Chapter 36: 36 – Frustration

“Oh yeah…” she sighed, relaxing near every muscle she could. The filth and tension of gods knew how many miles walked and two fights were melting away, and before she knew it, the tub was nearly full.

She absent-mindedly closed the valve with her foot, and returned to soaking in the water. It reminded her of the liquid nothingness she woke from, as long ago as it felt, yet as recent as it really was. 

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Zefaris thought herself self-aware enough to accept her own lack of understanding for the world. She thought that she never had and never would know enough for knowledge to drive her to drink. Yet now, it was the lack of self-understanding that drove her to down mug after mug of that sweet, lightly-alcoholic ale. Mug after mug, and by the time Makhus returned, pitcher after pitcher, all in service of drowning the uncomfortable thoughts that the strange foreigner brought on.

It wasn’t just her immaculate, statuesque physique or her strange two-tone hair, or the fact she dressed in a somewhat provocative manner. No, in her life before the war she had encountered and even fancied both men and women bearing one or two of these traits, it was the way in which Zelsys acted that truly struck at something deep within Zefaris that she hadn’t known was there up until now.

Sigmund’s rugged calmness yanked her from the swirling abyss of inner conflict.

“She can tell when you stare,” he muttered through his beard. 

Confusion washed over her, and she only managed to stutter out, “What?” 

“Zelsys. You don’t notice ‘cause you’re too busy starin’, but I can tell,” he smugged, sipping ale in infuriatingly small increments. “Every time you look, she stretches or moves just enough to give you a better view. She’s playin’ with you.”

“And what’d you expect me to do about that?!” she blurted out in response.

The historian just grinned through his beard, “Just figured you should know that she knows.”

Half a mug of ale later, when the inn was becoming fuller and fuller with the evening influx of workers returning from the fields, the barkeep emerged from the kitchen bearing a pitcher in one hand and three keys in the other. Once he put the pitcher down on one of the nearby tables, he beelined to their table, holding out a key with the number four in front of Zefaris.

“Apologies for taking so long to get you your room keys,” he beamed, waiting for her to take it before he placed keys numbered five in front of Makhus and Sigmund each. The two men exchanged looks and nods, but she was too preoccupied with a wordless internal debate to take notice, staring at the number on her key for a few seconds before she looked up the stairs, then back to the number. She stood from her chair and made her way to the second floor, bearing no particular intentions in mind, spurned on by the swirling cocktail of flustered confusion that roiled in her head.

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“I’d have gone into seizure if I got half that flustered,” Sigmund chuckled to Makhus just before she got out of earshot. Even still she didn’t take note of what he said, busy trying to fit the key into its slot. It took her a few attempts to realize she was trying to open the door numbered five and rectify her mistake. The key fit into number four’s lock on the first attempt, and with a single turn its mechanism clicked home. 

The room she stepped into was nearly dark, but she had no issue finding and lighting the illumination crystals, as they emitted a constant, weak glow even when inactive. They rang out with quiet tones as they came alive, and from the other side of a door she hadn’t yet noticed, a familiar voice yelled.

“That you Zef?” Zelsys asked loudly. Zefaris whipped around to face the source of the sound. What was that room and what was she doing in there? The sound of splashing water answered that question. 

“Y-yes, what is it?” she tripped over her own tongue. Zef? Where did that come from? 

There was a brief delay before she got a reply, and even then it was just a rather amused-sounding remark of “Nothing, just making sure.”

She let out a frustrated sigh and began shedding the outer layers of her clothes, her heels having grown sore from walking for so long. Even after the war, she hadn’t become acclimated to long marches. Not with the abominations that were these half-assed self-molding boots, for they seemed to only adjust their shape partially.

The markswoman threw her jacket to the side, and stewing in the stench of her own sweat, melted into the immaculate covers of the bed that was closer to the window. She wasn’t exactly content with such smells, but what was she to do about it? A thought sparked as though a light in the Rubedo-fogged confusion of her mental state, eliciting a sigh of annoyance at herself.

“You gonna be done bathing anytime soon?” she asked, hoping that assumption was correct and trying not to dwell on what her words might be taken as. 

The answer came after a couple seconds of continuous splashing, “Five minutes!”

And so, five minutes she waited, and surprisingly, it was indeed almost exactly five minutes before the bathroom door opened, and from the cloud of steam that spilled out Zelsys emerged wrapped in a towel, the brown portion of her hair hanging almost to the floor like a cape.

She stared without shame, tracing every curve that her eye could see. Not a single blemish, not a single scar, not a single hair. Only thin, silver lines in the shape of snaking electric arcs broke up the near-uniform bronze shade of her skin. Ridiculous. Impossible. An unrealistic standard of raw physical perfection. Yet there she was, radiating a palpable aura of smugness as she traced wet footprints across the hardwood floor, carrying a shapeless bundle of bandages and clothing in her arms.

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