Chapter 223: Chapter 220: Ends and Beginnings

Hiking and outdoor stuff in general was something I loved. It was a nice way to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city I lived in. Never did I imagine becoming a cavewoman, though.

No jokes, I spent the rest of the echo, basically five days, in a cave with Stella and . . . well, Traiana. Five long days and four nights in a cold, damp, worm and bug infested cave a few kilometers from where we found ourselves in the maze. Spending a night there was quite an adventure, after four nights sleeping on the hard ground and in the cold I was pretty grumpy. Unfortunately, we didn't have much of a choice. It was either that or out in the rain, which came on the evening of the first day and had been pouring ever since.

During these past days I often dreamed of my modern igloo tent, likely still under my bed somewhere on Earth, as was my warm sleeping bag. That tent was safe from bugs, dry and even easy to heat. What's more, it could be packed into a small bundle, something that would fit nicely into my spatial storage, unlike the tents Stella had described to me. They took up so much space that even she didn't have one, so the cave it was - fortunately without the previous tenant still occupying it. All that was left after the beast, whatever it was, were gnawed bones scattered around the cave. Though that wasn't the worst of it either.

The temperature was. When the rain came, it got considerably colder. The obvious solution was to make a fire.  Should be easy, right? Stella had a magic fire-making tool, and the smoke was not such an issue to worry about being found out - courtesy of the heavy rain. The challenge was finding dry wood. With the relentless rain, it was almost impossible to keep the fire going long-term, so in the end I preferred to stay in my beast form, where my fur kept me warm. And when that wasn't enough, I heated my runes with mana.

Lest that not be enough - just trying to survive - I, and of course Stella, worked hard to regain full control of our skills. And then there was Traiana, trying to teach us what we both needed to know to get through Eleaden's 3rd United Army encampment And there was a lot to take in, details that might have seemed unnecessary, or facts that were not so much about the roles we were supposed to play, but about the world of the past in general. But despite all that, Traiana was still reluctant to tell us what they were really up against, what lay behind the darkness that clouded the minds of the beasts.

"So it's time?" Stella asked as she stood next to me in the cave entrance, looking out at the rain as I did. I found it strangely relaxing.

"You're asking me?"

"Who else?" She said back with a quirky, teasing smile on her lips.

"I don't know . . . Traiana, maybe?" She was the one who could tell us exactly when the echo was going to end.

"Honestly, she's not what I imagined."

Staring out into the rain, I nodded, surprised that she dared speak of her like that when the woman in question was further down in the cave. At first, I thought her staying with us was just a whim, a spark in the darkness of a nightmare, as she said, that she would only stay with us as long as it was necessary. But she sat with us by the fire and spent the nights lying next to us. In a way it was heartbreaking. I may not have been able to tell if she was aware of it herself, but what was apparent was her longing for interaction with someone alive, for change, for a normal life, her old life.

"That happens," I finally replied to Stella. "This world was not what I had imagined either. Traiana's t . . . , Idleaf was not who I imagined; you were not who I imagined. Doesn't mean I was disappointed, just . . . you know, it is - you are different."

She chuckled and shook her head. "I still can't get over the fact that you're from another world - that there are other worlds. It's crazy . . ."

"Thank you." My whisper was almost drowned out by the sound of the rain.

"For what?"

"For not being afraid of me." When I finally told Stella about my earthly origins, she didn't take it with the gusto she was showing now, but she got over it pretty quickly and chalked it up to just being another one of my oddities. And so, instead of shunning me, she took an interest in what my world was like.

"Should I - be afraid of you?"

"Only if you piss me off."

She laughed, and I laughed with her.

"You know, now that you mention it, you're not what I thought you'd be either."

Did I want to know? "What did you think I would be like?"

"You tell me first."

'Bitch! But have it your way.' She was the boss - well, squad leader. "An arrogant, spoiled brat with a stick so far up her ass that she would be a headache to deal with."

"Auch . . . that first impression was that bad, huh?"

"You're surprised?"

"Not really."

"Your turn."

Stella took a breath. "An ex-slave who didn't know her fucking place, thinking she could be more when she was just a wild animal without a master. Sorry, I was really pissed off that Rayden assigned me to Squad Four."

"Yeah, you made that pretty clear even then. Still, damn."

"I've learnt my lesson."

"Which one?" There wasn't just one single blunder that she had made.

"Funny, Grey. Really funny." Catching on, she gave me a sarcastic laugh. "Anyway, I was talking about not judging people based solely on what you hear from others."

"That's pretty hard to stick to, huh?" Even more so than here, in the modern world, where you were under a constant barrage of information. It was so easy to form an opinion of someone without ever actually meeting them.

"It is," Stella sighed, and turned around, just as I had, at the noise coming from the cave.

"What are you two talking about?" Traiana asked, walking slowly towards us. Whether she was just pretending not to hear us, or actually didn't, remained a question. Not really human anymore, at least not in the true sense, she had tried damn hard to act like one these last days.

"We were just . . . gabbing . . . you know, before . . ."

"That I wasn't who she thought I was and vice versa," I said, seeing no reason to hide it from Traiana. "Well . . . that you're not what either of us imagined, ma'am."

She actually laughed. "I imagine that. Perhaps the me out there on the battlefield will be closer to your . . . imagination."

"You're saying the you there is different from the . . . you?" Stella asked, not shying away from talking about it now that it was out in the open. She tried to be too respectful at times. I suppose her upbringing was to blame.

"Dreaming the nightmare for a thousand years will change you," the ancient woman said with a sad smile on her lips, then brightened out of the blue. "But don't trouble yourself with it. You have your own burdens to bear. Speaking of which, the time has come, little ones."

Swallowing dryly, I looked up back at the dark sky one last time, sucked in the cold, damp air before I gave the nod to Stella, shifted into my full beast form, and went out into the rain with her. No more words were needed. During our cave days we had often talked about what to do - how best to cover the part of the forest matching the part we found ourselves in the maze in the shortest possible time. It was definitely doable, especially now that I didn't have a dead weight on my back. Sorry, Stella, but you're not exactly the lightest and easiest to carry. Even easier would be if we could split up. That way, we would be able to cover a lot more ground. Unfortunately, since we had crossed the misshapen space between past and present together, we had to stick together even now - an imprint left in space and time stuff.

Once we reached the spot, we proceeded to move across the woods as planned, following patterns drawn both on paper and on the dirt floor of the cave, ears pricked to hear Traian's response if, by some miracle, the misshapen space leading back home did appear. And so I ran as fast as I could, drenched to the bone by the heavy rain, my mud-splattered legs sinking into the soggy soil.

The joy that Stella could walk on her own, that I didn't have to carry her on my back, was fading fast. I knew it wouldn't be fun to have wet fur, to run around with it, and it damn well wasn't. The weight was more than I had imagined, but how heavy Sage - with his long, soft, fluffy hair - had become was simply unbearable. Literally, I couldn't keep my tail off the ground. And once he sank into the wet ground and the mud stuck to him, all I could do was drag him shamefully behind me.

I endured it, though. The humiliation, the discomfort, the pitiful and sympathetic looks from Stella. The bitch was much better off in her watertight hood, making me regret my not so well thought out decision to search in my beast form. Only pride kept me from shiftting back into my human form and begging her for the same hood - pride and the fact that we didn't have time for that.

Well, lesson learned.

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We ran back and forth through the woods, aware of our dwindling time, hearing only the sound of rain rustling high in the treetops, feeling nothing but droplets hitting our bodies and soaking the ground beneath our feet. No eerie noises emanating from the misshapen space to give me the creeps, no call from Traiana to tell us we had found the place.

We knew it was unlikely we would find a way out of here. Still, we hoped. We hoped until the last moments of this cycle. The end of which didn't come abruptly, as with the flick of a switch of devices I was familiar with or magical tools I knew, but it took its time.

First, the whole world fell unnaturally silent. It rained and rained. The world moved. Stella, now with me, her arms around my neck, was trying to tell me something. Yet no sound, no words reached my ears. All I could do was watch, hopelessly, the fear in her eyes. For the last few days she had been struggling not to let the thought of what lay ahead of her get to her, whereas now she seemed unable to do so. Hardly surprising. I wasn't looking forward to being messed up again either, and I wasn't as worse off as she was after coming through. In fact, one night she confessed to me that she had been at death's door back there.

Not being able to return the hug in this form, I pressed her to me with my wing and wrapped the mud-soaked Sage around her as time stood still. Similar to the thing that my heart used to do from time to time, and yet eerily different. Like then, I was still fully aware, still thinking. The eerie part was that this time . . . time stopped completely, and with it, me. Though I tried, I was unable to so much as twitch, let alone blink an eye.

The eerienes didn't last long. Just a few . . .breaths, heartbeats, seconds? How did you measure time when it stopped? But before I could figure it out, the dark woods around me brightened, and not long after, a radiant glow engulfed the entire echo, taking me and Stella with it.

 

***

 

Coming to my senses seemed awfully familiar. It was hell. I had a raging headache, my whole body hurt like . . . fuck, my stomach was upside down, I could taste the vomit in my mouth, the smell of it was assaulting my nose and my shorts were uncomfortably wet. On the bright side, I was no longer covered in soaked fur.

'Stella!'

That one thought, the realization of where we were, snapped me awake into the murk of a clouded sky. Stella lay beside me, moaning in pain, me crushing her hand in a tight grip, just like after our first crossing into the echoes of the past. Letting go of her, I flooded my body with mana, boosting my regeneration, and watched her do the same as her auras lit up around her.

Her condition might have been appalling and dire, yet she grinned. "T-They're w-working... my auras."

"I can see that," I said with colossal relief, feeling myself that my regeneration was working as it should. We had indeed taken what we had learned in the previous cycle with us into the new one.

"P-Potions?" Stella asked, and coughed, which sent me rushing to check my spatial storage. 'How could I forget!' I berated myself. The most important question: Did our supplies dwindle with each cycle, or did they renew with the dawn of the new one? A glance at the state of the potions - and meat - in my storage and I let out another pained sigh of relief. Our things had been subjected to the echo, which meant they'd returned to their original state, just like us.

"Here, careful," I said to Stella as I held the uncorked bottle of healing potion to her lips, taking one myself when she drank the contents. There was not much to say after that. We both just lay there, doing our best to pull ourselves together.

While I was on my feet in a few minutes, it took me several hours to get ready to walk down the cliff and through the woods - again - in my beast form - and with Stella on my back. The way down was no less strenuous for both of us than the last time, and although my rider looked much better than the first time around, now that she had almost full control of her auras, she needed more time to fully recover. Her skills simply had their limits.

And so, as planned, accompanied by Traiana, who appeared a short distance away from us just as the cycle began, we made our way to us familiar cave, intending to head out in full strength to the army encampment the next day.

"You know, I was really hoping we'd be wrong," Stella said, poking at the fire we were sitting by with a stick. Unlike our first night here, I had managed to collect enough dry wood in the woods to get us through the night before the rain fell, so we didn't have to huddle together in the cold - me in my beast form, keeping both Stella and myself warm with my Guardian runes.

"You're not the only one," I said, mouth full, as I took a bite of the meat. Since I didn't have to worry about food, I didn't hesitate to fill my belly. I swallowed the bite and groaned. "Do you think we should give it another shot?" After all, we could have just been unlucky and missed the right spot, or had bad timing.

"Seriously?" Stella wondered, raising her eyebrows and swinging the stick in front of me as if it were a sword. "I thought you found it to be pointless the first time."

That didn't change. In my eyes it was still pointless. "I have a bad feeling about tomorrow." I did. Sure, it could have been the jitters getting to me. There were so many unknowns, so many things that could go wrong. So, yes, I had cold feet and thought about postponing our plan to infiltrate the military encampment.

"I'm nervous too, Korra."

"You don't seem to be."

Stella scoffed to herself. "I was taught not to let it show at all."

"Well, good for you. I tend to be a nervous wreck." Shaking, cold sweaty hands, that sort of shit.

"So how can you eat? Just watching you gorge yourself makes me sick."

Actually, I had no idea, so I shrugged my wings. "Beast think, I guess."

"It could also be Deckard's fault," I added after some thought. "The last few days . . . I mean, out there, he's been forcing me to eat a ton of food."

"Your weight-raising skill, huh?"

"Yeah, you got one too?"

"Damn, didn't you notice when you were carrying me on your back?"

"Well, you weren't exactly a lightweight, but I didn't want to say anything . . ."

"Why wouldn't you . . .?" she said, pausing at the fact that I found it awkward or even rude to talk about her weight, before realizing that the local common sense didn't exactly apply to me. "Sure, I have one. After all, a sixty-kilo woman would have a hard time going up against a hundred-kilo man or a quarter-ton beast".

"So . . . how heavy are you?" Just for the sake of reference.

"About ninety kilos, you?"

I almost choked on a bite. "Wait, only ninety . . . I mean, my skill is Tier II and I'm a hundred kilos heavy . . . and I'm at least thirty too light."

Eyes wide, Stella struggled to keep her emotions in check. "Then you've got a heck of a skill, Korra. Mine is Tier V and . . . wait, does yours give you some Constitution and stuff, too?"

"Just a little, 27% as long as I'm at full weight."

She chuckled in disbelief. "Oh, it's not the most, but I wouldn't call it little either . . . for a Tier II, that is. The condition, however, is a bit of a bummer. My skill doesn't have that."

"Well, it would be great if it wasn't there, but I'm not complaining," I said after swallowing another bite. Oddly proud of her reaction to my skill.

"You know, it's kind of nice to talk about skills with someone like this . . ."

True, it really was. To say the least, it took my mind off our little quest tomorrow - well, for a moment. As we wrapped up our campfire chit-chat, and the time approached to go to bed - a good enough place in the cave to lie down - the uneasiness about tomorrow returned. The reason I didn't get much sleep overnight.

Nevertheless, in the morning, as the sun rose behind dark clouds, and after chasing away my crankiness with a more than hearty breakfast, with Stella and Traiana at our heels, we set off through the heavy rain, me under the borrowed watertight cloak, towards the military encampment.

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