Every now and then, Theora’s mind came loose from sleep. It was never too clear to her how much time had passed. A few hours maybe, or days. Perhaps weeks?

Sometimes, she felt so disoriented, it felt like it had to be months.

And every time she woke up, a different kind of feeling overwhelmed her, as if taking turns to torture her.

On some days, she felt bad about her Main Quest. On others, she felt bad about Dema. About how she was trapped again, and about how Theora could free them both, but didn’t. And then, she felt bad that if she were to free them, it might cause bad side effects to the surrounding area.

Whenever she was awake, Theora tried to steer her mind away from all of these thoughts and focus on the prison they were in. Remembering the soft whirls of energy she had felt when she first touched the field. Sensing the power flowing through it, and judging its decline. Thinking about the logistics of it — what kind of skill might have created it, what kind of affinities it would absorb or be weak to… She made a long list in her head, identifying the seal’s properties through thought alone.

But it took a lot of time, and a lot of observation, and she was tired, and happened to nap away by accident every few minutes.

 

“This ain’t cool,” Dema grumbled one day, after about six years.

Theora opened one of her eyes, wearily. It was winter. A thin coat of snow rested on her body like a blanket.

Their prison was small, but weather and outside forces like winds still reached them. It was unclear to Theora whether this was an extension of the illusion or if the cage was permeable; they never actually saw people or animals here, so some form of separation still existed. There was still a lot of analysing left to do.

“Are you done thinking, then?” she asked. “I thought you wouldn’t mind waiting.”

“I don’t mind the waiting!” Dema whined. “But this is— gah!” She made a gesture like ripping something from her face. “You’re angry with me! I can feel it. And I’ve no clue what I did wrong!”

“I’m not angry with you,” Theora mumbled.

“Then why? You’re gonna spend your life like this? Look, I’ll be all fine and dandy, but soon, you’re gonna be an old woman! Throwing away all our time together.”

“So you still haven’t noticed,” Theora replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Haven’t noticed what? You keep saying this!”

“Hmph,” Theora puffed.

Dema’s eyes went wide. Suddenly, she started to scramble all around herself. “Oh my. Oh my, where is — there!” She pulled out a wrinkled sheet of paper and her pen. “New top one cutest thing,” she whispered as she wrote something down. “Oh my, these happen when you’re sleepy, huh?”

“Lowers my filters and defences,” Theora muttered.

Dema nodded. “Why, that also sounds like something you wouldn’t say when awake. New weakness of yours, heh.” Again, she became busy making more notes. “I already have three. Getting worried?”

“If that makes you happy.”

“Why, it sure would,” Dema smirked.

“Then I’m very worried, yes,” Theora mumbled, shifting her legs closer to herself, and rubbing her eye clumsily. Seeing that, Dema bit her lip and raised her brows like she’d just seen a puppy, and wrote down another note.

 

The days kept going by; sometimes, the sun would dare peek between the mountain rifts, and Dema would throw most of her clothes away and lie down on the ground to capture as much sun on her skin as possible. During winters, she’d try to scrape up all of the little snow that fell, but she didn’t dare throw any balls at Theora that had been mixed with dirty soil.

To their left and their right, a decent amount of stone was accessible without leaving their cage, so she used her Skills to search through the rock. She found another fossil one day, which she couldn’t shut up about for weeks, calling the little horseshoe crab ‘Old Lass’ and talking to ‘her’ non-stop.

“You know,” she mused, “Fossils are great. They’re even older than I am. And one day, they’re gonna outlive me, too. If you get your way, that is.”

She held her hand out over it, and let some of her blood gush out from beneath her finger nails, encasing the fossil in an oddly shaped, foamy red bubble. “I kinda wanna know,” she continued in a bit of a soft mumble, “If my blood and earth magic could bring something like this back alive. Would be so cool, right? Never worked, though.”

Theora hummed in an acknowledging response. “Would probably need to be a Legendary Skill. But you have [Immortality] already, right?”

Dema sighed, and nodded. “Yeah. Big shame I can’t have two.”

Eventually, Dema gave up bringing Old Lass back alive, though it took her a few years.

 

“So,” Dema was saying one day. “How much time has passed? Did you count?”

Theora opened her tired eyes. “Don’t need to count,” she replied, opening her quest dialogue. 

 

Time remaining: 38 years.

 

“Hm. A bit of time has passed.”

“Aren’t you getting old? I feel like you must be.”

Theora pushed herself up from the ground, staring at Dema. “I can’t believe you.”

“What?”

“Do I look like I’m getting old?” She crawled closer to her, face on full display. In a voice as calm as a sea brooding with movement beneath, she said, “In fact, how do you think this works? You are the Ancient Evil, who has been walking over the planet for thousands of years. And I get stronger than you in, what, twenty years of training? Is that what you were thinking? Did you not question this at all?”

Dema just shrugged and shook her head in confusion. “I thought you just had a broken cheat Class or something.”

Theora’s mouth gaped for a moment, then she closed it again. “We met over 60 years ago, Dema.”

“Yeah, I know it’s been long!” Her eyes flared up with an orange glow. “And that’s exactly why—”

It was at that moment that the cogs in Dema’s head seemed to finally click together. Staring at Theora, at last realising that she looked pretty much the same as when they’d first met. 

“Ah, damn,” she spluttered. “Wait. Oh, damn. Must have missed that somehow.”

“How?”

Dema threw her hands up. “I mean — humans just age and pass so quickly! I didn’t… I didn’t look so closely. Makes me sad when I do!”

“And yet you said you liked my sleeping face,” Theora said, rolling her eyes.

“Not a lie,” Dema replied, sounding rather serious. “Not a lie! I just— I didn’t look at the details, okay? I didn’t read the fine print. Gosh, damn. You are… Wait. Long-lived, or immortal?”

Theora looked into Dema’s amber eyes for a moment while she tried to come up with an accurate answer. “Neither, I suppose. But the important part is that you will not see me die. No matter how long you keep ‘thinking’ or ‘scheming’. So stop worrying about me, alright? I am a strong girl. Let me make my own decisions about how I want to spend my life. If I want to sleep, please let me sleep!”

“Alright, fine! Fine!” Dema sighed in resignation.

Upon seeing that, Theora felt bad. She took a step back in her head, and added, “If you want to wake me up because you are bored, or because you are lonely, then I will be there for you.”

Dema started grinning. “Damn, alright! I get it. You could have just… told me, you know!” She laughed. “Not that a few years mean anything to me, but damn, way to make a point!”

Theora averted her gaze. She wasn’t good at communication, she knew that. Well, and the fact that she was travelling with someone she was tasked to kill didn’t exactly help her with tackling such issues sincerely. Being vulnerable in front of the person you were going to murder? Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. No, avoiding problems and sleeping forever was preferable by a long shot.

When she managed to stop brooding in such thoughts, she looked back at Dema, who had gotten rather close to her, staring intently.

“What are you doing?” Theora asked, but didn’t shy away. Dema seemed serious, her eyes wandering over Theora’s face with a weight she could almost feel on her skin.

“Reading the fine print,” Dema smirked. 

Theora stayed steady with great effort, holding back a wince at these words. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from blushing slightly.

“Well, sure, do that, if you must,” she whispered. “I am an open book.”

“Oh, I absolutely must,” Dema said, the corners of her mouth curling up into an almost dangerous expression of mischief. “After all, that was your point. With trapping us in here. I see it now.”

“Huh? There was no point. I didn’t trap us.”

“Maybe not, but you refused to let us out! I was wondering why, and now I know!” Dema called her out with a victorious raise of an eyebrow. “Little rabbit was sulking. You were like, ‘Why doesn’t she look at me? I’m all lonely!’”

“That doesn't sound like me at all,” Theora said, biting her lip.

“And then we got trapped here, and you thought, ‘Ha, now I have her all to myself, and she's gonna have to look at me. She's gonna have to notice!’ Well, sorry for getting distracted with the Old Lass, but good news! Now I’m looking all at you.”

Theora shook her head, her heart beating a little quicker. “I don't think that's what I did.”

“Oh, it most definitely is!”

“I doubt it,” she mumbled.

“So, can you let us out of here now?”

Theora took a deep breath. “Sure, why not. If it means you'll stop pestering me with this…”

“Ha.” Dema put her hands on her hip, rising up. “That's what I thought. Your point is made, after all.”

“I don't think there was a point.”

“There most definitely was!”

Theora broke eye-contact, picking up her sword from next to where she’d slept, and took a deep breath in hopes of clearing away her tomato-red blush.

“[Obliterate],” she murmured, and with a single swing of her blade, the cage gave way.

“Huh?” Dema let out as she saw the particles of blue and rose-pink energy descend around them while the cube-shaped prison fell to pieces. “[Obliterate]? That a Skill of yours? Never heard of it before.”

“Yes.” She hadn’t ever spoken its name aloud before when using it around Dema. Doing so raised its strength, which was usually not needed, but Theora wanted to avoid a situation where an [Obliterate] got absorbed — even though that would have been very unlikely to happen.

Pretty much impossible, in fact, but she hadn’t become the strongest person alive by taking unnecessary risks to look cooler.

“I wonder what kinda Class would grant a Skill like that… Wanna share some of your other Skills with me too, while we’re at it? I’m very curious. Well, I already know you must have a Skill similar to my [Immortality], you made big efforts to prove that to me, after all. Well done. But, what else?”

Theora didn’t answer. In fact, these questions just made her want to go back to sleep. She didn’t know how to respond in the first place, because she didn’t have an [Immortality]-related Skill at all, and even a Skill as versatile as [Obliterate] didn’t grant any effect like that. Her inability to die came from a very different source, one that she really didn’t want to think about. And yet, now she was almost thinking about it, and it made her feel awful.

One day, she would have to do something about it.

For now, she just went on through the chasm, with Dema running a few steps in front of her, still busy with taking in all of Theora’s facial features.

If only the two of them could just keep going like this forever.

In fact, wouldn’t it be nice if after this entire ordeal in the dark mountains, a ray of sunlight could hit them for once? As they made their way out, Theora almost dared to hope.