Splitting with Aria, Axel decided to return to what was becoming a second home while he was in Greenhaven: the Library of Illumination. To save on expenses, he returned to the inn and got directions from the innkeeper for the easiest way to the library. Axel learned the trip would take about an hour on foot through half a dozen city blocks. This quickly dissuaded Axel from walking, as the threat of bounty hunters still hung over his head.
Although he was lower on funds than he liked, taking the platforms felt safer alone. Axel arrived at the launch and took a platform. The ride to the library was about the same as the last several times he had taken it until construction blocked the path ahead, and Axel needed to get off about two blocks away. As he walked, Axel tried to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious, but that was hard in an area full of strangers, mostly having their cores already. Everyone began to look like a potential threat, and his vision started to get as hyper-focused as it could when he knew he was in a predator’s territory in the jungle.
As Axel crossed an alley, a deep chill ran through the previously warm air, causing him to look to the right and see a man in armor frozen in a block of translucent blue ice. This caused a new chill to run down Axel’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold coming from the alley. Scenes of Cade, the man he would have beaten to death at the inn if not stopped, and the bandits flashed through his mind unwanted. Axel’s breath started to seize in his chest with these memories.
Breathing hard, Axel stumbled away from the alley, thinking this might be some kind of attack on him from whoever killed the man. Axel’s journal informed him that his body was having a panic attack based on vital data information, debasing him of this fantasy. Not wanting to be vulnerable and near the alley with someone recently dead, Axel moved as quickly as he could and made it to the steps of the library, only to sit under the statue of the Goddess, waiting for whatever was happening to pass.
Working his breath in and out repeatedly until it was back to normal, Axel grew worried about his reactions to dead people. He didn’t seem to have issues when the beasts were dying or when he killed them. It also seemed to be much easier to handle while he was with Aria when they found the dead man in the other alley. Was it something he was doing, or was he backsliding because he was feeling vulnerable? Working through the memories while sitting on the stairs under the statue of the Goddess, Axel did one of the hardest things he had ever done. He began to work through the emotions from Cade’s death.
Sitting with his back to the stone pillar and closing his eyes, Axel began to breathe rhythmically to help with the process of reliving memories. Axel started with the first time he had met the man he had until recently called his best friend. The memories followed Axel as he had just been rejected by several of the other kids and had no one to play games with. The sun was bright and warm with a gentle breeze wafting through the park. The swing was a lonely place, and in the distance, Axel could hear the other children laughing in a game they had made up and likely forgot later that day.
That was when a young boy, all smiles and skinned knees, came up to Axel and asked if he wanted to play. This was the first time in a very long time that anyone but his father wanted to play with Axel since he had hurt several of the others during class when Axel failed to control his strength. The memory moved to a game of tag where, in his excitement, Axel tagged Cade too hard, sending him tumbling across the grass.
Knowing what would happen, Axel waited for the crying and fearful looks, only to get a bright laugh and “That was amazing!” from Cade. This memory began to fade as Axel returned it to his memory palace and could feel the tears of the child he was, isolated from everyone, trickle down his cheek. Returning to his trance-like state, Axel let the memories of childhood flow quickly until the day that Cade took himself, Axel, and the newly adopted Lyra out of the village through a secret path, a water drainage tunnel set in the wall that had broken bars. Cade could see that Lyra was having issues fitting in just like Axel, as she was from a foreign city-state and did not want to take a blood rite to become the blood of Axel’s family.
The drain led to a small river that was near the northern wall. This was such a foolish idea as many beasts would have eaten all of them, but after an hour of fishing, it had helped bring a smile to Lyra’s face and allowed her to finally relax and lose some of the sadness in her eyes that Axel knew she was carrying. Axel then relieved the pain of getting his butt beaten by a scared and irate mother who had been spending the last few hours looking for all of them. As the memory flowed away, Axel let it go with a gentle push to return to his memory palace.
The next memory that came into clear focus was the first hunt, a trial all children must do in the village to be ready for the dangers of the world. Axel and Cade had to wake hours before the sun to join the hunters on one of their easier hunts for Gin, while Lyra had caught a jungle fever strain that was taking her blessing time to heal, so she had to stay home. The chilled air of a spring morning caressed Axel’s face as he bundled up and stood excitedly next to his friend. They had been planning this trip out all that week, boasting to each other that they would take down a ShadowFang like Finn did in the past and how proud Cade’s dad would be of him.
The hunt, though, was long and boring for most of the morning until the hunters started to panic when they ran into the tracks of a Tempest beast. A large bipedal carnivore with two arms with sharp claws that could rip through armor or scales. This beast’s jaws could swallow a man in two easy bites and was, when standing tall, between 25 to 40 feet tall depending on age. It also carried the armor that many of the beasts in this world seemed to breed. Just as they began to panic, there was the sound of snapping trees not too far in the distance.
With no better plan, the hunters decided to lead it away from Axel and Cade and had them hide until they did not hear the beast. The hunters informed them that if they did not make it back by the time the sun was at the topmost point, Cade and Axel should follow their training and take the hunting trail back to the village. The hunters then started to make noises to draw the beast away and used their powers to move as quickly away as possible.
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The hours passed and no hunter returned. Axel only found out later that they were chased for another day before his father, Quin, and Finn saved them by defeating the beast. Axel and Cade began to start making their way back when they saw a Snar sitting there eating some of the vegetation. Axel looked at Cade and then got a nod back from his friend, reading each other’s intent. Almost synchronized, they raised their training spears and threw them at the same time, missing wildly with each, causing the Snar to turn and begin to chase them mercilessly. This made both Cade and Axel leave the hunting trail and get lost, a major mistake as neither had anything more than a book and classroom knowledge on wilderness survival.
The memories then went through the long nights and days that they spent in the jungle trying to find their way home. By the end of the first day, they were out of trail rations as neither thought to bring more than that day’s worth. That night they lost their packs to some scavengers as they did not set a good night watch, and both dozed off. This forced them to make spears out of branches and chipped stones and hunt their deadliest prey to date, one of those damn Snars. The memories flooded of the several failed attempts to trap or fight one until they finally succeeded by using the makeshift spears to trap and kill the Snar.
The meal was awful over the terrible fire they set, but Axel could feel the accomplishment followed by them both swearing an oath that they were now brothers in spirit and through the blood of their prey. Later that night, Quin arrived at their small camp and brought them home to Axel’s worried mother and a similarly worried Finn. That hide from the Snar was likely still in Cade’s room while the horn was in Axel’s if it had not all been thrown out by Finn by now.
The next memories that flowed were of the hours training with Lyra always riding both of them on their forms, Axel with his inability to use anything besides a spear or halberd, and Cade much of the time not sparring seriously with either of them. This was also where Cade started to be distant as he was training more and more with his father, but Cade would always find time to hang out with Axel, making life less lonely.
Those years were more of a blur even to Axel’s ability to recall as the days besides learning were very much the same. Then Cade left the village, as he came of age six months before Axel and Lyra. Seeing the memories now, Cade seemed to have lost much of his impish grin and was much more serious when he bid farewell. Axel assumed at the time that it was just him being nervous, but Cade didn’t return for almost six months when he came with a new core.
Now that Axel was going through the process of getting his Trial, it was making less sense why Cade was only a Novice one and his core did not seem the most stable when he issued his challenge. Try as Axel might, though, he could not find anything in his memories that had an answer to this question. As these memories faded, Axel braced for the hardest memories to get through, the final duel.
As he pulled the memory, it seemed to fight him as if against his will, trying to refuse the viewing of the memory of the duel. But with effort, this terrible memory began to play before Axel’s eyes. Feeling the wounds again and desperation, Axel began to get confused as his thoughts started to jumble and his memory palace shook while reviewing. His head began to pound, but Axel pushed through the pain and saw the dumb pride and the refusal of either of them to back down on something that Lyra would likely have given them both, mixing her genetics for two children through the iron wombs that the healers kept from a time before the Silence.
As Axel reviewed the memory over and over, trying to work through it, things were not making sense. While he could feel the emotions and pain of the time, several of them felt, for lack of a better word, hollow. The pride did not feel correct, the anger before the crimson backlash took him felt more inflamed than any anger he had felt before, like something was feeding it.
Could his proto-core have been in a backlash even then? As that thought went through his head, Axel reviewed every backlash and they felt different. Someone’s power? That felt right… no, it could not have been, for someone would have caught it. This would need more looking into, but after working through the memories, Axel felt much better and more balanced.
As Axel was about to put this to the side, the fact that his thoughts had abruptly changed track and started to make up other reasons worried him. When he looked at his mind palace now, there was damage to it from when he forced the memory of the duel. That had never happened before and pointed to something much scarier than Axel was ready to handle at this moment. This caused Axel to do something that Aria mentioned doing many times and ask his journal to make a quest to ask Lyra and Aria about the duel and what he found.
Across his vision, his journal added the quest, much to Axel’s surprise as this was the first time trying something like that and not letting the goddess guide his quests and give advice. Feeling better and knowing daylight was burning, Axel got to his feet and made another realization in that he was stupid as if there was a bounty hunter, Axel had been sitting right there in the open like a moron. Thanking the Goddess for looking after fools like him, Axel moved up the stairs quickly and found the section on known Crimson Entities looking for the one he was planning to fight.
This was an easier task than the beasts as things in the section in the library were much easier to do research but were also much busier than the beast section. With a quick skim of the shelves, Axel found a book on his prey and the two books on what Lyra would likely fight if she was lucky and could take energy healing or the path she and Cade planned out. Axel then began to read through the thick tomes that held many known strategies, taking note of weak points and what needed to overwhelm his entity.
Axel finished his reading as the evening bells rang out, calling an end to the workday. Axel then returned his book and waved at the Curator that he had originally met on the first day. She was cleaning another mess as someone else must have startled her, though she gave Axel a nod while stacking documents. Axel noticed the construction signs were gone and took a platform back to the area where his inn was located. As Axel arrived at the prearranged tavern, he found a seat and waited for Aria to give him the all-clear to return to their inn.
The signal turned out to be Lyra in a new dress of deep greens that matched her eyes. This caused his health monitor to alert him at an irregular heartbeat when his heart did a hard budump. Not for the first time, Axel wished that Lyra swung his way, but there was nothing he could do. As Lyra sat down, she said in a sultry tone, “Why Axel, your face is all red. I take it you like my dress?” At Axel’s nod, she continued, “Well, Aria made me dress up for our ‘Date’ and since she is dealing with a tail, wanted me to escort you back to the inn.”
With those words, Lyra rose from her seat and held out a hand to Axel, and proceeded to escort him back to the inn and up to his and Aria’s room to be greeted by a grinning Aria who then leaped into Axel’s arms, kissing him fiercely and passionately.
“Have a hard day with the scrolls?” came a breathless question.
“You have no idea. Let’s get some food up here and talk out some of our plans. I also have some things to ask Lyra about the time around the duel,” Axel said in a serious tone.