Hugging my knees quietly, I wondered whether this was the end. She was a broken girl for sure, but now it had to be even worse than that.
Would she plot to kill me? If so, then I was willing to accept that fate, but if she chose against doing so and was hurting whenever she looked at me, I wouldn’t accept it. I would do everything – including taking my own life – to rectify the issue I made for her, so that Lucinda could smile again.
But I wasn’t just thinking about that. I was also wondering how I could salvage this. There was no way Louis didn’t realise that this reality warping magic came from Lucy and along with him, everyone else would get even more suspicious of Lucinda.
Sighing quietly, I stood up from the dirt, jumped onto the roof of the next building and headed towards the main road where I found a few men I knew, Marc – fully healed – Louis and the heroes. The spotted me as soon as I jumped down onto the street and everyone directed their gaze at me.
“What is this dome?” Ellie asked right away and pointed towards the darkness swallowing every light.
“Dark magic.” I concluded, hoping they would buy into it.
“No, don’t give us that crap. Dark magic doesn’t alter your feelings.” Well, it appears they were already connecting the knots slowly.
“Fine … this is Lucy’s magic. Just like Sofie can crate this ball of green light which heals everyone around, Lucy can do this.” I explained, avoiding the correct answer a little.
“It’s exactly the opposite of mine, isn’t it?” Sofie asked, conjured up her healing magic and let it hover near the dome. Just a little bit, the dome made place for her magic, but also extinguished it rapidly. “That means … this magic is … death magic?”
Clicking my tongue in annoyance, I sat down on a barrel and gritted my teeth. There was hardly any way for me to keep quiet about this when I didn’t want to see a vulnerable Lucinda being bombarded with questions.
“Okay, I’ll answer your question as long as you don’t ask me things along the lines of ‘is she evil?’.” I said and walked away from the others until we were out of range.
“Go ahead.” Schwarz said, quite eager to know more about Lucinda even if my answers wouldn’t be to his liking.
“She isn’t like us. Not even remotely. You can view her as a goddess of death, without her being able to use her powers that much. And she also cannot manipulate other elements, so there is that as well.” I explained right away, which was probably more than they could take.
“A … goddess of death? How?” Sofie asked shocked but didn’t seem to doubt my words that much.
“Because she was born from the god of death himself.” I explained truthfully.
“That’s cheating!” Gregory shouted out angrily and stomped onto the ground, creating a little dust cloud around his feet.
“Shut the fuck up Gregory. You don’t know anything about her. You guys are cheating. You were given these powers and also level up faster, which is something normal people can only dream off. She had to go through excruciating pain to gain anything.” I hissed angrily at him. I hated this guy from the moment I met him, that was for sure.
“So a goddess of death, huh? How many did she kill already?” Ellie asked, way more level headed then the others.
“How many pregnancies did Sofie have? Just because she is born as something, doesn’t mean she has to live it out. And besides, there are more than enough deaths on a normal day already.” I explained, which wasn’t exactly the truth, but I already stated I wouldn’t answer these types of question in the very beginning.
“But she still killed some, at least tonight.” Well, if they didn’t get out in time, it was hardly Lucinda’s fault, was it? But that’s not something I could say as well, which was why I rather stuck to the sad truth itself.
“She is … she is desperate right now. Luna died and … and she can’t take that.” I explained. In a sense, Lucinda’s emotional development didn’t happen at all, thanks to Aska’s actions. She never learned to live with loss.
“As saddening as that is, it’s not an excuse to murder.” Ellie stated and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“She gave all of us enough time to escape and that’s a fact.” I pointed out.
“Her actions were still pretty evil. And that leads me to think about what the demon king told us. Is it true that we are being observed by the gods for their own amusement?” Gregory asked which I didn’t understood that well. But this wold was created for Lucinda and in a sense, she was one of them with the key difference that her memories about her previous life – if one might even call that a life – were laying dormant within her.
“I … don’t know that.” I still said regarding being watched by the gods.
“Then why are we here? Why was she pushing so hard to invade while the frontline was basically stable?” Well, humanity wasn’t close to extinction yet, but with the arrival of a certain god, this may change quickly.
“Because the demons are trying to get the vessel of her father into this world. And none of us want that.” I explained carefully not to spill too many information. I certainly didn’t want them to know that Lucinda wanted this world for herself. That would paint a very bad light onto her.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Ellie asked and squinted her eyes.
“Because he tortured her? Because he didn’t give her any room to breathe for the first hundreds of years of her life? Because she hates him for everything he did to her? I don’t know, that could be a few reasons. Not every god is as nice as Irminsul and Askatesh definitely isn’t.” I told them the most saddening facts about their relationship, while obviously leaving the less beneficial things out. They didn’t have to know these two were in an intimate relationship after all.
“So we have your word against the demon king’s.” That was the gist of this, that was for sure.
“Believe what you want, do what you want just like you did all this whole time. I’m going to search for a boat now.” I added and turned away from them.
“Hey!” Gregory shouted out angrily as I had ended the conversation one sided.
“What?” I asked annoyed.
“I think we need to think calmly about this. But until we find an answer, I want you under supervision.” We’re they for real? I saved their sorry asses so many times and now they were basically putting me under house arrest?
“… fine.” I couldn’t really fight them on my own, and even if that would ruin all the chances we had to reconcile with them. And I was pretty sure we would need them in the next part more than ever before.
And so, I strolled back towards the others, sat on my barrel while the so called heroes told the others to keep me in their vision.
And then they talked … without anyone else. Even Louis wasn’t invited, which was strange as Ellie was usually attempting to involve him in these conversations.
Well, at least their first conclusion was that Louis should create a boat for them and that all others except the heroes, Louis and me should be teleported away. They wouldn’t be of any use anyway.
And then, on the second day or so, they still hadn’t found any satisfying conclusion to their issues. Louis made a small row boat with his gift of creation, but otherwise there seemed little progress except that everyone else was gone at this point, leaving my usual quiet surroundings rather quiet.
But at least I got something out of them before they left. Miraculously, an axe wielding dwarf survived every battle so far and was able to patch Lucinda’s glasses up somewhat. Well, with a completely broken right side, there was no other choice but to close that part off completely. Sadly, Lucinda would need to look solely through the cracked left side of these glasses. But at least I had something for her.
And on the second night or so when the others were sleeping in an old inn and asked me to keep watch, the impenetrable dome of darkness shrunk slowly which prompted me to run towards the edge of a massive crater Lucinda had created right away. Like a ball, it shrunk in size quietly, always touching the bottom of the crater in the middle. At one hundred metres size, I jumped down the crater, slid through the mud and ran towards the middle as fast as I could. At two hundred metres, I had to slow down a little and at two metres, I stopped completely.
The ball still shrunk down further, but I was already drawing my sword instead for going ahead.
Opposite of me there were the two twins, no blade in their hands at all and looking at me with interest.
“Why are you here?” Shouldn’t they have ran away already? Didn’t they realise the heroes would end their life quickly when they were spotted?
“We saw how Lucy cried for a girl …” One of them said … was it Clara? Or Clarice? Holding them apart was a real challenge.
“ … around our age.” The other one added.
“And we want that.” Both of them said in unison.
“What?” I asked as the ball had shrunken enough to reveal Lucinda’s and Luna’s legs, intertwined in a last hug.
“We … want someone to cry for us when we die. We want to be loved … we want to be accepted by someone.” One of them said while all of us looked down at a deathly pale Luna being hugged by a sleeping Lucinda.
“We are not some group picking up vampires on the streets. The others wouldn’t like that.” I said, knelt down beside Lucinda and picked her up gently.
“We want to help …”
“… and defeat the demon king.”
“No.” I concluded right away. Taking them with us would be the end of our cooperation with the heroes. And if I had to choose between idiotic teenagers and crazy vampire twins, I would definitely take the kids.
“But we are friends with her!” One of them said right away.
“ … a flask.” Looking down in shock, I noticed that Lucinda’s eyes were open, even though they were devoid of any emotion.
“Quick, Clara! You have the mana potions!” Clarice, apparently the right one of them said.
“No? You do!” Both of them opened the backpacks they got from who knows were, rummaged through them and each found a mana bottle. At the same time, they opened it and drained its contents only to extend the glass bottle over to us.
Weakly, Lucinda struggled free of my grasp and knelt down on the ground, smashing one of these flasks to pieces right away and using the shards to engrave the other with runes I never saw before.
And then, she closed the lid of that flask again, hugged that flask and began to weep quietly.
“Hey …” I muttered while the twins went on their knees in front of Luna’s corpse.
“She is gone … she will never return to be the person she was. Her soul is broken … and I’m standing in front of future I never wanted to have.” Lucinda said quietly, her cheeks still dripping with tears.
“Her soul is in there, right?” I asked and pointed at the flask. I just couldn’t see any other reason why she would ask for something like this.
“It is … but I don’t want to put her back into her body. She wouldn’t be the same … and I cannot bear to look at her like this.” Well, if she said so, then there had to be some truth to it. Kneeling down behind her, I hugged her from behind while ignoring the clamour the heroes and Louis made behind us as they slid down into the massive crater as well.
“Demons!” Gregory shouted out while the two twins shielded themselves from the bright light.
“Get away from Lucy!” Schwarz said and dashed towards us right away. Lucinda tensed up right away still looking down onto Luna’s corpse.
“Leave them be, Schwarz … Luna wouldn’t want us to fight.” And finally, the four noticed the corpse in between Lucinda and the twins who hadn’t moved at all.
They stopped in their tracks and dimmed the light a little as Lucinda stood up quietly and looked over to the hill in the distance.
“We should bury her …” She muttered, reached beneath Luna’s back with one hand and her legs with the other. Without caring about anything else, she walked over to that hills, only hindered by the steep slope which was quickly transformed into a stair thanks to Sofie.
In silence, we all followed her, the vampires in front, me in the middle and behind us the heroes. And on the very top of the hill, Lucinda turned around and placed Luna down carefully.
And then, she started to dig using her own hands. Lucinda stopped everyone from helping right away and used the most gruesome method to dig. Even the twins managed to stay silent for hours until Lucinda was satisfied with the hole she dug out and placed Luna’s corpse into it. For several seconds, she merely gazed at her before she took the first batch of dirt and filled up the shallow hole again.
As soon as she did so, she merely stood in front of Luna’s grave for several minutes before she found the right words.
“Till next time my friend.”
Hugging my knees quietly, I wondered whether this was the end. She was a broken girl for sure, but now it had to be even worse than that.
Would she plot to kill me? If so, then I was willing to accept that fate, but if she chose against doing so and was hurting whenever she looked at me, I wouldn’t accept it. I would do everything – including taking my own life – to rectify the issue I made for her, so that Lucinda could smile again.
But I wasn’t just thinking about that. I was also wondering how I could salvage this. There was no way Louis didn’t realise that this reality warping magic came from Lucy and along with him, everyone else would get even more suspicious of Lucinda.
Sighing quietly, I stood up from the dirt, jumped onto the roof of the next building and headed towards the main road where I found a few men I knew, Marc – fully healed – Louis and the heroes. The spotted me as soon as I jumped down onto the street and everyone directed their gaze at me.
“What is this dome?” Ellie asked right away and pointed towards the darkness swallowing every light.
“Dark magic.” I concluded, hoping they would buy into it.
“No, don’t give us that crap. Dark magic doesn’t alter your feelings.” Well, it appears they were already connecting the knots slowly.
“Fine … this is Lucy’s magic. Just like Sofie can crate this ball of green light which heals everyone around, Lucy can do this.” I explained, avoiding the correct answer a little.
“It’s exactly the opposite of mine, isn’t it?” Sofie asked, conjured up her healing magic and let it hover near the dome. Just a little bit, the dome made place for her magic, but also extinguished it rapidly. “That means … this magic is … death magic?”
Clicking my tongue in annoyance, I sat down on a barrel and gritted my teeth. There was hardly any way for me to keep quiet about this when I didn’t want to see a vulnerable Lucinda being bombarded with questions.
“Okay, I’ll answer your question as long as you don’t ask me things along the lines of ‘is she evil?’.” I said and walked away from the others until we were out of range.
“Go ahead.” Schwarz said, quite eager to know more about Lucinda even if my answers wouldn’t be to his liking.
“She isn’t like us. Not even remotely. You can view her as a goddess of death, without her being able to use her powers that much. And she also cannot manipulate other elements, so there is that as well.” I explained right away, which was probably more than they could take.
“A … goddess of death? How?” Sofie asked shocked but didn’t seem to doubt my words that much.
“Because she was born from the god of death himself.” I explained truthfully.
“That’s cheating!” Gregory shouted out angrily and stomped onto the ground, creating a little dust cloud around his feet.
“Shut the fuck up Gregory. You don’t know anything about her. You guys are cheating. You were given these powers and also level up faster, which is something normal people can only dream off. She had to go through excruciating pain to gain anything.” I hissed angrily at him. I hated this guy from the moment I met him, that was for sure.
“So a goddess of death, huh? How many did she kill already?” Ellie asked, way more level headed then the others.
“How many pregnancies did Sofie have? Just because she is born as something, doesn’t mean she has to live it out. And besides, there are more than enough deaths on a normal day already.” I explained, which wasn’t exactly the truth, but I already stated I wouldn’t answer these types of question in the very beginning.
“But she still killed some, at least tonight.” Well, if they didn’t get out in time, it was hardly Lucinda’s fault, was it? But that’s not something I could say as well, which was why I rather stuck to the sad truth itself.
“She is … she is desperate right now. Luna died and … and she can’t take that.” I explained. In a sense, Lucinda’s emotional development didn’t happen at all, thanks to Aska’s actions. She never learned to live with loss.
“As saddening as that is, it’s not an excuse to murder.” Ellie stated and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“She gave all of us enough time to escape and that’s a fact.” I pointed out.
“Her actions were still pretty evil. And that leads me to think about what the demon king told us. Is it true that we are being observed by the gods for their own amusement?” Gregory asked which I didn’t understood that well. But this wold was created for Lucinda and in a sense, she was one of them with the key difference that her memories about her previous life – if one might even call that a life – were laying dormant within her.
“I … don’t know that.” I still said regarding being watched by the gods.
“Then why are we here? Why was she pushing so hard to invade while the frontline was basically stable?” Well, humanity wasn’t close to extinction yet, but with the arrival of a certain god, this may change quickly.
“Because the demons are trying to get the vessel of her father into this world. And none of us want that.” I explained carefully not to spill too many information. I certainly didn’t want them to know that Lucinda wanted this world for herself. That would paint a very bad light onto her.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Ellie asked and squinted her eyes.
“Because he tortured her? Because he didn’t give her any room to breathe for the first hundreds of years of her life? Because she hates him for everything he did to her? I don’t know, that could be a few reasons. Not every god is as nice as Irminsul and Askatesh definitely isn’t.” I told them the most saddening facts about their relationship, while obviously leaving the less beneficial things out. They didn’t have to know these two were in an intimate relationship after all.
“So we have your word against the demon king’s.” That was the gist of this, that was for sure.
“Believe what you want, do what you want just like you did all this whole time. I’m going to search for a boat now.” I added and turned away from them.
“Hey!” Gregory shouted out angrily as I had ended the conversation one sided.
“What?” I asked annoyed.
“I think we need to think calmly about this. But until we find an answer, I want you under supervision.” We’re they for real? I saved their sorry asses so many times and now they were basically putting me under house arrest?
“… fine.” I couldn’t really fight them on my own, and even if that would ruin all the chances we had to reconcile with them. And I was pretty sure we would need them in the next part more than ever before.
And so, I strolled back towards the others, sat on my barrel while the so called heroes told the others to keep me in their vision.
And then they talked … without anyone else. Even Louis wasn’t invited, which was strange as Ellie was usually attempting to involve him in these conversations.
Well, at least their first conclusion was that Louis should create a boat for them and that all others except the heroes, Louis and me should be teleported away. They wouldn’t be of any use anyway.
And then, on the second day or so, they still hadn’t found any satisfying conclusion to their issues. Louis made a small row boat with his gift of creation, but otherwise there seemed little progress except that everyone else was gone at this point, leaving my usual quiet surroundings rather quiet.
But at least I got something out of them before they left. Miraculously, an axe wielding dwarf survived every battle so far and was able to patch Lucinda’s glasses up somewhat. Well, with a completely broken right side, there was no other choice but to close that part off completely. Sadly, Lucinda would need to look solely through the cracked left side of these glasses. But at least I had something for her.
And on the second night or so when the others were sleeping in an old inn and asked me to keep watch, the impenetrable dome of darkness shrunk slowly which prompted me to run towards the edge of a massive crater Lucinda had created right away. Like a ball, it shrunk in size quietly, always touching the bottom of the crater in the middle. At one hundred metres size, I jumped down the crater, slid through the mud and ran towards the middle as fast as I could. At two hundred metres, I had to slow down a little and at two metres, I stopped completely.
The ball still shrunk down further, but I was already drawing my sword instead for going ahead.
Opposite of me there were the two twins, no blade in their hands at all and looking at me with interest.
“Why are you here?” Shouldn’t they have ran away already? Didn’t they realise the heroes would end their life quickly when they were spotted?
“We saw how Lucy cried for a girl …” One of them said … was it Clara? Or Clarice? Holding them apart was a real challenge.
“ … around our age.” The other one added.
“And we want that.” Both of them said in unison.
“What?” I asked as the ball had shrunken enough to reveal Lucinda’s and Luna’s legs, intertwined in a last hug.
“We … want someone to cry for us when we die. We want to be loved … we want to be accepted by someone.” One of them said while all of us looked down at a deathly pale Luna being hugged by a sleeping Lucinda.
“We are not some group picking up vampires on the streets. The others wouldn’t like that.” I said, knelt down beside Lucinda and picked her up gently.
“We want to help …”
“… and defeat the demon king.”
“No.” I concluded right away. Taking them with us would be the end of our cooperation with the heroes. And if I had to choose between idiotic teenagers and crazy vampire twins, I would definitely take the kids.
“But we are friends with her!” One of them said right away.
“ … a flask.” Looking down in shock, I noticed that Lucinda’s eyes were open, even though they were devoid of any emotion.
“Quick, Clara! You have the mana potions!” Clarice, apparently the right one of them said.
“No? You do!” Both of them opened the backpacks they got from who knows were, rummaged through them and each found a mana bottle. At the same time, they opened it and drained its contents only to extend the glass bottle over to us.
Weakly, Lucinda struggled free of my grasp and knelt down on the ground, smashing one of these flasks to pieces right away and using the shards to engrave the other with runes I never saw before.
And then, she closed the lid of that flask again, hugged that flask and began to weep quietly.
“Hey …” I muttered while the twins went on their knees in front of Luna’s corpse.
“She is gone … she will never return to be the person she was. Her soul is broken … and I’m standing in front of future I never wanted to have.” Lucinda said quietly, her cheeks still dripping with tears.
“Her soul is in there, right?” I asked and pointed at the flask. I just couldn’t see any other reason why she would ask for something like this.
“It is … but I don’t want to put her back into her body. She wouldn’t be the same … and I cannot bear to look at her like this.” Well, if she said so, then there had to be some truth to it. Kneeling down behind her, I hugged her from behind while ignoring the clamour the heroes and Louis made behind us as they slid down into the massive crater as well.
“Demons!” Gregory shouted out while the two twins shielded themselves from the bright light.
“Get away from Lucy!” Schwarz said and dashed towards us right away. Lucinda tensed up right away still looking down onto Luna’s corpse.
“Leave them be, Schwarz … Luna wouldn’t want us to fight.” And finally, the four noticed the corpse in between Lucinda and the twins who hadn’t moved at all.
They stopped in their tracks and dimmed the light a little as Lucinda stood up quietly and looked over to the hill in the distance.
“We should bury her …” She muttered, reached beneath Luna’s back with one hand and her legs with the other. Without caring about anything else, she walked over to that hills, only hindered by the steep slope which was quickly transformed into a stair thanks to Sofie.
In silence, we all followed her, the vampires in front, me in the middle and behind us the heroes. And on the very top of the hill, Lucinda turned around and placed Luna down carefully.
And then, she started to dig using her own hands. Lucinda stopped everyone from helping right away and used the most gruesome method to dig. Even the twins managed to stay silent for hours until Lucinda was satisfied with the hole she dug out and placed Luna’s corpse into it. For several seconds, she merely gazed at her before she took the first batch of dirt and filled up the shallow hole again.
As soon as she did so, she merely stood in front of Luna’s grave for several minutes before she found the right words.
“Till next time my friend.”
