Chapter 2: A New World

Chapter 2

A New World

The two walked amid the never ending, shifting winds of ash. But strangely, near this strange man, Ei, ash seemed to deviate from his path. Suna didn’t like being close to someone who was practically a stranger, but she didn’t like the idea of breathing in ash even more. Now, breathing in what seemed to be fresh air, she realized just how thick the ash had become, and wondered just how she was ever able to get used to it. Having walked with Ei for a little bit now, she also noticed her aches and pains were lessening. She had grown so used to them, being without them made her feel different, as if she was now in a new body. She couldn’t help but double check that she wasn’t imagining things, testing her different joints.

The man turned briefly, then back, simply smiling.

“Suna.”

Suna stopped her motions, shifting her gaze to the man.

“...Yes?”

“I’ll speak bluntly. I travel worlds.”

A look of confusion crept onto Suna’s face. She wrestled with the sentence, but couldn’t come to accept it.

“This is one of many worlds, Suna. All part of a greater world. Connected by a barrier, which we’re heading towards now. Moving things between worlds costs a great deal, but…”

The girl stopped walking. And so too, did the man, who turned around to face her.

“I refuse to live in your debt.” She placed her hand on her knife. “I can’t pay off this kind of debt.”

She knew it was too good to be true. This was a crazy man.

“No, no,” The man waved his hands. “I don’t mean it like that, that’s not- that’s not what I’m trying to say. Just, look.”

Then, something inexplicable occurred. She saw… the World. Not with her eyes, but with something within her. Something deeper, something she didn’t know existed.

“You can see it, right? Look here.” The image the girl was sensing seemed to zoom in. She saw a world, beset by a blanket of ash. It was her world. She never saw her world from such a ridiculous angle, but she didn’t need to be told that this was where she was from.

“We’re here, right now. Yrma, they call it. We’re going to go to Nadeer, which is connected at these points. Forget what I said earlier. I just wanted to let you know what was happening. Once we get to Nadeer, you can go and live out your life there. It’s not perfect… but then again, nowhere really is. Understand?”

The girl digested the knowledge. She didn’t know how, but as soon as she saw the world, she knew. That the world she was in was dying, and that she really truly was the last person alive on it. And that Nadeer really did exist. That this person wasn’t making this all up.

So she nodded. And the two continued once again, setting off into the storm of ash.

“...”

“... What is it?”

“?”

Out of nowhere, unprompted, Ei put forth the question. A bit startled, Suna didn’t know how to react. They had been walking for a rather long time, and that whole time they didn’t share a word.

“I can sense roughly what you’re feeling. Do you not want to go? Do you really want to stay here?”

This only startled Suna further. She struggled to find the right words to say, she felt like a bug under a rock, comfortable, only to have her safe place lifted. Her own mind, her own emotions. This person can even sense those?

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just, you know, there’s not much point in walking this whole way if you don’t even want to leave.”

“No, n-no, of course I want to leave this shitty place…”

“...Then?”

“It’s just… what you said earlier. About it costing you. What do you mean?”

“Oh, that?”

“I mean, if it really costs you so greatly, I don’t get why you’re letting me go, free of charge. Why help me?”

She didn’t say it outright, but doubt was written on her face.

“... Haha. It’s as you said before. I don’t know. Isn’t that right?”

Suna’s eyebrows furrowed.

“Well, let’s just say I’m helping you because I feel like it, okay? Yeah, it’ll cost me a bit. It costs energy to traverse the world boundaries, and taking someone with me will cost even more, that’s just how it works. But my energy will eventually come back with some time, it’s not permanent or anything. That satisfy you?”

Suna remained cautious, but decided, for now, to trust the mysterious figure. It’s not as if she would know more about weird powers than this person anyways. And, well, she resigned herself to the thought that maybe even a life of servitude would be better than dying in this ash.

For a long while, the two walked in silence between them, with the drone of the ash surrounding them. They slept at various caves that scattered the wastelands. At first she constantly kept her guard up, discreetly monitoring every movement the man made. She also got a closer look at him, which was much easier out of the fierce winds of ash. He seemed to be young, in his 20’s. But given his abnormality, she figured it was useless trying to judge him by her conventions. He had dark, straight, pitch black hair that tapered to his neck, covering his head. Looking at it was odd, as if it reflected no light whatsoever. As if black ink was splotched onto her view. She felt as if his face was a bit uncanny. Somehow slightly off from what she was used to seeing. She couldn’t really put a word to this feeling of hers, though. He was rather thin, but not frail. He just had a thin frame. He wasn’t extremely tall, but definitely not short. On closer inspection, his legs seemed somewhat long. And occasionally, he would glance at her and smile. Normally, thinking about it now, she felt that such an action would be extremely creepy, like a predator smiling at its prey in anticipation. But, she didn’t feel this was the case. Her gut feeling was just that the man was genuinely happy to help her. But this behavior went against absolutely everything she had come to know about people, and a large part of her brain warned her to remain vigilant, that this person definitely had bad intentions, but at a certain point, even she had to acknowledge the large possibility that this was simply a good, albeit abnormal man.

Contemplating such things, the two eventually encountered a mountain. The terrain, which had been relatively flat, grew more rough, requiring the two to scale boulders and hills blanketed with ash, so much so that a lot of time and energy was spent solely on wiping off the accumulated ash off a surface to climb it.

“Yeah, this is getting a bit rough and slow. Suna, if we don’t move quickly, this world will collapse before we reach the boundary. I didn’t want to do this, but…”

Suna, who was currently scaling a small vertical rock wall, was too focused on climbing to notice Ei who appeared right beside her. With strangely little time to react, Ei’s arm wrapped around her waist, and the two ascended. She was beyond startled, but she couldn’t move, simply due to the sheer speed the two were traveling at. Ei was practically jumping up the stone steps, cliffs, and hills of the mountain, using his feet and hands to propel himself when his jumps came short.

It was strange. It wasn’t just jumping. There was some sort of trick to it. He wasn’t literally generating tremendous force with his legs and pushing off the ground to jump such massive heights. It seemed too easy. No, it was too easy, as if a light step was all he was doing to achieve such physical feats. And, given that she was being held by him, she could feel how little effort he was using to traverse the mountain. It was extremely odd, she didn’t even feel the wind you’d expect from such propulsion, as if she was just seeing things. She remembered how the ash seemed to avoid this man, it seemed a similar phenomenon was at play here too.

Not sure how to feel about being literally carried up the mountain, Suna just kept silent throughout the journey, which was oddly comfortable. With her focus freed up, she observed the world around her. She had the feeling before, but she was certain now. The world was ending. The ash seemed even more thick, and the winds more fierce, but this feeling wasn’t really related to those observations. She could just feel it. The world itself, screaming. Emitting its last death throes, a magnificent elegy that seemed deafening, yet so quiet. She could hardly describe the sensation. As if a choir was assembled, of every living being on the planet, sentient and non-sentient, all belting out miserable death screams, only amounting to mere whispers.

This aroused… certain feelings within her. Feelings she never felt before. She hated the world, she felt like she deserved better than this life of suffering, of ash, of constant betrayal and survival. And now, she realized. The world felt the same way. The world also hated this slow, agonizing, painful death. It longed for water, just like she did. It longed for life to grace its lands, for the sun and the moon and the stars to shine down upon it, it longed for happiness. But it knew. It both knew yet rejected the idea that it would no longer be able to have these things.

“This world… This world also deserves better.”

Suna’s head jerked towards Ei. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was put off by Ei’s uncanny ability to sense her feelings before, but here, at this moment, where she was feeling more emotion than she has ever felt in her entire life, she was glad. Glad to share it with someone, that this heavy elegy wasn’t one that she had to bear by herself. Even just the knowledge that someone else was witness to this event was enough to comfort her. She started to regain her senses.

Soon, the two arrived at the peak. Ei set her down, and began wiping away the ash from certain protrusions that came from the ground. She also helped.

“It’s time. Let’s not delay at all.”

Ei beckoned for Suna to join him, at the center of the strange protrusions. Oddly, a bright, blue light emanated from the oddly shaped protrusions. It wasn’t bright, yet she couldn’t stare directly at it, as if it were the sun. She hesitated to close her eyes, but had no choice when the lights grew in intensity.

“Noric Ashiv Desir Aarm

Medi Castra Namph Meyr

Syndra…”

She heard strange chanting from Ei beside her, who gripped her shoulder. The energy in the air began to rise, yet another strange sensation she had never been exposed to before. She could feel vibrations through Ei’s hand – she was unsure if they were due to Ei shivering from exertion, or instead due to some external force. With a strange nervousness welling up in her, she tried to calm herself, but to no avail. This situation was just too strange, too weird. Every doubt she had before about the validity of this man and what she was experiencing, thoughts that he was a vision or that this was a dream, that he was a delusional survivor, that she was already dead, they were all dissolving under the face of the real thing. She couldn’t describe anything of what she was experiencing, even as it twisted, changed, grew intense, weakened, laughed at her, scorned her, filled her, became her, knew her, was her, remembered her…

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

–

“Hey. Hey, wake up. Hey.”

She was dizzy. No, far more than dizzy. Discombobulated, she couldn’t even tell up from down, she didn’t know what thoughts were hers and which weren’t, what was real or what wasn’t…

“Heeeey. Come on, wake up.”

Birds… Birds? The chirping of birds filtered through her ears. Yes. These are real. She could just tell. So, using those as an anchor, she started paying attention to the things like the bird chirping. Such as the soft, dull patting on her cheek. Or the weight of her clothes. Or her hair, draped on her face and neck. Like the air, clean, fresh air, entering and exiting through her nose…

“-Ah!”

With a jump, Suna awoke. Her body’s instinct was to propel itself from the unknown situation, but she was kept from doing so by the arms around her.

“Hey, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

Startled, nearly hyperventilating, Suna wrestled with her body’s instincts and forced herself to start to calm down. Her rise and falls of her chest began to slow as she started to control her breathing. Her eyes, which had been frantically searching for some kind of escape every which way, began to rest, slowly taking in their surroundings. A forest?

“Welcome to Nadeer. Glad to see you’re not hurt. Do you remember where we were before this?”

Suna’s mind began to remember things. But a lot of what it remembered were indescribable, inexplicable sights and sensations. Calling them such words didn’t do it justice. She was befuddled.

“It’s normal to experience that kind of thing when you’re exposed to Magic for the first time. Especially such strong Magic. But, listen to me, just like a dream, it’s not real. It’s your soul struggling to interpret that which it is presented with, so it meshes together various bits and pieces of your imagination and things you’ve seen before, and it tries to interpret it, in a futile manner. Think before those things. Can you tell me your name?”

Name… name… Suna.

“I’m… Suna.”

“Yes, good. Can you tell me what my name is?”

The man… He was weird… His name was…

“E-... Ei…?”

“Yes, good, seems your mind has gone through safely too. Sigh, thank goodness, I was worried…”

The man let Suna down. She felt a softness. Her hands clenched in and out, grappling with the new sensation she had never felt before, like a toddler.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes, as if waking from sleep.

“Grass?”

“Yes, Nadeer has many forests like this, with personally what I find to be some of the most lush greenery in the whole Greater World.”

“...I, I was…!?”

All of a sudden, her memories came back to her. Or, rather, she remembered what her memories meant. Of her journey with Ei. The pale ash of the dying world, of her struggles.

“It’s… It’s gone now, isn’t it? Yrma…”

“Yes, well, it will be shortly, relatively. It can take awhile before a world well and truly dies. They are rather resilient, after all. Anyway, if all is well with you, then let’s get going. I’m going to drop you off at the nearest city. You’re survival skills should be more than enough to get by in a rather peaceful world such as this one.”

Suna looked at Ei. She felt a bit… she felt a lot of things. Anxiety over the future, a whole new world. Sad that she’d soon depart from the first kind person she had met for years. She remembered the elegy, she wondered just what other kinds of wonders there were out there, just out of sight. She came to be a bit enamored with the strange sensations of Magic, but she knew she had no right to request to accompany or learn from Ei, whom she had already costed who knows how much. To burden someone who saved her from certain death, it just went completely against who she was as a person, so she shut such indulgent thoughts from her head and instead focused on what she would do on her own in this new world. She would no doubt need to thoroughly prepare for all kinds of danger.

So the two walked, once again. Her mind was filled with unsettling anxiety, at the thought of a world that could house any sort of dangerous inhabitant or harmful phenomena, like the ash, or vicious, towering creatures. But, gradually, she was smitten. The way the sunlight filtered through the leaves, the way the moss grew over the stone, she had no words for such things but she nonetheless was captivated by their beauty, a beauty she was completely new to.

A bird flew through the leaves, and she dropped to the ground, hand on her knife, shaking with worry, rebuking herself for allowing this beautiful world to drop her guard, and preparing herself for any incoming danger, but there was none. The bird came and went, a flit in her peripheral, all too fast. Its speed scared her, but there didn’t seem to be any danger. She exhaled a sigh in relief, resuming her normal posture, until all too quickly, Ei stepped in front of her.

She didn’t have time to react. All she could see was Ei’s back, his arm stretched before him as he struggled to fend off some sort of attack. The glow of Magic appeared again. But there was no luxury to simply close her eyes this time.

She drew her knife, and jumped away from Ei, sliding along the dirt ground.

“S-Suna, No!”

“Hello there, darling~”

She simply couldn’t react. An arm picked her up by the shirt, raising her. Whatever it was that picked her up, it was rather tall, many times her size. The ground seemed so far away.

“Don’t tell me you keep pets now, Eidra, that’s rather uncouth, you know?”

Suna did not hesitate. She plunged her knife, with all of her force, into the arm of her captor. But, as if hitting an invisible metal wall, it suddenly rebounded with a clank, the force so unexpected that the knife flew out of her hands and onto the ground.

“Hey, you should really train them better, like this…!”

Pain. Pain was all she could feel. Somehow, far more pain than she had ever known.

“AaaAaaagGGhhhHhH!!!”

A scream the likes she had never heard before entered her ears.

“STOP IT!!”

The sound of fighting entered her ears as well. But none of it registered. Too great was the pain, as if her entire body, her entire being had split into many pieces. She couldn’t even think.

The ground. The cold dirt. It was pressed against her, no, something was pressing her into it. A large surface, like she was squeezed between two walls. The pain grew even greater, the shock, however, now subsiding.

“Rrrrckkkk…”

She tried to break free. She tried to move what she thought was her arm.

“How unsightly…”

And then, she lost connection. With her arm. Yet another scream. She didn’t know the human voice could make such a noise.

She could still hear the sound of battle, but it started to grow faint. Fainter, fainter…

No. Not like this. Not yet. Not after… Not after everything I’ve been through.

She remembered the elegy. She sang it, in her head. A desperate cry against the pitiful fate it was succumbing to. Miserable, pitiful, pathetic… Yet still, so strong. With the strength of every living being, all desperately crying at once, a collective rebellion against the immutable, the unchangeable. Amidst pain she never knew, amidst the destruction of everything, this was what she clung to. Desperately. Until the bitter end.

“Hoh, so you’ve found yourself quite the jewel, huh, were you thinking that a piece of criminal traitor scum like you could fashion yourself a weapon? How pitiful. But maybe I’ll take her off your hands, turn her into something actually useful, unlike you, hehe~”

The pain, the pain seemed to recede. Her consciousness was returning, her vision, her senses. I’m still in danger! She immediately got up and readied herself for a fight to the death. But what awaited her…

Blood. It blanketed the ground. A bleeding man was held up by a tall, armored figure. It was Ei. Strange abrasions ran down his arms. They looked like burns, but were more likely related to Magic in some way. A weapon of some sort lay on the ground, its lustre fading.

Suna’s attention quickly scanned and noticed the other figure present. A tall lady, with thin, thin limbs… like needles. Actually, her entire body was rather disproportionate. She didn’t have normal arms, rather, her arms seemed to reflect light, like metal. Her long hair glittered like a diamond, her chest was deep like a ruby, her waist was shaped like a man-made metal contraption, but with elegance. Her entire appearance was elegant, curved to appeal to a base aesthetic sense. Whatever she was looking at clearly wasn’t human, so why did she think she was looking at a lady? There was something more to it, as if what she was seeing wasn’t the entire picture…

Her arm. She remembered her arm. Looking down, she expected not to see it there… but it was there. In its entirety. Well, except for the sleeve that once covered it.

What’s going on? This confrontation was obviously completely out of her league. Was there any way she could boost her rate of survival? It didn’t seem likely… Either way, she only had one option: observe, and wait for an opportunity, if it would ever come.

“Wh-” Before Ei could speak a single word, blood poured out of his mouth. The armored figure behind him tightened their grip, causing an expression of pain and grimace to come onto his face.

“Hah, hah… Why… Why are you here…?”

“Oh, isn’t that obvious? Because we own this place now, duhh~!”

Despite her face remaining still as the gem it seemed to be carved out of, Suna could still see the wide, patronizing grin that extended across the whole width of this lady’s face. Ei made no attempt to hide his utter befuddlement.

“Didn’t you hear? We took Nadeer! Haaahahaha! It was only a matter of time, of course.”

She seemed to linger on her every word, as if to prolong her gloating and drive ever deeper the stake of reality into Ei’s shaken being.

“But, of course, someone disgusting and incompetent like you, hiding like some rat, probably wouldn’t even know it if the Sun disappeared, wouldn’t you?”

“Hah… What, don’t tell me, after all this time… the stupid Radiens are still playing their stupid games, hahah…”

The female figure shook, leaking a dark, oppressive air that made Suna shudder, as if seeing death, face to face.

“Games…? Games? Haha, you REALLY don’t get it, do you? You, you scum that forsook your God, Hah! I guess that’s all it really was to you, just a game, huh? I bet when they DIED, you thought it was funny, didn’t you? You’re pathetic. You disgust me. I thought the feared Eidra Flynt, the one whose pathetic scummy villainy is known all throughout the Greater World, I figured they would at least put up a fucking fight, but look at you. About to die a death more pitiful than a fucking dog’s. Die already.”

The lady merely glanced at the armored knight to convey her meaning, and a mere instant later, a head rolled.

Suna had seen many deaths. But this, what was practically an execution… she hadn’t seen any of those. Her mind raced to determine her next course of action, but she couldn’t suppress her sorrow.

A loud, exaggerated sigh rang out.

“How pitiful. Well, at the very least, this head should raise our standing quite a bit. Aymry, help me with this, we need a fanciful yet realistic tale of our deadly battle with the infamous Eidra. We should probably even inflict some injuries onto ourselves, after all, who would believe we came out of such a legendary fight unscathed, right?”

The knight made no noise as it moved its long arm to pick up the head of the now deceased Ei. The lady began to strut over to Suna, whose nerves began to tense, who deemed the situation extremely hopeless.

Guilt.

“And look, we were even lucky enough to pick up a gem for all our hard work. Do you think we should sell her? Or should we keep her?”

There was no audible response.

Guilt.

“Hmm, I don’t know~... Why would we do that?”

Guilt.

Ei… This didn’t need to happen to them. I’ve inflicted death upon others in the past, but I had no real choice, they all were people who tried to kill me… But Ei… The death of my savior, on my hands… This feeling, is sickening…

But Suna’s body knew better than to dwell on the nauseating urge to vomit. It focused on survival, continuing to search for any hope of escape until the bitter end.

“Oh well. We’ll do as you say, you often know better than me, anyway.”

Suna could do nothing, as the arm of the tall, metallic limbs moved closer. Seeing them closer, they moved unlike any metal she knew of. As if it was flexible, a living thing with a mind of its own, parts of the thin, needle-like limb extended out into prongs towards Suna. She knew better than to try and fight this strange being.

Closer. And closer. Unnaturally, they extended. They wrapped around her, like tentacles. Their surface was not metal-like. It was rough, like sharkskin, yet also like a fluid.

Suna grimaced, putting up with the weird sensation, until a weird urge came over her. Before she knew it, she had given into the urge.

The urge to kill.

She had no weapon. But with a swipe of her hands, the weird, metallic head of the lady fell. Thud. Immediately, she sensed the approach of the armored knight. They were many times taller than her, many times more deadly… But she wasn’t afraid. She knew where to strike, as if she had studied the knight for a long time. She knew their weak point. The heart. In the deepest center of their armor. Strike in the gap between their back and their shoulder.

She didn’t even know how she would achieve such a thing. But, without hesitation, she followed through. Cut. And like a puppet with its strings cut, the armored figure, Aymry, collapsed into the grass.