Steel strikes the earth as clumps of dirt are displaced all over the place. This backbreaking labor, this sweat and tears that dug itself down his bones. It was something that Lilus never understood he would ever feel. For all his life, he was under the reluctant tutelage of the witch, but… "THIS SUCKS TO HELL!"
He worked the fields surrounded by other villagers who all looked at him before going back to their work. He was told by the witch earlier today to work here instead of going with them, much to his dismay.
He even tried to attack her, and he knew himself how that would've played out, "Hang in there, Mr. Lilus!" Beside him, bathed beneath the shadows of a parasol and holding a notebook was Alisa. She had been tasked with keeping tabs on the fertile land circles that the witch had casted.
She was also tasked with studying how the runes worked, "Hang in there!? You're just as insufferable as that damned witch you know! I'm going to hang you once I'm done with this!"
She had been taught not to take Lilus' threats too seriously. For one thing, the things that the witch had taught her were more than enough to pacify the feline; and for another. He would suffer serious repercussions if he were to harm anyone in the village.
So she simply smiled at him, and tried to pacify him in a way she knew how, "I can help you hunt for us later, I promise you'll get a good feast out of it," She wasn't exactly the hunting type, but she had been taught basic tracking techniques and magic based on it.
"Hunt? You hunt?"
She closed her eyes and let out a small laugh, quite pathetically, "No."
"Then don't suggest that to me!" Lilus slammed his hoe to the ground and began dragging it down. It's not that he's a bad worker, rather just annoyed. Around him, some villagers found themselves entertained about his antics, much to his own dismay.
"I mean… maybe you'll get along better with the hunting group, you know? I am supporting them later, after all."
"You think I'll get along with you?"
"I hope we do!"
"Did that witch tell you to?"
She did, "She didn't, I was just wondering if, you know! I want you to integrate well in this village with the others, and it won't do well if you're so crass all the time." Quite frankly, Alisa was annoyed with Lilus' attitude, but she was given that task by the witch and she knew it'd do no one good if he kept being like this.
Lilus however, wasn't aware of this whole thing about his behavior. To him, his actions were entirely normal. Not because he was a feline, exactly, but because he was a terrible victim of that witch, perhaps even her first victim.
Still, a certain part of him was curious where these series of decisions would take him, "Fine," He said, though only to satiate his curiosity, "I'll go with your hunting pack. Maybe you guys won't even be able to get some deer without me," He laughed before gritting his teeth and digging back down.
Alisa was still reluctant on the witch's plan to properly integrate him. As far as she's concerned, Lilus is too far gone even for her, but she remembered how Hana looked when she mentioned Lilus. It looked regretful.
"Hey, what are you waiting for?" It was unusual to see the witch this silent. She stared back at the village, towards the fields. There was a sense of forlorn in her face, yearning for something she can't quite reach.
Perhaps, upon hearing my voice, a small smile appeared in that dejected face, as though a piece of her snapped back into place, then she turned towards me with that characteristic self serving smirk, "Aren't YOU excited?"
I felt a flushing redness in my face, "No!? I just want to get this over with as soon as possible, and you still have to tell me what to actually do when we get there."
"Well, for one thing," She walked forward, according to her we didn't need to use horses on the way, even if it'll take us more than three days to get to Valeria at that pace, "I'm expecting you to not act like a tourist the moment you stepped foot in that castle."
"I don't lack tact like you," I kept in step with her. It won't be long before I reach a point in this journey where every step is the farthest I've been from home. I really don't know what to feel about that.
"Please, Soren. Don't call it that. Curiosity is not a sin," She marched while explaining her pretentiousness, "A curious mind is a healthy mind, one that always questions the world and everything around it. If you lack that, you may as well be dead. Have you not?"
"Not what, become curious? I know I have. I was curious when my parents disappeared in the forest, when my uncle decided that it was his turn to die. I was curious about the stars in the night sky and wondered why they seemed to not care what's happening to us, despite the fact that my mother always told me about those gods."
"Right, and you already have an answer for at least one of those things!" Of course, she referred to the boar that took out my entire family, though I didn't like how she talked about it so enthusiastically. Still, she continued, "Didn't you feel satisfied with that knowledge?"
"Satisfied? Not at all. I still… I still want everyone back." My mother, my father, my uncle, every single one of those that died in that forest. Some of them were my friends, people I had grown up with. One of them was a teacher of mine who had suffered from the death of her child. She went there without even a weapon.
All of them died as a result of curiosity, like cats who never truly knew any better. I was also one of them, but unlike them I had someone to save me during that time.
Right, if the witch wasn't there, if there was no one powerful enough to protect me then I would've ended up like everyone else. I wasn't powerful enough to protect myself, so how can I protect anyone? How can I get anyone back?
"The dead don't come back. Believe me, I tried."
I stopped. It's only been a few minutes since we've left the village, my legs were already sore but I didn't feel like giving up right now.
The silhouette of the witch before the sunlight was unlike anything I've seen. Her hat, her dress all bathed in a shadow so sharp that one could be cut by it. It reminded me of a story that my mother used to tell me.
One day, a mortal woman who was filled with unbound curiosity and desire for knowledge decided to embark on an unfathomable journey. She said she was a clerk of an old empire, a simple woman with a simple life, though in her journeys, the knowledge she accumulated gradually strengthened her.
From the ruins of southern empires, she learned how to hunt and forage; from the sprawling cities of the east she learned from hundreds of masters various artforms, even martial arts and the art of war. It wasn't long before she headed north. It was here where she met her first follower.
That follower was an elf. My mother said that the elf was strangely very devoted to that woman, as though she found a sort of deliverance in her presence. That woman taught the elf all that she knew, and imparted her philosophy of curiosity. They traveled together, to the west where they finally encountered the last living God of the fifteen.
No one knew what happened with the encounter with that God, only that when the doors opened, both him and that woman were gone. Only the elf remained, as she walked out with hazy eyes, making her way straight into a forest where she disappeared. No one knew what happened to her after that, but my mother had something to add to that story.
That mortal woman may have been a clerk from an old empire, but she was also a villager from Soleil, back when the village was in its better days. Back when it was the primary trading hub between two massive kingdoms.
She promised someone, perhaps my grandfather, perhaps my grandfather's grandfather. I wouldn't know, only that that promise is still in my mother's mind. It was a simple one, but it carried with it some form of reverence, it was thus: "One day, I will return to your side."
I muttered that phrase as the witch paused in front of me. She turned to me, her silhouette momentarily casting on her beautiful face before she turned to look. I couldn't see her eyes from the shadow, but she was silent for a long moment.
Then she asked, "Are you okay, Soren?"
"I'm tired."
"Did I rush you?"
"Yes. You know I just woke up from goodness knows how long."
"Two days, you were passed out due to exhaustion for two days," She sighed, "I forgot fatigue exists. It's easy when you've gone through so long without feeling it." She went to my side and bade me to sit down on the side of the road.
"Should we head back?" The sun was starting to dip below the horizon, it hasn't really been long since we've left. We might have reached the village before anything bad happened but she insisted we didn't.
"Heading back means we forgot something. We didn't forget anything, I simply miscalculated. For the first time since I left. Goodness," She would say, as she chuckled to herself, "Already. And it hasn't even been a week."
She didn't wait for me to move, she pulled some surprising necessities from the stars in her dress. One of them, transformed from a faint red giant, was a rolled up sleeping bag. She carefully set it down by the grass, "Sleep here. A proper sleep. I need you to rise before the sun rises."
I dropped all my items. The bags, the shortsword I had inherited, and fell towards the sleeping bag. I crawled inside it and felt the warmth of quite a premium bedding. I haven't felt this in so long, not since the collapse of my house.
Above, the stars were beginning to take shape as the witch looked up at them. She was deep in thought, before she stood up and grabbed something else from her dress. More survival necessities. I asked her, "Were you… that woman's apprentice?"
She had pulled out a whole small kitchen setup, complete with a stovetop and pot. With a flick of magic, the dried wood below it caught on fire. It wasn't long before this entire place erupted with the beautiful scent of flavor. She didn't answer for a long time, her gaze focused on the meal.
Then, "No. I don't know her." Simple, curt. Then again, she knew who I was talking about. The night wore on in silence, as her eyes gazed towards the forest where creatures emerged, which I could not see, on account of my exhaustion slowly taking me. "Rest well, Soren. I'll wake you when dinner's done."
The world trembled beneath the hunting party.
They've stayed in the forest for far too long, "What's going on? Didn't the witch say this place is clean?" one of the hunters said, his eyes darting around, hands kept tight unto his bow. In the darkness, the shadows of the forest all individually seemed like a threat.
"She did," Alisa said, clutching her notebook tightly. She had led the party to this area after successfully tracking down fourteen different deer, all of which the entire party had carried with them. Now it felt like dead weight for what's about to come.
Lilus sensed it first, his feline eyes were bright in the dark and as such he could see past the shadows of the night. Yet, it was still far away. Beyond the shrubs to the east of them, where the way back to the village was.
It was a heavy thumping thing, a certain creature that should've died when the witch had cleared this place days ago. It persisted still, in a stroke of luck, this particular creature wasn't in the nest when the witch had cleared it, and though it retained damage, it still walked.
Hard.
In front of them.
Its footsteps rumble across the entire forest floor, each of it laced with unfathomable hunger and world-rending anger. Then, it appeared to Lilus. A pair of red eyes staring from the darkness.
His breath hitched and he immediately stanced up, "Behind me! Now!" The entire hunting party, a strong twenty men and Alisa all moved behind Lilus. They haven't seen the beast yet, but they could feel it.
Alisa, though, had something up her sleeve. She blasted open her notebook and scanned the pages. She had almost memorized where each spell was in this long list, though what she wanted to see were what the witch had given her.
She shakily grabbed her wand and tried to cast something but it sputtered into nothing. She took a deep breath, as if to remove the panic from her soul, but to no avail. No matter how much she tried, the shakiness won't stop.
Then, the beast emerged.
It was a boar the size of a house, wounded across its entire body. Its left eye was bloodshot, one of its snouts was cut in half. A huge gash lay across its entire body, but it continued to move despite all these injuries. It looked hungry, angry.
Twenty-two people, and more than a dozen deer. In front of the boar was nothing short of a feast. It growled, each breath exuded steam from its wet snout. There was nothing here that would not satisfy it, and it would die for it.
Lilus didn't wait for any cue, he charged at the beast before It could even move, his daggers taking in the air around it as it shaped itself into a blade of sharp wind. He used that wind to propel himself forward, aiming for the boar's other eye.
But the boar had been running on pure instinct, and something like this was far too easy to see. With a forceful smack, it turned its head to smack Lilus, luckily, the feline was moving towards where the snout had already been broken. Lilus put up his arms to block it, winds picked up in front of him to mitigate the damage.
The moment the boar's head and Lilus' shield met, a strong gust of wind exploded between them. It blasted the boar's head away as it recoiled a couple of meters to its side.
As for Lilus, he was launched across the treeline, disappearing from sight of the rest of the hunters. He landed on a tree branch, using the wind around his daggers to safely land. It was a clear sight, but it didn't take him a while to recover, with the blast and everything he was sufficiently dazed.
While the boar was sufficiently distracted, Alisa turned to the rest of the hunting party and yelled, her voice somewhat wavering, "PLEASE TRY TO GET OUT OF HERE, KEEP CLOSE TOGETHER AND CIRCLE AROUND THIS CLEARING!"
Her hands were still shaking. She had not seen what the creature in the forest was, all she knew were the amount of people that had disappeared here. She had believed what they were going to have was just a routine hunting and not a direct encounter.
Even if she survived here, she reckoned the casualties will continue to haunt her for the rest of her life. So either they all get out, or she doesn't have to suffer that anymore, "GO!" She flipped her spellbook, eyes quickly darting for all the spells she could use, but—
An arrow shot from behind her, piercing the air with a resounding whistle. Followed by another, and another, and eighteen more. They pierced the hide of the monster as it recoiled even further, "Not this time, kid," One of the hunters said, "That piece of shit ate my wife."
Alisa breathed deeply, recovering from her screaming session. Perhaps it took her so long to realize what this fight meant to the people around her. Everyone, including her, had lost someone to this forest, to these boars—and now here was one of them. Wounded, weakened, as hungry as they were, and as angry to the world.
Each person here carried a resentment that they wanted to release to the monster in front of them. Perhaps this was the true product of the witch's blessing, but Alisa didn't have time to think about that right now. She gave a curt nod and stood up.
Her hands were still shaking, and the boar had returned its focus on the hunting party. They were still reloading their crossbows. If it was to charge at them now, they would be caught offguard, blasted away, some may even be killed. She breathed deeply to try and focus herself.
The witch had told her that magic was like speaking a foreign language. The spellbooks were dictionaries and the wands were your method of speaking with reality itself. A wand can take many forms, and to some it doesn't even take a form at all. These are fluency, to cast without a dictionary, to speak without talking.
Her hands straightened, fear had left her body. She was ready to speak.