” He asked as I pulled my arm away from the tender wound.

“Ah,” he startled me slightly, “Uh, yeah, just woke up a moment ago,” I responded, “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

“Oh no, you’re fine,” he said waving his hand in dismissal, “I was just trying to practice acceleration. Haven’t made much progress though.” He finished with a laugh. He must have noticed I was disturbed, because he asked if I was doing okay. I was surprised by the question, but I told him about my disturbing dream, and said that’s probably why.

He took a moment and thought about it. “I wonder,” he mumbled to himself while thinking, “I think that might have something to do with your Second Soul. Nadred or Kared could probably tell you for sure. You should talk to them before we go to that tournament.”

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I brought my legs out from under the blanket and slid them off the edge of the bed, which rested half a foot above the floor. I then took care to push myself off with only my not-been-stabbed hand, worried that if I used the other it would cause more pain. It was only after the pressure of standing was put on my legs that I became aware of how sore they were. I suppose that makes sense, I’d been standing or running around pretty much the entire day, I thought to myself, as I slowly walked over to the door.

Jarou also got out of bed, and got ahead of me, opening the door for me.

“Done already, Jarou?” Nadred’s voice joked from the lounge area of the room.

“Yeah, but also,” Jarou responded in a similar tone, trailing off as I walked out of the room.

“Ohh, Kuro! Good morning,” Nadred greeted, “Though it’s more like evening now. I was beginning to wonder if you’d wake up before the matches began tonight.”

“Good morning,” I responded smally, trying to ignore my headache.

“Oh yeah, what time do the matches start anyway?” Jarou asked.

“We’ve still got a couple hours,” Kared responded from the kitchen section, “Plenty of time to eat and talk about things.”

I took a seat on the couch where I had woken up earlier. I hadn’t really realized earlier, but it seemed I was out all night, woke up around midday, then fell back asleep until just before sunset. When I inquired about the whereabouts of my mentor, Nadred said Oroske was out getting some drinks, while Kared was preparing our meal for the night.

“You seem like you have something more important to ask me,” Nadred pressed. He was right, of course, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase my question. So, I simply nodded while thinking about it. Eventually, I figured it would be easiest to just tell the story again and go from there.

After recalling the dream, and the dream I had a few weeks before, Nadred adopted a more serious face. “Interesting,” he said simply after a moment to collect his thoughts. “You are familiar with Second Souls, yes?” After I nodded in affirmation, he began properly. “It’s not uncommon for Half-Demons, and for that matter anyone with a Second Soul, to occasionally get glimpses into the other’s life. The most common way this happens is what happened to you. You see what they’re living through while you are dreaming. In some cases, you see what’s happening at that exact moment, other times you see things that happened to them in the recent past. So most likely, what you saw was something that happened to them within the last three or four nights.

“As for why you’d see that event now, the two of you have recently had experiences that can reasonably be described as painful or traumatic. Half-Demons have a unique mechanism to help with pain and suffering like that, where the two halves will share the experience in some form. Probably the most common case is a dream like that, or feeling the pain they felt, without actually getting hurt yourself.”

“Misery loves company, as they say,” Kared chimed in from the kitchen. “Sounds like she’s in a bad trenui company, poor girl.”

“Trenui?” Jarou and I both asked.

“Yeah, that’s the Alten word for slave,” she explained as she left the kitchen, “Or close enough anyway. Most people don’t like using the ‘S’ word for it though, so they’re called trenui.

“Unfortunately, owning trenui still isn’t illegal, as much as people would like for them to be. Too many people in power own them, and don’t want to let go. Us Half-Demons have it the worst. If you’re a Half and aren’t a member of a Clan or the Twilight, odds are, you’re a trenui.” She finished solemnly, sitting down next to Jarou on the couch.

“What did you mean by a bad company?” I asked.

“Since owning trenui isn’t illegal, the Clans and local law enforcement normally won’t do anything about people or companies that own them. And the Crimson Twilight wont do a thing unless they’re getting paid, which only happens if a company pisses off somebody with proper connections.” She lifted a finger, “But, going off of your story, it sounds as though the company that owns your Second Soul is on the run, for one reason or another. The Tsumi Clan and the Twilight don’t have any active marks on any company at the moment, and are the only two groups you can flat out pay to hunt them down. The flashy burning down would fit the bill of either the Ishen or Incol Clans, and in some areas I could see law enforcement doing such a thing. If I had to guess, they either pissed off one of the Clans, or they pissed off another company. Or there’s some other group in the Underground that’s trying to hunt them down, but I haven’t heard anything like that.” She finally finished her rambling explanation.

I was left speechless for a moment, then finally recollected myself. “You seem to know a lot about the trenui stuff,” I remarked.

“Oh yeah,” Nadred laughed a little, “Kared used to, unknowingly at the time, be part of the Crimson Twilight’s crew for busting trenui companies. In fact, when we met she was in a particularly awful company, working to bust it open from the inside.”

“Ugh,” she groaned as she threw her head backward, “Don’t remind me. Those guys were the worst.”

“How do you bust a company from the inside if you don’t know that’s what you’re doing?” Jarou asked.

“Well, she’s a bit calmer now, but your mother used to be quite hot-headed,” Nadred jested, earning him an elbow from Kared from the seat next to him, “She had already been trained in combat and magic and the like, so as soon as she’d get mistreated, she’d explode in a fit of rage and give her allies an opening.”

“Eventually they would have had to stop putting me in those positions,” Kared picked up, “Much longer and I would have developed a reputation in the Underground. Thankfully, that was the last of those missions I had to do, since Nadred and Oroske brought me to the Clan shortly after that.”

“What kind of people are in the Crimson Twilight?” I asked.

Kared thought about it for a moment, looking up with a hand on her chin. “I think the best way to explain it shortly would be that the Crimson Twilight is like a more free, more brutal version of the Tsumi Clan. Which makes sense, seeing as the Twilight was founded by a group of people who left the Clan. Through their Tsumi Clan bloodline, they still have the Guardians’ protection, even though they go against local and natural laws far more frequently. The Twilight operates entirely in the Underground, however, while the Tsumi Clan does both over the counter and Underground work.

“Lots of people see the Tsumi Clan as dangerous criminals, but the Twilight has a far worse reputation in that regard. Among the people who are aware of its existence, anyway.” She finished with that remark. And as she did, Oroske returned, opening and closing the door loudly, in addition to announcing his arrival.

“Ah, welcome back!” Kared exclaimed, half standing as she pushed herself up on the back of the couch to look toward him, “How did it go?”

“Oh, pretty well. I got those spirits you recommended,” He replied, taking off his cloak and laying it over a chair. It was rare to see him without his cloak, fully exposing his muscular build through a rather tight, black t-shirt that contrasted his almost pure white coat. He then set down the bag he was carrying on the table, “And for everyone else, I got a few different flavors of dark soda.”

Kared got up and announced it’s time to eat, adding a sarcastic “finally” to the end. We all got up and sat at the table, and Kared brought over the delicious smelling food. It was a lighter colored meat, with a very spicy breading and sauce. It was unlike anything I’d had up to that point.

“So, how are you two feeling?” Oroske asked Jarou and I after quickly devouring his share of the meal.

“I still feel sore all over,” Jarou started after swallowing down the bite he had just taken, “And while I’m not sure what, I can tell there’s still something wrong with my internals.”

Oroske simply hummed a response.

“My legs are sore from running around all day, but where I was stabbed only hurts if I put too much pressure on it. Other than that, I feel okay,” I answered.

“Good, good,” He said as he took a sip of the drink he bought for himself, Kared, and Nadred. It was an almost completely clear liquid, with a hint of blue in the color. “You’ll probably want to take it easy until we can have some of the Clan healers take a proper look at you.” He suddenly adopted a very stern tone, “That means no training until we’re back, and after that you’ll do whatever they tell you. Understood?”

Jarou and I both nodded.

“Good,” He said with his own nod, before looking at a clock on the wall. “We should probably get going, don’t want to miss the matches. We can talk about the Hunt and wrap-up stuff on the way there.”

We all quickly finished the rest of our food, Kared and Oroske put their cloaks back on, we put on our various types of shoes, and left as the darkness of night enshrouded the city.