Day 95 - Dawn:
This morning I crept out of bed and walked out of the tower and back into Qufim. I was restless. As I stared out at the wasteland, I heard footsteps creep towards me. They were normal footsteps. I was unconcerned.
There were fires in Jeuno. A new group of survivors, I supposed.
I supposed that Marz and Cai and the others would be there within the week, but I couldn't really see us waiting that long. With the team disbanded, I figured that we had no real obligations.
It was Alyria again. She wordlessly just stood there for a few moments, the same as myself really.
The sun was rising, slowly but surely.
She nudged me and handed me a chipped cup full of coffee. I thanked her. She had her own. We just stood there, looking out at what we could see, drinking stale coffee.
It was eerie until she broke the silence.
"I heard there was a commotion in the war room."
I took a sip and simply said, "Yes, something like that. Wolfgang was being a jerk, so I put him in place."
My voice was unnaturally cold. I was angry, thinking back to how the political nonsense mattered more to Wolfgang. As if he could bring back the world if he had someone to blame. It was sickening.
There was silence for another few minutes.
"You don't want to be here," she said.
I actually gave a small laugh before I sighed. "What gave it away?"
"You're rrrestless," she purred. She was an awful lot nicer to me than she used to be. "You keep looking to the East."
I said nothing.
"So what
happened that changed you so much?"
I glanced at the snow filled ground and waved my hand as I muttered a spell. The ground lit on fire for a moment and dried up for a good six or seven feet. With another motion and incantation, a gust of wind blew over it and cooled it.
With that, I laid down and stared at the still dim and dusty sky.
"When I went to your land, I was tortured. I was tortured so badly that I almost died. I started to go crazy. They confused me for some criminal escapee or something. It's a little hazy in my head. Do you know of the pain serum they have down there?"
She nodded as she sat down next to me.
"They had me drinking that down by the pint. At one point, a spearhead had broken off and was just floating inside my torso. And then, the spiders..." I trailed off.
"I killed the Galkan torturer with a jaw I ripped off from the spiders they were torturing me with. I was set to be executed the following morning. That evening I started to... 'hear' the Galka, for lack of a better term. I can still hear him if I need to. It was then that things began to become a little more understandable. That was the first step."
"We found Selim, and he helped us while we escaped. While in the gallows, I had blown up a vial of the pain serum that I had hid in my ruptured torso. I'm not sure what happened after that, because I pretty much passed out again. We fled Eastward. We had warned Olzhirya, and so I cannot find it in me to feel any pity when the Turned showed up. It was harder, though, for them to win there due to the terrain. They just don't work well in Jungles."
"The next thing I can remember, I was in Aht Urhgan, being operated on. It was a very, very harsh recovery for a few days, until Cai had managed to secure an audience with the Empress to discuss the situation. A few nights later, I was taken in to see the Empress, just myself and her guards and Vizier. I don't remember much of what happened there. It's strange. I was blacking out memories. The Vizier said that it was curious that I had a person inside of me, and that simply had never happened before. Ever. It intrigued him."
"What intrigued him more was that I, unlike his soldiers, had trapped the entireties of the souls that I had killed; not just fragments. I noticed that there was something different and that I seemed to have miraculously healed my wounds in the course of a few minutes, as well as that one of my fingers was just... wrong."
"Have you ever seen a Soulflayer?" I asked her.
"Twice," she said. "Terrrifying creatures, those things are."
I smirked. "Yeah," I said. "But it was at that point that I realized that I could simply transform my hand into the same tentacle hand as a 'flayer. I had the same rapid regeneration power that their tissue had. It was like, for lack of understanding still, I had found a way to just control and transform myself. Like instead of totally losing my soul to the beast, I was simply rearranging the shattered pieces of it to go from Man to Beast. It was... bizarre. That secured the deal for them to send assistance."
"But the assistance could not come so easily while there was still war in those lands. I knew enough to know that a Soulflayer was generally affiliated with the Undead army that was assaulting Al Zabi, and I knew that there were two others. I did some local questioning and found out just enough information on their histories. At that point, I formulated a plan. I was to kill the Mamool Ja Sagelord."
I felt myself shivering. "And I don't really want to talk about what happened there."
I felt myself lock up for a moment. That hadn't happened for a while. I was stuck remembering the part where I had found myself ripping into the stomach of a Mamool, feasting on him, and I was scared again.
Oh, how I was scared.
But I continued.
"I was successful, and I had started a war between the Mamools and the Undead that had left both of their numbers utterly decimated. It took little more than a cleanup crew, I imagine, to demolish them entirely. The Trolls were so scared at this point that they willingly Allied themselves with The Empire. I was stuck in a small coma at this point, yet again. It was like living inside a constant nightmare, and relief only came every so often. I woke up a few days later and was having nervous breakdowns every few hours. It was bad. It was really bad. I had seen things and experienced things by this point that just had me totally, totally overwhelmed. Yet, I was the hero of the land suddenly."
"I met with the Empress again, and this time she ordered her staff to leave and we were alone. She revealed herself to me, which I don't think was something that was to happen often. I guess she saw what I was going through. She... made it better, somehow. She coaxed me to talk about it. She walked me through what I felt. I lost it, again. I try not to cry so much, but it just happened. I just could not take anything any longer..."
I paused as I thought back to that first moment. Our first real moment together.
"They allowed us to raid a treasury of weapons and armor. Nashmeira was waiting for me outside of the treasury, and she took me to her room, and this time it was her turn to cry because she felt so guilty over how far I had broken myself in the process of saving her lands, just to get some help. And that was the start of it..."
Alyria actually let out an
awwww sound. I didn't think she had that emotion in her.
"That was when everything changed. I started to learn to live with myself. I started to learn what it meant to share a life and want to share it. It's hard to explain... but we were together most of the time I was there from that point on."
"She was your first?" she asked.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That's adorrrable," she purred, and actually rumpled my hair. I gave as much of a shrug as could be given when laying on the ground. "You'll be back, some day."
"I hope so."
I really did.