Rob
Pew Pew Pew
This Feeling Will Never Die
2040 Words
2040 Words
Her eyes darted across the room. Left to right, and right to left. They rested on her closet off to the right, a simple mahogany. It was about as tall as the room was high, but that didn’t really say much since her room was only slightly higher than she was tall - and she was relatively small compared to others her age. To the left of it was a chair, wooden and largely unimpressive. On the left of her room were a sink, and a door leading to a somewhat half-assed shower.
It did its job admirably, but it wasn’t anywhere near as luxurious as the shower she had back home. It wasn’t quite a hole in the ceiling where the water came from, and a hole in the ground where it poured out into, but it wasn’t royal bathing either. She tried to push herself up, off her bed and onto her feet, but found that the strange dream had lingered a bit. Her body felt sore, her limbs all but wrought with muscle pain.
She felt numb, her body foreign as strands of hair fell in front of her eyes ever so slightly as she fell back onto the bed. This wasn’t an all too comfortable experience given that the bed was mostly a wooden frame filled with a bunch of hay and some awkwardly placed linen sheets tossed over it to emulate a proper bed. Sleeping in it normally wasn’t so bad, she was used to the semi-hard surface, but fallen back down on such a bed was never fun.
“Oww,” she moaned softly to herself as the light of day began to shine through her windows. She brought her arms to in front of her eyes and sighed softly. Everything about that dream had been so familiar, yet so wrong at the same time. They reminded her of the nightmares she used to had, but this one was so much more livid than what she could remember.
Perhaps the reason for that was because she was older now, more in control of her own thoughts, but that still didn’t make the nightmare any less frightening. In fact, it probably made it much worse considering she could still remember it vividly. Still her neck, arms and legs hurt from the hands that had grabbed her during her sleep. Sore and sensitive as they were, she had to do her best to get out of bed.
“Oi!” a voice suddenly called out from just outside her room.
Kai, she thought, and suddenly her body felt reinvigorated. “What is it?” she asked back in a slightly softer tone of voice than Caesar had done.
“What is it?” Kai asked. “Have you looked at the goddamn time, woman? I expected you downstairs for training half an hour ago!”
“I... uh...” Truth be told, she had felt so tired yesterday night that she had gone to bed immediately after she’d gotten home and as a result she forgot to set her alarm. Normally this wasn’t even that bad of a thing either, she had always had a rather decent internal clock, but with everything that had happened she’d just slept through all of it for once.
“At least let me take a quick shower, okay?”
“Fine.”
Echo was confident that Caesar wasn’t at all happy with her given the nature of his response. She could just picture him standing there in front of her door. He’d have his arms crossed, showing signs of great intimidation upon whoever dared to thread past him, and strands of his medium-length, raven-coloured hair would fall just in front of his eyes because he just didn’t take care for his style enough to feel any kind of shame from it.
It made her smile just thinking about it.
Without much further ado, she undid herself of her clothes and took what was perhaps the fastest shower she’d ever taken. It was then that a thought popped into her head. A thought she had been thinking about for while now. Caesar had seen many of her bad sides lately, without getting any kind of explanation as to what was going on in her life. That wasn’t exactly fair of her, was it?
She had to let him know at least a little bit more of herself. Perhaps... a name, her name. Moreover, not just one of her aliases, but her full, birth name. Maybe that would put his mind at ease a little bit, especially considering the things she had in mind for the future. If the things that had happened until now had already unsettled him, she shuddered to know what would happen if he heard of every single, gory detail of her brewing plan.
Then again, necromancy was pretty much frowned upon wherever she went, so maybe she shouldn’t expect too much from it to begin with.
When she finished showering, had put on some clothes, and made her way out of her room, she realized that Caesar was still waiting for her. He wasn’t exactly standing right in front of her, he stood against the wall slightly off to the right, but he was definitely waiting for her. As she stood there in the door opening, she saw him beginning to motion for her to follow him, but she curtly cut him off before he could finish.
“We need to talk,” she said, her stormy grey eyes locked with the man’s brutally cold gaze as she held the door open for him.
“We do,” he responded as he stepped over the door’s threshold.
She could tell that he was not at all happy with her, but something told her that things would probably only get worse from here on out. Still, she had to do it, had to say it, and as she closed the door behind her she sighed softly. Caesar had already sat down by the time she glanced over to her bed. Walking over, she sat down right next to him to avoid having to look at him all the time.
“So...” she said with hesitance filling her every syllable. “What do you want to know first?”
“Who are you?” he asked. “Like, really. Who the fuck is sitting next to me right now? Is it Echo, the trigger happy, energetic young woman who wants to make a name for herself as a mercenary, or are you this distant, brooding girl whose past is so obscure she’d rather cast a mask over it?”
“A bit of both,” Echo admitted, her head hanging down slightly.
“Which parts are from where then? I take it Echo is just an alias, and not your actual name?”
“Makes sense, right?” she said with a half-forced chuckle echoing past her somewhat hoarse voice. “My parents have a sick sense of humour, but they are not completely insane - although, as you might’ve guessed by now, my mother is slowly turning insane it seems.”
“Hmm,” was all the response she got, and part of her felt Kai’s eyes drilling down on her person, but she remained facing away from the man.
“I was born and raised a Rosalina Tacita Aetius,” she finally conceded, feeling somewhat of a small set of weights fall off her shoulders in the process. “I am child of Aranea Achillea Aetius and Alexander Wolfgang Bergfalk, don’t ask me how the two met or why I have my mother’s surname, and not my father’s. I do not know, nor do I particularly care.”
“That language,” the warrior interjected, largely uninspired by her real name apparently. “What was up with that? Does that have to do with where you’re from, or what?”
“Yes,” the grey-eyed woman responded. “Yes, it does. I was... raised in a somewhat forgotten city, a city where...” She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts as she dared a peak in Kai’s direction. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, but she could still feel a sense of unease coming from him. “Well, let’s just say it isn’t exactly the most friendly place to live if you value your life, if you catch my drift.”
Kai nodded, but Rosa wondered if he really did understand what she’d meant. She didn’t want to explicitly talk about necromancy, at least not for as long as she could keep it a secret to him. It would probably come to his attention someday, but today was not that day. People did not take kindly to desecrating the dead.
“How about that... vow you broke?”
“Vow... ah, yes.” She pondered on that for a moment. Of course, she’d broken a vow, but it had mostly been a gamble. It was superstition, nothing more. The Way of Echoes died when Valmoor’s founder died, but tradition dictated that it still be taught as a truth. She’d was told by her mother at an early age to always keep in mind that while it was taught as a truth, it was more of a thing to keep the population of wandering off.
“I bluffed,” she finally decided on saying, figuring that was probably the easiest way of explaining it. “Those cultists work for my mother, and so I banked on them being... well, being the kind that believed in such things as magical vows.
“It was pretty convincing, right?”
This time, the two of them really did lock eyes. Gazing strangely intently at the man, she saw a faint smile creep up on the man’s face for the first time since she’d woken up this morning.
“Yes, it was,” Kai responded with that same smile still on his face. “That was some quick thinking, I’ve got to admit. However, isn’t it... difficult? Like, the language sounds...”
“Strange?” Rosa asked, teasingly.
“No,” the towering man countered. “It sounds dead.”
Funny you should mention that, she thought to herself as she shook her head.
It was actually somewhat interesting how awfully right Caesar was with his response, but Rosa wondered if he even understood the meaning behind it himself. There was a reason why the tones, the syllables, and everything else about the language sounded dead. It was an ancient tongue, for one, but it was formed around the concept of ‘death’.
“Well, it’s not widely used anymore, so much of its melody has gone I suppose.”
“Makes sense,” he said, and got up from her bed again.
Leaning backwards a bit, Rosa watched as the rather tall and imposing man positioned himself in front of her with a surprisingly reassuring smile on his face. “How are you feeling?” he asked, and for a moment the redhead found herself to be rather confused, but then she burst into laughter.
“You’re an asshole,” she said in-between laughs.
All this time she’d thought he was legitimately angry at her - which he probably really was up to a certain point - but in reality he had just been hoping for her to not only be a bit more open about herself, but to talk about the things she’d cropped up for a while now. He probably didn’t know what things she wanted to get off her chest so much - like, keeping her true name a secret, etcetera - but he didn’t really need to know to get it out of her.
“Well,” he responded. “You’re quite the asshole yourself, i]Rosa[/i]. But, you haven’t answered my question yet: how are you feeling?”
“Better,” Rosa said back, jumping off from the bed herself this time. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Kai said, his smile slowly disappearing again. “I’m still not sure what to think of you, Rosa, but there’s no point in rushing through everything all at once.”
“Right.” Spast her companion, she opened the door again and watched as Kai passed across her door’s threshold again. “Oh, and Kai?”
“Yes...?”
“Could you keep my name... and the rest... a secret?”
“Your secrets are safe with me, Echo.”
“Thank you,” she said with sincere warmth coursing through her words. “Really.”
“Don’t mention it,” the raven-haired man spoke as he began to walk away from her room. “Now, get your ass in gear, we’ll be training all afternoon to make up for lost time.”