On one chilling night, on the edge of the black sea waves which rumbled under the full moon, a line of people assembled and stood as a group.
They were struck by the cold winds that would shiver someone unguarded, yet their torches were nowhere to be found.
Behind them, however, a pile of woods was being burned in one huge campfire, giving enough light for them to look around.
There were some whimpers and cries in between the crowd that filled the midnight's air. One careful listening would enough to tell that they were trying hard to drink back their tears.
I stood on the side, my tiny palm being held by the half-wrinkled hand of my grandfather.
"What are they doing?" my question was referring to the group of people.
"Shh.. bring down your voice, they are praying," my grandfather hastily replied.
"To who?" I asked again, obeying his rule of speaking quietly.
"Their son, or brother, or maybe husband. Depends," he answered.
"Husband?" I inquired.
"Yeah.. husband. You can say they are the head of a family," he explained while focusing on the crowd.
"Like a father?" my voice raised a bit.
"Like a father," grandpa concluded.
"Oh," I ended the small talk and returned my vision to the group of people in front of me.
They were clutching a spear in one hand and a cloth on the other. But sometimes they lacked one of the two items in their possession. The people who were the nearest to the sea approached the border between the sand and the water then stood idly.
After being silent for a moment, they stabbed the spears deeply into the sand while the clothes were simply dropped to the ground. They took turns row after row until we had reached our turn.
Grandfather picked out a cloth from his sleeve, a small cut cloth with brown color. He closed his eyes for a short time before putting the cloth carefully on the sand.
The sea waves rocked back and forth, washing all the buried spear and the dropped cloth. Eventually, they would be dragged by the water and thus vanished into the vast horizon.
We returned to our position after we had finished but we walked a bit further from the crowd. He then sat by the sand and invited me to his side, which I followed. He went unusually silent as he observed the view with weary eyes.
"What was that for? I mean the spear burying," I decided to start a talk.
"Those spears and clothes, you see, used to be the ones that the soldiers use," he explained while his finger pointed to the ongoing event.
"In a battle?"
"Of course in a battle," he answered as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. "But those users lost their lives in it," he continued.
"Did my father or mother fought in a battle?"
"Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure," he hesitated.
"Then whose cloth was the one that you brought?" I asked.
"Someone," he gave a vague answer.
"Who?"
"...someone."
"They battled?"
"No, not directly," he answered.
"Then why are we here if that person didn't fight at all?" I was genuinely confused at that time.
He smiled a bit but his overall look wasn't the happy one. "To remember them," he replied shortly.
I was taken aback by his sentence and went wordless. But then, he became the one who broke the silence first.
"Yana, listen to me," he grabbed my shoulders firmly.
"One day, I won't be there for you, and when that time comes, you will be left alone here," he continued while his face was showing more worry.
"You said you will stay with me forever," I complained to him.
"Forever in my lifetime. I will stay until the day I died," he explained patiently.
"But you are strong!" I replied again.
He chuckled almost loudly.
"Like those people who fought in the battle, I have limits too, Yana. Especially when I reached this age," his face turned into a reassuring one.
I couldn't reply to him with anything.
"Say, do you know how old you are right now?" he asked again.
"Six years?" I answered with doubt.
"That's right. You are growing so rapidly, damn it. Soon, you will have to earn on your own and meet someone special," he uttered.
"Special?"
"Yes, to make a family," he answered.
"Aren't you my family?" I asked and made him chuckle again.
"It's different, you will learn about it somehow," his voice was a bit coated by teasing.
Once again, I went silent because of confusion.
"Alright, Yana. My wish for you is simple," he held my head by grasping my cheeks.
"Be strong. Strong enough to protect everything that you cared about," he spoke with burning determination.
"Can you do it?" his straightforward question echoed inside my mind.
The answer was supposed to be a simple one. But that time, silence became my answer.
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Volume 2
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Four days had passed since the raid of the feral insects. We had returned to the house and thankfully the members of the house were alright.
The woman had the worst condition at that time, but with enough rest, her pleasant expression had returned.
Every aspect of the house was recovering, except for my sleep cycle. The parents were continuously repairing the damaged part of the house, banging the wooden walls loudly to cover the breached holes.
Sometimes I was fearing the house would collapse just from the slamming vibration on the floor. I wouldn't want that to happen since I was placed on the second floor again.
When the noon was filled with thunderous smashing, the night was filled with ominous chanting.
For the first three nights after that incident, people were marching outside of the house. They mumbled some words harmoniously while steadily passing our building.
The light from the flames was sneaking to my window, making me curious as to what they were doing. Although, I had a pretty good guess after listening to some sobs and whimpers that existed between the crowd.
Each time the march occurred, I would always be reminded of grandfather and the girl I failed to save. When their faces appeared in my mind, I would join the chant as I prayed for their deserving rest.
Due to those activities, I had found a little bit of trouble sleeping at the supposed time. Sometimes I could only close my eyes when the woman visited my room and calmed me in her embrace.
Since the man would leave with the other guards at night, the three of us were left until the morning came. The girl was secluding herself for some reason so the woman would be the only person to accompany me.
I truly needed her comfortable lull since I wanted my body to rest and be in prime condition. If my body grew well, then I could eventually start my plans to search for Aria.
For the time being, I had a basic outline of the tasks I needed to do in this life:
First step, learning the conversation of this world to the point of fluency.
Second step, building my body to become strong enough until it could wield a weapon.
Third step, understanding the places and directions in this world that I was in.
Fourth step, getting the abilities that I had seen before to fight enemies.
Fifth step, following the direction of Aria's fall based on my memory.
Sixth step, finding her no matter what the cost and finish our promise there.
Last step, finding out the sea lady's task and find grandpa if possible.
Those were the steps I had managed to think of when I was planning my routes. All of that must be finished before any beast could mortally harm Aria. I could only wish the process was exactly as simple as that.
But just like I had predicted beforehand, the path was a long and hard one to get through.
My first and foremost stumble was definitely the foreign words. After almost a week of listening to the conversations, I still didn't have a clear understanding of their meanings.
The problem was not my hearing since my ears were simply working fine. I was just having neither the knowledge nor the context of their chatters.
Usually, there would be some guests that came over to talk with my parents downstairs. Men, women, and even children traded words with them.
I would try to carefully listen to their blabbing but it did not have any effect whatsoever. No matter how many sentences pried into my ears, I couldn't take a look at their current activity to add any information.
If there was anything that I gained by hearing them, it was the fact that the string girl's voice was never present when the guests came.
Due to the time I was being taken care of by the woman, I had learned some words that were supposed to spell as 'mother', 'eat', and 'bath'. But my endeavor to provide any dialogue was wasted with my underdeveloped mouth.
My words were unclear and the sound produced was like gibberish you would expect from an infant. Therefore nobody in the family took my attempt seriously and only thought they were cute dabbles of a baby.
It couldn't be helped, I guess.
Although my word knowledge had not met any improvement, my body was at least showing a bit of progress.
I could barely use my feet to stand but I could drag my body somewhere just like that night of the incident. I spent the majority of my time traveling around the pillow that my cradle was encasing.
My body spun round and round on that limited space until I felt dizziness in my head. I didn't know whether it was real or not, but my arms were starting to feel a bit stronger since then.
The woman would panic when she saw my reckless movements and would always attempt to put me back to my supposed position. However, by the time she returned to the room again, she would often find me in a totally different position.
She always seemed to be frustrated about my crawling session but there wasn't even a single speck of anger on her expression. Sometimes I wondered if she was really that patient or she was actually fed up with it but kept silent. The answer might affect the continuation of my physical exercise, which didn't receive any repercussion so far.
I didn't get any response from her, of course, since I couldn't ask.
After she readjusted my position with ease, she blew the dust on my cradle before looking at the room's surroundings. My room was not exactly dirty, but being somehow dusty was not an exaggeration either. They might have not used this room previously before I existed, so it was understandable on their part.
She twirled her wrists lightly and summoned the wind power in the room, wiping every dust that existed on the walls or floor's region.
The sudden move was making me coughing up a bit but she continued on exterminating the dirty part on each surface. Not long after, she gathered all the soiled wind and threw it out of the window. She did all that almost in a blink and she made it look so easy.
That view of hers brought me to the next problem I was having, the power in this world.
I tried to shoot breaths of wind and rubbed my fingers to ignite a fire so many times, yet my fingertips produced nothing.
How could she do that while I was still stuck with myself?
Aside from the obvious factor of experience, could there be something I had been doing wrong this whole time?
I had imitated her every movement down to the specific gestures on her fingers, but I couldn't quite follow the sense of smoothness and elegance of her moves.
After inspecting her dusting motion, I had just realized the circling gesture that she did at the start. I extended my hand to the air and immediately did the same before trying to shoot air again. I grunted as my hand yanked forward. Nothing.
It was so frustrating to do something over and over like a mad person, and yet I couldn't stop.
My hand was raised again, this time circling at a much slower pace. The wind was softly grazing my skin as my palm collected them. I let the wrist guided my arm before it decided to follow a stream of wind by itself.
Be gentle, be smooth like her movement. I repeated those words inside my head. My fingers followed along with the flow of the air while my palm spun upward aimlessly until...
Strike.
*Whhooosshh*
A very short blow swept past the surface of my fingers. It was way too brief but a tiny gust of wind was definitely blown there. I was stunned as the sensation had been shot out from my palm and wrist. When I retreated my hand, my mind was blaring with an announcement I had finally be able to make.
I succeeded at shooting winds.
Excitement filled me as I was craving for another attempt. I repeated exactly each movement that I went through; circling of the wrist, following the faint wind flow, and focusing on my palm. When I felt that my entire arm was ready, I shoved it forward again...
Another strike.
Nothing.
No wind had come out from either my palm or my fingers this time.
What happened to the wind power?
As soon as my mind asked that, my arm got cramped.