When I opened my eyes, a bright light made me squint. The smell of onions, sweat and fat, and a mixture of other vegetables reached my nose. Next, there was the sound of a knife quickly and loudly hitting the wood.
Tac-tac-tac
Once my eyes had adjusted to the new lighting, I followed the sound.
Beside me, there was a girl with dark blue hair. She had a bob cut with some short bangs in the middle.
She was wearing a long gray linen tunic-dress with long sleeves, a loose fitting. She also had a shoulder capelet over the chest and the shoulders. And a coif tied at the back of her head.
"Here. Take these to Madame Mortier," she said, handing me a board loaded with carrots and cubed potatoes. She looked very serious and hurried.
"What?" I managed to say.
"NOW! Move, move!" She gave my shoulder a good shake twice.
Then the blue-haired girl got another wooden board and started chopping what looked like leeks. At the same time, I noticed the counter in front of me. It had veggie leftovers, salt and other spices that I had no idea what they were.
It was then that I finally realized I was in a kitchen that looked like something out of a scene from a medieval movie. There was a group of women of different ages moving together as they cooked.
In front of me, at the other end of the counter, a group of three women were kneading dough. As soon as they were done, they passed it on to another group who shaped it into circles using wooden bowls. When the second group finished, they passed the dough to a third group, who put it in a pottery oven.
A couple of girls walked past me as they picked up the leftover food that had fallen and put it in a sack.
"WHERE ARE THE POTATOES AND CARROTS?!" a middle-aged woman with black braided hair and gray streaks asked from the other end of the kitchen.
The girl with the dark blue bob haircut gave me a kick to the ankle.
"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!" she said, looking so serious that I felt my anger disappear immediately.
I felt like I had to do something, so I decided to carry the board to the middle-aged woman without saying a word.
As I walked through the kitchen, I stopped when I saw the cauldrons near the end of the room.
The cauldrons were wide, maybe five meters across, and stood over what looked like bonfires under iron grates. The girls arrived, threw some veggies into the boiling pot, and then ran back to their stations.
"You! Tall one. Don't just stand there! Put the veggies in the stew," the woman barked.
'What the fuck is going on?'
"I got this," another girl with a very familiar appearance said as she gently took the board from my hands and threw the vegetables into the pot.
The middle-aged woman moved from her spot and walked until she was standing in front of me.
She slapped me.
"Listen, girl, you need to react. NOW. If you can't do the job, then you're no use in my kitchen,"
"Emilie!" The woman said a name that made my heart sink.
It was then that I recognized the familiar-looking girl. Her dark brown hair with bangs that covered half her face. Brown eyes and a gentle gaze.
It was Emilie. My ex-girlfriend.
"Emilie? H‑how are you—" middle-aged woman interrupted me
"Take this one and two more girls with you. Get everything you can to the walls. Hurry!"
"Understood," Emilie said, wiping her hands on her gray dress, then rushing to me.
"Come on, big one. We take the barrels."
She took my hand and led me to one of the cauldrons near the wall. Then the girl who was a bit on the short side took two empty barrels and put them in front of us.
"Here," she said, handing me an empty bowl without looking at me, while she used another to pour the stew into the barrels.
She glanced across the kitchen and two other girls.
"Livia, put buns and bread into baskets. Milaine, bring a wheelbarrow from storage." Emilie said firmly.
Following her gaze, I saw both girls there: Livia, pink-red hair tied back, coif, plain dress. Milaine, blonde hair, also tied back, coif and plain dress.
Both answered at the same time.
"Understood!"
'Okay, I'm totally lost. What the fuck is going on? Am I dreaming or wh—'
Suddenly, a strong tremor shook the entire kitchen, followed by a loud sound of something collapsing outside. Some of the girls who were cooking fell down, and plates, cutlery, pots, and other utensils fell with them.
"Seal them! We're taking them as is!" Emilie shouted.
Instinctively, I sealed the barrels. They were half full.
'Fuck it, survive first, ask later.'
Milaine arrived with a wooden wheelbarrow; two baskets strapped tight filled with food. Livia added a third one.
Emilie tried to lift one barrel, but she was struggling, based on how she was gritting her teeth.
"I got this," I said to her as I hauled the two barrels onto the wheelbarrow. Emilie nodded at me.
Livia and Milaine stacked bowls and threw them in the wheelbarrow.
Then each of the three girls grabbed another two baskets, one for each hand. I decided to take the wheelbarrow.
"All right, we are moving. To the walls!" Emilie said as the rest of the girls cooking moved aside to make way for us.
As we left the kitchen through a door, we crossed a bar that matched the medieval aesthetic of the kitchen.
A tavern.
The chairs and tables were broken and piled up at the entrance. The girls dropped their baskets and started to move some of the broken stuff from it, just enough to make room for the wheelbarrow.
When we went outside, I saw the ruins of a city, destroyed houses, burned buildings, and huge craters.
It was raining hard. The road, which was just mud and dirt, was all washed away, leaving a small brown river. Ignoring the corpses floating in the water, we kept moving forward.
"Hurry! Two hundred more meters!" Emilie said.
We ran. Livia and Milaine raised their hands to shield the baskets. The wheelbarrow sank and squealed. I barely managed to stop it from falling.
The only thing truly safe was the stew inside the lidded barrels.
I looked up.
Green sky. Black clouds, thunder, and green lightning. There were also green‑yellow fireballs that traveled across it.
'Did they change Vulkris's color?'
I asked myself as I kept running with the girls towards the walls that could be seen.
They were stone walls, twenty or thirty meters high, but the most striking thing was the giant hole in them. It was a miracle that the thing was still standing.
There was a big crowd at the bottom of the hole. Kids with bandages under gray blankets. Women were tending to men with shattered armor. There were arms and legs missing, and half-cut bodies tied to stretchers.
Milaine and Livia started distributing the food from the baskets among the survivors.
"There. TheGoddess of Adventure's army, we need to deliver the last food" Emilie pointed.
Beyond the camp, in the field, there were maybe fifty men standing in formation. Their armor was pathetic. Some were broken, others had pieces missing, and some of them weren't even made of metal.
However, no one looked down.
Emilie handed off her baskets to the girls and helped me push the wheelbarrow.
After a few minutes, we arrived at the army. We took the barrels off and started serving the stew into bowls. Emilie went from the left and I covered the right.
"Thank you, miss," said a bearded man in his forties, wearing leather armor.
"Glad to taste stew one last time," a young boy said, almost smiling.
"I'm fine. Give it to the captain," said a robust man a bit smaller than me.
I worked from the back to the front. A man, the same height as me, was standing there.
He looked like a knight. Broken armor, no helmet, sword at the hip. With long and loosely tied brown hair.
He stood with his arms crossed, looking out across the battlefield.
When I followed his gaze I saw an army of creatures, or aberrations, to be exact, stretching endlessly along the horizon.
Some of the creatures resembled races I had seen in fiction. But others were totally bizarre and deformed; some were combinations of animals, and others were… 'things'.
Two called my attention. The giant beetles that fell from the fireballs, and several giant sandworms that emerged from the ground.
They were waiting.
I offered him a bowl of stew. He answered without looking back.
"Thanks. Give it to my men, please," he said. The voice sounded strangely familiar to me.
"Sir… everyone ate. You're the last," I said, completely consumed in the character.
The man relaxed his shoulders and turned to receive the plate of stew from my hands. When I saw his green eyes, I recognized him immediately.
"Thanks."
"O‑old man?" slipped out of me.
It was him. My future self. Younger than the last time I'd seen him, and also with a different haircut.
"Old man? Mhmm… must look awful, haha," he said with a grin "Go on, girl. Find your family. The battle is abo—"
Suddenly, one of the green fireballs fell from the sky in front of us, a few meters away. A bright green flame appeared, and a woman came out of it.
Pale skin. Long dark cyan hair with emerald highlights. Two deer ears and horns branching like twigs. A sleeveless black dress, bejeweled, that didn't get wet and barely covered her bust. A long dark cloak covered her frame
The woman lifted her gaze with a smile, her emerald green eyes shining.
"Oh, Chosen of the Goddess, are you ready for your final adventure?" The woman said, smiling with extreme ecstasy on her face as she opened her arms.
"Tch. You're disgusting, Witch of Chaos, Agatha," The man, who looked like me, said as he drew his sword.
The witch turned to me without losing her smile and pointed with two fingers.
"Ha! How poetic. Even your wife has come to witness your last moments. Perfect! Let her witness this ending,"
The captain stood in front of me and remained facing the witch.
"You never tire of talking bullshit, do you?" he said.
"Oh, don't be shy. Tell her something romantic, I enjoy a little dram—"
"Hey. Stupid bitch." I took off the coif I was wearing and crushed it with my fist. "Cut the shit alredy and help me. I don't have all day." I said as I burned the cook's clothes I had and wrapped myself in the purple flame of the Sigil.
"Eh?" She tilted her head. The smile froze.
***