The Embercaller's shadowy silhouetto created dark waves out of thin air as it towered Hexa. It didn't attack. It talked. The words started to sink in. You wanted to wake up. It was true. It knew. But truth was that she wasn't sure if she wanted it anymore.
"How do you know?" Hexa asked. "Are you manipulating me?" she continued.
"I've seen your reaction to the fire. Since then, I've been observing you," the Embercaller stated.
"You've been watching me?" she asked.
"Ever since I felt you looking at my most valuable flame like it was something else entirely. A sentinent being," it answered.
"So you know?" she asked.
"I know what I see, but I don't know what you believe," it answered.
"I believe I'm still at home," she said, looking down to avoid the Embercaller's unseen gaze.
"Home?" it asked, voice laced with rare curiousity.
"Earth. The machine. I think it exploded and we never reached another universe. I'm still unconscious somewhere. Everything that happened after that..." she stopped to swallow. "None of this is real."
"And if you're correct, why are you afraid to wake up?" it asked her, but she avoided the question entirely. Her eyes remained fixed on the ground.
"If you're real... If this is all real... Tell me what happened to Aatos," she managed to get out.
"Very well. You have have watched a body perish, but you did not watch a life end," it said. Hexa's stomach flipped.
"What do you mean?" she asked. Her heart pounded in her chest as she braced for an explanation.
"His echoes cannot be described as simply as another death. Echoes shall stay and shall grow," the Embercaller's voice turned more formal as it chanted the lines like a spell learned by heart. Hexa barely made any sense of it, but it was enough to know Aatos wasn't himself.
That's when Hexa realized what she watched happen might have not meaned what she thought it would. What the Embercaller said connected to what they read in the ruins, so she couldn't call it a lie straight away.
In the forest, the group noticed Maya's return. Remy immediadly noticed something was off. Maya was soaked and Hexa was nowhere to be seen.
"Where is Hexa?" they asked.
"With the Embercaller," Maya answered so calmly it was unsettling. Remy tensed up immediately.
"We need to go after her!" they commanded.
"She's too deep in. She refused to follow me, but I believe knows what she's doing," she explained.
"That thing killed Aatos. We need to save her!" Remy cried out.
"So we have two options: 'leave Hexa with the fire monster' or 'walk directly into the fire monster and possibly get everyone killed.' And we're going for the latter. Great!" Hazel pointed out.
"What would you have us do, then?" Remy challenged.
As the two continued their fight Aatos noticed something metallic by the ruins. The fight about the person he didn't remember was so useless in his eyes he wandered off to examine the more interesting things.
When Aatos was gone, Ocean felt something was wrong, but didn't know what. He kept his focus on trying to find a way to make each of the opinions count. He was trying to gather the thoughts of Remy, Maya and Hazel.
Aurora, however, noticed Aatos's leave and followed him, glancing back to the group every once in a while. No one seemed to notice. And it didn't matter. The ruins were in front of her again. Aatos picked up something shiny.
The foreign machine in his hands looked more technologically advanced than the devices back at home. It was full of parts that Aatos couldn't remember. But somehow he knew what was wrong with it, and began fixing it.
"Who built this?" he muttered as his hands worked the wires and different kinds of parts.
Ocean looked around, but because he could notice the absence of Aurora and Aatos, he was hit with the sight of fire. It wasn't necessarily the Embercaller. Just fire. But Hexa being with the Embercaller when he saw fire wasn't a good thing. His eyes widened.
"We need to go. Now," he stated.