Caeileera

Lady Malika moved into the estate the same evening. The Viscount stayed one more day and then left towards the city. As we weren’t sure how much time we had we set off for Dan-Hem two days after that. By then, Lilyth was back to full strength and could move without any extra support. Her magic was still gone. When, the day after the noble left, the two of us were talking alone, Lilyth said that she was slowly starting to consider the possibility of it being gone for good. I didn’t want to agree with her just yet, but I had to acknowledge something was likely very wrong. By then it had been ten days since the battle with Kojiro and there being no change was worrying. Akh’Ret did warn that some of the effects would be permanent and that was before whatever Ereshkigal did to her.

There was also a certain bitch named Caeileera who asked Lilyth to check whether her powers returned.

I knew Lilyth would never blame me for this, but I still felt horrible about the whole thing.

The way she screamed…

This was only made worse by the fact that a weird bond formed between me and Lilyth where we just felt safe with one another - a feeling of comfort none other could provide us. We just… understood.

I also was, finally, able to focus on growing my relationship with Aki and it was over the weirdest thing - her interest in alchemy. Lilyth really tried to do it, bless her slimy heart, but I could see her struggling with it. It’s not that she was too dumb for it, far from it, but… some things in alchemy ran counter to her life experience so much that it broke her brain to consider them. For example, healing potions - you could create them using melkorath tree extract. The substance was semi-difficult to obtain and there was some magical component to it we all took for granted. Not Lilyth though - for her it was just a, to quote, “just fucking tree paste” because that’s how it worked on Terra.

‘It’s not like we didn’t have herbal medicine over yonder,’ she explained. ‘Some of it even worked. But there is a difference between “aloe vera helps you heal burns and deal with inflammation” and “melkorath extract can be distilled into a magical liquid that heals your wounds”. There’s a difference between seeing that in video games and actually in action.’

Still, Lilyth happily volunteered to be a test subject, because “she could probably survive if anything went wrong”. It was painful to see her stab herself in the arm so that there would be a wound to heal, though not as much if any of us did it. Aki was initially hurt by Lilyth’s lack of faith in her, but quickly changed her tune after she saw how sick our volunteer got after her first attempt. We decided to wait with the second one until after we got back from Dan-Hem. On the flip side, I didn’t know that Lilyth could actually turn this shade of green. So we all learned something new that day. The other lesson was that probably someone other than Aki should be cooking for our little family.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it, as we decided to call Savri for help. So the final thing I learned that evening was that I had never actually seen her mad. After the dressing down the two of us got, Aki decided to limit her experiments with alchemy to simple and safe stuff for now, my dictionary was enriched with several new swearwords, Chirpy began giving the medic a wide berth and I heard Malika say one time that she didn't know whether to be proud or terrified of her daughter.

‘For someone allegedly at the loss of words, Savri sure had a lot to say to you,’ my jelly joked after she felt strong enough to talk.

‘I’m so soorry!’ Aki said probably for the thousandth time that day.

‘Don’t worry. You meant well. Though I agree with Sav that maybe… less risky projects are a better place to start.’

‘I just wanted to make something useful for us!’

‘You will. You just need some practice. And we all learned something useful too from this. I mean, if we ever need to poison someone we’ll know what to make.’

Aki punched Lilyth in the shoulder.

‘Not funny!’

‘Why not?’ I asked, innocently. ‘I think you could make a decent living as a poisoner.’

Aki harrumphed and stormed out of the room. Lilyth and I looked at ourselves and broke out laughing.

Our blue-haired cutie quickly got over her indignation once Lilyth got out of bed, looking only slightly green. This in turn made Chirpy unhappy as he found out that bedridden people are perfect to cuddle against. Lilyth said that she felt strong enough to get up an hour before, but the furry asshole looked so cute and comfortable she didn't have the heart to disturb him. I threw Chirpy an annoyed look but my wife simply said that she did the same with her cat, which only caused the furball to look like he had been vindicated. He then started rubbing against Lilyth's legs, which only caused her to lift him and hug him. Chirpy then looked back and poked his tongue at me.

Motherfucker. Oh no, you furball. I will not yield before you.

So I approached Lilyth and kissed her, squeezing Chirpy between us. He let out an annoyed meowl and jumped down. After we parted Lilyth asked:

‘Not that I mind, but are you seriously jealous of a glorified housecat?’

The nesumi let out an indignant chirp.

Teeheehee!

Then something occurred to me and I told Lilyth about it.

‘You think Chirpy is trying to come between you and the people you love over you casting a [Sleep] spell on him?’ she asked in disbelief and looked at the blasted furball.

I have never seen him trying to look as innocent as he did now.

Lilyth shrugged and pulled me towards the bed.

‘Let’s see how he likes this then.’

Chirpy, clearly defeated, left our brief make-out session halfway through.

Victory had never tasted so sweet.

The closer it got to our trip the less we actually wanted to go. Even Lilyth didn't seem that willing to go try to restore her powers, though I can imagine the cause for that particular change of plans started with “C” and ended with “aeileera”. Still, it was something we had to try to do. Certain “Nazi Fuck” had to be stopped.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

We estimated the whole trip would take us between two and three weeks. It was a surprise to Lilyth to learn that a week on Dwynveia lasted six days rather than seven like on Terra. I had no opinion on the subject as we just tracked days and years in the Badlands. If I had my maths right it was currently two-hundred-and-twenty-fifth day of the third sixth year of Vicar Tirrleena. Each of the inner-circle Vicars got a twelve-year period named after them before it rotated to the next one. As there were only four of them at the time the whole rotation technically was supposed to last forty-eight years. It rarely did. So despite it being Tirrleena’s third turn she actually held the position for about sixty years, which was way above the average of thirty, and ever since she got her position there has been quite an attrition in the ranks of the Crimson Vicars. Did I mention that she was quite influential with the Serrated Blades?

At any rate, our first stop was Zel-Vyme as we wanted to pick up some more fresh travel supplies. We did have a small stock of travel meals between what remained from the stuff we had on our way to Mer-Cas and what we found on the Red Masks, but there was a clear difference between eating fresh food and preserved meals. Especially after spending a while eating Ireela’s cooking. Discovering that Ren was almost as good a cook as her mom only made getting proper supplies more essential.

Given how our previous visit to Zel-Vyme was under less than pleasant circumstances, it was weird to casually enter the village the evening of the second day of our trip but to say our group turned some heads would be an understatement. Rennie handled all the formalities in the village because she was the most normal-looking of our little bunch. Said formalities may have included giving the innkeeper an extra five hundred Divines as a just-shut-the-fuck-up-and-serve-us fee. Funnily enough, it was Lilyth of all people who caused this. While she had arm “tattoos” covered up, there was little we could do about the patches of liquid darkness on her cheeks. They had mostly “dried up” by then, but there was still this slight… ooziness to them. Aki was furious about that and said so when we went to our rooms to unpack, but Lilyth, while also upset, simply shrugged and said:

‘I’m just happy it’s not you or Caei that got hit with that.’

My stupid, silly, jelly. When will you start caring about yourself?

Lilyth

We spent the night in the inn and set off towards the cave in the morning. I could see neither Caei nor Aki were happy with me shrugging off the bigoted innkeeper, but what else could you do? It was either that or sleep outside and I got too used to beds of late again to pass up an option to sleep in one.

At least for me going following the road was… weird since I had two distinct sets of memories of going the other way and I had to dive into one that wasn’t mine to get directions. There was also a difference in terrain layout between what we remembered and what was here. That caused a very weird sense of… I don’t know deja vu? Cognitive dissonance? Being absolutely bonkers?

‘Correct me if I am wrong, guys, but that side path at the foot of the mountains wasn’t here “before”? I asked the next morning when we reached the mountains surrounding the hollow where the Tower of Trials was.

It wasn’t much of a path, actually, just an area cleared of trees. The area was still very eerie though as there was a “border” where the forest just… ended.

‘I distinctly remember there being a forest here,’ Aki said. ‘But I also… don’t.’

‘Same…’ Caei admitted.

‘Why does it matter?’ Ren asked.

‘Because our destination is up this path,’ I explained. ‘And the idea of heading into a place you can swear didn't exist a month ago and is clearly magical…’

I pointed at the no-more-forest line.

‘... doesn't fill me with confidence.’

Ren looked at the forest and I could see her eyes widened.

‘I didn't notice that.’

‘We are also in a pocket of silence, but for the life of me I cannot remember if it was here before.’

We looked at ourselves with Aki and shook our heads.

‘No clue,’ I said. ‘Neither me nor the other-me were paying attention to such details.’

‘Same here,’ My wife added.

‘Those can sneak up on you, can they?’ Ren sighed.

We all agreed, sent our pets to a safe place as a precautionary measure, and started heading down the path.

It took us maybe half an hour to get to the cave. The place looked surprisingly non-spooky, but it clearly was not natural, as few natural formations would have a mostly even-looking corridor leading to a circular chamber of smooth stone, in the middle of which stood a summoning altar identical to the one I woke up on what seemed to be an eternity before. It was just a simple stone block, but I involuntarily shuddered seeing it. Under the wall to the right of it, there was a simple wooden chest the other me found some starter equipment in and behind it the very reason we came here too: three slightly glowing lines of magical runes - one flourishy, one almost perfect and the cuneiform bullshit in the middle.

‘Any change?’ Caei, clearly nervous, asked.

‘No,’ I sighed in response. ‘Let’s take a look at the script, I am going to copy it… again and then we will go.’

I lost my original magical scroll along with the rest of our gear in the Abyss.

‘Hurry then!’ Aki stressed.

‘Gonna need you both, actually. You know areas of magic I don’t, so you might see things I would miss.

That turned out to be the right idea as Caei was able to identify two of the three scripts.

‘The top one is in the language of Fire, while the bottom is Life. I have no idea what they are saying though. I won’t even bother asking Akh'ret whether he could translate because I know he won’t.’

‘So what's the middle then?’ I asked.

‘That Primaeval Arcana Sav uses maybe?’ Caei ventured a guess.

‘Can I see?’ Ren asked but had no more clue than the rest of us did. ‘Why are they glowing?’

‘There is some faint magic to them,’ I explained. ‘If you touch them they should be slightly warm.’

‘You sure it’s safe?’ she asked.

‘Should be? When I touched these back in the Tower nothing bad happened. See?’

I did and traced one of the life runes with my fingers. It was as if the electric current ran through my body. It wasn’t painful though… there was joy to it. A message popped up in front of my eyes.

Interface reinitialised.

Yes!

I wanted to pull my hand away but it was stuck there. The runed began glowing brighter.

I started yelling to the others to run but it was too late. There was a flash of light and we all found ourselves standing in a dimly-lit room with a drab mustard-coloured floor covering and white, water-stained walls. There was a cheap worn-out wooden door in one of the walls. A message appeared in front of my eyes

Entering: The Extrinsic Corridors

Type: Dungeon(Legendary)

Difficulty: Medium - Deadly (depending on the path taken)

Description: You find yourself in a place that only exists in the dark cracks in the fabric of reality.

Objectives:

* Find an exit

* Survive

Rewards:

* 5000 experience points.

Well… fuck.