“Blakh!” Isobel yelped out and jumped back when the last prowler actually bit at her. Theora held the creature back firmly with a strong hug.

“Shh,” Theora went, stroking the fur, and then gently swung the creature around, and let go. It jumped into the dark and vanished.

“Whoa!” Iso said. “That one was pretty energetic. We’re done now, whoo!”

“Almost done,” Theora said. “I want to follow the riverbed to see if we can find anything.” She blinked. “Oh, but you don’t have to join for that. Feel free to head back home if—”

“No way!” Iso yelled. “Gonna help, gonna help!”

“Careful with the noise. Some of them could be on the prowl again.”

“They like us now! We tamed them!”

Theora stared into the blackness. “That’s… That’s not how it works,” she said. “Please don’t think we tamed them. Let’s hope they don’t attack, but also, let’s not imagine that we are safe.”

“Sure, sure,” Iso said, waving off. “Anyway, let’s do some investigating!”

And thus, they ‘investigated’. It probably wasn’t the most exciting detective work imaginable, considering they were simply walking along the riverbed in complete darkness, but then again, Theora had no idea about how detective work was supposed to work. Perhaps this was just normal.

After all, she did usually investigate a quest before completing it, though that typically also involved her just walking from place to place, asking questions.

Advancing through the darkness in the middle of the dried river, Theora held her gaze open for anything that might be important. Crucially, the river was completely dry. No puddles, no mud. Hallmark, due to its position next to a mountain range, was a place of near constant rain — maybe not enough of it reached this place?

“Soooo,” Iso intoned after a while. “I have a question. Just like, from daughter to mom!”

“Yes, please?”

“When was your last date with Dema?”

Theora choked on spit. She coughed, getting her eyes watery, and knocked against her own chest a few times.

“Date,” she finally repeated. “Date.”

Her mind blanked out, even though her body had recovered.

A date with Dema. A date? What was that? She knew the word. She knew what it meant, very clearly. And yet, her brain refused to connect the dots in this context.

“Yea, for example, going to a café together to just talk, or visiting one of Hallmark’s museums, or maybe just going on a picnic to sit on a meadow. Or go hiking together. Watch the sunset! You know?”

“I know.”

“So?”

“I—” Theora’s heart pounded. “I don’t think we ever had one. I don’t think.”

“Why not!”

How were these questions still increasing in difficulty?

That said… Dema and Theora had done so many things together. They’d spent well over a century with each other, only separating a few times. So, in a way, hadn’t they already been on one very long, continuous date?

All the blood rushed into Theora’s head, her heart doing its best to pump it up in a frenzy. Her cheeks blazing hot, she swallowed.

“Actually, since you mention it, we did watch the sunset together.”

Theora distinctly remembered having asked Dema to do that with [Flower Language], although she’d thought nothing of it at the time. Watching the sunset together was considered a date? Why? Just sitting side-by-side, gazing at the glowing sun, the breeze gently frisking through their hair — when all their attention lingered on that radiant phenomenon and not each other, that could still count as a date?

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Well, not all their attention. Dema’s electrifying presence had definitely been a slight distraction.

In any case, if even that counted as a date, Theora wanted to have another one.

“It’s hard to ask for it,” she murmured.

“Is it? Why? Just ask!”

Theora stared into the dark. People with good communication seemingly lived an entirely different sort of life.

Actually, now that she thought about this a bit more, wasn’t she about to ask Dema on a date? A date to visit the Grand Observatory of Fiction together. To live through Dema’s favourite book.

“Oh, Iso, did you remember the name of—”

Theora didn’t finish the sentence. As she spoke, they left the sphere of influence of the flower pollen. The world brightened.

“Ah…” Iso sighed. “Ah, that would be why. I suppose that would be why the river dried out.”

At the far side of the hillside meadow, at the end of the riverbed, a cliff had broken apart. Hurled its contents into the narrow valley and blocked off the flow of the water. It was a gigantic rockslide, plugging up the lifeline of the ecosystem.

“We should climb up,” Theora suggested.

“Yeah! Wow, this is… I wonder what happened. Maybe some big monsters had a fight and blew up the mountain.”

“Maybe,” Theora said.

“Or an earthquake!”

“That’s possible too.”

“Or it was some unstable formation from the start, and then just went boom one day.”

Theora nodded.

It was afternoon by now, and the sun slowly lost its strength. They wandered across the wide landscape, with a full view of all that was around. A hawk cried in the far distance, the breeze was stronger now. What would they find on the other side of those fallen rocks and boulders? Would they be able to ‘fix’ it?

She had a vague idea of what it might be — or what it might not be. Regardless, at this moment, Theora wasn’t optimistic. She didn’t have the capacity to relocate all of these prowlers, much less the flowers. What conditions would they need to grow? How could they be planted? How much time would pass until they bloomed?

Theora noticed Iso was falling behind. She turned around and saw the scrunched up fossil face. Isobel’s thinking position looked very different compared to Dema’s — Dema would have put her chin in her hand, or scratched her head, but Iso stared at the ground, full focus, eyes narrowed just a little.

“Are you alright?” Theora asked.

Isobel’s gaze shot up. “Yeah!” she blurted. “Just, thinking! About what we could do.”

“Have any ideas?”

“Well… that really depends on what we’ll find on the other side… but I’m getting a little excited. Just… moving some thoughts around in my head, that’s all!”

Theora nodded. “I can’t wait to hear them,” she said.

Finally, as night broke, they made it to the cusp of the cliff.

Beneath them lay a gigantic lake, held back by the collapsed mountain like a dam. Birds tweeted from the trees at the edge of the water, crows cawed in the distance. Insects hummed and chirped. Echoes of the noise carried up, unhindered by the clear water.

“I thought this was what we might find,” Isobel murmured, but seemed a little wary. “But this doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

“Doesn’t make sense?”

“Yeah, well, took us only a few hours to get here, didn’t it? Wouldn’t the prowlers have found it? Why were they starving in the darkness?”

Theora glanced at the shimmers of the night sky reflected in the soft waves. “Perhaps they can’t leave the dark,” she suggested.

“Yeah…”

“We only found that one flower. I think it might be the last.”

“Right,” Iso nodded. Then, she clicked her fingers. “Wait, are you saying…”

“Maybe the remaining ones stayed to protect it.”

“You think they would do something like that?”

Theora shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Either that, or they really got sick, on top of it all. Mountain burst, they lived a few years migrating here to drink, but some got sick, and were left behind.”

That was also possible.

In the end, they might never find out.

Much like with that trap set in the cliff back then. Who’d put it there, centuries back? What caused the fate of these prowlers? What had happened, millennia ago, for Dema to become the target of the System? All Theora could do was deal with the fallout. Outcomes of unknowable origins.

But in this case, the situation seemed bleak. It wasn’t a seal she could shatter with [Obliterate], it wasn’t a demon girl she could shower with affection. This was a dam, cutting the valley off its source of life, but the lake itself was an origin of life too. Theora couldn’t harm one to save the other.

Eventually, maybe, the dam would overflow, and life would spring again in the dried out lands, but how long might that take? She couldn’t even poke a hole into the bottom, to make a bit of water flow back into the river, because the rock formation might not hold, and she could cause it to collapse, spelling disaster.

And, if she was being honest with herself, showering Dema with affection wouldn’t solve the problem with the System either. In both situations, Theora was powerless.

“So, what do we do?” Isobel after a moment of contemplation.

“I don’t think we can do anything,” Theora murmured, and those words burned on her lips and tongues like acid.

“Oh!” Isobel let out in surprise. “What do you mean, we can’t do anything? I have, like, at least two ideas! I was just wondering which one we should go for!”

Somehow, these words impacted on Theora’s soul like thick drops of rain after the longest drought. “Two ideas?” she asked, with her voice rising up in a soft plea.