NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter-176 Perceval
[Ewan—Perceval]
A broken man limped through the dark tunnel, turning around to cast a spell every four or five steps, and tripped into the hall, his wheezes blowing the dirt away as he lay on the earth—wet with his own blood. His head wound bled into his eyes, and he cried crimson tears.
“What went wrong…,” he mumbled. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this….”
The spectral past cracked, and time raced ahead. The man recovered from his major injuries, the wounds didn’t threaten his life anymore, but he still sat in the hall with his dead eyes. Ewan accompanied him in the drab-gray world of <Remembrance> only as a spectator, yet the man’s emotions gripped him, and the line between their perspectives blurred.
Weeks of solitude and haunted silence turned hatred into regret, and when the impulses settled down, only grief and despair stayed. The ruthless passage of time soon washed that away too, and one morning with a clear sky, the rise of the sun and its warm rays on his skin asked him to live.
He restructured the cave, sectioned out his bedroom, the kitchen, and the practice area. His amateur hands learned the trades of woodwork, Potioneering, and etching murals with practice. His dull life woke him up with a bright smile and sent him to bed with a grin. Though he still bore the scars, he became happy again. When the minimum satisfied him, the embers of his ambition cooled down. He beamed brighter and brighter, enjoying every second that he lived, as if a shooting star at the end of its journey.
Yet, an encounter with a lost foraging-girl flipped his settled life upside down again. When his death didn’t concern him anymore, he was able to let go. So, even though she identified him as the defeated and the ‘dead’ ruler of Ashocan, the much beloved Tyrant, he showed her the way and sent her down the mountain. Only his despondent sigh walked with him on his way back; the spell he cast would break with the girl’s interjection; his meaningless life would finally come to an end…
He held his breath for ‘them’, for his death, but only the girl, Taria, showed up on the second day—she was lost again. And on the third, and the fourth day…
From despair to serenity to accepting his death to gaping at the girl stumbling on his cave every day, the ups and downs left him sapped and helpless.
“Are you really that bad with directions or are you playing with me?” Perceval asked one day.
“I’m really lost,” Taria replied in a mosquito voice.
“Are you able to forage much like this…do you even have enough to eat…”
“My father and brother hunt, I’m only responsible for some fruits and herbs,” she said, lugging the nigh empty basket on her back, brushing her hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Come with me, I’ll find you something,” he said, and led her deep into the mountains. “Is your family feeding you properly? You’re skin and bones, you even dared to enter the mountain like that.”
“We have enough to survive, I don’t want anything else.”
“Be a bit greedier. If you don’t dream big, your life will be meaningless.” He clicked his tongue.
“I’m happy with my life. My mama says if I become greedy, the greedy wolves will pay me a visit, and if I’m content with what I have, they stay away.”
Perceval scoffed. “Your mama’s dumb, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Taria pouted and threw a stone at his head, sniffing and fixing the awry basket back in its place. The stone halted and trembled before Perceval, and soon his innate defense crushed it into dust.
“D-Don’t talk about my mama like that.”
“Fine, whatever, she’s a genius. Go pick that up,” he said, pointing towards an edible mushroom at the root of a damp tree.
…..
A down-and-out tyrant met a gullible but homely girl at his lowest, and the reality matched the expectations, the spectral past unfolded like the fairy tales. Several encounters tugged at their emotions, their bickering and the squabbles built up the intimacy, and they fell in love without the spoken words. She cared for him beyond his status, beyond who he was or what he’d done, and he gave her his all.
“Do you really not fear me?” Perceval asked as they lay naked on his bed, entangled, and buried in each other, the quilt and their clothes strewn far away. “My infamy has long preceded me.”
“Mama says there’re two wolves in us, one bad and one good. And the wolf we feed is the wolf that wins,” Taria said, caressing his chest. “Let’s feed the good wolf from now on.”
“Again with the wolf, is your mama a werewolf? Why does she like wolves so much?”
“She’s not!” she said and bit his shoulder.
“Fine, fine, she’s not, but she does love the wolf,” he said. “Stop biting already, you’ll chip your teeth.”
Their days passed with laughter, and the nights blended their warmth. They would create a family, they would create their home, they would live happily ever after. Yet they could never be…
A stormy night ruffled the Morinfair, and its enraged waves took Taria away. And the last thread that kept Perceval up on his feet snapped, his drive to live crumbled. What use was his talent if he couldn’t save her, what use was his strength if he couldn’t keep her with him, what good would his ambitions do if he couldn’t share the success with her, he was all alone again….
When he saw no hope, his willpower collapsed, and his mind and body followed. Without her, he refused to live. Each passing of a day aged him a year, and his life whittled away. Towards the end, he only wrote one book, and as he put the last trembling stroke in, and when the book flew away to his intended destination, his time came.
“If there is an afterlife, I hope we meet again,” he mumbled and awaited the absolute silence inside the cave. His breaths withered by the seconds and his feeble heartbeats quietened, and the famed monster Perceval died in obscurity.
The gray world shattered upon his death, and Ewan was back in the vibrant cave with the Governor staring at him. Before he could register the separation of the perspectives, before he could digest Perceval’s death, the unknown book left in the corner of his claw-ring quivered, and the medallion glowed a dazzling blue by its side.
‘Follow the wolf, you’ll find what you need. I wish you luck, my friend’s blood’, letter by letter, a searing glow etched the slanted sentence on its first blank page.
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