After Miles and the others left, Berla had tucked away Shadi’s scripts and headed back to the former High Priest’s office on the third floor of the temple, which they were still using as their base of operation. She usually enjoyed coming back here. Despite technically being an office, she found the room rather cozy, and she and Miles spent a lot of time on the comfortable couch in it. Things had changed the day before, however, when Miles invited her cousin to work for them. She understood why he needed Hayla in this position, and she hadn’t rejected the plan. Even the two getting engaged was just an unfortunate accident. But she had yet to get used to the thought of seeing Hayla regularly now.
Stopping in front of the office’s door, she mentally prepared before entering, while Brie took her usual position next to the room’s entrance. It didn’t take long for her to glance sidewards at Berla, wondering why she didn’t go in.
“Is everything okay?” Brie asked her.
“Hayla is in there...” Berla responded absentmindedly.
“Should I accompany you inside? Tomar said we didn’t need to watch her every move, but if you’re worried—”
“No, that’s not it. Don’t worry.”
Taking a deep breath, Berla shuffled around her crutches to free up a hand. Balancing herself on her one leg, she reached for the door handle and gave it a push. The door swung open and revealed her cousin, sitting at the desk on the other side of the room. She briefly raised her head to check who was entering the office, but quickly went back to work afterwards. Seeing this, Berla wordlessly hopped inside and closed the door behind her.
Hati had assumed his usual spot on a rug in the middle of the room, while Riala was lying upside down on the couch, her legs leaning against the back and her head dangling from the cushions.
“Berla!” she exclaimed as she leaned to the side until gravity did its job and she fell over. Propping herself up, she continued with an expectant expression. “What happened with that woman? Why did she have mana?”
“It seems like she’s... a Sourcerer.”
“Really? How did that happen?”
Berla walked over to the couch and let herself fall onto the couch as well, while putting her crutches in position to rest against its side with practiced motions.
“Well, she apparently got the Calling during her ritual. It’s—”
“Is it mine!?” Riala interrupted, scuttling closer towards Berla.
She glanced over to Hayla, who was still focused entirely on the papers in front of her. Still, she wasn’t sure how much to reveal in front of her. Both the fact that Miles and Tomar were checking people’s Callings, as well as Shadi getting the “Sourcerer” Calling, would undoubtedly spread through town like wildfire, so there was no point in hiding it. However, she figured it would be better if people didn’t learn about Riala having this Calling as well just yet.
“I’m sure Tomar will be able to tell you more later. Until then...” She pulled out the transcribed scripts, handing them over to Riala. “He said you could take a look at these.”
“Whoa! There are so many! Wait... They’re all that new kind,” she said with a pout.
“Check the last page, Tomar figured out one of them.”
The little girl immediately flipped through the pages until she found the one Berla was talking about. The characters weren’t in a proper format to be used as a script, and everything was written down rather hastily, but it was readable, and the page also had a few references to how the decoding process worked. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough for Riala.
“I don’t get this... What’s this word?”
“It says ‘compression.’”
“And this one?”
“That’s... I don’t know if I would call that a word. It’s ‘LZ-like,’ so... I guess it’s like whatever LZ is.”
Riala furrowed her brows and wrecked her brain, doing her best to glean the meaning of the notes. Though they clearly weren’t meant to help her understand this process, but for Miles to remember what he had discovered.
“Hrm.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
While Berla watched her trying to figure out the scripts, she threw occasional glances in Hayla’s direction. The two had never had much of a relationship, and it was normal for her cousin and the rest of the family to ignore Berla, but having her sit in the same room like this for prolonged periods of time was awkward, and her anxiety of being inferior to her cousin kept rising up.
I wonder what she’s thinking of me now... First I became a Fighter and then I lost a leg. If it wasn’t for the others... I wouldn’t even be here anymore.
When she left the temple, Berla was usually with Miles, and while there had been the occasional whisper or deprecating look from townsfolk, nobody ever dared say anything in the presence of the divine messenger. However, she knew. Regardless of the group’s view on her, it wasn’t normal for a cripple to walk around town. And for a Ruler, she expected this feeling to be intensified, because they had to pay even more attention to making good impressions.
A few glances in, Berla’s eyes suddenly met Hayla’s when she looked up again.
“What?” Hayla asked emotionlessly.
“Nothing.”
“It’s bothering me a little that you keep staring at me. Would you stop, please?”
“Eh? I...”
Berla didn’t know what to say at first, though her apprehension eventually gave way to anger, as she thought about her cousin’s request. The first time Hayla had directly addressed her in years, and she was asking her to not look her way.
“Do you really hate me that much? You don’t greet me, you don’t acknowledge me, and now I can’t even look at you?”
Hayla sighed and put down her quill. Figuring she could use a short break, she stretched and then looked straight at Berla once more while leaning back in her chair.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I know I’m worthless in the eyes of our family, but I’ve got enough of getting ignored!”
“I’m not ignoring you, I just don’t have anything to say to you.”
“What?” Berla asked, perplexed. “You said like five words to me in the past six years, since my ritual!”
“So?”
“So!? Do you think that’s fair? I didn’t do anything to you, and me not becoming a Ruler wasn’t my choice!”
“I really don’t understand what you’re on about. We never talked much. We have no common interests, we don’t have the same job, and we don’t find each other very interesting. What are we supposed to talk about?”
Shocked by the revelation that, to Hayla, this apparently had nothing to do with Berla’s Calling, she thought back to their childhood. She wasn’t wrong in saying that the two had never talked much, though she still felt like it had been more in the past.
“Fine, but you at least greeted me before!”
“Right. Greetings are kind of a waste of time though. ‘Hello!’ ‘Hello.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine.’ It’s so annoying, isn’t it?”
“You... Are you saying you never treated me differently because I became a Fighter? You just... weren’t interested in me? Or in saying ‘Hi?’”
“Was it not the same for you? You never said anything to me either.”
Realization smacked Berla straight in the face. She never even considered the possibility that a family member might have ignored her for an entirely different reason than the obvious one. And when they all started treating her differently, she had left them alone as well, not wanting to bother anyone. If Hayla wasn’t messing with her, this was all just a misunderstanding.
“When you asked me to not look at you just now...”
“It was just a question. It feels weird if someone keeps staring at you.”
Hearing this, Berla was reminded of her boyfriend. Miles tended to say what he meant as well, with little room for interpretation. He told her that he changed the way he spoke slightly over the years, however, to avoid any confusion—like what she was experiencing now. If someone ignored you and asked you to not look at them, you would of course be offended. It was natural. But taken at face value, and ignoring any potential negative implications, it didn’t necessarily mean anything bad. Hayla was driven by rationality and logic, just like Miles. In fact, he disliked greetings and smalltalk as well, though he usually made the effort now, because he knew that others tended to be different. But if that’s how it was, why was Hayla so different when interacting with other people?
“I thought you understood this.” Hayla said. “Sorry if you thought I was ignoring you. I mean, I’ve known you for as long as I can remember... I thought I didn’t have to pretend with you.”
Berla was floored. All these years, she had missed that Hayla wasn’t ignoring her because she didn’t see her as family anymore. It was quite the opposite. She trusted in Berla’s judgment as someone she had known all her life, assuming that she didn’t have to bother with pleasantries just for appearances’ sake.
“I... I guess I’m sorry for misjudging you?” Berla said.
“It’s fine.”
Silence fell over the room, as the two quickly ran out of things to say. Though it wasn’t an awkward silence. Hayla sat in her chair, contently enjoying her break, while Berla also leaned back, staring at the ceiling and rethinking her past interactions with her cousin and how wrong she had been about her.
Still lying on the floor, at a good vantage point, Hati looked back and forth between the two. Having listened to every word, he felt like he had learned something new about human interactions, and he planned to keep all of it in mind. Their conversations and relations were more complex than those of beasts, and if he were to stay with them for a while longer, every detail might matter.
Riala on the other hand had barely listened to a word while going over Miles’s notes again and again. It made for a weird display when the room grew quiet and she suddenly threw her hands in the air and herself backwards into the couch, loudly exclaiming, “This makes no sense!” in frustration.
Chuckling, Berla picked up the paper out of curiosity and looked it over herself. She had the advantage of being able to read all the notes without needing help, but they might as well have been written in scripture sigils, because they didn’t mean anything to her.
“You’re right. This does seem like nonsense.”