790 Never Knowing
I didn’t know where I was for a while there.
My mind was still seeing swirls and smoke despite my eyes telling it different. Everything I felt, heard, and saw was as real as real could get… yet I was still waiting for it all to just up and disappear in a whirl of black fog.
It kinda felt like a long time has passed in no time at all.
In an unthinking daze where I suddenly found my phone scorching my retinas until I remembered the muscle control to blink, I was surprised to see that only barely ten minutes had passed since everything has transpired… and not that rough estimation of ten trillion years and a night that the exhaustion coursing through my body was trying to gaslight me on believing.
Ten fuckin’ minutes, man. Barely any time at all in the grand scheme of things and for me, that’s even less time it takes for my lazy ass to get out of bed at times. Yet in those ten measly minutes, a couple of hundred seconds at best, I’ve seen, heard, and experienced enough to fill an entire calendar’s worth and then some.
It was just like with Ash. How years of her hardships and turmoil were compressed into a span of a restless night’s sleep – and also much like with Ash, as soon as I returned, reverted… spat right back into being and staring dumbfounded at the world around me, I have the very same thought stirring in my head as I did back then.
The same unease.
The same question.
“Was… that it?” I heard my own voice rouse as if it were sounding a million miles away from my lips. My head swung loosely to the left, feeling as if it were about to topple off of my neck. I shot right past Adalia and briefly needed to readjust my trajectory before my eyes and hers could even be considered aligned. “Was that all you wanted to show me?”
.....
“Yes…” She whispered, and it was another row of split-second adjustments to grow accustomed to seeing her in color again, speaking, breathing – living flesh and blood, and not some dark silhouette magically manifested. “This is… all… I have to show…”
Then there were the breaks between words – words hollow of any inkling of emotion – another thing I had to quickly adapt to all over again. I saw the clouded, empty gray of her gaze… and it was like it was the first time I was seeing them all over again.
“But what happened next?” I inquired, quickly breezing through all of her memories within mine. “To you, to him, to… everything?”
“I… do not… know…”
“You don’t know?” I repeated, incredulous. “What do you mean you – ? They’re your memories, Adalia.”
“And that is… all that remained… of them…” she said, aimlessly wandering through the disorderly leftovers of the movie set. “What I have shown you… was the last… of what I am able… to remember… of before…” and slowly, she came to a stop, curiously surveying her own shadow formed before a green screen mounted against the backdrop. “I only… really remember… memories… that happened… after…”
“After?”
Adalia turned to me, nodding slowly. “After… I reverted…”
With everything tossed and flung my way, very rarely do I ever find myself with a proper explanation for any of them. Most of the time, I’m left only more clueless, simmering with only more questions. This time, however… I really wish this was the exception.
“So you don’t know what happened to you?”
“I know… what happened…” She responded. “I… reverted…”
“No, I mean – remember? I heard you, you saw it… you said you didn’t want to. Back there, you were pretty set on just simply wasting away. You’re alive, what changed your mind?”
More than anything, I was really curious about this. All I’ve heard, all I’ve seen – they were all just a more intricate retelling of what Amelia had let slip just a couple of hours before during our brief outing together.
Hayley asked a question and she promptly gave a readied answer – of a warrior village in the southeastern region of Astra, the province of Gron… and the terrible fate that befell upon the land, an ambush of demons… and a sighting of a frenzied Matriarch to ultimately seal their demise.
Call it coincidence, destiny, or contrivance… at any rate, it didn’t take a genius for one to put two and two together. Demons came just as soon as Adalia was to turn frenzied, to die starving… yet that’s not exactly what went down that day, was it?
Despite all odds, she was here with me now – and I really haven’t the faintest idea why that was. So I tried to make a guess, from what I’d seen, heard, and I did my best.
“Your sister told me what happened to the village,” I muttered.
She blinked. “I… see…”
“No survivors, everyone massacred… except for you.”
No reaction this time.
“Did Liamel save you?” I asked. “Did he change your mind?”
“I do not… know…” Adalia spoke up, repeating again. “I… guess…”
“You guess?”
“When… I woke up… the demons were… slain… and everyone… was killed…” blunt to the point of callousness, she whispered. “I was… fed… and Liamel… was dead…” Adalia blinked again. “So… I guess…”
Another thing that had managed to slip past me was the matter-of-fact way she tends to address things. I already assumed much of what she had said, but to hear her regard him in that way.
After all the things he’s said and done only to amount to nothing but words ringing hollow… even if I know she didn’t mean for it… nevertheless, it did still feel a little perturbing to hear.
“So you fed on him. He offered you his blood, he must have,” I said. “Maybe he found out about you, or maybe you told him. That’s why you survived, that’s why…”
“No… I do not know…”
“Can’t know for sure, of course – but that’s really the only logical explanation as to why you…”
“No… I do not know…” Adalia insisted. “I will never know… and I will not guess… correctly... I do not want to guess… correctly... because I do not… want… to get it wrong…”
It was probably one of the rare times I’ve heard her so fervent, so audibly adamant. The gray in her eyes swirling like a blizzard storming.
“Get what wrong?” I asked.
“The reason why… I am still alive…” She muttered. “If I had changed my mind… I do not know… if he had offered himself… or if I had taken him myself… I do not know… if he had said something… to me… if he had had final words… to say… a reason to explain it all… I do not know… I will never know… what happened… and I will never… pretend to know… I do…”
I finally understood then. The reason she’s so detached when I was so insistent. All my inquiries, all my questions – she really had not a single answer to any of them… not even if she had to guess. She doesn’t want to guess.
For he doesn’t want to get a single instance of her memories wrong.
“So the reason you’re alive right here and now,” I looked out at her, thought briefly what it’d be like to be a consequence of your own actions you have no memory of, and my heart just went out for her even more so. “You really don’t know…”
“I know only… that I am alive… that I have reverted…” Adalia reiterated firmer and clearer than ever “And the faint emotion… I felt… when I woke up again… as myself… a single feeling… the only one… I can still remember…”
“And what feeling is that?”
The lights of the outside shifted, dimmed, and her looming shadow receded – fading into the dark of night, with only her lone, somber self standing left behind.
“Guilt…”
This content is taken from fr(e)ewebn(o)vel.𝓬𝓸𝓶