Chapter 269: Chapter 266: Lost and Found

Coming back was hell. I had a raging headache, my whole body hurt as fuck, my stomach was upside down, I could taste the vomit, the smell of which rankled my nose, in my mouth, and my shorts were uncomfortably wet. Bloody close to my usual awakening in yet another cycle.

“Shit! No, no, no . . .” With the realization of the possibility that despite our best efforts, against all odds, we ended up back where we were, in the echo of the past, my stomach twisted in dread even more and a shudder ran through my body. If - if . . . I didn’t even dare to think about the possibility of us still being stuck somewhere in the Echo - or worse.

A whimper escaped my throat as I rolled onto my side in search of support, just as a pained moan sounded to my right. “C-c-can you let go of . . . my hand?”

My ears perked up and I opened my eyes, expecting to wake to the gloom of a clouded sky that both Stella and I grew familiar with; instead, a harsh light cut into them.

Another whimper and curse escaped my lips, but a rush of joy hit my heart. Wherever we were, this was not the echo of the past; this wasn’t Traiana’s nightmare. That was for sure.

Yet there was still a chance . . . better not to think about it.

Eager to look around, to see the sun, I opened my eyes - carefully and slowly this time. My heart sank a bit at what I saw. Stella was lying next to me in the grass, stark naked - not what disappointed me, though. I was so relieved to see her by my side; wherever we ended up, I wasn’t alone. No, what disenchanted me was the fact that we were still in Fallen’s Cry. The black square labyrinth pillars that held up the false sky of the floor could not be mistaken for anything else.

“Y-your hand!” Stella, looking no better than she did at the beginning of each cycle, grunted again with effort, finally drawing my attention to her hand and mine. I still held it, afraid that some spatial force would separate us and we would end up in different parts of this damned world. We didn’t, and I was only causing her more pain. “Hold on,” I said, letting go of her and guiding my mind to the spatial tool, the ring on my hand - which wasn’t there. Actually, none of my stuff was where it was supposed to be. I was as naked as Stella.

Horror gripped me. Not for lack of clothes. After all, as a shifter, under Geran and Vienlin’s guidance, I had gotten over most of the shame. What freaked me out was that no spatial tool meant no healing potions.

“Stella, I . . . my things are gone. I - I don’t know how to help you . . .” I stammered, biting my lower lip in dread. I was far from fine myself, but no worse than I was at the beginning of each cycle - actually better than at the end of the last. My wings were where they should be. A bit of time and my regeneration would get me back on my feet. What was hard for me to tell was how Stella was off, how badly the passage through space and time had messed her up.

“I c-can handle it. I’m n-not as b-bad off as I was in-in the Echo,” she stammered out, the joy in her voice, though tinged with pain, undeniable, especially in the last words. Stella was grinning from ear to ear through all the aches. “W-we did it.”

“We did,” I chuckled back and rolled over onto my back into the grass. There I laughed my heart out. Sure, it hurt like hell, but I didn’t care. 

The sheer joy did not last long, or should I say it was interrupted by a familiar chime in my head - the system. The artificial restraint and guidance that the humans and beasts of the past had placed on Eleaden and its inhabitants was something I had not heard in over eight months. I was back online.

• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 67

“Huh?” Not the cacophony of system notifications I was expecting. Perhaps the system was still loading, or - my accomplishments in the Echo were not as great as I thought. Nevertheless, my heart swelled with relief, yet another confirmation that we weren’t trapped in the past - at least not so distant for the system to not work.

“S-something wrong?” Stella asked with effort, the change in my mood all too obvious to her. She must have been in the same boat with the system, so - I told her about my little dysfunction problem.

“Same h-here,” she said briefly to save herself the pain. “I t-think we h-have to show our p-p-powers.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” I breathed, mentally kicking myself for not thinking of it first, for panicking instead. Just like in Echo, space and time spit us out as we entered it - minus the injuries from the battle and our stuff. Actually, Traiana had warned us that this could happen. While the past couldn’t exist in the present without tearing it apart, the present couldn’t exist in the past forever without eventually becoming the past. What happened to our things, now part of the past, threatened to happen to us, our bodies, which in the present held our minds - a soul, if you will.

And it was our minds that held the prowess of what we had learned in those months on the battlefield - just the same old song. Once again, and hopefully for the last time, we would have to start over. After all, the system was not something digging in our minds; it was a tool - or rather a kind of access point - stored in our bodies for our minds to access. Simply put, as Stella said, we had to show the system what we were capable of.

On the one hand, disappointing. I wanted to see what I had accomplished in the Echo. On the other, not necessary. I knew exactly what I was capable of, what I had gone through there. The system was just a guide, a mentor, a teacher, not something absolutely necessary for me to grow. In fact, I was glad I wasn’t overwhelmed by the onslaught of notifications in my head, given the state I was in.

• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 68
• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 69

Ah, yes. All I had to do was boost my regeneration with mana, the way I had honed it, and the levels started to skyrocket.

• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 70

Honestly, I found it weird, a little cheat-ish. I know I deserved it; I earned it. Still, usually, at least as I remembered it, leveling up came after a lot of hard work - or in this case, pain.

Speaking of pain.

• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 136

It was hard to tell if the crude trick of burning my nerve endings with mana to ease the pain had anything to do with this mental skill of mine, but it did require - apparently - quite a bit of resolve.

“How are you, Stella?” 

“I’ll live, d-don’t worry,” she said and paused, not quite sure how to say what she had in mind. “Th-This is just . . .”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. It’s l-like I’m d-dreaming, you know . . .”

In a way, I was still trying to wrap my head around it myself, my stomach clenched in fear that this was just a dream, as Stella had said.

“T-this sky isn’t even real; it’s n-not the real sun, and y-yet . . . I c-can’t stop crying, Korra. I-I can’t even imagine h-how I’ll feel w-when I see the others, my family . . .”

I froze at the thought. The others. My family. All this time, except for Stella, it was the thought of them that kept me going, and now - I was actually afraid to meet them. ‘How were they? Did Squad Four and Sgt. Pinescar from Fallen’s Cry get in at all? What will they think of me? Did they think of me at all? Did they miss me? What if they didn’t?’ Doubts and fears flooded my mind.

• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 75
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 137

How stupid, huh? I berated myself as the system notifications continued to ring in my mind. Having come this far, I couldn’t just tuck my tail between my legs. In the Echo I had faced beasts, monsters; hell, even the will of the planet, and now I was afraid to face those I loved. No, the truth was, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bear to meet them because of how much I missed them. Idleaf the most.

I don’t know if the Guardian link was to blame, but that little spirit has grown very dear to my heart.

• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 77
• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 78
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 139

“Idleaf,” a whisper escaped my lips as I gathered the courage to call her.

“W-what?”

“Idleaf, I . . . I’ll try to call her, Stella. Can I? If this is a floor of the Labyrinth, she should . . . ” I froze at the realization. If this was the floor of Fallen’s Cry, there must have been beasts.

I immediately sprang to sit, ignoring the - slightly reduced - pain I’d caused myself, and scanned the area with my eyes. What I saw took my breath away. Not the beasts; to my relief, there were only a few horned rabbits in the distance, no two-tailed foxes. Judging by the all-too-familiar terrain, we were probably back on the tenth floor of the Labyrinth, the floor where the whole mess started. No, what struck me was how much I could see.

The distance I saw into seemed the same, but the amount of detail I noticed was surreal. Not to the extent of my domain, far from it. Nevertheless, to the point where my old self seemed blind. I couldn’t help but laugh when I realized how much going through the battle had changed me.

“Korra?”

“Sorry, we seem to be back on the tenth floor. I was afraid the beasts might . . .” The ridiculousness of the idea kept me from even finishing the sentence. Back on the battlefield, we faced beasts as strong as the two of us, one after the other, and were even able to deal with level two hundred beasts in the Pit. A couple of level 63 horned rabbits - that was what I remembered the beasts on the tenth floor to be, levels 48-63 - should be no problem for us, even in our condition.

• [Spatial Domain] reaches lvl 51
• [Spatial Domain] reaches lvl 52

My ears perked up. To the sound of the notifications ringing in my head, the grass on the opposite hill rushed. Not the ever-present breeze. A horned rabbit poked its head out from behind the grass.

Thoughts of shifting crossed my mind. After all, I was naked and without a weapon. Not the best thing to do when you were a mess, though. Actually, it wasn’t even necessary. All I had to do was to exert a little of my five hundred level presence on the beast, and the rabbit’s craving for flesh, so blatantly displayed, was gone.

“Taken c-care of?” Stella asked. She might not have been able to see the beast from her lying position, but she had a good view of me. In these eight months, she had come to know me like the back of her hand.

“Yeah,” I breathed in relief, leaning back on my hands only to pause. The wetness I felt between my fingers - on the grass I was sitting on - struck me as somewhat familiar.

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• [Spatial Domain] reaches lvl 53
• [Never-Dying] reaches lvl 80
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 140

And it was. 

As it turned out, the unpleasant wetness I felt in my nether regions upon waking up here was not pissed shorts as I had assumed - after all, my shorts were gone - but grass covered in the drool of a horned rabbit. Where I sat was where the horned bastard was grazing and drooling over a dream of a piece of meat.

Icky, for sure. Not the worst thing I’ve ever rolled in. Compared to the stuff that covered the battlefield, the drool didn’t disgust me that much.

“W-what is it?”

“Just some drool,” I said back to Stella as I wiped my hands on the dry grass. By some miracle, the lucky bitch landed out of the icky spot. Anyway, putting my jealousy and lousy luck aside, I rolled away and did the same with the rest of the body. I couldn’t meet Idleaf covered in drool.

And yes, I was ready to face my fears - more than excited to finally meet my ward. The wagging Sage behind me was a proof of that.

But first things first. “Stella, are you all right with me calling Idleaf?”

I did realize that it would be better to confront my ward when we were both at full strength - after all; I had no idea what kind of mood we’d find her in. My fear was that she would blame me and hate me for leaving her alone or something.

“Nah, j-just go ahead. I know h-how much you wanted to see her all along.”

With her permission granted, I squealed with delight, jumped to my feet, and without further ado, lit the rune on my side white-hot like so many times before.

And like so many times before, nothing happened.

I surveyed our surroundings with both my senses and my eyes - nothing, just nothing.

My heart sank into a quagmire of despair.

Idleaf didn’t show up.

• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 141
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 142
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 143
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 144
• [Indomitable Will] reaches lvl 145

“Korra’leigh?” Hearing that soft, youthful, ethereal voice made me tremble with such rapture that my knees almost buckled. That was her voice. Fearing it was just a figment of my hearing, my mind sinking into despair, I turned slowly, expecting to see nothing but rolling, grassy hills.

But there she stood, in all her glory. A specter, the spirit of the Esulmor World Tree, the strangest creature I’d ever seen, made of mist that I could see through, glowing with the same faint violet light as the dangling, streaming clusters of flowers that grew on her tree - the same light that lit up my runes - the upper body of a woman, the lower body of a mossbear, the wings of an eagle, and the tail of a squirrel, she stood there, as frozen as I was. Her eyes wide open, her mouth agape, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, probably thinking it must be the Labyrinth playing tricks on her.

My heart pounding, beating so loudly that each beat resounded in my ears, I swallowed all the earlier despair lodged in my throat, channeled a bit of mana into the rune on my side to reassure her that it was truly me, and stuttered: “Idleaf.”

She stayed where she was, still stunned in disbelief. Or so I hoped, were it for another reason, it would have broken my heart. And so, unwilling to accept that she might hate me, I lit all the runes, everything that made me her guardian. “Idleaf, I am so sorr . . .” She didn’t let me finish, slamming into me at full speed, knocking the breath out of me.

“Korra’leigh,” she howled into my shoulder, crushing me in a hug, crying with joy.

“Yes, I’m here.” Shaking, I hugged her with everything I could, arms, wings, tail. It only made her cry harder - and me, too.

We had made it; we were back.

 

***

 

I don’t know how long we stayed in the bear hug, neither of us willing to let go in case this was just some cruel joke of fate, but long enough for Stella to be able to sit up. She remained silent the whole time, just watching us, a huge smile on her face, tears of joy rolling down her cheeks as they rolled down ours.

“I’m so sorry, Idleaf,” I finally managed to stammer out. “So sorry.”

The spirit swallowed a sob. “I shouldn’t have let you go; I should have brought you to me.”

The pain in her voice - that struck my heart hard. She was blaming herself, not me. She guilted herself for not dragging me out of the maze when she could have.

One had to love the young spirit - the joy of her not resenting me was too much to bear.

All the more it pained me to do what I had to do. Taking her cheeks in my hands, I looked into her eyes - Idleaf needed to know the truth. “I missed you so much; I called to you every night, but . . . I’m glad you didn’t; I’m glad you didn’t take me away.”

“Korra’leigh?” She was hurt, confused, not understanding. 

“If you had . . .” If she had taken me from Fallen’s Cry, the maze we found ourselves in, to Esulmor when she begged me to. “. . . Stella and maybe the others might have ended up trapped instead of me, alone. Trapped in a nightmare like you once were - before you woke up.”

Of course, I wasn’t so conceited as to think that our return was all my doing. It certainly wasn’t. I couldn’t have done it without Stella. The truth remained, however, that the idea of her, or anyone else from Squad Four, having to go through what we’d been through alone removed any regret from my mind.

“Thank you, Idleaf,” I said with all the gratitude I could muster. “Thank you for believing in me. You were so brave, and I’m so sorry for what I put you through.”

She sobbed and hugged me tighter, as if she never wanted to let go, just to giggle. “I found you. I finally found you, Korra’leigh.”

It took me a second to realize what she meant. 

“Yes, you did,” I gushed, grinning from ear to ear as I ruffled her hair - guilt in my heart. Back in the maze, I convinced her that wherever the misshapen space took me, she would be able to hear me and find me.

“I found you,” Idleaf sang with joy again, and to my surprise, released me from her embrace. That didn’t mean she was letting me go. She wasn’t ready for that, and neither was I. Idleaf grabbed my hands and began to dance around me, twirling me, squealing with delight.

Then, all of a sudden, she let go of my hands, her tail entwined with mine, and threw herself at the Aura Warrior, who was sitting quietly in the grass, her eyes on us, a smile on her face.

“Stella,” Idleaf squealed with glee as she wrapped her arms around her neck. Despite the obvious pain the crushing hug caused her, my friend, my packmate, hugged her back, tears of joy in her eyes. “So h-happy to see you, Idleaf.”

Before I knew it, the spirit pulled me down with her tail and dragged me into a group embrace, trembling with undisguised joy. “I found you both,” she squealed so loudly that my ears rang and my mind trembled with the echo of her joy.

 

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