Sir Bryrant Delrey idly mused on the faint scratching sound his quill made as it traced characters onto his parchment. There was little else to focus on- for all her seemingly terrible power and ruinous rage, the woman who'd introduced herself as Kiyo was… eccentric.
A sharp laugh tore him from his thoughts as Kiyo gesticulated wildly in a random direction, pantomiming something. "Biscuits? Really, terrible… no, the space program doesn't need imperial support. Just slap it down on the southern continent! Honestly, you'd think people didn't learn their geography nowadays." Some people liked to liken her to a prophet or sublime ancient, but… well, a despairing glance to a map of the world distinctly lacking in a southern continent said otherwise.
Sir Delrey was entirely convinced she was completely mad.
………
A rough hand on her shoulder woke him in an instant, eyes wide and heart thundering as he struggled- ineffectually- to throw off his captor's firm grip. He glared up at- slumping, he let out a muffled moan as Kiyo gestured for him to remain quiet. "What's going on?" To whatever force out there, he begged- not again.
"They've caught up to us- we need to move." Again it was, then. This insanity of this woman knew no bounds. "The imperial cultists sicced a pack of quetzal on us. We're going to have to move fast if we want to make it out of this jungle alive."
Bryrant nodded seriously, secretly glancing out of the window. At the snowbound boreal forest. In the middle of nowhere, with no pursuers, no empire, no cult, and definitely no creatures that didn't exist. "I'll get packing immediately. We're in grave danger here." The resolute cast of his motion and determined yet slightly worried tenseness was rather inspired, but one got used to such around Kiyo.
His door slammed open once again as Kiyo leapt into his room, slashing an ethereal blade that blew up the wall and half the- he really hoped it was empty- hotel. "They're here! Hold on-" and then they were bounding through the snow, himself bundled layers and Kiyo in scandalous- and frostbiting inducing- rags. Wind whipped wildly at his short hair and threatened to pluck the notes on her nonsense from his hands as she rained wanton destruction at invisible foes around them.
He couldn't help but gape when a single wave of his hand shattered an entire rocky crag, and definitely cringed as the rocks started falling back down around them. This would have been less harrowing if there'd been actual enemies!
Several hours later, bruised, battered, and half-brained by a rock that left him lightheaded and mumbling almost as stupidly as Kiyo, they stumbled out of the forest and into a clearing, wherein Bryrant finally got her to relax. Unfortunately, this wasn't even a particularly bad day when it came to Kiyo spawned escapades. Pulling out a crumpled sheaf of vellum, he slowly began to scrawl down more useless findings.
He got the distinct feeling that his bad month was quickly going the way of the plural suffix.
………
Bryrant winced as traffic seemed to slow to a stop around them. He'd known it was too good to be true when they'd almost walked the entire city with only minor incidents. The pedestrians gawked. The bodyguards bristled in barely restrained fury. The… well rounded, in shape and snobbish disposition, noble looked down at the woman hanging delightedly off his arm with a look of abject disgust and disdain. The poor farmer behind the stand looked both horrified and clenched in the grip of restrained laughter.
He just sighed, wondering how they'd get themselves out of this one.
"Pyoka-dayo! My favorite dealer- I haven't seen you in years! Didn't know you'd moved out here at all!" The noble managed to look even more enraged at being called such an obviously foreign name.
Humming slightly under his breath, he struggled to contain his amusement as the noble's face turned positively apoplectic. "Infidel! Mongrel and- and-" he tried to push her away, but if there was one thing Kiyo pulled off every time, it was being unfairly strong. "I'll have you flogged for this! I'm no one's dealer-" he spat the word- "and certainly not someone as uncouth as you. Guards!" He could practically feel the condescension roiling off him. If his truly immense ego was the base of his one-dimensional personality and lackluster pattern recognition skills, then… he surmised a two to one homogenous mixture of distilled classism and racism fueled that well used mechanism.
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"But! Don't be so mean, Yoyo! We used to have all the fun, back in that dive- you'd drink everyone under the table and sing for hours, you tone-deaf bastard!" Kiyo mock-pouted, but the noble's face had moved beyond apoplectic, whatever that entailed. "Then you were all stiff and angry in the mornings. An absolute slave driver when it came to cleaning up…"
The noble's face had gone impressively pale at that, complete with suddenly shaky croak for his guards to get her off of him. "Slander! I haven't… haven't done anything of the sort!" Unfortunately, even his steadfast guards were looking entirely unconvinced.
"Of course not! You're an upstanding gentleman… though, remember that one time when we were sailing the coast, and there was that boy…" Kiyo's face twisted into a knowing smirk-
Two days and a bit later, they managed to pull themselves out of the flaming city and into the surrounding countryside with the rest of the refugees. Exhausted, covered in soot and sweat and not a small bit of blood, they slumped to the ground as a city burned behind them, lighting an ashen sky apocalyptic red that gleamed in Kiyo's eyes as she stared off beyond distance.
Bryrant tried not to pay attention to whatever strange, random thing she was doing now. In all honesty, he was far too exhausted to be paying attention to whatever strange, random thing she was doing now.
The only thought on his mind was whether or not they'd ever figure out Kiyo's 'masterful political maneuver' had been completely and totally unrelated to whatever was going on within the town. Or the two. Or probably the existence of the entire continent, which she still insisted was a densely populated tropical empire.
Whatever. He pulled out his paper and jotted down a single, quick note-
Cities destroyed: 7.
………
Kiyo blinked beside him, suddenly… aware. "So. Uh… I think this is the awkward moment I say, congrats for being not real?" Bryrant stopped taking notes, glancing to meet her suddenly fathomless gaze. "I don't really know you- I only tend to get a vague idea of my past in a specific temporal shift. Half the price of remembering- my personal actions are relatively consistent in universal time, even if everything's different."
"I don't understand."
When she actually responded- for real, to his face, recognizing who he was, he dropped his papers out of abject shock. "Something's changing time, and I'm unbound to mere temporal whims." She managed to sound wistful, annoyed, enraptured, and morose simultaneously as she spoke to the sky. "Sometimes it's every few seconds. Sometimes, its waits for years."
His voice was strangled when he managed to speak. "What… what's doing this?" Changing time. History was being rewritten- had just been rewritten, not much more than a minute ago, if he understood correctly. Everything around him hadn't existed before… his memories felt like a betrayal.
Her gaze was soft as she looked out past the infinite. "Fire. The… it's indescribable, but I know it's its Fire. I can see it, beyond the bounds of reality, circling in maddening glory."
He'd heard that before, but hadn't believed- suddenly a lot of his notes made significantly more sense. Sighing, he slumped against a nearby tree stump as he tried to resolve his existential crisis. "So… my entire life, I just- wasn't real? Nothing?"
"Nope." There was a wry tilt to how she shook her head, a faint amusement written into a joke told a thousand times over. "We're both real, just real from different perceptions of time." She tried to explain it further, but it pretty quickly went over his head. It was almost astounding how intelligent she was now that her focus was on 'this phase of temporality' or something along those lines. "Sorry, should have known you wouldn't understand… you took notes, though?" There was a slight twinkle to her eyes as he nodded.
Bryrant nodded hesitantly, only relaxing as a wide grin split her features.
"That’s perfect. The stories are the best part- you've got to tell me how many times I made a fool of myself…”
As Bryrant began to pull out several very thick binders, he decided that as far as existential crises went, this one was pretty fun.