"So, that old human fairytale was began by me?" Asked the Knight.
"Yes" asked Laurel Mivol.
The Knight battled the thoughts it had made about the Ouran before now, correcting them. Many things were off, if all of this had to be true. And one of those things had to be one of its encounters in the void.
'If indeed, I am the first human who sent the rest down the line that eventually made enough of a growth to produce a resistance to the void, then meeting that Yiril by the blood river was no mistake.'
"Continue."
"with pleasure…"
"Mivol, wait, Can I tell him of the very beginning first?" Laurel Lerva got up.
"I don't mind, I still feel woozy from earlier, by all means do."
"Thank you." Her gaze then focused on the Knight. "Do you remember how you left me that night?"
"Backster threw you into a hole, one covered by a plate similar to the one outside this place. Leaving his sword in there."
"walk with me."
The Knight followed her outside. Both stopped at the rusty plate outside. She pointed towards all the grass around it, and far off into one massive tree, at least when compared to the rest on the island.
"This actually is the same old hole you threw me into. And all the way on that tree, is where you managed to crawl away, and lead all the destroyers away from me. This place isn't just a replica, is the actual grounds on which you fought and died."
"How can that be?"
"The most powerful human to ever emerge, found that our planet, was not enough to sustain a long enough stand against the void for us to amass the power needed to fight back. So, he decided to make a super planet. A planet so complex that none should exist that could copy it. One so big that, despite the looks of it, this planet and the sun are both circling each other. He then renamed this planet Ouran.
Before he changed it though, I asked him to take away a plot of land, and this is it. This is what remains of Earth. A little effort had been put into maintaining it, but this is it."
The Knight stitched a few more pieces to the map of reality in its mind. It already knew about this human, they were the reason a void lord as powerful as Avarice was hanging out with the knights. This is the same human that created the dungeons.
'Now, it makes sense. He needed a planet strong enough to bear the brunt of containing the void and monsters inside dungeons, so he made one.'
"On that morning, I couldn't stop crying. As young as I was, it dawned on me that if I don't get out of this, night might come again. I picked up the sword, ledging it deep into the well's closing, but it didn't budge. I gave up. I didn't want to get out anyway, so it didn't bother me. After I thought about how desperate you fought, I felt bad, so I tried again.
This time, the sword did most of the lifting to my surprise. I got out, and just then, I immediately dropped the sword to the floor and crawled away from it. My legs were still suffering from the pain of the night, so I couldn't get up.
The hilt of the sword was mostly normal, but the blade itself was pulsating. Green thick mucus likeness had attached itself to it. It had seeped deep into the blade. I could not see during the night, but I knew it was them, the same things that killed you. I panicked and ran, leaving it there."
She had this reminiscent look on her face, recalling more that just the events, but her feelings about the whole situation.
"I turned back; I couldn't leave it there I thought to myself. Now that I wasn't so scared. I noticed things that were even stranger about all this. The destroyers on the blade weren't disappearing. There was even a faint blue light I felt I recognised. When I held the sword, the hilt didn't feel so empty anymore. I felt a kind of spirit, trying to tell me something.
I thought I was crazy, but it was already mid-day, I had to get moving. It was a good thing that I came back for it too. The first time I ran from the sword, I didn't know where I was running to. I forgot to look at the arrow you left for me in the sand. I followed it in a straight line. The sword was still too heavy for me, so I had to drag it.
I made it to town late, dawn was setting in and night was almost here. This should've been a bad thing, but because the streets were so thin, I managed to pick out my mother very quickly from the crowd. She was the red head with bad hair, screaming out in panic. I was so happy to see she was still looking for me.
She saw me, covered in bloody bandages, crawling with a sword all too big to be mine, ran towards me, and embraced me with so much love I almost didn't feel the pain from her pressing against my wounds. Not many saw me come back, but those that did came to us, looking with a hint of curiosity. None wanted to be out here for so long, but they were struck with a curiosity too strong to ignore.
One of them touched the sword, I tried to cream at them not to touch the blade, but by then I realised the green goo had vanished, and the blade wasn't pulsating anymore. By now, I thought, strange as it was, the blade actually came alive just to help me get out. Too many things were happening. I was a child; I just took it at face value.
They carried me to my mother's house. My dad was so happy to see me coming from the distance, he collapsed to his knees and cried more than mom did. The people who carried me home also took the blade with us. Even they felt the blade slightly heavier."
Lerva looked intently at the Knight. "Thank you for saving me. I thanked the blade so many times, I thought I'd never get the chance to thank you myself. You made my parents so happy…"
She couldn't finish her last thoughts and just began crying. Sobbing like a child. Just like with Kitrino, the Knight really didn't know how to react to such emotions, especially them being so pure and directed towards it. Well, it got worse, because all the other Laurels also began to cry out as well. That is when the Knight figured something out.
It looked around. 'This whole thing was so much for them to accept, that only now, after so long, have their emotions caught up to them.'
The whole island echoed with their cries. The Knight was no human, it didn't feel their emotions, neither did it keep most of its human habits, but having absorbed memories of Backster, brief though they were, it just did something strange that would move things along faster.
The Knight teleported all the Laurels to the park in the middle of the house. Them being so buried in sadness, and so trusting of the Knight, the Knight was able to force teleport them, and itself by force at once. And gathered in there, it was finally able to meet all of them. Whisper introduced a few more names, giving the Knight a counter.
'Eighty-seven memories.'
In the place, the Knight sat on the grass, crossing its legs. It ran the nursery. Fortunately, enough, Backster had done so before, so it was nothing all to new. But unlike Backster, the Knight was surrounded by memories all having broken through the forth seal. It let its presence leak out. It controlled it this time, only letting it calm the place, and tone down the colours, holding back all its dread. It then funnelled a cheerful spirit through [Desire].
Four hours, the Knight sat there. All of them bracing the Knight in a massive group hug. It was as though they could not feel the cold chill of its armour. Contrary, their hearts so full, the Knight felt their warmth heat up its armour.
They had more crying done that the Knight had thought they would. Now that it realised how old its point of origin within existence was, it felt older than them, as if it was the very same Backster, with the very same kid it saved that night, Lerva, crying her heart out.
They almost fell asleep, not from instinct, from being so at peace, but they stopped themselves. Wiping away their tears, they got up. Looking at the Knight.
"Thank you…"
"So much…"
"Really…"
Lerva then stood up. "I think this is kind of funny. This is actually how much I cried that night. My parents held my mouth close, trying to make sure I didn't make a noise to alert the destroyers. Back then, none of us understood anything about them, but we would never dare make a noise in the middle of the night, as soundproof as the buildings were.
The last time I cried like this was because you were gone, and I thought I'd never see you again, and now you're back, I really shouldn't be crying. Anyway, let me finish. That morning, I had calmed down, so I slept till the next morning. When I woke up, my legs still ached even after all the medicine. Eventually, I was given a wheelchair, my legs couldn't work.
I made it a point to go around the town, regaling people about how I survived that night. Realistically, all I told them should have been taken with a hint of scepticism, but they believed every word. People wanted to believe, and quite frankly, I gave too much proof for them to doubt the single bit of good news they had heard their entire lives.
For years I did this, no-one ever got bored of hearing it. People had somehow crossed towns to hear it. This was no easy feat, towns were separated by time that far crossed the amount of time it took for night to beset, so many had come up with strange methods to cross before night came. All to hear my stories. By the time I was twenty, everyone in the surrounding towns had heard my tales.
But even more importantly I say that every time they came, even I began to question the events of that night. I wasn't asking myself if they happened or not, but I was asking how? The more knowledge I picked up over the years, from the neighbouring towns, I realised, somethings had to have an explanation.
Around this time, I began to ask this seriously, taking time from my story telling to learn about the world, the darkness, and you. I didn't know anything, but eventually, some of the towns folk remembered a boy in armour that went out that night. When asked about him, all they remembered was that he didn't stand out in terms of strength.
Now, you surviving that night enough to save me, didn't just sound like a miracle, it sounded more like an impossible fantasy a delusional child would dream up. Something had to be off. Machines, nuclear war, evolution, and engineering had failed to combat the darkness, leading to a state of conceit, where humanity had chosen to be passive in the face of all these horrors, how could one human in armour do what they could not?"
Lerva had this confused look in her face, almost like as she retold the story, she actually had forgotten that she eventually figured it out.
"I spent many more years, and finally, as I reached thirty, I had an epiphany. Not because of any of the details from that night, but about the details that happened after, the sword. I realised crazy as it was, my child self-had taken the whole thing with the sword coming alive, to be a mistake.
Using that, I realised, crazy as it was, you must have awakened some sort of power. It had to be. How else could your sword come to life and have destroyers covered on its blade like some sort of toxin? I was in my workstation in my room. School had been removed, but being stuck on the wheelchair, my father made me this desk instead of sending me to work, so I had to use it wisely.
If indeed I was right, I had to figure out how did you get this power. Because as far as I knew, you didn't have any when you came there, and you didn't come there to get any powers, you were always intending on dying there. They were something you got in the spur of the moment.
I had to give up, but before then, I had realised a couple of thing. How you found your power has to do with how you fought. The thing that mattered most to you that night, eventually went on to be the philosophy of power for every single knight after you. I pieced it together from the moment you asked me if I wanted to live.
Regardless of the odds, in fact I'm sure you couldn't see these odds, you were sure that you could save me. You had no doubt none whatsoever that you could and you did. And the fact that this seems more like something acquired, I hypothesised that indeed, with such determination, one day, humans could manifest within themselves this power of yours.
I went on to write many books detailing my studies and my work. Scholars found it interesting, but even before my papers, some had theorised such finding, but none ever came as close as I did in detailing them. I created a whole series of these books. When we had to erase the memories of the people, I destroyed many of them, storing away most in the Knight archive, and changing my name to many pen names, Chisil Isn, Ouin Nam, Nexuil Gio, Hobi Asi, and most recently Ivil Redee."
"So, you wrote the book on the madness of power?"
"Yes, that was one of my earlier works."