The trees grew buds, became lush with gold, then began to drop their leaves. The last of the leaves fell as Yaro and Ellis made it to the city closest to the Tuumon Kova’s location. Yet another place she did not care to find the name for. Ellis, however, said it would be in their memory: Ethgan, the morgue city. The name seemed fitting as they would experience a kind of death and rebirth, she expected. Either she would die in her world to be reborn in his, or he would have this happen.
Before then, they needed to rest. Ellis had managed to still have money from their time at the Great Koaga Library. Since this was to be their last day to need it, he took them to a rather nice hotel. It had at least 20 floors, the foyer’s carpet a deep red, the color of drying blood.
They were welcomed warmly by the receptionist, Ellis using physical flame tender to pay for their night upfront. The guests, however, seemed to burn holes through Yaro’s cloak. Ellis swayed her from taking any action or even preventative measures. Come the morning, they would be gone.
They did not sleep, they barely stayed in their room. Late into the night, when the zuyg had already passed its apex, they decided to venture forth, their hearts swelling with anticipation. If they weren’t to get sleep that night, what use was waiting in a room?
On the dawn of the first day, they set forth back into the wilds of the City of Sornata. The buildings had a distinctness to their architecture that said they were in some district, township, or something that was to be differentiated from all those around. Great crystalline structures like glass sculptures cracked from this and there, their form and function lost to the eons. Unlike the buildings who kept in a timeless stasis, their adornments seemed to not hold the same fortitude.
The wilderness seemed to hold its breath for the day.
The next day, those silent structures found they could no longer hold their tongue. Clear structures of distorted light were not fully white, but dark with moving shadows that followed them for hours. Then, after Yaro had forced their stop, the ambush came. A tribe of Urie, small furred bipeds with crocodile heads and six eyes beset upon them with tools of bone. They shouted as Yaro defended with whips of wrath. Ellis, may Ah shelter him, cowarded behind a wall. Yaro nearly lost him as one of the Urie, seeing easy prey, went after him. She lassoed him with the burning rope, pulling him down to the ground in a crackling thud.
Once the Urie saw that they would not be successful in their hunt, quite the opposite, they fled.
The third day had its description remembered by Ellis as night fell. He reflected on his still sore leg, limping as they found shelter. To him, they were walking the hills of trees, rocks, and glades. He had stepped on a stone wrong and fell down a ridge, scraping his leg on something. He bled profusely. Yaro, without a second thought, put her tongue to the wound. He yelped, clutching his leg, but she held him firm. Fortunately, her ability could pass the barrier of worlds, healing him with something that shouldn’t be possible for him. She spent the night, while he slept fitfully, thinking of the ramifications of her actions, of their actions. It would not matter, so she disregarded it.
Yaro knew something was amiss. The fourth day held heavy air. It was no mere for or mist, no trick of the senses. They traveled in obscurity, the density of smoke blotting the streets and buildings until only they were left, hand in hand, wandering an emptiness. Ellis would not have been able to feel it, but Yaro did: a tinge of aura. Not something that she could work with, no emotion to it, no personality. But it was there, meaning the mist they wandered was not something that would blow away.
She could feel her mind slipping off to a dream. Hallucinations from her past generated forms in the fog. She had no time for her past, their future awaited. With a shout, she announced their presence and her readiness to overwhelm whoever is causing the mist. Her anger must have been enough as it dissipated, that aura moving off somewhere. She wasn’t sure if it was her actions that caused it to move away, or if they had merely unintentionally crossed paths with something. They had to keep moving forward.
The fifth day brought a joyous thing. They followed white piping that steamed with heat into one of the non-descript buildings. Lit by Yaro’s whips, they snaked their way through the abandoned dark. What they followed, what Yaro knew had to be somewhere along the pipe’s path, was a small pond. The pond was intelligently made, a bath flowing with hot water like from a spring. The ancient architecture would not fade, and it meant some of the old processes wouldn’t either. They took a warm bath together, relaxing in each other’s embrace.
The Sixth and final day beckoned. Before them: a tower waited. Not like the other towers around, no, this tower, if it were a person, would have worn a crown. It imposed on all of the buildings, leering down on them with a pomp of form so riotous, one may think it a holy sight.
To Ellis, it was not a tower they came to, but a small house on a knoll, quiet and in wait for guests. The building was a house turned museum, a clock maker of old and his work decorating the reminder of his prowess and existence. They enter the museum, a sole occupant to allow for free tours greeting them with a smile not well used, but well liked.
Up the tower they scaled.
Down to the basement they were drawn.
The Sayk, reaching its apex, beat down on them. The clocks struck noon around it.
The great Stygian door, bound in chains and carved with depictions of stories, called to them under the air. Not the, but a: Tuumon Kova welcomed them to the end of their journey.
It was Yaro who took heed of its call. She took the edge that persisted in a space-less time and pulled. She had the feeling, deep in her concept of self and existence, that it would not move. It was not meant to move. The door was made not to open.
It did. It opened.
There she was, looking at Ellis for the first time. And by his side was… herself? The woman standing there didn’t look like her, a colorful Humi draped in expensive garb. Yet she knew, she knew she was looking into her own eyes. She was frozen. What had they done?
Ellis reached. His fingers passed into the other him and he fell. Then, the blinding came, a deafening exaltation of light and dark, of soul and body, of time and space. She was with it all, could be everything, a perfect being, a perfect union of she and herself. Then, it left her, and she was left with nothing.
---
Yaro opened her eyes and blinked away the sleep. It wasn’t that she remembered or even felt like she was asleep. She’d closed her eyes and saw Egra, then opened them. But the body she found herself in had pins and needles stabbing her, it was still in that unremembered slumber.
Egra’s voice came in raspy and gentle, “so, how do you feel?”
Gathering herself, she knew how she felt. She didn’t want to think about it, not after waking, not so soon. The prompting, it drove the stake through her empty heart, pain in a hole where she knew something should have been.
She felt violated.
Egra, she had rended something from her, something she had no grasp on. Not even that feeling of something half remembered, or a memory of something once remembered. Just nothing, and empty void in her mind with stains of this vile person who stood before her.
She reached further, a hopeless reaching for something she knew deep within her soul to not be there. And it wasn't, just as it always was, to her. The same missing that had been with her since coming to Natrai’s . No, it wasn’t like her childhood, a memory barred from her with iron walls. This truly was nothing, a time and person just gone. A goneness she'd been fighting to recover since then.
She’d been fighting for? She could feel it, that person, that emptiness, it was still here. No, not within her, but within reach, within this world. She had to find him, that memory wrended from her.
She stared wide-eyed at Egra. The old crone plassidly stared back, waiting. It was not her, she was not evil and did not take from her without her consent. She had given this person up freely. Egra was to mold the thing, the memory, taken from her into something she could use externally.
“Give it to me,” Yaro demanded in a voice faltering with slumber.
“That doesn’t answer my question, Yaro. But I know what you mean, and I suppose I could make a very educated guess as to how you feel. You have that same look as they all do. Regret, rage, longing. As I’ve told everyone else, I suggest letting this new state settle before you go galavanting off.”
The old lady seemed energized, a happiness that came with a good night's sleep to a new day without obligations. Yaro suspected, but did not have the time for, the fact that she had surely taken something more than just him from her. Yaro did not feel drained, but no lady that old, that close to death, should have as much energy as she did then. Nor such an irritating smile.
For the first time in her life, Yaro felt that she was not the monster in the room. Sure, an abomination, she could be called. But what this Egra, this crone, this witch had done to her, she could not think of anything more monstrous. Enter one’s mind, manipulate them, control them, subdue them, all were terrifying realities many people spend their days ignoring the possibilities of. Only in wars, black crimes, and from terrible people did those acts occur. But here, in this hovel in the middle of nowhere, Yaro let herself be subject to an experiment performed by the grotesque.
“Give it to me,” Yaro repeated.
Egra sighed. Yaro could smell her breath, something not unpleasant but rattled her all the more. Egra stared into Yaro’s eyes, their milkyness as keen as any new born’s that is rapidly learning. “I will ask you once more to reconsider.”
“Give,” Yaro growled, standing up from the table, “it.”
Egra bowed her head and backed away, a motion saying: alright, you win, but only because I’ve allowed it. If she did not have such a position of Yaro, Yaro would have driven her beak into the floor then and there. She held her tongue, fists, and aura at bay, waiting as patiently as she could.
“Such impatience with the young,“ Egra chided. From the table, next to where Yaro had laid her head, Egra brought up Yaro’s ring.
Her ring, the one that gained her aura and expressed only her as an individual. She could not remember where she had gotten it, but she knew what importance it held to her, and that recent heartbreak of her imprinted on it.
It had cracks of glowing red that released smoky teal spheres. And from those cracks emerged more. More than that cinnamon and sage smell it had. Spines of obsidian with white branching tips released cooling milky smells that made a kind of energizing concoction with her own. But that wasn’t her, those spikes, they weren’t her. The ring wasn't hers? Who pierced her essence. Egra?
Flames licked her feet. The twin ropes so desperately wanted to taste flesh once more, evil that needed to be burned away from this world. She took one heavy step towards villainess, ready to enact justice for not only herself, but all those she had stolen from.
Egra shrieked. “Yaro, please, wait! I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you cannot have it right! Please, listen to me!”
Yaro would have none of this. She lifted one arm and pulled the weighty flames down onto the monster. Egra’s flesh crackled and blistered. She cried out in pain, calling for help. Yaro would be through with her before any help could come.
“It is him, it is your Atho, can’t you tell!”
Again, more burning flesh. Smoke began to fill the air, the excretion of the anger she would consume this house in. “Liar. You have taken from me, you have killed me!”
“No,” the muzoval yelled, “Please.” Crack. “Listen.” Sizzle. “It is your Ellis, your Atho. PLEASE!”
The smell, that energizing milky cinnamon concoction, a drink that would both energize and fuel a day’s work, it pulled her. Hard. She fell to the floor, misshapen nose possibly broken. She did not pass out, but she did not get up.
Hurried and limping footsteps left her. She was soon alone, laying under a thick blanket of smoke, bright fire blazing all around her. She was comfortable in fire, she had reveled in its destructive embrace before.
No one would care to come save a monster from a burning building. They may want her dead after what she had done to Egra, but they would either wait for her to come out, or, if she didn’t, assume she’d been taken by the flames. She had time to think.
She focused on the ring, which had fallen to the floor with her. That person, it looked like they pierced her, but that wasn’t the case. The spikes, they didn’t grow through her rift, but from it. The bubbles of mist were not popped by the spines, but gently bounced off of them in a display of coyness and, something she would never have thought herself as, cute. This aura, the one that interlayed with hers, was not an invader, was not even something she should be afraid of. She… enjoyed it.
Though she could not recall, she could feel that those spikes were from that gap in her mind. Using what little mental power shoe could for context, they were him, this Atho Egra had mentioned. Her Atho? She had an Atho? Preposterous.
But who else could be this entwined with her, so accepted by her very being as to exist in tandem with her aura. She knew from her feelings that she must find this person, though she could not recall why. Her Atho, they must have been just that important to her that she would go through such extreme lengths to find him. And this is what she got? How did this help?
The world melted away. She wasn’t sure if she was dying, losing herself to explication. She might have been. All things physical became distant, but not in the way of sleepiness. More like her aura, the rage of the fire she caused around her, seemed to grow louder. It seemed to shout, chastising her on her stupidity. And she was stupid.
The ring, the mingle of aura, it combined them. And, when she let it, her portion of the aura on the ring, seep back into her, it brought with it a longing, a pull.
She supposed she should get going, there was no point in dying yet. She had to find answers, fill in that gap she so stupidly gave away. This person, her Atho --It still sounded wrong to her-- was so important that those feelings trumped memories locked of her guardian, made little of the memories of every one at Natrai’s house, and dragged her back from a consistent life of loneliness to be with at least one person.
Her Atho, her other half. As she left the fire’s light behind her, disappearing into the night sky, she wondered: what kind of person would they be?
