Let me pose a dilemma to you. An attempt on your life is made. You escape unharmed. However, the person who made this attempt is now staying under your roof. What was the appropriate way for me to feel in such a circumstance? Of this I was unsure.

The remainder of the evening was fairly uneventful, though all the time I could sense the tension in the air. Viola clearly wasn’t happy about Scarlett being here. Scarlett herself was rather laid back, and she seemed to have forgotten completely about her declaration that she would kill me. Maybe saving her had been a worthwhile endeavour after all. Despite this, however, on several occasions I had to intervene before Viola could get too heated.

Needless to say, after playing mediator in the conversation between two women all evening, I couldn’t get to sleep. I was watching the ceiling, half-expecting Scarlett to burst into the room and hurriedly dispose of me after having a change of heart. I rolled onto my side. Then onto the other. I tossed the covers off. Then, a cold breeze rolled in through the window and I pulled them over myself again. After a few moments, I sat up in the bed.

Clearly, I wasn’t going to fall asleep anytime soon. I grabbed my pipe on my way out onto the balcony. I scratched at an itch on the nape of my neck as my eyes glanced towards the half-moon – hanging low in the sky. It never seemed very bright these days. I blew a cloudy ring into the night air.

“That unhealthy habit will kill you, you know?”

I nearly fell over the balustrade as the feminine voice pierced the silence. Scarlett stood on the neighbouring balcony, giving me a disdainful glare; her night clothes clinging tightly to her figure.

“You’re not the first person to tell me that today,” I replied as I regained my composure. Why did I need her to tell me that? We were strangers up until a few hours ago; and anyway, wasn’t she trying to kill me? Surely, she’d be glad if she didn’t have to get her hands dirty.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she said.

How thoughtful.

“Given your social standing nobody would believe you in any case.”

Just when I thought she was being nice she went and said something like that. I replied with a “Hmph” and took another puff. I breathed in too much smoke and choked.

“Do you ever feel like it doesn’t matter what you do?” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or to herself.

I shrugged.

“You don’t have any, you mean?”

I hated that she was right.

“Even someone like you has to desire something though.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what she was implying but I’m sure it was meant to be condescending.

“Why did you help me anyhow?” she said, not waiting for a response. “You could have run away and left me to those monsters.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I’d asked myself the same thing but, honestly, I couldn’t say for sure. This might have been a good time to make myself look like a real hero, not that I cared what she thought of me, but something in her eyes told me she’d see right through any lie I tried to pull off.

“You’re a nicer person than you let on, aren’t you?”

I gulped. That thought made me uncomfortable. ‘Nice’ wasn’t the right word for me. My hands were clenched in uneasy fists. I reached instinctively for my pocket, where I kept Emilia’s photograph.

Scarlett watched my hand out of the corner of her eye. “What’s that?”

I touched the thing awkwardly before replacing it in my pocket. “Nothing,” I said.

“What an original response.” She leaned casually over the balustrade, her curious eyes shining in the light of the moon. “It’s clearly not nothing.”

I wonder why she was so talkative this late. You’d have thought she’d need rest after being close to death, but I guess this is what they’d call a ‘warrior’s constitution’.

“My daughter,” I said, retrieving the photo once more and holding it out for her to see.

“Where is –”

“Dead,” I said, without meeting her eyes. I took another puff. “Five years ago.”

I shuddered. Looking down at my hands I could see the red on them. Filling every small crease in my palm. White flashed across my eyes and I held my head in pain. When I looked again the blood was gone.

“It’s difficult,” she said. “Remembering loss. You’d rather think of anything else. You can’t even carry the guilt on your own shoulders when you were helpless to stop what happened.”

I wondered if she monologued often.

“When you take their life yourself, you can take responsibility for it –”

She wasn’t talking about anything I understood. Maybe she wasn’t directing this speech at me?

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Correct. I wouldn’t.

“You won’t be safe here anymore.”

“Huh?”

“The Chaos Gargoyles. They’ve seen your face.”

“But we killed all of them.”

“I did yes, but your image will have been communicated back through a Chaos Portal.”

I noticed the emphasis she placed on “I”. Interesting. Regardless, this business of “Chaos Portals” was something I’d only encountered in the occasionally offhanded comment at the local pub – an establishment I intentionally neglected to inform my sister of my frequent visitations to.

“As I draw power to my sword from the lunar beams, so they draw theirs from the portals to their world – the Chaos Realm.”

I couldn’t really understand what she was talking about.

“If you want to survive, I’d recommend you come with me when I leave at dawn.”

Adventurers always left at dawn. An altogether unpleasant time to awake, especially after a restless night.

“Survive, you say?”

“You think that that small flock was all the Chaos Gargoyles there are? More will come if they think either of us is still here. And they aren’t even the worst thing the Chaos might send after you.”

“What about my sister? Call her what you will, I can’t leave her at the mercy of those things.”

“You really are a good person.”

I reddened. “That’s beside the point.”

“I can’t guarantee her safety, but she’ll be safer without a target for the Chaos here.”

What she said made sense, but that didn’t stop me from feeling uneasy. I winced as the orange of the sunrise began to peak over the horizon. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting in a single wink before we departed. Brilliant.