My Servant Is An Elf Knight From Another World

"Here we are," Amanda proclaimed, lifting her thumb off the thumbstick; the Leonardo on-screen coming to a halt in the middle of an open glade amidst a seemingly endless maze of barks and branches. "The Great Forest of Valenia."

'Great' was right, alright. There wasn't an inch on the map compass in the upper right that wasn't layered in some shade of green.

Something I didn't expect to happen was me recognizing the view. This wasn't the first time I've seen this forest. Then I realized why, it was the trees. Valenia trees. Hence, the name.

This was the same verdant of leaves, bushes, and streams that Ash had been living in with her sister. I remembered seeing this same place in her dream, her memories, the two of them together living in peace deep inside a burrow bored from a mound in the earth.

Of all the places for Dad to start reminiscing over… who would have thought?

For the most part, he stayed quiet and brooding, much more so than before, and as Amanda floundered about aimlessly through dense thickets of foliage and protruding tree roots, his reaction stayed mostly unchanged.

God only knows what he was thinking. Amanda kept glancing at him here and there trying to gauge just that. But luckily for us, we got the next best thing to a heavenly deity leisurely sipping her cup of tea close by.

"If you're keeping an eye out for a gravestone, sweetheart," she spoke out, catching his eye. "Chances are the developers of this game had no clue of that aspect of your backstory to even consider planting one."

That caught Amanda's attention more than mine, stopping her character in his tracks for a drip-feed of more lore, "Gravestone? Who's gravestone?"

"Mine," Dad said, eyes still glued to his idling virtual self.

"Yours?!" Amanda blurted, too surprised to worry about manners. "Wait, you died here?"

"Before I was summoned, yes. Before I became the hero you know."

Seeing the flabbergasted look on her face, Dad went on to further elaborate. As for me, I already knew the story he was telling for the most part. About how he used to be an Elf-hunter, how he became a dagger for the church to use, and how he died, alone and forgotten, slain by the hands of a vengeful half-elf in the quiet of a vast forest.

So this was that forest.

Where Dad died. Where Eshwlyn lived.

Y'know, life seriously has a funny way of connecting the dots no matter how incongruent and far apart they may seem from each other.

"Before the game starts, you have to pick your character class by choosing your origin," Amanda said, muttering to herself. "A Magus that vanquished a great demon. A warrior who single handedly thwarted an entire army. A tactician who had mastered the ebb and flow of war. I always wondered what the canon origin actually was… Leonardo's true background… I never would have thought…"

"Nobody knew," Dad interjected. "And now nobody has to. It doesn't matter anymore."

"Right…" Amanda finally turned back to the screen, and unsurprisingly after everything she'd been told, her head wasn't in the game, regardless, she played on. "So, yeah… here's the forest, that's about it. Is there anywhere else you'd like to revisit?"

"Like I said, anywhere's fine. You choose."

I don't know if Dad even knows that he was only putting her on the spot by delegating her the choice like that, especially now, when the game freak in her is much too busy gushing over newfound knowledge to focus on narrowing down any good tourist attractions.

But as it turns out, Dad wasn't the only member on this tour.

"Actually, I have a place I'd like to visit too," Mom chimed up, sliding her empty cup of tea onto the coffee table. "Do you mind?"

"No, uh, not at all, sure," Amanda said, recovering quickly from the sudden request. "Where do you have in mind?"

That's something I'd like to know as well. Mom always struck me as being the most sentimental between the two of them, even now, knowing what she used to be, that hasn't changed for me.

Question is: what could she possibly find sentimental in a world she brought to complete and utter annihilation?

"It's a bit of a walk from where we are now, but…" Mom got up from the sofa, walking the long stretch of the couch where Amanda and Dad were sitting, before settling herself down on the empty spot on Amanda's right. "...Could you bring us over to Paragon's Rest?"

Amanda immediately stiffened up; their shoulders lightly touched and for a moment there I thought her heart had stopped beating. Instead, she hunkered down, looking as if she shrunk a couple of inches while the grip on her controller tightened even more.

"I haven't unlocked that region of the map yet on this one," she muttered timidly, rigidly tapping through buttons. "Let me go to another save first… hold on…"

My heart seriously ached for her. I can scarcely imagine the position she's in right now.

From my point of view, all I saw was my mom and dad, whereas Amanda was completely beset on both sides by the protagonist and antagonist of her favorite video game. In her home, no less. While watching her play the very same game that they were based on.

Yeah, by all accounts, I think she's taking the whole thing quite well.

"Paragon's Rest," I said, taking up the vacant spot on the sofa that Mom left. "What's so interesting about the spot anyway?"

"It is where Kronocia's great heroes are buried when they die," Dad explained, refusing to tear his gaze away from Amanda's menu navigation skills. "It is a plateau, the highest point in the region of Astra. People make the climb to offer their tributes, and it's where soldiers, new heroes, go to pray for protection from legends long pass."

"It's also where your father and I first met each other," Mom said, peeking out at me from Amanda's left shoulder. "Because of that, it's a very important spot to me."

Wedged between them both, Amanda clamped her lips as if she were restraining herself from saying something. She pressed the start button, entered a load screen, and a moment later, loosed the lock on her mouth.

"We're here," she announced. "This is the only save I have that's in front of Paragon's Rest."

Except, on the screen, there was no high plateau, no grave marking the slumber of heroes to be seen. Instead, there was just a large gaping crater in the ground. Its deep depths filled sparsely with chunks of crumbled earth, debris of stone, and skeletal remains.

Leonardo stood at one edge of the ruined cavity, the border of the screen pulsating a deep red, his posture slouched, and his health bar in the upper left reduced to near zero.

"This is after our first meeting," Dad said. "Do you not have a save before that?"

"No, unfortunately not," Amanda said meekly. "This is the best I got, sadly."

"It's good enough," Mom assured her, gazing at the scene of utter devastation with a fond smile. "I only want to see it for the memories, not the monuments themselves. Do you remember, dear?" She turned to Dad. "How we first met? Our first words to each other?"

"No, I don't remember that," He said, shaking his head. "I just remembered you disrupting my prayer and crumbling the whole plateau under my feet."

"Really? You don't remember?" Mom looked a little disappointed. "Back then, I asked you if you even knew what was being asked of you. If you were really willing to go to the lengths they expect of you."

"I see…"

"Then you told me to shut my mouth," Mom continued, chuckling a little. "That you were trying to pray."

"Then you crumbled the entire plateau from under my feet," he said flatly. "Probably why I don't remember much apart from that."

"That I did," she affirmed with a nod. "And then, to my surprise—you survived. I remembered thinking back then how interesting that was… how interesting you were."

"Didn't stop you from trying to kill me."

"Tried, sweetheart," she corrected affectionately. "Never succeeded. And look how that turned out. it's the best failure I've ever had."

Amanda feigned a cough. I don't blame her. That thick miasma of affection wafting all around her has got to be suffocating.

"So, that's Paragon's Rest," Amanda set the controller down on her lap. "Um, that's all right? All you wanted to see? I think the meatloaf might be finishing soon, so—"

"Not for another twenty minutes, I don't think," Mom interrupted, speaking and knowing confidently without so much as a glance toward the timer on the oven. "Besides, while we're here anyway… I just realized I never got a proper look at the Kingdom of Astra."

"The Kingdom…" Dad followed up, rubbing a pondering hand across his chin. "Yes, I think I'd like to see that too. The Castle. Princess Riona. Could you…?"

"No problem," Amanda sighed, reluctantly picking the controller back up again. "I'll find another save file."