The Temple Ruins of Sola
Milodas Forest, Cessine Territorial Borders
The Temple Ruins was an old sanctuary, comfortably hidden on the far corner of Milodas Forest that they've scouted a dawn ago.
It's an articulate mesh of granite and stone, the temple boasted a four pillar facade that was reminiscent of Gothic architecture of our world and housed an image of one of the Ancients of the eight gods. It was, he guessed, at the peak of grandiose at its time. But today it was nothing more than a flicker of its past glory and the more Aiven sees with his mind's eye, the more he became aware of its emptiness.
His party's so-called adventure---an innocent break from all the quests they have been completing these past three moons and a half, had turned out to be as easy as a walk in a temple's morning prayer.
If only it was also as quiet, Aiven sighed, his harvesting knife was securely placed on his palm as he squatted on a few undergrowths.
“Aiven," Delica's sugary voice cut through his concentration.
On her hand was a loose note from his sketches. "Nee," she beckoned to him, "when did in ALL history of the Frear did the Kingdom of Alvalar became a Rainbow Kingdom?”
Ah, that, not knowing how his journal got mixed in to their map scrolls, Aiven answered her with a shrug.
The paper she held up weakly flayed, and there, written in crisp words; 'Runsaer is black, Elrhondir is white, and Alvalar is rainbow.'
"It's...color-coded," he answered slowly, unable to come up with an appropriate hand signal for the word. Aiven instantly felt tired but continued to work on his harvesting.
Delica was staring at him, wide-eyed, the fact that her normally tight-lipped friend even bothered speaking was ignored, “that doesn't make any sense!” she almost yelled, startling a few squirrels scampering to their tiny feet.
"R-rainbow...pffft," Simos, the last member of their party, almost doubled over from laughing, while clutching a bundle of herbs on both hands. The blonde boy just came back from scavenging from the other side of the river. He was wearing steel armors, heavy and constraining, but his movements were still smooth as he laughed heartily, "our great Kingdom of Alvalar, the proud descendants of the Olden Kingdom that united the Land of Man and created a pact of the champions. A-a rainbow kingdom?!"
Aiven, however, kept his face blank.
If given enough consideration, Runsaer Kingdom from the east was a melting pot of necromancy and dark arts and could easily be identified with the color black. Elrhondir on the west, being a holy and the pilgrim kingdom would be the white one. And their own kingdom became rainbow since Alvalar was technically a color-wheel as far as Aiven's opinion goes.
The Alvalarian Heraldry Caste System was based on metallics of gold, silver and bronze, and the city-fortresses were represented by primary colors. The fact that all members of their party sported red overalls from the Cessine City-Fortress only showed that they were members of the proud southern plains of Alvalar.
It was so ridiculous to the point that people could get their heads chopped off if they use the wrong set of color-schemes.
How many color-blinds must have perished? Aiven thought morbidly.
"And that's not the end of it!" Delica pointed at one section and asked her brother a question with all the authority of a magisterium professor, “tell me, Simos, what is the center of the universe?”
“The void, easy,” Simos said automatically, too entertained to missed out the argument.
“And...what is a void, Aiven?“
Reverting to his normal lack of interest in speaking, Aiven made a simple hand sign for everyone to see that clearly translate to ["black hole"]
“See?! See?!” said Delica.
Aiven remained impassive. During her interrogation, he made a few successive flick of his wrist at the reddish herb infront of him. A young shoot of Bloodroot was immediately harvested to the point of baldness.
Simos was still audibly snickering at the other side of the patch.
“To call the Great Void, just a HOLE?! A BLACK HOLE?! Do you wish to Gods to rain thunder on us?!" Delica was livid. It took a second before her meaning sink in. "To actually name the primordial place of Ancients a-an...overly simplified dark colored hole in the vast space of continuum...are you stupid? No you must be stupid,” she held her temple as if massaging a throbbing migraine.
The terms were all familiar to him. When it was explained during their lectures back at the Cessine Training Grounds that the Void was and is indeed the mysterious remains of a collapsed star, Aiven simply went back to his old world knowledge.
If taken theoretically, their source of heat was from a young planet that was immense in size and denseness, that it emits its own light. They aptly called it Sun Planet making this mass of earth they currently habitate nothing more than a satellite. In layman's term, they live in a moon.
And that the unlikely pair planetary body had been floating around a galaxy with a black hole at its center.
A very horrid end, but the Frearans have long accepted this fact, and the journey towards the sucking darkness was relatively slow--it'll take billions of years before they could be even halfway the center.
Thinking about it, a large part of their studies were centered on celestials since it was believed that the Void was the source and end of all creations, making it more like a Big Bang Theory, or in this case, a religious path towards their mythos.
Aiven found these creationist theory as---well, theories and lore instead of a way of faith. Not that it affects him anyway, he never really cared about the gods.
["So...it's a worm hole?”] he answered, motioning with his hands.
She gaped at him, eyes widening in horror. “Did you just called the Gods of Ancients 'worms'?!"
Right, I shouldn't tease Delica this much, Aiven smiled inwardly.
"All Holy Orders of Continuum will crusade against you!!! Why do I feel like my brain is deteriorating? Uuuugh, this is all your fault!” Delica continued in her tirade, now holding her palms to her face.
"There, there. We all know he's a weird one," Simos consoled Delica, while picking the few bundles that stumbled away from Delica's basket.
The girl was still indignant, and would mutter her complaints every now and again, but she had thankfully dropped the subject for the moment and focused on their task on hand.
Afterall, finding fresh crops of herbs first thing in their exploration was a stroke of luck that any novice their age needs to prioritize.
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So right off the first light of dawn, the small three-man party was on their knees, scraping weeds and turning rocks for herbs.
Bloodroot was a common shrub that helped in tending wounds and was the main raw material that gave off the red color of health potions. Harvesting would have been tedious work, but wild plants had a more potent effect and the fresher the stocks were, the better for his synthesizing.
Earlier, when they scouted the area, he was relieved that the Milodas forest reflects their intel. It was categorized as beginner zone with monster ranging only from level one to five with the rare variant level nine. As novices, the party was a level higher than the hunting grounds, but from the start they didn't come to Milodas for leveling.
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Their current quest was simple, explore the old temple, go to the altar and receive the blessing of the Goddess Sola.
According to Simos, rumor has it, touching the Divine Protection Statue at these temple ruins during full moon would grant them a “Gift” from the deities regardless of the pantheon they believe in. It was all baseless superstitions but Simos decided it would make a nice commemoration for their leap into the world of the adults.
They have been part of so many adventures already and this Coming of Age Ceremony would be another of those memories they would create with each other.
Adults, huh? Aiven can't help but question the validity of the custom everytime he looked at his companions.
"Oi, I've seen the bloodroots, but why the thickseeds?" Simos pulled out bushels of yellowish bulbs straight out of Delica's stock pile.
Aiven raised his palm up. Delica, seeing the hand sign, tossed one of the bulbs. And it hit Aiven straight on the nose. When he looked back at her, nose red, the girl stuck her tongue out.
The farther they are from the city-fortress, the more these two idiots regress, Aiven quietly observed. A simple spell later, and a sudden movement of wind carried the piece of parchment out of Delica's grasp. It unraveled and smacked her on the face.
Delica scrunched the paper away and was glaring.
"Hey, stop it you two," Simos said, holding out the two from flinging harmless spells to each other.
Aiven indifferently gave a salute to Simos, before withdrawing with the thickseed in hand. Delica, on the other hand, harrumphed and blew Aiven a raspberry.
Ignoring Delica's childish antics, Aiven recovered his harvesting tools and made a clean slice that separated the thin roots from the bulb and started processing the herb. After a minute, Aiven held out a flask with a half-full of liquid. His scavenging knife glinted from the noon sun, against his equally dark leather armor.
["This,"] Aiven explained in their usual hand sign, his friends had been used to his unnecessary lack of speech that they were able to grasp all of his hand movements, ["good for oiling clockworks and,"] before he could finish his hand signs, Simos butted in.
"Ah, is this for Madame Ailyn?" Simos asked, remembering that the madame, Aiven's blood mother, was a known alchemist and also delve in automaton projects throughout the training grounds. Simos, have always been interested in golems, so mentioning about clockworks made him excited, "this smelled better than gearing oils...um, Delica? Why are you looking weird?"
"Eh? Uh," Delica stuttered, her face was paler and her eyes didn't left the bottle that was being sniffed by her clueless brother. "I mean, this is..." Delica snatched the bottle away and elbowed Aiven on the ribs, "why the circle of hell would you use this as oil gear? Do you know what this is?!"
Massaging his (probably) broken ribs, Aiven answered with his signs, ["lubricants"].
"I know this is used for l-lubricating..! But, but," Delica's face turning red and was clasping the bottle to the point of breaking. "As a responsible adult here, I'll confiscate the bulbs and we'll all just forget about this, understood?" and she continued mumbling, as she pulled out the bulbs out of her inventory in disgust, "Goddess, I should have realized these bulbs for what they are!"
Aiven stared at her unflinchingly as if questioning her statement.
He wanted to discredit Delica's train of thoughts but as usual Aiven kept mum. Just from her outbursts and actions, there was no doubt in Aiven's mind that Delica knew that thickseeds were primarily used in the harem, for private purposes. The part that she knew about it only shows that she knew her alchemy, and he didn't put any other meaning behind it. Afterall, they were in the same age. Knowing how resourceful his friends were, it's not surprising.
However, what Delica doesn't know was that the properties of thickseeds were ideal as gear oils for automatons. With the herb's natural property to boost vitality in life essences, it could easily prolong the affectivity of the manabeasts' blood in the magic circuit, which was the heart of all automatons. This made thickseeds a better conduit than the grisly smelly clockwork oils that does nothing but keep the gears in motion.
He stared at Delica, his expression already saying if it's possible to discard the goods at the old shopkeeper at the nearest settlements. This only earned him another glaring scoff from Delica. And when he mentioned it was for 'personal use', her scandalized blushing red reaction was so amusing that Aiven continued pushing the subject while hiding his amused smile.
On the outside, he was as expressionless as a rock and dead serious which only infuriated Delica even more.
"Eh? I don't get it," Simos' confused face seemed to have strike at Delica.
She dropped everything she was doing as if she was struck by lightning and placed her hands heavily on Simos' shoulders.
"S-simos, in the future, please remember that I am a girl and the youngest here...so it's impossible, truly impossible for me to explain this!"
"Hey, what? What? What are you saying?" Simos tried to shrug off Delica's hold but she continued bearing down on him.
"Also, girls mature faster, right? We even get to get engaged at fourteen! So it's normal for me to know...these...things, you know? And how do you think I could ace apothecial and alchemical classes if I don't know...these...stuff, you know? You know?"
"D-Delica, calm down, calm down, oi, are you crying..? D-don't cry..!" Simos expression became more helpless.
At this point, Aiven looked pitiably at Delica for having a clueless brother, such as Simos.
"Shut up! I don't want to hear that from you, pervert," She answered to Aiven while giving him a death glare as if she could hear Aiven's very thoughts.
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