After what felt like an eternity of silence, Oliver still found himself waiting for the next move. His body was too damaged to move properly, so he could only open his eyes and squint in the direction of his opponents, trying to make sense of the situation.
To his surprise, the two figures, well, technically one person and one once-human; were also standing still, watching him intently. They didn't move a muscle. It was unnerving.
"Do something!" Oliver thought, his frustration growing. 'If you want me dead, get it over with. If you're following her orders to keep me alive, then start saving me already! What's with just standing there, staring?' He couldn't help but wonder if they were mad about the smoke bombs he had thrown earlier, disrupting the elf's vision.
Then it hit him. Of course, the elf had died once already. There were probably things she couldn't stand being reminded of. The smoke that clouded her sight; was it something that triggered memories she preferred to keep buried?
"Just my luck," he mused bitterly. 'Of course, I'd manage to step on that landmine.' He thought back to his teacher's advice. It always seemed like he was good at hitting the wrong nerves. No matter how skilled his archery was, his teacher had always joked that his luck and charm were lacking.
Finally, there was movement. The elf, seemingly having made up her mind, approached him with a small bottle in hand. The human followed closely behind, like a silent guardian. Oliver tensed. What were they planning?
Instead of pouring the liquid into his mouth like he expected, the elf uncorked the bottle and let the potion spill over his body. The cold liquid soaked through his clothes, seeping directly onto his skin. The sensation was odd; cool, but not unpleasant.
"What in the world is she doing?" Oliver thought, completely baffled. In his experience, potions were either meant to be drunk or applied directly to wounds. But this? Letting the potion soak through his clothes to heal him? He couldn't wrap his mind around it.
Yet, to his amazement, it worked. Almost immediately, he began to feel a tingling sensation as his limbs regained feeling. The pain that had once throbbed through his body began to fade, and soon enough, his strength returned. Even the sharp discomfort from his broken ribs piercing his lungs vanished. His heart, which had been slowing with fatigue, picked up its rhythm again, and his mind cleared from the fog of exhaustion.
"Is this for real?" Oliver wondered, still dazed. His whole understanding of potions and healing had just been flipped upside down. He had never seen anything like this in his time. What kind of world did she come from? What sort of age had she lived in to have access to such a miraculous concoction?
'Perhaps an era filled with war and death,' he thought grimly.
Oliver slowly sat up, gingerly flexing his fingers. The pain was completely gone. He was intact, as if the battle just moments ago had never happened. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead, not from pain, but from sheer nerves.
'To be honest, I'm a little nervous,' he thought, then corrected himself. 'No, very nervous. Extremely nervous.'
The elf suddenly spoke, breaking the silence. "Did you come here for answers?" Her voice was calm, but there was a sharpness to it, catching him off guard. Oliver, who had been scrambling to come up with an excuse, found himself replying without thinking.
"Yes," he blurted.
The words left his mouth before he could stop them, and once he realized what he'd said, he cursed himself internally. But then again, it wasn't a lie. He had come here for answers; often. So perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing to admit it.
"And what is it you're looking for?" she pressed, her eyes fixed on him, completely ignoring the way his expression shifted from surprise to cautious curiosity.
"History. I'm looking for history," he replied, scratching his head awkwardly. He gestured vaguely in the direction of the city. "The history of Joshua, a human city. It's over that way."
His explanation hung in the air for a moment, and as he looked at her, he realized she might not even know what Joshua was. After all, she was an ancient creature, possibly older than the city itself. Maybe she had been dead for centuries before Joshua was even built.
Or perhaps, he mused, 'she had been around for thousands of years, watching empires rise and fall.'
'Tens of thousands of years?' Oliver shook his head in disbelief, waiting for the elf to respond, still trying to wrap his mind around the possibility.
"I understand," she said after a moment, her voice calm and distant. "If it's a book recording history, it should be there." She pointed toward a stone wall, which, up until that moment, had seemed like nothing more than a solid mass of rocks and dirt. Suddenly, a hidden passageway opened in the wall, revealing a narrow cave entrance. Oliver nodded, though he couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. Still, this was no time to second-guess her motives. He needed answers, whatever her reasons for leading him here.
---
As Oliver stepped through the entrance, a soft light illuminated the cave. The source of the light wasn't magical, nor was it a torch. Instead, glowing stones lined the walls, radiating with light-element energy: simple, but effective. It was clear they served no other purpose than to brighten the space, guiding him deeper into the cave.
Rows upon rows of bookshelves filled the cavern, the air heavy with the smell of aged parchment. The shelves were packed tightly with volumes, their spines pressed against each other in neat lines. A wooden floor stretched beneath him, though Oliver couldn't tell whether it was laid for aesthetic reasons or simply because someone had too much time on their hands.
Despite the calm setting, an unsettling feeling crept up his spine. He couldn't explain it, but something about this place made him uneasy. His instincts were right, when he approached the nearest shelf and scanned the books, he quickly realized his worst fear: none of the books were marked with dates.
"Of course,"' he thought bitterly. 'Their history is so ancient, they don't even bother with something as basic as a timeline.'
He stared helplessly at the shelves. Without dates or any clear order, he had no idea where to begin. He could try to search systematically, but knowing his luck, he'd probably end up with the most useless books. The deeper he ventured into the cave, the more overwhelmed he felt. The shelves seemed to stretch on forever, as if mocking him.
"This is going to take forever."'
The books themselves were massive, like bricks, and their text was absurdly small; tiny letters crammed together like ants on a page. He shook his head in frustration. 'Did they write these to torture future generations?' He couldn't help but wonder what kind of tools they used to write these in such minuscule detail. 'A microscope, maybe?'
Resigning himself to the task, Oliver sighed heavily. There was no avoiding it now. He grabbed a book from the far left shelf and began to read. Although he could understand the elves' language, it wasn't the one he used most often, and that only made things harder. Each sentence required extra focus, and if he wasn't careful, he might miss important information. The slow pace gnawed at him, but there was no other way.
Hours passed, and before he knew it, an entire night had slipped by. He barely noticed when the elves, fully rested, began to stir and greet each other. An, full of energy, entered the space.
"Where's Oliver?" An asked, glancing around the room. The elf pointed silently toward the cave.
An, along with a couple of the elves, entered the cave and found Oliver still at work, his back to them. His hands trembled slightly as he slid yet another book back onto the shelf, clearly exhausted. Dark circles hung under his eyes, and his shoulders slumped with fatigue. He let out a deep breath, trying to suppress a yawn, and walked over to the next shelf, eyeing the countless rows of books still left to examine. He had gone through three rows during the night, covering nearly ten thousand years of history. Yet none of it had anything to do with the answers he sought. And there were still so many rows left.
"This is useless,"' he thought, his irritation growing. For every bit of relevant history he uncovered, he had to wade through endless records about mundane, irrelevant details. 'What fruit quenches thirst? What food was considered delicious back then?' These books were supposed to be historical records, but they seemed more like the ramblings of someone with too much time on their hands.
But, in the midst of this seemingly pointless information, Oliver had stumbled upon something; details about the four individuals he had recently encountered, the ones who had been resurrected. Their names had been deliberately erased from the records, but the descriptions matched perfectly. After all, Oliver had personally been on the receiving end of their overwhelming power.
He stared down at the book in his hands, lost in thought. 'Who were these people, really?'
Despite his frustration, he couldn't deny that the more he read, the more curious he became. The history he was sifting through was ancient, predating the world he knew by centuries; perhaps even millennia. The answers he sought were buried somewhere in these pages, but the journey to uncover them was long and grueling.
'And yet,' he thought with a sigh, 'there's no turning back now.'
With tired hands, Oliver closed the book and reached for another. This time, though, a small glimmer of hope flickered within him. After all, he had survived worse, and somewhere within these texts lay the knowledge he needed to face whatever was coming next.