Dreamer

one hour before his awakening

Lepius

It was only fitting that their path took them back to where it all started. It was the same road as it was the thousands of times they had walked it, even underneath the rubble – a turn here, a couple of steps there, and another turn.

It was simple, reliable instinct.

Andura talked without end, chattering on and on. With her in the backdrop and his eyes closed, he could almost pretend they were walking home like they always did, and of course she spoke about the mundane and the inane, about Yurth and the day of love. He didn’t even try to stop her. If he also had a method to his madness, a way to relieve the storm inside him, there would be no stopping him either.

Her fingers tightened around his, and they squeezed. He squeezed back.

The raging battle was elsewhere, and beyond their house was the perimeter of the forest. They needed to see it just one last time.

Andura fell silent as it came into view.

What were once proud oaken walls now was rubble. Half the ceiling had collapsed, and the foliage that had given shade overhead was dust on the floor. Seeing it again, so hatefully ruined, made something inside him lash out until he weeded it out with a breath. Enough throwing up. Enough with his silly fantasies, not when a darling of reality stood shaking before him.

Both his hands tightened on Andura.

All that kept him walking now was the vision of a place elsewhere, where she could sit and laugh and smile without the burden of today to dampen it.

And then it came.

“You should be elsewhere. It's not safe.”

Andura beside him began to tremble. Oh… what a beautiful noise that is.

Rosemary’s voice was so hoarse, like she had to drag every word up her throat herself. His tears gathered all over again. If only could he ignore the rest of the morning and focus on those two things: Rosemary being worried for them, and Andura waffling on. If only he could... he would be able to imagine walking through the door, then seeing Father carving something silly, and Mother berating him for it as usual, wouldn't he?

But he couldn't. The smoke and char chided him, and they were too loud.

Mother and Father were gone. Yet Rosemary was not, and here she stood, somehow still alive, and that fact gave him the energy to turn and look at her.

Without her vibrant hair and coated with soot, he could have mistaken her for a log of blackwood. Cracks ran up and down her body. His knees gave way at the sight, and he clutched onto Andura, unable to lay a hand on the spirit lest she dissolve away into dust, like the logs left for too long in campfires.

“Rosemary…”

“You must’ve lost your satchels. Here.” She produced two more, but the tanned bark holding the insides were charred, “I must apologise for that. My powers are reflective of the grove.”

This time it was Andura, “Rosemary… stop. Please, just come with us.”

“I am bound to my grove.”

“Damn it, Rosemary. You can leave. You’re just not-”

“I must stop you here. I wish for you to leave right now. It's still unsafe.”

So, this was it? The last piece of rope they had clinging to the warm past, finally cutting itself off?

Lepius found himself kneeling at her feet, but he didn't care how he looked or sounded because Rosemary, his Rosemary, was right in front of him, and her bark was dissolving away. She was dissolving away. He reached out and placed just one finger on her foot, then a hand when he discovered the bark was still firm.

She was still here.

And so he leapt forward and latched himself around her legs, fastening his arms around them, trying not to let the tears spill out now. Her legs shoved at him, trying to push him away, but he did not budge.

“Lepius, take Andura and leave. There may be more invaders roaming around.”

His voice struggled to pass through the sludge in his mouth, “No… no, I’m not – I’m not leaving without you, no way-”

“Lepius. My sapling. I am bound to my grove, as I have said-”

Andura shook the staff doggedly at her, “Damn it, Rosemary! You are bound to a grove? No, you are bound to a home! Do you think every grove in every forest has a spirit?”

“No, but-”

Andura bowled her over. “You are bound to us! I am selfish, and I want you with me! We make a home, not the grove!”

“I-I…”

Andura dropped the staff and came over, “Please. We’re your little saplings, remember?”

They locked their arms together, sister and brother, and now Rosemary was trapped within a net of arms and tangled hair. She wriggled like caught fish. Then Andura leaned down, and just like she did with him, she pressed her forehead to Rosemary, and for a moment, he could feel it. A slight shift in mana.

Andura… his heart swelled, then deflated as he thought of Mother and Father.

She did it… Mother, Father… I’ll tell you one day, but… she did it.

Rosemary’s shoulders relaxed as Andura breathed in, then out. Lepius did not know what mana Andura had just focused, but it spilled out onto him too, and for a second he could hear it all in the distance. He could hear the flirtatious laughter, see the shared smiles across the room. After them came the smell of Flures’ autumn hair, the dryad he shared a kiss with last spring, and how her arms felt wrapped around his neck.

Of course… was there any other? Of course his sister’s mana was love.

“We love you, Rosemary. Don’t leave us.”

Rosemary gave no rebuttal. Instead, she began trembling, and Lepius wrapped himself tighter around her legs, pleading with all the Eldertrees that it was not what he thought it was. The trembling went down to her feet. Is she dying? And then he looked up, and the face so well composed was twisting up, and there were tears, actual tears, and a flickering behind the eyes that she couldn't hide. Rosemary was crying.

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It made him cry, and Andura too, and they made a little bundle on the floor.

She said through the tears, “Okay… okay… I love you too. So much... you wouldn't know. And you'll need someone to guide you, you silly fools.”

Already her bark began to harden, and he thanked the Eldertrees for Andura. A spirit came from someplace beyond reality, and to think that it was bound by the rules of this world? By tree trunks? No, she was bound by mana, and what a beautiful thing mana was, to craft Rosemary up and sustain her with their love. And she would be sustained, for there was no end to their love for her.

They remained in that bundle for a while. Both of them spent thetime running their hands over the bark growing harder, smelling the charcoal fading away, and watching the summer leaves regrowing on her head.

It would be all right.

There was a nasal voice from a man in gold and purple as he rounded the corner.

“Looks like we have a couple of stragglers, huh?”

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They stood no chance.

He tossed Rosemary back like a bushel, then kicked Andura to the side. The staff he threw away without a thought as Lepius’ head spun with a snap to a boot.

Crack.

There was something welling and bursting, like a dam he had kept from breaking for far too long, and the sight of Andura screaming forced fissures onto it. Behind the dam was something that he didn't dare think of. Since the moment he had left that half-forgotten dream in the Sanctum, the insidious voice had grown louder and louder until he could no more ignore it and push it down than he did a cough. It rushed up, faster and faster, as whatever control he had slipped at the sight before him.

“That damn adventurer will pay,” the gold man said, and then smiled when he saw what was before him: a wriggling, terrified Andura. “Ha, I’ll have some fun before I leave.”

It all came rushing out of them both. Rosemary, who had never raised her voice, let out a guttural scream, and a spire of oak shot upwards and pierced a fault in the armour at the shoulder.

Somewhere, Reidhammon smiled.

Someone had savaged slashes onto what was once enchanted, pristine gold. There were too many faults to pick from, both deep and shallow. But Rosemary picked well. There was a small bit of resistance at the clash of wood and gold, but the armour broke before her focus did.

Then upwards the spire stabbed, through bone and flesh.

The assailant roared and slashed about in every direction, at Andura, at the oak, at empty air, and his steel cut through the wood. The spire broke. But he was injured, and that was enough for Lepius, or was it even him? He felt like an observer, watching the world shift around a body he had no control over, and there it was again, that voice.

“You did well, heheh, time for some fun.”

His hand clasped onto the man's knee, then around to the bit of skin uncovered behind it. He was not sure where the mana came from, inside him or from whatever was battling for control in his brain: hatred against despair against disgust against protectiveness. But at one touch he could see it all. He could see the vessels of blood, the rotten liver, the tormented brain. The heart pumped blood to the kidneys; the kidneys pumped it back clean of excretions.

It was a perfectly functioning machine.

Not for long. That sinister voice rose in him again, giddy: “Oh, this body has healing affinity! Heheh this will be fun,” and Lepius almost shouted in horror, but for a half-second, he faltered. The dam broke. His head and heart were shaking as he looked at the mountain before him. It was overflowing: the losses and the nightmares that came true, they piled up and up until he was standing before a teetering brink of which there was no drain to other than the human before him. The human so ripe for destruction.

The mana pressurised inside him burst and raced to his fingertips. There was a lull to which he asked himself, "What… what am I doing?", but he succumbed to it anyway.

Succumbed to the voice.

Under his hands the flesh bubbled, and every muscle atrophied all at once. Had those vocal cords not been twisted like a rag, the man would’ve been screaming.

Bile and acid leaked through the pores in the gold armour, and he saw every atom of it all. His mana narrated every detail. Digestive acid pumped through the blood vessels, ripping apart capillaries, bile and blood replacing it in the stomach. Every muscle cramped as one. The flesh curled in and collapsed onto itself as the acid tore through whatever remained. Blood spurted out of the visor.

And the gold man fell and didn't rise.

“Did you see that?!” the voice was smug, “I still got it.”

He felt himself return to his body, and with that, he threw up again. He looked down at the mess, then his hands.

They were the way he had left them, roughened bark with no wounds, but now there was a searing heat that wouldn't abate. He had never used so much mana before, and what was the point of it? The sudden urge to cut off his hands struck him, to toss away the ruined, tainted bark and burn it so it wouldn’t come to taint everything he touched.

Murder, Lepius thought, I have killed. With these hands for healing.

There they were, his simple hands. Atop them now were the entrails of the fallen, intestines and organs scarred with acid, and they soaked his bark with blood. He blinked, and it was all gone.

And the overwhelming gravity of it all collapsed onto him, him on his knees and in a puddle of blood and bile, the monster he was.

He heard a voice behind him, “Ah.”

Andura had a great slash going down her torso.

Sap flowed out like a waterfall from his nightmares, and Rosemary was stitching it up, but he could already see... it was deep. The spirit looked up with teary eyes and shook her head.

Everything was so insignificant now - his bloodied hands, his murder. The little voice vanished. The sight of his sister chased away the growing headache. Everything was shutting down, down, down.

Down.

“No... nononono- Andura, no.”

“H-h-hey, Lep. The sword got me.”

He latched his hands onto the wound, and the moment he did, all the breath in his lungs left him. There was a gaping maw somewhere below the ground, and what was left of him it sucked in, tainted limb by tainted limb.

This is a joke, right?

He would wake up, safe in bed, and he would find Mother and Andura chatting away in the kitchen about Father’s latest carving. They would turn to him with their bright smiles. “Sleepyhead is up,” his mother would say, before fussing him into chair with a plate of bread, cheese, and fruits, while he told her about the crazy nightmare he just had. She would complain and braid his hair again. Then, he would eat and listen as Andura poked fun, and talked on about Yurth, and he would never take the warmth of the sun or the company of the ones he loved for granted. Never again.

Then, Andura coughed up sap. The vision shuddered and fractured away to reveal the prone body before him. His mind was leaving through his nose.

He set his jaw, even if what little mana he had left shouted at him not to.

“You’ll be fine. Come on, Rosemary, on three. Together-”

“Stop, L-Lep.”

There were no words from Rosemary. She had to stop crying first.

“Rosemary, please, if we just gather our mana-”

“Just stop, Lep,” she said, and it was barely above a rattle and a whisper now, “shut up and listen to me.”

“Andura…”

“Y-you… you stay alive, you hear me? Because… because I’m scared, Lep.”

She was sailing away, far, too far for him. Her voice was thin, but he could hear the rising and falling of pitch, the warbling within each word. This wasn't the voice of a young woman, not anymore, this scared whimpering of a child.

“I’m scared… I don’t wanna die, Lep, I don’t wanna-” and whatever else was drowned out by sniffling and sap bubbling from her mouth.

He held her close to him, just like they did when they were young and could still share a cot. The position was familiar... and yet so strange. “Shh…” he said. And then he hummed the lullaby their mother did whenever they woke up from nightmares back when they were young, and between him and Rosemary’s caresses, her trembling died down.

“Mommy? Mommy… I’m scared…”

He knew what he needed to do. Even tainted, he was still a healer. He latched onto her hand.

“You’re coming home, Dura. And Rosemary’s here to greet you at the door, isn’t she?”

Rosemary steeled her voice just for Andura, just to say one sentence, “Welcome back, my sapling.”

“Mmm.”

“And Mommy’s making elderberry-stuffed bread. Can’t you smell it?”

“Mm… Mommy…”

Within him were the dregs of his mana. If he used it all up, he would die. But… this was more important, much more than life or death.

This was his baby sister.

Andura,

His vision swirled into a blur. His focus sharpened one last time, and he wasn't alone, for Rosemary clutched onto his hands too, adding to the symphony. What a beautiful noise it was. There was the clacking of Father’s tools on the wood, the chirping birds and the bubbling streams, and at the foreground – Mother’s laughter.

“My little saplings.”

He wanted to lose himself in it too, but he blinked away the tears, and added his voice, then Rosemary’s too. And when Andura smiled, it was enough for him.

“Rosie, Mommy… it’s been such a crazy day, huh… but I’m home…”

She didn't say more. The world closed upon him as he gripped the ring on her finger.

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Rosemary

Everything had turned to ash. Yet here she remained, and she didn't know why.

Rosemary huffed, tears streaming as she lugged the staff and Lepius through the forest. Between her blurry vision and the foliage, she tripped and stumbled more than she walked, but it was at least a step away, one step further each time from all the good and bad she’d known in her life.

When the sky opened up, she thought she had reached the end.

No. It was just a clearing.

Lepius should rest here. In the sun. It will be warm.

The staff she discarded next to a tree. She placed Lepius on the softest grass and watched him sleep.

To wake, another time.