I get that. I understand why everything is scared.
They’re living in a realm that has been slowly consumed for thousands of years, and even if you took that away, there are some very dangerous people that stalk this realm who escaped from the punishment side.
That means that they were scared before it plunged into darkness, before the Abyss creatures arrived. The inhabitants of this realm have lived in fear for a long, long, time.
Chapter Nineteen
Farren
The thing with that is that we just met some of the Others, the ones who were supposed to be from the punishment side of the realm. They were souls after all, which means that they can’t die again. This is their realm, so they aren’t going to look like souls. Not that I’m entirely sure what souls look like. I am also aware that there are now generations descended from the originals, both the escaped prisoners and the natives of this land. Possibly the other side as well, although that seems unlikely because no one knows where that is.
So the Others that we met may well have just been descendants and not the original souls that escaped.
What I’m getting at is that none of them attacked us. In fact, they asked us not to attack them. I didn’t get any sort of warning from them, nor did I get a warning from the realm itself, and that has been a constant companion.
I liked the Others who are supposed to be the escaped souls or the descendants of them far more than I liked the ones from thecompound who are supposed to be the natives of this land and the ‘good guys’.
There is absolutely something that we don’t know. There is a big piece of the puzzle that we’re missing, and I have a feeling that once we get that piece, a lot of things are going to start to make sense.
Having said that, knowing how our luck goes, we might get the piece that answers most questions, but I would be willing to bet that it also gives us questions too.
If we ever get that piece of information.
Everything is up in the air, as it always is. The fact that it happens so regularly should make it easier to deal with, but it doesn’t.
“If the Others are the souls who have escaped the punishment side, what happens to them when they get killed again here? Do they die?” I ask suddenly as the thought occurs to me.
Rast’s eyebrows rise. “They mostly stick to wherever it is that the Others call their home base now and send out their descendants, and the generations that have come after them, those who choose to switch sides and support them instead. They can be injured, but they won’t die again. If they are injured, it weakens their soul, and if the soul gets too weak, then they risk being unmade entirely. They fade into nonexistence and become nothingness.”
“Wow, okay. Thank you for explaining that,” I reply, and he nods with a slight smile.
They’re all looking at me with curiosity. My question did come out of nowhere. I really don’t have a very good answer for any of them. My brain is still trying to process and make sense of what it’s trying to figure out. I might share as soon as I figure it out.
If I ever figure it out.
My thoughts turn inwards again.
I always trust my instincts. I will not be going anywhere with any of the members of Rast’s compound. I don’t know if the members of the other compounds feel the same to me, because I haven’t met any of them, and I will reserve judgement until I do. But I do know for sure that the members of Rast’s compound do not feel like friends.
Quite the opposite.
As for the Others, I suppose it is possible that we met an outlier group, although they spoke about that crazy prophecy that told them about us, and that would suggest that there was more than just the group of them, and some of the things that they said also make me think that there is something else going on.
I had every intention of asking them about it, as I’m sure Rival did, but we got attacked before we could ask anything, and then we had to move before any more of the Abyss creatures came to investigate the death of one.
My eyes catch on Rast.
I tried to keep my eyes on him when we were fighting against that Abyss creature. I’m not going to lie, I was hoping to see what kind of supernatural creature he is, or at the very least what he’s capable of. However, that seemed to be impossible, not just because he was moving so fucking fast that even I was struggling to track him, but also because he wasn’t using any magic, apart from the small amount that he was using to make himself go faster.
At least not that I saw anyway. I was rather busy trying to see if my magic could make a dent in it, stopping those who were flung by it from being extra hurt, and trying to figure out if I could kill it like the other one that I killed.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that there would be different kinds of Abyss creatures.
Then I was stopping someone from crashing into a tree and didn’t catch Zev in time, I decided that enough was enough and to risk it anyway. If I could kill one of them, surely I could kill another one.
Khaos was not happy that I asked him to throw me, but he relented, and I will always be grateful to him for that.
All of that meant that I couldn’t actually keep very good track of Rast.
