FINAL CORE - Chapter 128 (Patreon)

The world was made to be at peace.

The serenity of the world on a calm spring’s day is proof of this, as gentle winds press through the glades — evergreen — and carry with them the last kisses of winter’s chill and the first hopes of summer’s grace to come. It can be felt in the touch of soft skin upon your own, seen in the smile of a beloved person glancing your way, and heard in the cry of a songbird fluttering through the air.

While, yes, there are too many moments of horror.

There are moments when the songbird is caught by the falcon, when the smiles turn to screams, and when winter cuts through our hearts, but these are the minority of moments. Remember that.

Winter is the only cold season. One of four.

One season is warm, and two are temperate. Only one is cold. The majority, therefore, is warm and kind.

The world was made to be warm. You were made to be warm.

You were made to be kind and at peace.

Don’t let one single winter turn you away from nature’s purpose for your soul.

~ Musings of a blossoming flower, that is curiously able to think

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Rorate

Dark Elf, Female, Fighter + Field Medic

Location: The Island, River

Water splashes in the dark as Rorate dives back down below the surface, a serpentine body gliding past her as they swim together in search of a prize.

If anyone were to ask her why she’s out here now instead of upstairs, preaching to the desperate and the needy, relieving them of their burdens, worries, and fears, there isn’t any answer she could give that wouldn’t paint her in an unfavorable light, that wouldn’t make her appear to be a selfish, uncaring person. However, life can’t always be about serving others. Someone who fails to serve themselves now and then too will eventually also fail in their task to serve others, as the innate desires of the body and soul will still persist and manage to worm their way into the act of caregiving, where they might parasitize the help being offered to others.

Sometimes, it’s good to just do something you want to do for the simple reason that you want to do it. Sometimes, other people need to just survive by themselves for an afternoon.

Isaiah gave her her life back to live, after all. It’s hers to live, and she intends to do so.

And then, when she’s done living a little, she’ll return to her duties to continue to make amends for the wrongs she’s done in the past.

A hand grabs hers from before herself, pointing on ahead. Rorate, holding her breath, nods and lets herself be pulled away by the river-monster with whom she has become friends.

They shoot through the water, cutting through the river’s current, gliding up and over and around the heavy rocks at the bottom of the dark, cool waters. She’s gotten good at holding her breath, as they go on these outings often.

The melusine pulls her along down the river, allowing her to surface now and then for air, before they finally reach a spot the two of them stop at.

Rorate pulls her head out of the water, gasping for air, her long, white hair — soaked and shimmering with moonlight — stuck to her face as she looks around the area where they are, her eyes going wide as the many colors touch her face.

They’ve left the main river and followed a small, serpentine offshoot into the island, to a place she’s never been.

The dark-elf looks around herself, staring at what looks like a small grotto. They must have gone down into an underground river system that feeds into a cave of sorts.

Beautiful gemstones of all forms and hues jut out of the walls, filling the place with a luminescence akin to fairy-light. The water here, in a small pool of sorts inside of the grotto, just past the flowing of the river, where it channels on deeper, is unusually warm in comparison to the source. Rorate holds her breath, diving down again to touch the stone ground at the bottom of the pool. It’s warm. There is some sort of natural heat coming from below this area that heats up the pooled water.

— A face floats past hers, followed by a torso and then many colorful scales; her friend is drifting through the warm waters, to a small alcove in the stones that lies half on the surface and half in the waters of the pool.

Rorate rises up again, looking at the creature, the shy monster, and then around the area. There are other things here. There are things people have thrown into the river, or lost; potion bottles and weapons, boots and rucksacks that had gotten snagged. There are all manner of odd nicks and nacks and things both strange and mundane. There is some money and a few gemstones, that look like they don’t belong to those on the wall. She exhales, realizing.

“You have a lovely home,” says Rorate, looking at the monster, who, upon being looked at, submerges her face halfway into the water, bubbling with her mouth. She had no idea the monster lived anywhere else than simply in the river, but it makes sense. This is a much nicer place to be, and, given the creature’s affinity for shyness, it seems more in touch with her sensibilities.

Rorate swims over to the ledge, sitting down on it and leaning back against the stones behind them, staring up towards the ceiling, which is covered in jewels.

She sighs, leaning back and relaxing. The warm water feels nice, especially in contrast with the cold river they were just in. She looks over at the monster. “It must be stressful for you, huh?” asks the dark-elf. “With the village growing and everything, people are always at the river,” she says, receiving a nod in return. “Yeah. I feel that,” remarks Rorate. “It’s okay,” she assures. “It’ll be quiet again soon,” promises the woman, not really sure why it would be.

Her friend looks at her, as silent as ever, and then nods. A moment later, the serpentine creature uncoils itself and tugs on her arm, pointing back at the river. Rorate follows her finger, looking at the hole it points towards, an underground channel.

“Down there?” asks Rorate. She points at herself. “I can’t hold my breath that long.”

The melusine shakes her head, waving with her hand to signify a gesture of assuredness, perhaps as she had seen people do.

“You sure…?” asks Rorate. “I don’t really want to drown.”

The monster shakes her head again, rising up and pulling on her arm.

She’s already gone this far, why not? Rorate looks at the hole the underground river flows into. It’s one way for her; she doesn’t have the strength to swim against it and down there, there isn’t a way back out as far as she knows.

But her friend likely has her reasons.

She’s going to have to have some faith in her, just like she had in Isaiah.

She lets herself get yanked back into the cold water and the two of them dive down, vanishing into the hole below.

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Icy waters cut at her skin, the rocks of the somewhat tight underground tunnel rubbing against the skin of her shoulders and legs — cutting ever so slightly, as they haven’t been here in this new construction long enough to become naturally smoothed by the water. A few traces of blood leak from her cuts and washes on ahead of herself and past her monster friend who leads the way.

Rorate’s head spins from the cold. It’s so much colder down here than it was up atop the island. A sharp pain comes to her lungs from her lack of air, which is much harder to try and sustain in this freezing water.

A hand grabs her as her vision unfocuses, and pulls her upward.

The dark-elf gasps for air as they pop into a small bubble of sorts, halfway panicking as she flails, trying to grab on to anything to pull herself out. But the bubble is only a head or so high, with nowhere to go. Her heart thrashes in her chest, her mind yelling at her for going into this stupid idea.

Her hands distinctively grab onto the only thing that’s here, the serpentine monster that has surfaced with her — perhaps more out of consideration than a need for air herself. The general life advice is that drowning people are dangerous, and this is indeed the case here too, as even Rorate has difficulty overriding her inner fear at a time like this as her natural instincts come to the surface.

The melusine recoils at being touched, but then stays there anyway, before then slowly exhaling and breathing air against her face, not that she needs to. Rorate looks down at the yellow eyes before herself, feeling the breath press against her skin once, then twice, then a third time, before she understands that she’s meant to mimic.

The panicking woman starts to slow her breathing herself; her friend nods.

“S-s-sorry,” shivers Rorate after a moment, pulling her hands away, but her friend shakes her head and holds her hands back against her shoulders, which are warm in contrast to the icy water. The monster turns her back to her, gesturing for her to hold on in what is a sure sign of trust for the highly skittish species. Rorate does, happy to oblige and steal some of her warmth for herself, before holding her breath in again as they shoot down below the water, cutting straight through the tunnel.

Even double-stacked, the melusine as a naturally affine swimmer navigates the tunnel so precisely that she doesn’t get a simple bump more on the way.

They cut through tunnel after tunnel, rising once or twice more to the surface for air before returning to the icy brinks of the watery veins that run deep through the core of the island, until finally, they exit into a massive, hollowed out cavern.

Rorate clambers around the serpent with her arms and legs, holding on for dear life, as they dive down one last time.

The great cavern in the true center of the island is a large, hollow space through which the waters of the island's hundreds of lakes, rivers, and springs flow through or from, one way or another. The water from the tower and everywhere else sources here, and there are hundreds of small tunnels like the very same one that they had come through, leading into all directions off in the distance, in which also a great, hulking, massive shadow swims past the edge of her vision.

— There’s a monster down here. Something massive, ancient, and secret.

Her friend shushes her, and then quietly slides onward, over a stone, and then points to the center of the cavern. There, where all the waters and pressures of the island meet, hitting in from all directions with a hundred varying currents, sits a stone upon a stone. Even here in the dark, it glistens and glows below the water. Its body has been shaped by the flow of many currents, carrying with them so many things, both physical and immaterial. The water used to wash away blood, the water used to bless the saved, the water drank and the water expelled, the water of tears shed in joy and in sadness, the waters of the rains, both tainted and pure. Thousands of waters press against the rock in the center of it all, tinged with the magics of Isaiah and the magics of everyone else to ever come in contact with the dew that ran off of blades of grass and into the world below. All of it comes together to make it.

…The perfect rock.

The chamber rumbles, their bodies shaking against one another, as something deep off in the distance of the endless water — something akin to a leviathan — moans and shakes the world.

The two of them look at one another, each gauging the other’s current state and level of ambition.

There’s something in the water.

Even within the domain of Isaiah, as its protected and loved children, there are dangers. Not every creature under Isaiah’s dominion is so sensitive and intelligent as to discriminate between threat and kin. Especially in a place like this, so cherished and deep and protected — the core of the island, a place where none ever go or even know of, has been guarded by a forgotten creature, whispered of only by the old, ancient faiths.

By proceeding, their very lives are at risk for what amounts to a childish game against someone who isn’t even here.

But it isn’t about the game, not in and of itself.

The two of them hold both hands, nodding to one another, before Rorate locks herself around her friend as before, so that she doesn’t fall off, as they get ready to shoot off into the great, open expanse of the vast breach, in which there is no shelter, no current, nothing but total, dark emptiness that leads to a single, stupid, rock, within the domain of the true beast — Leviathan.

It’s about proving oneself to oneself, but also to someone who matters. It’s about being alive and doing something stupid just because of that simple fact.

Faith is important.

But life is about experiencing more than faith alone.

A coiled tail propels them off through the water with a burst of speed straight towards their prize.

Rorate would swear that the water turned yellow that moment, that the space right in front of her eyes turned tulip yellow — so close to herself that she could touch it with her fingers. But that is simply an illusion of scale within the depths. As actually far off ahead of themselves, very far off, a single eye that is so impossibly large awakens — having sensed the disturbance in the waters. It is an eye the size of the tower as a whole, and perhaps a few more, an eye that does not even fit in the concept of a scale she had in her mind for this space they are in, as if it somehow came into existence and made the entire cavern and all of the waters in it so much larger than they were before simply through the act of its opening.

The two of them move through open water as the ocean rumbles and the titan makes itself known.