Chapter 1004: The Result
Chapter 1004: The Result
Ruria was fighting a monster; an entire battle being waged in the harsh glint in her eyes.
I don’t know what or why she was fighting exactly. Assumptions and guesses were the best I could do at the moment, and none that popped in my head seemed like a good answer.
It was just one of those things about her. An unspoken little quirk to our relationship I always try to brush aside.
A little quirk called Ruria.
Irene was simple, straightforward; pragmatic and practical on the surface, often to the point she could come off as being a little callous, but beneath all that was a compassionate, caring side, that, should you be blessed enough, you’d catch a glimpse of... if only for a moment.
Ruria, on the other hand, was the latter taken to some extremes. She’s playful, upbeat, and as coy and as sultry as a vixen worthy of that label.
It seemed so easy just moments ago to differentiate her disparities—distinct enough to the point she may as well be harboring two completely separate people inside her.
Now there’s a sharpness to the red of her eyes that wasn’t Ruria’s. An ever-constant swipe and flick of a tail that lacked Irene’s usual composure. It made me realize, frivolous as it was, that making any kind of distinction was meaningless.
She has and always been one and the same.
"If you think I’ve spent every waking moment of my life after Kronocia thinking of you, then I’m sorry to disappoint. You aren’t worth that kind of effort."
Ruria spoke, and from what I’ve heard, I could also hear what was missing. Maybe it was just me, but her inflection seemed to lack that heavy bitterness that’s been simmering and broiling for the past few exchanges.
"I see," Dad’s mouth remained slightly agape after speaking, and a little crease forming between his brows made it plain that he had expected something different. "But... you are upset, aren’t you?"
"I am, yes," she replied.
"Resentful?"
"That too."
"Then how can you say—?"
"My world doesn’t revolve around you, and it never has," Irene paced over to the right, facing one side of the barren horizon, gaze far-flung into empty streets and derelict buildings once rife with festivities from a bygone memory. "Kronocia’s gone and yes, you could have probably stopped it. Would have preferred it if you did. But am I supposed to live the rest of my entire life wishing you did? I barely even thought of you from before, why’d you think I’d start after?"
"Because it’s just as you said, I didn’t stop it," Dad said, gaze fully fixated on her figure, sparing not even a single blink, as if afraid he might just miss something. "So many lives gone, so many futures erased..."
"So you failed, what of it? As if you were the only one out there that failed to stop Terestra. So much death, sacrifices, so many lives discarded just trying to keep her at bay, but she just wins every time. She bested armies, kingdoms, nations... and in the end, she went and got the best of you too. Only difference is that you’re alive to mope about it, or whatever the hell this whole thing is supposed to be for you."
"Except I got to choose what happened, they didn’t. They—"
"Oh, will you stop that?" Ruria interjected, the rest of his sentence smothered beneath her impatience. "Does it matter? Right now, does it? I’m not arguing semantics with you. You failed, and that’s that. Damn how it happened. It happened."
"But—"
"If you want a rant about how I curse your name every night for what you did, I can’t help you. I gave up on Kronocia long before you ever did. I’m not going to absolve you, I’m not going to condemn you because sincerely, I do not care for you."
Dad swayed back an inch and with a frame as prominent and massive as his, it was harder not to notice. I don’t think he was accustomed to being rebuked and refuted this harshly by anyone. Conversations with people in general tended to steer in his direction, sometimes even way before a word had a chance to reverberate through his vocal chords.
He locked eyes with me, briefly, and all I had to offer him was a blank look back. If he wanted me to lend a hand, I’m afraid he’s already in way too deep for me to pull him back out. Hell, he was the one who wanted this hole dug in the first place... maybe he should’ve stopped digging.
"Here, I’ll give you this," Ruria spun back around him, lips stretched thinly above a clenched jaw. "Do you want to know why I’m actually upset? Why I refuse to even meet you at all?"
Dad nodded at her slowly, but firmly.
"Because you’re living proof of it, nothing but a reminder that Kronocia’s fate was sealed from the very start," Ruria’s gaze took shape, a pained, repulsed shape that served almost as a visual replica of her words. "There was a looming, unprecedented threat on the horizon. Rumours, and then later official proclamations of a being so great, so powerful, it was capable of slaying the most prominent individuals of our time in a single night. In a world that made sense, Terestra would have warranted the attention of the entire realm. But it didn’t, did it?"
I was listening just as intently all the while trying in feebler attempts to ignore the flashes of Mom’s face in my head with every mention of her name. I knew it’d be easy to just disassociate and pretend for the moment it was someone else Ruria was talking about. I knew I shouldn’t, and I had no intention to.
But it did kinda unnerve me just how much I wanted to.
"She was always somebody else’s problem, always some other nation’s blight. Someone’s bound to get rid of her, right? Just keep throwing bodies at the problem, it’ll sort itself out. Just think, how many decades it took—how many lives needlessly discarded before everyone finally decided to take her seriously. And by then, it was already too little too late. Terastra’s conquest had purged all life from across the Deep Rift, and now she was here... taking her first steps within the borders of Frieden Rike."
A giant heave past her open mouth stopped her talking for a moment. She wasn’t done, of course. Instead she took those few seconds as a chance to gather her thoughts—thoughts never shared, never voiced—before finally springing them free.
"There was no better time to be united, and yet we weren’t. To the very end, we weren’t. There were talks of it, sure, little alliances here and there but eventually someone gets too arrogant, someone gets too greedy, scared, and we all devolved into arguing ourselves back onto square one while Terestra continues to empty cities, townships... tiny little villages that had done nothing wrong but place their faith on monarchs and rulers that utterly refuse to see past their own hubris."
Compared to the music, the buzz of chatter, and the echoes of laughter from the prior memory, the silence that took its place now in this emptiness was a deafening resonance beyond comparison. As far as I stared, as hard as I stared, I couldn’t see a single soul in sight.
"Then some tried to take matters into their own hands, trying to fight against the inevitable. The Reno tribes had closed themselves off from the world and seemingly vanished without a trace. I know some species of Demonkind attempted to ally themselves with her in hopes that their lives might be spared. Gron, a warrior village, had been cultivating a legion of fierce combatants that showed some promise in repelling back her onslaught. Of course, there’s Astra with their impenetrable barrier. Then, last but not least..."
"Me," Dad finished. "The Seven Churches final and only solution to the threat of Terestra."
"Yes, you," Ruria said. "See what I mean by how you’re just living proof that we were already doomed? They couldn’t solve the problem, so what did they do? They turn to you. A forgotten hero from some forgotten legend brought back to existence. They gave you a sword, a mission and placed the fate of the entire realm onto you."
He went quiet, she did too... still with that same look of utter revulsion. But it wasn’t directed at him though, she’s made that perfectly clear. Her gaze, those feelings, it was for something else that extended far beyond him.
"To your credit, you did the best you could. The things you went on to accomplish, all those years spent thwarting her every move... the hope you inspired. People started revering you like some god, I remember. But you weren’t, never were. Gods don’t fail, do they?"
Then it happened again. The suddenness, seamlessness, the memory shifted, and the world was submerged in the starkness of the deepest red. The sky was crimson, the cobble beneath us charred and fractured. The village was gone. In its stead, chunks, bits and pieces, uprooted foundations that only vaguely resembled the houses they used to be.
And everywhere I looked, I saw the same familiar sight—these bright white rubble scattered and strewn in the dozen. The Reztria blocks, the so-called unbreakable material forged by the Divines to house Kronocia’s earliest denizens...
Broken. In ruins.
"This is what you’re proof of," Ruria said, her face bathed in the red of the sky. "Every action we’ve ever made: leading only to this. You will never the blame, never the cause. You were just simply the result of it all."
Dad didn’t say anything. He remained stoic and still, his figure darkened just enough by everything around that he was practically a shadow.
"You were never going to be able to save us from ourselves, Leonardo," Ruria spoke again. "Because like everyone else who has failed... you’re just a man."