Chapter 9: 7 : A Cold Roof Bellow Rainy Clouds

Tsuki didn’t sleep for long in the cave. It was so dark that she couldn’t even see her own hand. It was thus strange that she was able to see the squrab’s red eyes. The worst was that they were completely white when she was cooking it. Yet, they were the same she saw in the strange nightmare, and it worried her a lot. But the real reason she didn’t sleep a lot wasn’t that she was simply uncomfortable in the cave or that she was scared of a bad dream but because a large fight had occurred just outside of the cave’s entrance.

The ground trembled and multiple screeching could be heard during the day. Tsuki was too scared to leave her hole, shaking was all she could do. With her head in her hands, she wanted to scream, to make whatever was outside leave her. She cried and thought if this was retribution for killing the innocent animal and forcing more blood on Alice’s hands…

A loud sound of something falling and destroying trees was followed after a long fight. She could then hear the victorious creature eating the loser as it was still alive and screaming…After a while, Tsuki could only hear things such as tearing flesh, breaking bones, and other disgusting sounds. It lasted for what felt like an eternity and was only stopped when other beings got closer. They walked with heavy steps and stopped in front of the thing which was getting eaten. And then…nothing. There wasn’t any other sound she could hear for multiple minutes. It was as if they were gone, or as if nothing had ever happened.

❀

 

Tsuki left the cave after waiting for a long time, spending a few hours in the dark and not moving, just to be sure those who were outside weren’t just waiting to ambush her. She spent her time focusing on every single sound that was coming to her and after not hearing the dangerous being for a long time enough, decided it was safe to leave.

She left while trying to not step over the entrails and gore of what was killed just in front of the cave entrance. It was hard since a large tree was almost blocking her exit. There were only a few hours left before sundown, but she wasn’t too worried about the sun since the clouds were more packed than before, yet there was no rain.

❀

 

The following days of traveling on the path of dead grass went by with relative ease. There was the occasional danger and the strange sight she would come across made for an interesting exploration without much boredom. But her constant walking amidst the trees made her feel lonely. She would at times talk toward the necklace as if she was teaching a child about the world that she herself didn’t know much about. When she felt that her loneliness was oppressive, she would instead talk to Alice as if she was by her side.

“Look at that big tree Alice. Do you remember when I had to climb a similar one to save your cat? It wanted the birds who were annoying its nap, right?” She said one time before coming close to a large tree. Her thin limbs, her wounded leg, and her weak body stopped her from climbing it. She only stood in front of it for some time, remembering the past.

“Alice, Alice! That thing’s soooo tasty! We need to come back when everything is back to normal, ok? Let’s have our fill till we pop!”

Almost everything she said would make her miss Alice more. It was a vicious circle she wasn’t able to escape with having nothing to do other than walking in this forest…

❀

 

She didn’t know for how long she had walked in the forest since the clouds hid the sun and the moon. They were dark and heavy, at the ready to crush the earth with their accumulated rain. And rain it did. The wind picked up strength and whistle a scary song with the trees which were bombarded by cold rain. Tsuki was first surprised by the sudden rain, but she soon began to use the many trees as cover. Although she was mostly protected by the weather, large droplets of water that accumulated from the top of most of the trees’ crowns would wet her.

But was it luck or fate, as in front of Tsuki was now an old wooden house. It stood strong in the rain, but the years of not being cared for showed with part of the roof collapsed and a front garden that was in complete disarray. Tsuki, didn’t care about how the building might have looked, she only cared whether it could give her cover from the rain and it did.

The outer walls were made from long and straight red logs with some of them having rotten from the years. The entrance was an engraved white door that contrasted the scenery by depicting blooming flowers. Tsuki entered, the door creaking its useless complaint, and she was met by a small room with warm stone flooring. On either side of Tsuki were small boxes of different sizes and woven patterns, and as some were opened, she could see they contained different kinds of shoes.

She was able to identify three kinds of boxes in total. The smallest was woven with cute animals sleeping in beds of flowers and the shoes they would have inside were of different sizes and types. Tsuki didn’t quite understand why all those shoes were placed inside those boxes, but the idea of someone who tried to preserve memories crossed her mind. This was because the footwear inside the small boxes ranged to fit small baby feet to a young adult who would either wear delicate satin sandals or heavy leather boots.

Looking at the other two types of boxes, she concluded they were from the parents. One type was woven with musical notes which danced together with small birds and colorful butterflies. Most of what those boxes contained were simple shoes that all had the imprint of a warm sun on them. The last set was the simplest with vines woven to them. They all had the same wooden sandal with a red string.

Strangely enough, there was a pair of dark wooden sandals that was not in a box like the others. They laid at the end of the stone flooring and were badly damaged.

The stone was only a small square and the rest of the floor onward was only made from light-colored wood with some imperfections from time to time because of water infiltration caused by part of the broken roof. On the opposite wall from the entrance was a simple table with two door-like openings on each side. The table itself didn’t have much on it. A rectangular vase with three miniature trees. Two of them were dead, while the last one only had a few leaves still to its name.

Tsuki looked inside a drawer for anything that could be of use and only found a few incense sticks but nothing to light them. Both dead miniatures trees were only standing because of the one that was still trying to survive…

Other than that, there was a long rectangular paper on the wall with delicate calligraphy which she could somehow read. Although she could read the words used, she wasn’t able to understand the meaning behind the text.

Token of home ties eternities
Song stringed from fantasy
nightmare made in whispers
lift your hands of misery
So that us all together
my sobbing young idolatry
from our wishful desires
may we all taste eternity.

Even to Tsuki, who had no understanding of calligraphy, each brush stroke carried with them a sort of will filled with proudness. But just below this text was a line in red ink that was added.

Until the day our bounds may be stolen.

There was nothing more than the trailing of a sad brush, void of any proudness it may have once had…

Tsuki gave a small prayer and continued to the next room which both openings led to.

❀

 

The floor moaned and growled as Tsuki walked deeper into the abandoned house. She came to a large room which led to other rooms, but the floor had collapsed and revealed a dark basement. The basement was filled with rubble and spiky plank that made it dangerous to go down, more so that falling in the hole might lead to her being impaled. She thus needed to hug the wall and move slowly around the hole to reach the other rooms. Only two were reachable and the first she went inside looked to be in a relatively good state.

The room Tsuki entered had a bookcase and a massive desk. There was a chair but one of its legs was broken. She saw a sofa in a corner of the room and attempted to sit on it, but it broke, and she almost got stuck.

“Oyy! I’m not that fat, alright!” complained Tsuki to the sofa. “Just how old is this place even…”

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She simply wanted to sit on something comfortable for once after basically living in the wild for so long. The idea to sit on the desk did pass in her mind, even if it wasn’t more comfortable than sitting on the floor, but the realization that it might also break scared her from doing so.

For now, she wiped the dust on the floor to sit on it. She had somehow managed to survive for this long and was just starting to get used to Alice’s body. She still needed to worry about food, but during the past day, she discovered that the small brown cubes that were in her bag could be dissolved in boiling water, and they were quite nutritious. So, in a way, her biggest worry was to find water and since she didn’t have any sort of container for water, it made exploring the forest quite hard. As for the boiling water, she found a strange hole filled with water that would warm up at constant intervals and was the reason she discovered the property of the cubes.

The calming rain and the sad atmosphere of this forgotten house which used to have a lively family weren’t good for Tsuki’s morale.

“I want to go home…” she said with a sad tone. “My feet hurt, no good shoes… Should take some in the boxes. They won’t need it anyway. I’m always hungry… I never know when I’ll just eat something bad. I can read this but can’t read that. Knife cut well and then just breaks. I think a demon, or something, tried to kill me… Also, the weird monsters almost did… ‘sniff’ Why. Why…WHY!”

Tsuki complained for a while, complaining about everything from the orange leave and thus the coming winter to how she can’t even sit without her seat breaking. Some of the things she complained about were of good reason, while others didn’t even make sense.

But at this point, she had become used to her own mood swings. She understood that the only way out of it was to walk forward.

Tsuki got up and looked for anything of value in the room. There was nothing on the desk as for the bookcase, it only had a few books that weren’t fully ravaged by time.

Her tummy suddenly began to growl, but the only food she had on hers was the brown cubes. Thus, she went exploring the other room in the hope to find something useful inside.

The other room was a rundown kitchen that had one of its walls completely destroyed, giving a pleasant and calming view of the rain. There were a few broken plates that made walking around dangerous, and some metal pots that were rusted beyond any use. The only thing she found that might be of use was a concaved piece of metal that hadn’t rusted like the other. Although it wasn’t perfect, Tsuki wanted to use it to boil some water.

To do so, she had to collect multiple stones from the broken wall to hold the metal object in place while still being able to light a fire under it. It took some time and for the wood, she used the broken sofa from the other room. It took her a while to light a fire and she was completely tired of rubbing wood together, but a warm flame danced once again in this broken kitchen. The brazes flew up with the crackling wood and the rain fell with soft pitter-patter.

The fire was small and wasn’t able to boil the rainwater she had collected but the brown cube would still be able to dissolve with time. Tsuki went back to the first room, the one with the broken sofa, to look for books that were still readable in the bookcase. Only three were in good condition in total with everything else being either moldy or crumbling down in her hands.

One was a cookbook, another was a picture book for kids, and the last was a journal with many missing pages. It was the journal that looked to have been better preserved as it wasn’t in the bookcase like the other but inside a hidden drawer in the desk.

She took those books back to the kitchen and began to read them. The one she was most interested in was the cookbook since it could directly help her not eat something poisonous and also learn about what can be eaten.

Most of the pictures depicting the meals were drawn by hand and were accompanied by notes on the side about people’s preferences and dislikes. There was a warning about the squarb’s tail which could give stomach ache. Luckily, she only ate one of its claws and didn’t touch the tail. She only skimmed through it, but it gave her insight into what could be eaten.

As for the picture book, it was a strange story of a hero managing to slay an evil witch who wanted to end all that existed by stabbing her heart. Tsuki was lost in the book and almost didn’t realize that most of the water had evaporated while the cube was only a sludgy object that was starting to burn. She quickly added more water by using a broken cup and the rainwater.

The last she read was the journal and opening it welcomed her to a similarly styled drawing as those in the cookbook of a family of three. Above the mother was written a colorful ‘~~ME!~~’. She had long and beautifully straight hair that were like shining wheat. She carried a small green dog in her arms of which an arrow pointed to the name ‘Little Shamala’. To the right of her was a tall man with long pointy ears and a handsome smile. His jawline was thin, unlike the men Tsuki was used to seeing on the old television the two girls owned. He looked more like a handsome woman but his short green hair and his fluffy green beard, mostly the beard, confirmed that he was the father…

“Well… That kid does have his hair… but other than that. Well… It’s a drawing so it might still be his kid.” Said Tsuki who was now looking at the kid, or more precisely at the staff in her hand.

Tsuki had always been fascinated by magic all her life and tried to learn it whenever she had the chance but never managed to do anything. She found it a shame that there wasn’t any magic book still left in the house or in her belonging. The only thing she had was a flimsy magical knife that was only good at making smoke.

She looked back to the man, wanting to at least know what his name was in case it was used more in the journal. The man’s name was Yassil.

As for the young girl, who seemed to have been the same age as Tsuki in the drawing, she looked more like the mother while still having the same hair color as the father but shorter ears than him. There wasn’t a name attached to her, only some endearing words of love.

The following pages showed Tsuki the happy memories the family had. Tsuki even learn some of the words she didn’t understand in the two other books. She saw the thing the mother would cook for the family as they all smiled. The garden they all worked to take care of. The father’s passion for woodworking and calligraphy. The young girl dancing in the forest with multiple colorful fairies while the father watched over. She saw the harsh winters the family survived and the warm summers where they would hide under the tree’s shade. She saw the girl’s first love and first break up. The mother’s passion for weaving and collecting stuff. The smile and the tears. Tsuki saw the happy memories that were drawn by the mother. Tsuki saw the drawings become more details and beautiful as the mother became more skillful. She saw the family life until it came to an abrupt stop with the pages having been torn off. There was no indication as to why those pages might have been removed, but Tsuki guessed something bad had happened to the family because of the red sentence at the entrance…

“Some of those drawing showed the father working on woodworking in the basement… Might have a better knife than mine down there.”

The journal, like the other books, helped Tsuki better understand the world. There were still a lot of things she didn’t understand but she guessed she could learn them slowly with time.

The biggest worry she had was whether people still existed in this world. For all she knew, there might have been a sort of apocalypse which wiped all the humans and made her the only of her kind on this planet...

For now, she would have to sleep after drinking the warm soup she was making. There was no way she would be able to see what was in the basement with how dark the clouds made everything. She used a broken cup after washing it with the rain to drink the brown liquid. It wasn’t good, but it was filling. It was all that mattered to her for now.

Tsuki used the other set of cloth like a blanket and laid it on the floor just next to the fire. The kitchen was made from stone, so she wasn’t scared that the fire might spread.

She looked at the soft rain, the pitter-patter and the warm crackling from the fire made her sleepy. Before she was able to fall asleep, she came to think a bit about her past.

She used to not like reading when she was younger, but it all changed when she met Alice. Tsuki took pity on her since her condition was so bad that most of her day amounted to looking at the sky through a window by her bed. Tsuki wanted to show her more of the world. But she, herself, didn’t know much after having lost most of her memories. Thus, Tsuki began to read stories to this sick girl. At first, she didn’t know whether it was a good idea, but seeing Alice’s warm smile every time Tsuki read something made her begin to love books…

Even when Alice’s health got better and she could read books by herself, the two girls would keep the same tradition. Alice loved stories of voyages and exploration; the type of story that could ignite her imagination of the world that was outside her room.

Tsuki loved to read stories that taught her something, not because she liked to learn, quite the opposite, but because she loved teaching new things to Alice and acting dependable.

But what was the use of books for this girl who was all alone?

Under the rainy sky and protected by an old house, a girl slowly fell asleep with tears in her eyes…

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