I was the Hero.
At least, that’s what they called me after I died.
They weren’t supposed to love me, they weren’t supposed to even remember me. I hated that title because I’d done nothing to deserve it. I hadn’t destroyed that army, I hadn’t done anything but bring war to a place that had known nothing but peace. All I’d done was kill the king. All I’d done was purge the world of a monster only to let more monsters take his place.
But…who had destroyed that army then? Eliax couldn’t help but wonder…I didn’t give her that answer. I wasn’t ready. I found myself falling back to the edges of her mind, stubbornly refusing to face this.
Eliax found herself staring at Aymiae. Her mind racing at this newest revelation. She couldn’t let her know though that she had been Foralen. That she’d been the person to do all those terrible things.
Aymiae took it as a sign to keep talking, she didn’t seem to think it was odd. “Do you want to see my favorite part of the Ayfel?” Eliax nodded slowly and the older woman smiled, “Right this way then!”
She led Eliax up some stairs, a ladder, and then finally into the attic. It was fairly small, but mostly just empty. There was nothing but a couple of chairs, a small round table, and an empty vase.
Aymiae sat down in one of the chairs and Eliax followed suit. For once the resonance was silent. “This is the quietest place in the Ayfel.” Aymiae whispered as she spoke, she looked out the small window with a smile, her crossed eyes absorbing things that Eliax would never know. “It puts things in perspective for me. You can see the city below, the people, the sky, the sunrise.”
Eliax watched those things, feeling a kind of peace well up inside her. It still wasn’t okay, she still wasn’t okay, but perhaps one day she would be. “Thank you.”
--
Eliax frowned at Jiuhen as he nudged her shoulder once more in an overly friendly manner. Clearly Givei didn’t like that since she kept glaring at him when he wasn’t watching, like right now.
She wasn’t entirely sure, but Eliax got the feeling that Jiuhen didn’t realize this. She would have done something sooner, but she liked planning these types of things out, she wanted to make a move and have it be effective.
Either that or she wanted him to just take a hint and pay more attention to his girlfriend already. She nudged him back but made it far more violent. Whoever said that violence wasn’t the answer was clearly an idiot. It had a place, and that place was now.
He overbalanced and fell off his chair, Eliax glanced at him to make sure he wasn’t dead and continued sipping her drink.
She was starting to think that Niun was right in his extendedly impossible revenge plot. Sparks, she should check up on that and make sure it was actually called off.
Raendus wasn’t here today since he had a game coming up and needed to practice, Hivren was sitting across from Eliax but he seemed distracted by something, and Givei was clearly not paying attention to the game either.
Oh, plus Jiuhen’s cards flew everywhere when he landed, giving Eliax a pretty good view of what he’d had.
She glanced at her cards and looked down at Jiuhen, who was just now picking himself up, “Sparks Eliax, what was that for?”
She picked out a card, a nine with a nick in the side and played it, “You’re ignoring your girlfriend again, I’ve noticed you do this a lot.” He sat up, giving Givei a wide-eyed look. Sparks he was so stupid.
Givei only glared at him.
Jiuhen groaned, “I swear, girls have a special language or something.”
“We aren’t denying it.” Givei said tensely.
“You never are…” Jiuhen said with a sigh, finally playing his turn.
They continued in silence for a while. “So Eliax,” Givei started, “I heard the school wanted you to enroll, what’s that about?”
Eliax supposed it was only a matter of time before that little tidbit got to the gossip queen… “yeah, I’m a Dimensionalist, they wanted to make sure I’m being trained.”
Givei perked up, “You know, most magical lines like that are genetic, my brother’s got a weak affinity for it and so does my father, we might be related!” She smiled pleasantly and Eliax got the feeling she was desperately trying to make some kind of connection with her.
“Huh, maybe.”
“So?”
Eliax blinked at her.
“So are you getting trained? How is it?”
“No, I’m not being trained at the moment.”
Hivren glanced up from his cards with a surprised expression, “Why not? Starsbane isn’t the greatest magical school out there, but it’s best to have something. Plus, the Hero went there.”
Eliax closed her eyes, “She did?” Of course she did… The resonance laughed at her. Eliax could just imagine the memories that she would surface if she explored that place.
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Hivren nodded, oblivious to her internal war, “Of course, she graduated top of her class.”
Uhhhh I think I would remember graduating. Who comes up with this stuff? Eliax rubbed her forehead and managed a weak grunt.
Jiuhen nodded at that, also grunting. “They had a whole unit on the Hero in my history class. I don’t get it, she died like twenty years ago, that’s not really history yet.”
“It was twenty-two years ago, and she went missing.” Hivren corrected.
“...Your point being?”
The human sighed in exasperation.
Eliax frowned, the little puzzle pieces in her mind connecting together. There was a four year gap there before she’d been born, or at least…before she should have been born. Hrm. If Eliax hadn’t really existed until that day in the sand, that was an even bigger gap, twelve years in fact.
This wasn’t lining up quite right, but how was she supposed to know how reincarnation worked? Sparks she should look into accounts, she couldn’t be the only person that this had ever happened to.
Right?
The discussion continued without her attention, before she knew it she’d missed most of the context. “-What? But it’s Raendus! Are you seriously saying you won’t go to the game?” Jiuhen’s tone was accusatory, and also directed at Givei.
That’s not what I meant when I said pay attention to your girlfriend… Eliax thought in his direction, wondering how an Empath could be so oblivious in some ways and so charismatic in others.
Hivren made a noise that Eliax couldn’t judge the tone of, “I heard there’s lots of injury in Echoball, I don’t know if I want to support that.”
Jiuhen gave him a confused look, “What? The human is saying this? You guys are almost more violent than the dragons for goodness sake.”
He shrugged, “We don’t die as easily. I once knew a guy who lost an arm in a battle and kept on fighting for two hours with nothing but field medicine keeping him from dying of blood loss.”
“Case in point. Violence is literally your thing.”
“Well I’m not arguing with that, I’m just saying that Tuvei are pretty fragile. Don’t you get poisoned if the oils on your exoskeleton get in your blood?”
That was…true enough. I’ve known a lot of people who died, and the Tuvei ones always died faster. Which is very relevant because of reasons. “I think I read somewhere that we were cursed by an angry deity.” Eliax interjected, “Before that we were super hardy. The uh… the record was from before most of recorded history so there’s no way to prove it, but it seemed interesting.”
There was silence as everyone digested or ignored that. I don’t claim to be able to read people and neither does Eliax.
“Huh.” Hivren eventually said, and the other two seemed similarly as willing to move on the discussion quickly.
Eliax sighed, it seemed like even with people willing to tolerate her, there were just some things that were too far. She wished there was someone who seemed to genuinely care about what she cared about. Even though she was just looking too much into it and basing this on tiny parts of the picture when clearly they did care. Just, not about this apparently.
It only made her less and less willing to tell anyone about the resonance.
--
The bells rang, the people panicked.
Everywhere had its own way of warning folks about a passing dragon, but most of them used bells. Eliax had once even seen a village in the middle of nowhere with twelve different bell towers, each for a different level of threat. It was a pretty interesting setup all things considered.
In Reiaran they had four bell towers, one at each side of the city; depending on where the dragon was coming from, that tower would be used to inform the inhabitants of the possibility of their demise.
Eliax had never actually seen a dragon attack, apparently they were worse along the eastern coast closer to the dragonlands, as well as the Aoulous area which everyone except the inhabitants agreed had been a terrible spot to build settlements.
She looked upwards to the east, where the belltower had sounded, squinting with the hope that she might see the creature. Often they flew too high and were mistaken as birds by most folk, but the wall guards always had special goggles and training. Besides, a false alarm was always better than a dead city.
She didn’t see anything yet so it might not be above the city…If indeed it was even going to fly overhead.
Focusing back on the city itself, Eliax retreated back into Alsen’s Inn which she’d left just a few minutes earlier. Being out in the open when a dragon was on its way seemed to everyone as a monumentally stupid idea.
Alsen seemed a tad anxious, but despite that she smiled when Eliax came back in, “It’ll be a crazy day then. I’m going to make some biscuits, would you like any?”
Eliax shrugged as she made her way toward the stairs, “Sure, let me know if Illila comes back too, I’ve been meaning to chat with her.”
“Oh that’s good, I was starting to think you two were avoiding each other. Orien knows that girl needs more friends.”
Well, Eliax had been trying to avoid crossing paths with the musician, mostly because it felt awkward. She did think it had been a bit easy, especially considering she was at Nightwind most nights, perhaps Illila had been doing the same thing. Eliax had just labeled it as luck and moved onward.
She smiled hesitantly at Alsen and finally moved up the stairs to her room, intent on watching the sky from her small window for a glimpse of the dragon. She was lucky it was an eastern facing one.
It was ten minutes before anything happened, she entertained herself by making various spatial distortions while glancing upward every few seconds. The sky was clear and blue, so there was no chance of missing it as the white ‘bird’ appeared. It got closer quickly, before Eliax knew it she could make out the creature’s form. It was too far away to see details, but its long tail swished about in the sky behind it as two enormous white wings sparkled in the sunlight. She thought she could make out its head and it- it was…
I remembered my anger. VENGEANCE. I remembered as it tore at me, as the white claws drew blue blood, as the red mixed with blue and painted the sand beneath us. I-
Eliax grasped her skull as a pounding headache came out of nowhere, as a memory she wasn’t even close to being ready for forced its way to the surface. A memory that hadn’t ever really left. She remembered waking up after nightmares with this same image in her mind. over and over through the last ten years, she remembered the pain that she’d caused. buried beneath the sandfrost and deep below her exoskeleton, down into her heart and soul.
She gripped her notebook with white knuckles and threw it across the room. She was gone a moment later, the door swinging behind her as she plopped down at one of Alsen’s tables and tried to get herself to breathe.
She was alive.
Mostly.