Actions

Work Header

Refracted Light

Chapter 4: A Village Missing...

Summary:

Rose spends a few days in a strange mountain village.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

"So, you settled in okay?"

Rose turned from where she'd let herself sprawl on the small house's rug (it wasn't the most ladylike posture, but no one was gonna gripe at her about that here) to see Sorey shut the door behind him. "Yeah, it's nice. So, your talk with your grandfather went... okay, right?"

Sorey grinned sheepishly. "Well... Gramps was a little surprised, for sure, but I knew he'd be fine with letting you stay for a few days in the end. Elysia never gets visitors from the world below, but that doesn't mean we've forgotten our manners." He paused. "Also, technically he's not my grandfather. Gramps is just what we - I - call him, since he's raised me all my life. I guess Elysia in general did, really."

"Huh." There were a couple of things to unpack there - not least the implication that there were in fact more people living in this oddly empty "village" besides Sorey and his unseen 'gramps' - but she didn't want to go there right now, especially with both fatigue and hunger nagging at her. So she instead chose to follow up the simplest option. "What do you mean 'the world below'?"

"You know, the land that lies below the mountaintops. Where you come from."

Rose furrowed her brow. "You make it sound like you've never left this mountain."

Sorey shook his head. "I've thought about doing it sometime, sure. I'd love to travel around and explore ruins all over the world. That's kind of a hobby of mine, like I told you earlier."

Her mouth twitched. "You sound like my friend Clem. She was crazy about exploring the ruins in both our hometowns. Never really got the whole thing myself..." Though as she shrugged, the thought again came to her: But you are here now, aren't you?

***

Later, after a surprisingly delicious meal (and one where, again, it was a relief to just eat without having to worry about decorum and protocol and what-not), Sorey took up the earlier conversational thread again. "So, your hometown has ruins in it? You said you were from Hyland, right?"

"Yeah. Ladylake, the capital, to be exact-"

"Like in the legend of the Lady of the Lake and the Sacred Blade?!"

Rose blinked. "You - you've heard of that?" Even by what she had already come to conclude were Sorey's usual exuberant and excitable standards, it'd been a real outburst. "All the way up here?"

Sorey beamed. "Of course! There's whole chapters all about it in the Celestial Record!"

"The heck? You've read that too?"

The young man reached into one of the pouches at his belt and pulled out a small black book, bearing both a familiar symbol on the cover and the clear signs of extensive rereading. "All the time! Wait, 'too'? Does that mean you...?"

She pulled out her own, much more pristine-looking copy. "Clem gave me a copy a couple of years ago for my birthday. Honestly, I never really paid much attention to it, not until..."

She bit her lip. For a moment there was silence, and she waited for Sorey to press her, but he kept silent.

Am I really going to just... talk about this?

But then again, am I ever going to find a less judgmental audience?

"If you've never been below this mountain, then... you don't know about the calamities, do you?"

Sorey looked concerned. "Calamities?"

"Storms, floods, diseases, droughts... all sorts of disasters have been happening all over the world. They've been getting worse and worse over the last few years. Nobody knows why, but there's all kinds of panic about an 'Age of Chaos'. I've... tried to roll my eyes at the doomsaying, but things really are taking a toll. People are suffering." She swallowed. "Dying.

"Like I told you, I'm a knight. If people are causing problems, I can try and deal with it. I can fight them, or talk to them, or something. But what am I supposed to do about a tornado? It's... All over the continent there are people who think the best way to deal with the chaos is starting wars to steal other people's stuff, and that's so frigging stupid, but also - part of me keeps thinking, at least that's something I can actually try to stop! But this other - stuff...

She shook her head and waved her Celestial Record. "I don't know if I believe everything in this book, about Shepherds and seraphim and all that. Honestly, it - it kind of gives me the creeps, the idea that there are these powers out there that humans can't see or know about. You know? But... I don't know, if I can't help, I want to try and find some way to... Gah, this is hard to talk about, but you know what I'm saying, right?" She shrugged. "Of course, almost everyone back in Ladylake just laughs at the idea."

Sorey recoiled. "That's awful! What about your friend Clem?"

Rose looked down at the floor. A fringe of hair fell forward into her eyes, but she didn't mind; it was easier not to look at anything that way. "...She's dead. One of those disasters I talked about wiped out her whole town not long ago." She held up a hand as he opened his mouth for some kind of sympathetic platitude. "She's not the only friend I've lost, and I'm not the only one who's lost people. The world is not a nice place right now."

Sorey sat back slowly. "So that's why... Look, I don't know about Shepherds, although I did find a glove in those ruins earlier with the Shepherd's crest on it. But what you said about the idea of seraphim creeping you out... I know the Celestial Record talks about people revering 'that which they don't understand', but it also says that long ago humans and seraphim lived in harmony together. Maybe some of them would just like to meet you."

She gave him a skeptical glance. That had almost sounded like he was speaking from personal-

Nope. Not thinking too hard about that right now.

"Huh. Well, I guess we can talk more about this tomorrow. I think I'm gonna hit the hay now, so to speak. I don't know how long I was out in those ruins earlier today, but I do know it's been forever since I got an actual good night's sleep."

Sorey scratched his head, embarrassed. "Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to keep you up talking."

"You apologize way too much, you know that?"

"Sorr- uh, yeah." Another sheepish head-scratching gesture. "You can take the bed, I'm fine just staying out here for tonight. You want to go out and try and get some materials for your return trip tomorrow?"

"Sure. Night."

***

They did just that the next morning, engaging in relatively little serious conversation as they hunted down a handful of prickleboars. It was a side of Sorey that Rose hadn't quite expected to see; despite the good-natured ingenuity, he was quite capable of surviving in the wild. Probably more than she was, really. For all her missions and excursions she had to admit that she didn't exactly love the wildnerness.

But it also puzzled (and mildly freaked out) her even more. Sorey kept speaking as if there were plenty of other people living in Elysia, but where were they? The village seemed like it was missing everything - shops, craftsmen, and inhabitants - but then where had all the buildings come from? Sorey was definitely weird but he wasn't nuts. And sure, it might have been her imagination, but there had been feelings all day like someone was nearby, watching her...

At one point, she finally just snapped. "All right, I'm getting fed up with this! If anyone's out there, you can go ahead and just speak up now, okay?"

A very brief pause-

"...a-and show yourself too, I mean! The visibility part is very important!"

Sorey looked at her with another of his slightly embarrassed grins as the silence lingered. At least it wasn't the "you're crazy" look she had expected.

(Though she wasn't sure if his opinion was all that reassuring there...)

The feeling of watched never really went away, but she didn't bother trying to comment on it again. Partly because she probably just looked like a frigging idiot, but also because... well, it might also be her imagination, but it wasn't nearly as creepy a feeling of observation as the sinister presence she'd felt tailing her through the "Forest of Perdition" below.

Besides, if there were seraphim here and Sorey was friends with them, they couldn't be that scary...

***

Mikleo studied the dagger carefully as he made his way towards Elysia's gate. He had next-to-no firsthand experience with the things - nobody in the village bothered to make them when seraphic artes could serve better for just about any potential purpose, and even the kitchen knives were really only ever used by Sorey. But as cultural artifacts they'd come up at least a few times in the Celestial Record, so he still felt pretty confident in his assessment. In its functional yet elegant design - and slightly outdated aesthetic, suggestive of a pre-Death Age origin - it seemed very much in keeping with the rest of Rose's equipment. (Not that he'd really expected anyone else to have dropped a dagger in those ruins, but still).

Of course, that made the crest on the hilt - one that he'd seen way more than a few times in the Celestial Record - very curious indeed...

A part of him was a little surprised he wasn't more relieved that the human girl was leaving today. For a while there he'd been really convinced that Rose being there would bring some kind of trouble down on Elysia. After all, when had Sorey just rushing in without thinking things through not made a mess? (Okay, it had probably been his own fault when they'd tried rappeling down into the sunken shrine to the north that one time. And they wouldn't have met Rose in the first place if he hadn't been the one to step on those weakened flagstones in the Mount Mabinogio ruins. And- But still, it was usually Sorey's fault.)

Plus, while he'd be an enormous jerk to begrudge his best friend spending some time with a new friend, it was a little... annoying just how much time Sorey had spent exclusively around her these last few days.

But to be fair, they couldn't exactly spend time together as a trio when Rose could neither see nor hear him, and he'd been surprised how much that fact stuck with him. The way she seemed mildly-to-heavily freaked out by the idea that "invisible" seraphim could be hanging around was a little funny, yeah. He'd actually had to team up with Kyme and Mason to lay down the law when a few of the village's less-mannerly residents had proposed rearranging her things when her back was turned as a prank.

But it was also more than a little sad, because Rose was a good person. She seemed brave and determined and a little offbeat, and despite everything the elders had always said about humans, she barely gave off any malevolence at all. It didn't seem right that any knowledge or interaction between them could only go one way. It was enough to make him understand a little better the way Sorey felt, when he talked about how much he wished the world could go back to the ancient times when all humans and seraphim coexisted.

And it reminded him of part of the conversation he'd had with Gramps before venturing into the ruins to find the knife...

"You sure have mellowed on her, huh, Gramps? When Sorey first showed up with a human in tow it looked for a moment like you really meant to read him the riot act."

The old seraph shrugged and smiled. "I suppose I was just being a bit of an old fogey who doesn't like to see his kids grow up. I always knew this day would come."

Mikleo frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Sorey is a child of two worlds, Mikleo. He has both the capacity and desire to serve a bridge between human and seraph. Yet he's spent his entire life living only in our realm. He was born a human. It's only natural that one day he would venture forth to live out his days in their world."

Mikleo's frown deepened. "Sorey, going to live among humans? No offense, Gramps, but are you nuts? He'd get eaten alive! You know what he's like - he doesn't know anything about them, or the way they live! I mean, can you imagine him trying to use... what's it called... 'money'...?"

And besides, I'd... He shook his head.

Barely visible under his bushy eyebrows, Gramps's eyes twinkled. "Well now, I never said I expected him to go there alone..."

His mind came back to the present as he approached the gate. Thanks to the low-level wind artes that someone always had running, even from this distance he could hear the tailing edges of the conversation between Sorey and their guest. Once again, and inevitably, his friend seemed to be having difficulty with the idea that what was totally normal for him seemed super-nice to anyone else.

"...no, really, it was nothing."

"You're way too modest," Rose replied. "Sure, most people would say they'd help a stranger without knowing anything about them, but actually doing it? Let's just say I'm kinda skeptical." Her gauntled hands interworked together for a moment. "I mean... I did kinda lie to you right at the start, you know."

Mikleo strained to listen more closely. What does that mean?

Sorey asked the same question, and Rose gave a nervous-looking smile. "Uh, yeah, my name... My surname isn't Monmouth. It's Diphda. Rose Diphda."

(Sorey seemed to miss the reference. Unsurprisingly.)

"As in... the secondary branch of the Royal Family of Hyland."

Even this far out Sorey's surprise was visible. "Whoa, you're royalty?"

Rose shrugged. "In a technical sense. I'm only eleventh in line to the throne. Twelfth in a few months, when my aunt has her second baby. I should have told you right away, but... my mentor always told me to be careful with how much I gave away about myself, and, well..."

Sorey shook his head. "I understand. You were just being careful."

Mikleo could make out Rose's frown. "I was being paranoid. I know we've only known each other a few days, but I could tell pretty much from the very start that you're a good guy. And..." She shrugged again. "Look. I still don't know if I believe there are seraphim here in Elysia," (a couple of the onlooking villagers exchanged amused looks), "and I dunno if one old glove is enough to make me start believing in fairy tales. But we're not holding the Sacred Blade Festival because everyone believes it's literally true, we're holding it because it reminds us what's important to the people of Ladylake. And whether they're legendary heroes or not, Ladylake could use more good guys in general. Like you."

She looked down. "I don't want to pressure you into anything. But if you can make it... Well. I hope I'll see you there."

Sorey looked a bit dumbstruck as she set off through the gate and down the slope, back to the world of humans. Arriving on the scene, Mikleo tapped his friend on the shoulder.

"Invited to a festival by a princess? Bet you weren't expecting that to happen this morning."

Sorey turned around. "Mikleo!" He spotted the dagger. "What's that?"

"Gramps sent me back into the ruins to look for clues about Rose, and I found this." He handed it over. "Check out the hilt - that's the royal crest of Hyland. It looks like Rose really is royalty."

Sorey's face fell. "This belongs to her? Why didn't you get here sooner? I could have given it back!" He turned and looked through the gate, but the human girl was already out of sight. "Should I go after her?"

Mikleo smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. "No need to go rushing off. I'm sure you can catch up to her later."

***

And indeed, soon they would do just that.

...But not under the circumstances any of them had expected.

Notes:

This chapter was an absolute nightmare to write. Updates should come much more frequently from now on, barring IRL developments.