People always wondered. What if the sun had suddenly become harmful? A solar beam from the heavens to desecrate the earth itself in its unknowing rage?
Euglith never really pondered about it until now.
"Uh…" Her distorted voice was meek, quivering like a child who had done wrong. "Well… um…"
"How did you follow me here?"
It was quite often that the Hero of Hope would scold the smoke for whatever mischievous things or mistake that she did. Be it accidentally ruining rations or throwing some sort of temper tantrum to get his attention but the face that he was making at her right now, that face with his eyes sharpened like the tip of a blade with his arms scratching the handle of his weapon.
Euglith had seen that face too, but never really directed at her. She was a flower, innocently thriving under the sun, not a single thought of the sun being harmful to her.
After a moment of trying to rationalize herself, Euglith nervously blabbered the words. "I-I-I f-fo… followed you whe-n you, uh, left the castle. But I swear! It w-wasn't just me! That Bird-Eagle-Woman followed you as well!"
In return, the false hero reclined back, huffing in thought.
Leah should've known that people would've followed her. She didn't consider that someone as significant as the Hero of Hope would be followed wherever he went. She was just panicking, confused and homesick to the worst degree. How can a person who was basically losing themselves act?
But that storm of a thought was for another day to contemplate. There was another question she wanted to ask.
"And why did you attack me all of a sudden?"
And once again, Euglith scrambled her mouth away.
"Well-- Well-- ah, uh, I got kind o-of excited…" As if a wrong step would end up in her dying right then and there, her lips were moving at an irrational pace as her head was facing the soil. "It's been… a really, really long time since, um, I last saw you."
A quiet memory echoed into Leah's mind. Where was she this whole time when the Hero of Hope reached kinghood? Oftentimes, the Farblight would appear through a sealed hole in the floor of the king's chamber to report her findings. She just became a leading scout for Faudwick, their invisible eye that lurks around the land.
But oftentimes as well, it was not necessarily him that Euglith returned to. It was the Queen, Kyriaki Faudwick. Leah never fully knew what Kyriaki was up to all those times but she was well-trusted, from the beginning of the hero's journey to the end when the Demon Lord's blood had dried.
"But still," The earth shook beneath the false hero's feet. "that doesn't excuse you from suddenly trying to kill me, Euglith..!"
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…" The whizzes of smoke escaped from her mouth, each orifice on her human-like face leaking it like vapors of tears and saliva of a kid. "You-- you, uh, b-back then, you know. You, um, told me that I should try to… uh, attack you whenever I can. For training!"
"Euglith, that was years ago."
"You never told me to stop."
"You never had the consciousness to stop?"
The smoke spectre slumped even more. "...Sorry."
A sharp sigh escaped Leah's lips. She didn't like Euglith at all. An unpredictable whirlwind lifting and chucking things all over the place whenever nobody was looking. Leah didn't mind kids, she likes them but the one in front of her wasn't a kid. This thing used to murdered kids and then their parents as well at some point.
When the Hero of Hope first encountered the living apparition of smoke, it wasn't too long before they found the body of the original child. How the eyes became nothing but prunes, how the skin crumbled like dust. It was like staring at a recently unburied mummy.
How would you excuse a child that has ruined so many innocent lives? She wondered that so many times and her answer as a mother was "You don't."
"You're going back." Leah ordered. "You're not supposed to be here."
"But--"
"No 'but's. You're going back from the way you came from."
"But I, uh, don't know how." The spectre managed to get her protest in but only incited more anger from the false hero.
"Then how did you even follow me here?" She asked.
Euglith goes quiet once again, opting to glance at the few patches of ashen grass around her before speaking again. "...The lake."
Leah stared, green pupils piercing through the fake red ones.
"...Did Alga send you?"
"Uh…"
A meek explanation was given, and a meek explanation for a reason. The leaves suddenly shook from their trees, birds flying out of their nests.
"You what?!"
"She's… probably alive." Euglith was now hoping to merge into the grass. Grass is the same as flowers too, right?
"Probably?"
"That dumb bird lady already stabbed her! I just kinda… uh, asked her nicely, you know--"
"Ripping her body apart limb by limb and using it as the catalyst?"
Euglith was now smaller than a blade of grass. "...I did it nicely."
Leah groaned, pinching her nose. She couldn't possibly go back to the national park after all of this but she's not too keen on babysitting the devil's child as well. After contemplating as shortly as she could, there was no other choice.
"You can come," Leah raised a finger in an authoritarian manner. "but you have to behave the entire time. No killing, no destruction, no nothing. Follow my lead unless I tell you otherwise. Do. You. Understand?"
The smoke ghost gulped mentally. "Y-yes, Azra."
Leah physically stiffened for two reasons.
The first was the name Azra. That's right, Euglith doesn't know that Leah was the one she was talking to. She's going to have to play the role of the Hero of Hope after all because if she doesn't, she doubts that Euglith will even listen to whatever she says.
The second was because she felt something breathing down her neck, growling like some hungry animal.
Her arms instinctively moved to intercept, grabbing the snout of whatever was behind her before ripping it from its shoulders. A waterfall of ash poured down from the neck like a sandbag that got torn open.
It was the dead park ranger again.
"...For the record, I, uh, just f-found the body. I didn't kill!"
Leah sighed. "Yes, I know that."
She threw the severed head backwards as the human body sprinted over to catch it like some twisted version of playing frisbee with a dog.
How was she going to hide this corpse now?