Chapter 116
Pillar Begets the Weeping Spirits
She blew into her hands despite not needing to. She was never cold, not once in her life. In fact, she was never anything except normal--being burnt or chilled escaped her, the sensations as distant as that of love. There was something to be said, she knew, about living life never experiencing any highs or lows, existing in a perpetual state of content. Though she felt happiness and sadness, those emotions were abstract, elusive, hard to connect to. If they reflected in physical discomfort, she might have--but they never did.
Nonetheless, she blew into her hands. It was because of a strange feeling--one she hadn't experienced before. She felt jittery, jumpy, unsettled. No, there was a transgression there that abounded it--her body felt those things. Her right knee would dance up and down madly. Her heart pumped faster. Her breathing grew shallower. She even bit her lips involuntarily.
Staring at the distant town, a part of her wanted to run toward it. Not knowing was perhaps far more terrifying than being in the thick of the flames. She wanted to pray, to clasp her hands in front of her chest and close her eyes and mumble into the wind. But... she knew it was pointless. The act of prayer was wasted, she knew. The gods loved only her and would answer only for her. To them, he was likely an interesting anomaly that they were either tolerating or were indulging and engaging with.
Another sensation washed over her, one that she experienced quite a few times before--helplessness. It was the very same emotion, the very same feeling, that had nearly driven her to the edge of sanity. The common knowledge regarding the Prophets was that they'd see too many awful things in their visions and lose their minds because they were incapable of processing so many of them. But that wasn't quite right.
Though watching awful things in a dream certainly wasn't easy, it was knowing that she had no ability to change anything that haunted her--and many others. When she was eight, she had a dream in which a red, falcon-signed flag fluttered ragged in a horrid, violent wind. The flag was perched on top of an old, downtrodden castle whose walls were already falling apart, looking over a massive courtyard.
There, some twenty people were lined up, on their knees, mass-executed one after another in a bid of cruelty entirely inhumane. She woke up then, trembling, crying, screaming--but only for a moment. Then, like a gust of wind, something cold swept through her and calmed her down. Replaced the sorrow with helplessness. She'd seen what would happen, but what of it? She didn't know which castle it was, whose flag it was, or who those people were.
In fact, she never learned--some of her dreams she ended up seeing in reality, but most remained elusive, blurry, distant. It was that sense of helplessness that caused many to lose their minds. She wasn't a unique specimen among the Prophets--all of them were loved equally by the Gods, given the very same things she was given, given the same privileges. The likely difference, for her, was that she spent her formative years in the woods, entirely divorced from the world.
Her dreams remained dreams--she never saw them play out in reality, or saw others ignore her warnings. Others... did. Prophets, in and of themselves, were vaguely looked at across the Kingdom--it was beyond rare for a case like Cain's to occur, where a Prophet was accepted by someone and where his visions were adhered to properly. It was far more common for them to either be entirely ignored or, worse yet, accused of dark worship or attempting to usurp the Kingdom's peace.
Madness was equal parts derived from dreams as it was from reality--and as she was missing the reality part during her formative years, it became easier for her to live. And lived she did, though not the longest. She'd occasionally hear whispers of those before her, some of whom lived a hundred years even and heralded Kingdoms and Empires with their assistance.
She was dragged out of her thoughts by an abrupt shake--she felt the tremors run through the dirt and directly into her spine, knocking her down forcibly into the snow. She held her arms back and helped herself up, though not for long as yet another tremor came, knocking her down yet again. Before she had the opportunity to lift herself up, the world... erupted.
It was a deafening explosion that entirely disoriented her, turning the entire world into a blend of sounds and colors that confused her mind. Amidst all of it, however, she still managed to see a pillar of a white and black surge like a coiling dragon toward the sky. It roared like one, too, at least in her mind--with the expulsion of energy being such that it decimated the entire village into a crater that nearly reached her, this far off from the epicenter.
Just as she was about to run away, she saw a silhouette blur toward her and yelped; yet, it landed some five hundred yards in front of her, though continued to roll uncontrollably until it was basically just fifty feet away. Despite the horrid state he was in, she recognized him immediately.
Crying out though not hearing it, she lunged to her feet and ran forward, kneeling next to him. His entire body was burned almost beyond recognition, skin peeled back, revealing scorched flesh and bones beneath. He was barely breathing, one of his eyes quaintly open, dancing around until it landed on her. The lips--partly disconnected from the rest of the face--tried to curl up into a smile but to no avail.
"DAMN YOU!! DAMN YOU ALL HELL!!" a voice reminiscent of nightmares broke through her deafness, speaking directly into her mind. She shook and shivered, cold air belting against her soul. Looking away from what was a horrid sight, her eyes landed on an approaching figure--it was humanoid, at least, coated in thick layers of darkness and shadows. It 'bled', so to say, those very shadows, in the form of entirely ebony liquid.
The figure approached swiftly yet slowly, landing in front of Sylas and her, featureless face still appearing mad and raging.
"WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!! IT SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE--YOU... YOU SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE!!! ALL THE WAYS HAVE BEEN STRIPPED OF SOUL ARTS!! NOBODY ALIVE SHOULD BE ABLE TO WOUND ME IN MY ASCENDED FORM!" she didn't know what it was rattling on. But she knew one thing--Sylas was suffering. He was in pain. As such, her right hand reached for his belt and took out a dagger. It was misshapen but it would do. "HUMPH. HOW FAR HAVE I FALLEN THAT AN ORDINARY GIRL DARES LEVY A WEAPON AGAINST ME?!" she ignored him, however, biting her lower lip and reaching toward Sylas' destroyed eye, thrusting the dagger directly through it and into his brain. She could swear she saw his lips mouth a 'thank you' before she took the dagger out. All she had to do now... was wait. Whether aware or not, the world would reset. She prayed her memories would, too. She didn't want to remember him like that.
"AAAAAGGGHHHH!!!" the world was, once again, full of colors. Sylas sat down and stared out the window into the open horizons, baffled, traumatized, and lost.
The clash rang and repeated inside his mind infinitely, it seemed. In that moment, where he poured nearly all of his life force into a strike and when his blade met the shadow's, the world... lost all its hue. It turned grayscale. And a bell of death rang like a blossoming roar of a dragon, striking into the very core of his being. He managed to last for a breath and a half before the sheer onslaught of energy that the two expelled in that moment blew them apart.
He came out far worse for wear, expectedly so. However, he had still hoped to inflict more damage or endure for a little while longer. No, he hoped for that before he realized who the young boy turned man was--he was another shadow. Just like those two that ripped the castle asunder a long, long, long time ago and vanished without a trace right after. He met one of them again. And not just that... he learned many new things that shaped his perspective toward entirely different conundrums.
He had to admit to being a little bit lost. Sighing, he drank a sip of sweet wine and reclined back. There were a lot of things to peruse over what the shadow mentioned. Especially toward the end, where it expressed the confusion over how Sylas was able to even hurt it, to begin with. Or how other Ways were 'stripped of Soul Arts', whatever that meant. Deep down, he understood the core of the problem--he knew a lot. In fact, in terms of important knowledge, he likely didn't lag behind some of the Kingdom's big shots.
The core problem, however, was that he lacked the most basic building blocks that made sense of all the 'big things'. This, in turn, resulted in mass confusion every time he was introduced with a previously unexplored concept--something that the netizens of the world likely wouldn't have issues with.
"How many times will we play this game?" he spoke. "Just get in."
"I was waiting for you to get drunk," a voice carried through the window before a figure vaulted through. "To soften you up."
"Soften me up? Why?"
"Isn't... aren't you mad? That you lost?" she asked carefully.
"Why the hell would I be mad?" he looked at her strangely. "In what universe did I even stand a chance of winning against that thing?"
"H-huh? You... you know what it was?"
"Know... is a strong word," he said. "No, I'ven't a clue, really. I just know that people like 'im are really fuckin' strong and I've no business fighting them. And yet, I fought. Even wounded the bastard. If anything, that fight worked to sharpen my ego rather than wound it, as you were about to say."
"... I have a memory. Again," she said, lowering her head.
"Not a good one, I assume?"
"It's of you," she replied, looking up into his eyes. "At the end. Lying there. Burnt and wounded beyond help. You... you looked..."
"Crispy? Roasted? Freshly-fried?"
"How can you joke about it?!! Weren't you in pain?!" she blew out.
"Of course I was," he said. "Every inch of me hurt."
"Then how--"
"--because it's nothing new," he smiled. "I know this may shock you, but that wouldn't qualify even for the top 50 of my most painful deaths. One time, while I was training in my Way, I miscalculated and accidentally damaged my veins as well as my nerves, essentially paralyzing myself. As I was outside the castle, nobody could find me. And, so, I spent a whole two weeks in excruciating pain, hungry, cold, and thirsty. But unable to die."
"..."
"Don't look that pained," he said. "You're making me uncomfortable."
"Oh, geez, well if I'm making you uncomfortable--like hell!!"
"Ha ha ha, it's alright. I'm sorry you had to see me like that, though," he added, pouring her a cup. "But I need you sharp. I'm about to share a shitload of loaded information that you and I will need to decipher. Not to mention... we'll still have to kill that thing if we want to advance, no?"
"I... I suppose so..."
"So, let's get drunk, try to erase the bad feelings, and get down to business."