Chapter 6: World

The young boy’s eyes gazed over a hundred-thousand chaotic thoughts. They flew like objects thrown about in a storm, or more accurately, like a jar filled with marbles being shook violently up and down.

Instead of marbles however, they looked like shooting stars, flying and colliding with each other, and at the invisible walls of their energy field.

The light of those thoughts did not last long, and merely a few moments before they dissipated, new ones were also born at the same time.

Stretching his hand, his luminous body touched the storm of shooting stars, and he was bombarded by a few hundred thoughts.

Kill! Kill the enemy!

Traitors!

Why are they doing this?

They’re lying to us!

The lord is no traitor! They want only for our lands and riches!

And much more, before he once again felt a mental knife cutting through his mind, and the boy dropped to his knees as the world started to fluctuate before his eyes.

Solid colors and shapes began to swim like a sea, and the clear yet chaotic voices started to sound like disembodied echoes.

Through sheer persistence his mind endured, the world held, and eventually the pain and the confusing incoherence began to go away.

‘Le– Lesson learned…’

As the then wavering world before him eventually started to stabilize, his immediate surroundings started to dim. Looking up, he saw a wave of arrows and artillery shells numerous enough to blot out the sun flying over.

He gasped. Out of instinct he put his hands in front of him and closed his eyes, and in the instant that followed, hundreds if not thousands of men turned into corpses, or mere pieces of corpses.

Opening his eyes slowly, he scanned the area. Quickly he was reminded that he was untouchable, but more importantly…the sea of shooting thoughts around him had disappeared, replaced instead with ash smoke and dust fogs, that hid within them the true aftermath of war.

The luminous spirit body of a child began to stand up, and it wasn’t long before he noticed two massive armies from behind and in front of him, beginning to charge at each other once again…

Yet in that space before the collision of two bodies of war, in that vacuum without conflict nor thought, the boy noticed a single mote of drifting light.

‘…Well…I’m sure touching just one should be fine…”

His luminous hand stretched towards it, and he heard a weak voice transmitted to him. Instead of words however, the thought was more of an intent.

‘Please.’

‘...Huh?’

He looked towards the direction to which it came from, and noticed a trail of weak, drifting thoughts, that looked more like specks of dust in the wind rather than shooting stars.

Traversing through the smoke and fog, his hand stretched out to each drifting mote, listening to their contents earnestly and intently while trying to ascertain their source.

‘Larissa.’

‘Elwin, Mary…’

‘My sons, my daughters…’

‘Please, goddess of fortune, let me return to my family...’

There atop a pile of bodies, was a man whose legs had both exploded from the artillery. One of his arms was covered in arrows, with one such arrow entering and exiting through his left palm.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

And whether by random chance or cruel fate, his uninjured arm gripped even still, a bloodied sword.

The boy stared silently at both a volunteer, and a victim of war, before he then heard a crashing stampede of footsteps. It was not long after that the man’s head was mercilessly crushed beneath his own allied army.

Seeing the sight no doubt made him recoil, and just before the two armies clashed in a storm of negative thought and emotion, he instinctively willed himself to disappear.

Luckily he was in his own mind, and not in the brown book. The world before him shifted in an instant, as he opened his eyes to a new scene.

The blonde prince-knight, son of the king, was there in front of him. Swinging his sword at his enemies he was powerful, fierce, and yet graceful.

…Except his thoughts and emotions were anything but.

The royal soldiers around him seemed to be single-minded in their duty of ridding the kingdom’s traitors, only creating thoughts and intentions along the lines of cut and kill. Yet the prince-knight’s own, was a chaotic matrix of flying particles, even more frenzied than at the previous battle he saw.

In terms of emotions, a light-phenomena of grey-blue aurora shrouded him. Its colors were muted and heavy, owing to the emotions of uncertainty and burden.

At the center of his chest however, was a small yet radiant, golden light. And that awe-inspiring light, was currently under the assault of red spirals littered with silver accents. With each lash of their harsh color, the golden flame weakened.

Confusion appeared on the young boy’s face. With only a single glance, he couldn’t decipher how the sight before him translated into emotions.

Before he knew it, the hand of his luminous body started to stretch towards the prince-knight.

Yet before it could reach…a tide of sorrow and fury struck him like a tidal wave.

The emotion, the intent was so thick…that his incorporeal and intangible body was somehow thrown across the room.

Looking towards the source of that wave, he saw a man with thick locks of flowing black hair, exuding an oceanic storm of roaring emotions, and thunderous, lightning-like thoughts. The light auroras flooded the massive hall, his presence upon the world was evidently dense, as if having pull and weight on the very planes of creation.

One after another in a reverie, the young boy was presented with experiences beyond the realm of belief. Yet this time though, he could make a slight connection to what was transpiring in front of him.

Without a doubt, that man was the father of the form he had taken, Leonel Arituel…and it was his inescapable presence, that reminded the boy of his purpose for being there.

The tale centered around a single life, and it was not the prince-knight’s, Leonel’s, or any other person.

It was the tale of the last heir of a now extinct noble house, and the last blood of the mythical black lion.

And his purpose here, was simple, to consolidate the experiences he went through in the tale.

Before the two forces in front of him could clash, he focused on that word, ‘Consolidate…’ And as if the world heard his thoughts, the scene changed instantly.

Time jumped forwards rather than flowed as it was thought to have behaved, and the scene presented to him was that of a boy kneeling before a great and empty hall.

Vendus had a blank, neutral expression on his face, and he was as still as a rock.

In fact, the wind-blown curtains and flying particles of dust, were also as still. Time, in this chosen moment, had evidently stopped.

A figure walked up to the kneeling boy. The luminous spirit body of someone with the same appearance, stood right next to him, indistinguishable from each other.

The faintly glowing boy looked at his more mundane form, particularly on his neutral, blank expression.

Anyone else might have described it as calm, and maybe even serene, but he knew that face more than anyone else. It was a face like the calm before a storm, one that was…ready to twist in agony and torment at the very next moment.

The kneeling child, the empty hall, and the eerie silence— it all looked so closely similar to that dream, or more accurately, that nightmare that he had in the forests.

Honestly, who could blame Vendus though, when what brought about that dream was a scene that belonged in hell. The luminous boy wondered then, were those two instances connected deeper in some way? The dream world, and reality.

Whatever the case, in his own mysteriously manifested world, he was going to relive both experiences. Perhaps…even more than that.

He was going to accept those experiences in their entirety, for whatever that meant.

Taking a deep breath, he readied himself. No matter how much he wanted things to be, he knew that what would come next wouldn’t be sunshine and rainbows.

Still the luminous boy stretched his hand, feeling inexplicably drawn to the person whose form he took. Beneath what he knew as curiosity, was a deep, underlying feeling of compassion, and buried deeper, was that same compulsion that had repeatedly driven him to stretch out his hand.

Astral spirit met solid body, an endless ocean had finally met firm land, and the two merged as one.

A blood-stained banner fell from above, and like a magician’s act, all the horrors before them reappeared.

…

On top of a small boat, a tilapia fish was happily sunbathing under a dense curtain of clouds. To his left were his best mates, of a skeleton in tattered robes, and a floating book.

“Mmhmmm…” He hummed jovial and jolly, enjoying a day of idleness. Afterall, he was a very busy fish!

Days like this where he could just lay down and enjoy the light of the sun, came few and far between for someone like him who was so eminent and exalted.

“Heh! Things are better when that kid is quiet, and I get this boat all to myself!” He shouted.

And not too soon after he said that, the skies subtly started to dim…

“Ahhhh motherfucker!”

The tilapia’s eyes shot about left, right, up and down, taking in all the changes that were rapidly taking place. Contrary to the chaotic movement of his eyes however, everything around him did not move an inch, instead remaining just as they previously were. Even the subtle dimming of the sky above was unnoticeable to anyone not paying attention.

Yet then, his eyes landed on the motionless skeleton.

A fish’s gaze did not exactly evoke feelings of solemnity and seriousness, but that was the way he stared at those hollow eye sockets all the same.

And just as he predicted, tiny green flames sparked into existence within those hollow eyes.

Instantly, the skies darkened, and the color of those bright white clouds were shifting each moment into a heavy shade of stormy grey.

The normally calm and still ocean started to stir. Miniscule waves started to splash onto the outer body of the ship, and they were only swelling higher and higher.

Rain started to fall, at first a drizzle, yet that too only became heavier and denser.

As the dense fog all around lifted, it started to be blown away by gales of whistling wind.

For each moment that passed, the green flames in the skeleton’s eyes roared stronger and stronger, and so too did the world around them wail more calamitously.

The winds no longer whistled but howled.

Each droplet of rain that fell was no longer a soft kiss on the skin, but a pounding blow as heavy as the sorrow that caused it.

Within a vast tumultuous ocean, a tiny boat was rocked violently by crashing waves, just barely holding on from being capsized and overturned.

Then under skies that were almost as dark as night, the surroundings momentarily flashed, and the shriek of a woeful and wretched scream mixed with the crash of thunder.