Rune Seeker

Hiral lay back on the grass and stared up at the sky above him. At the stars. No matter where his eyes went, there were more and more of them. Thousands. Millions. Dazzling jewels across the tapestry of the night sky.

Down on the surface, they’d constantly had clouds above them, pouring rain and obscuring everything beyond. The rare times when it wasn’t cloudy, it was sunny.

But now, for the first time in his life, he could see them. And they were…

“Amazing,” Seena said, her footsteps crunching quietly across the grass. “I know we’ve been looking at them the last few nights—I remember looking at them—but somehow, this… this…”

“It feels more real,” Hiral finished for her, sitting up.

“Yeah. Mind if I…?” Seena pointed at the blanket spread on the grass under the stars.

“Pretty sure your butt-groove is already waiting for you.”

“There isn’t a butt-groove,” she said, settling down on the blanket, and her mouth became a thin line. “Okay, maybe there is a slight indentation…”

Hiral couldn’t help but chuckle, and she joined in. With that out of the way, he handed over a small hunk of cheese and a glass. “One of Sander’s friends recommended this one.”

“I generally think he’s a bad influence on you, but at least he’s got good taste in cheese,” she said.

With a nod of agreement, Hiral held up the bottle of wine he’d brought, then poured some into her glass. “He does. Well, more accurately, I think it’s his other friends who do. The wine suggestion is from the same lady.”

“Sander has female friends?” Seena asked, practically scandalized by the thought. “Nooooo…”

“I know. I was just as surprised as you. She was even kind of cute.”

“Oh, cute, huh?” Seena said, eyes narrowing above the rim of the wine glass.

“Obviously not compared to you,” Hiral said. “Cute for Sander.”

“Passable save.” She sort of paused, resting the wine glass on her lap without taking a sip. “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it? Talking like this feels so normal. But, if you’d called me cute a few days ago…”

“Yeah.” Instead of saying anything more, Hiral set his glass on the ground beside him, then lay down to look up at the stars again.

A shift to his right, and Seena settled down beside him. “Do you think they’re real?” she asked, only partially referring to the stars.

“We’re in a dungeon inside a dungeon, sometime in the past. They’re probably not real, but they are beautiful.” His response, likewise, was only somewhat about the sky above.

“If we… actually defeated the Enemy someday, do you think we’d be able to do this? Just sit out in an open field and look up at the stars?”

“Not up on the islands—still too sunny—but down on the surface? Yeah. Probably have to wipe out any monsters nearby first, but…”

“But Yanily and Seeyela would be with us. And maybe Nivian and Wule would be back by then, too.”

“It’d be nice to have everybody back together again,” Hiral said.

“You just don’t want to be the tank.”

“That’s a legitimate part of it,” he said, chuckling. “I miss them, though. These six months of memories don’t make it any easier.”

“Do you think that’s part of the reason we… You know? Why we became us?”

Hiral rolled his head to look from the stars above to the woman beside him. Seena’s head turned at the same time, and they just lay like that for a minute, looking into each other’s eyes.

“Might be part of it,” Hiral said. “Though, I’d be lying if I said you hadn’t meant something to me before we ever even came into this dungeon. You were one of the first people to ever see me as something other than the Everfail. To trust me. To let me join your party. You may never know how much all of that meant to me.

“To go from being… bullied… to being accepted. You’ll always be special to me.”

A soft, tentative touch against his hand, and Seena’s fingers intertwined with his. She smiled at him, then rolled her head to look back up at the stars. “So, what about all our memories? Did all this actually happen?”

Hiral also returned to looking at the stars while he gathered his thoughts. He had spent most of the day thinking about that exact question—much to Sander and Korkin’s annoyance when it impacted their productivity.

“I don’t think it matters,” he finally said. “Real or not—happened or not—we basically always live in our own memories. Now only lasts a second—less, really—and then it’s just part of what we remember. Almost everything in our lives, the things that make us who we are, stem from what we recall.

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“No matter how these memories got into our heads—whether the PIMP put them there, or we actually experienced them—they’re part of us now. Uh… unless we forget everything when we leave the dungeon. Didn’t actually consider that option until right now, but that wouldn’t really make sense if we consider…”

Seena’s hand squeezed his, cutting off his words.

“I think so too,” she said. “These last few months, even though we’ve only slept twice, don’t feel like a dream. The people on the streets, the friends I’ve made… they’re just as real as my family and friends back home. And, us—that feels real too.

“But,” she went on before Hiral could say anything, “I also feel like this peace we’ve had is coming to an end. My gut is telling me that once we leave here, maybe even before, things are going to get bad. We still don’t know what we’re going to face in this dungeon in a year and a half, but I doubt it’ll be pretty. And that’s not even considering the whole reason we’re going up to our Fallen Reach.

“These Fallen sound absurdly strong. What did you say—they’re basically SSS+Rank in all their solar abilities? I don’t know if we can deal with that. And I… I don’t want to lose anybody else. I can’t lose anybody else.”

Hiral squeezed Seena’s hand back, and their heads turned again to meet each other’s eyes. He could see it there—the truth of what she was saying. Of course she didn’t want to lose Yan or her sister, but there was the new threat of losing him too. It wasn’t that he was more important than either of them, but the pull on her heart was different.

“You won’t lose anybody else,” Hiral said. “Me included.”

“You can’t know that,” she responded, obviously fighting to keep her emotions in check.

“If he dies, mistress, he’ll be with us eternally as my apprentice,” Li’l Ur said reassuringly from where he floated just above their heads. The lich nibbled on a piece of cheese as they both looked up at him. “What? Do I have something on my chin?”

“Ur, would you mind… giving us some space?” Seena asked gently. “Go ahead and take the wine with you.”

The lich looked off to the side. “Your sister asked me to chaperone, but that does smell like a good vintage. I won’t be far if you need anything.” With that, the lich zipped off to the side, and Seena’s eyes came back down to meet Hiral’s. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” Hiral said. “I distinctly remember him popping up at more… inopportune times in the past.”

Seena’s cheeks colored as she obviously remembered the same instances.

“Ahem, anyway,” Hiral continued, heat rising up his own neck. “I’ve got the same gut feeling you do. That same sensation as when the storm wall was closing in on us. While it’s probably just our imagination, you do have a point. The Fallen need to be our priority. No matter what else happens, we need to stop them.”

“We need to focus on saving our islands,” she said. “No distractions.”

Hiral squeezed her hand again, the words stuck in his throat. Even as he forced them out, something cracked inside him. “No distractions.”

“Part of me thinks we don’t need to do this,” she said. “That we can just keep going like we have been, and it’ll be fine. The other part of me, though, is worried. Worried how my emotions will affect my judgment. When it comes to the Fallen, we can’t hesitate. Can’t second-guess.

“And I know we can’t just turn off how we feel, and I’ll never want something bad to happen to you or Yanily or Seeyela, but I can already feel it impacting my decisions. Just little bits here and there. Small things like wanting to stand closer to you than Yanily. Or, asking one of them to go on patrol so we can…”

“… come look at the stars?” Hiral finished for her.

“Exactly! And we still have our biggest challenges ahead of us. We need to have clear heads for it.”

“I agree,” Hiral said.

“You do?”

“On both parts, yeah. I also think we could keep going like we have been. Whether we’re like this”—he lifted up their intertwined hands—“or like we were before, it doesn’t really change things. It’s not like you would be asking us to sacrifice ourselves or anything like that. But, I also get it’s impacting our choices in ways we don’t even realize.

“When was the last time we trained? I’ve still got that book from Odi, and I haven’t even cracked it open.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is? You want more reading time instead of spending it with me?” Despite the joking nature of her question, she’d clearly asked it to deflect her own emotions.

“You know that’s not true,” he said. “We need to be sharp for what’s coming. After that, though… Once we’ve won—once the Fallen are asleep again—then we can… We can figure us out.”

“We’ll have time,” she said.

“All the time in the world. And maybe some extra if I can figure out a few more runes,” he added with a forced smile.

“Just be careful where you explode.” Then she leaned in close and gently kissed him. Her lips lingered on his for a breath and no more, and then she pulled away—untwining their fingers—and stood. “I’ll… bring Seeyela and Yanily with me next time. We have some training to catch up on.”

Before Hiral had a chance to respond, Seena swept Li’l Ur into her arms—the poor lich dropping the bottle of wine—then leapt into the air. The Reflection of the Phoenixburst out of her ring and swooped under her feet to carry her away.

Hiral’s eyes lingered on the shrinking glow of flame in the night sky as she returned to the city. Did things really need to go that way? For her own peace of mind, probably. She was right in that their emotions wouldn’t suddenly go back to the way they were before, but by the time they got to the end of this dungeon? Things should be back to being professional by then, and then, after they saved the islands, they could find out if their feelings were real or not.

Though, as he watched the spark of light from her mount vanish, he had trouble doubting the feelings in his chest were legitimate.

Then again, maybe that was the exact reason they had to put things on pause. Not that it mattered. He’d suspected the choice she would make even before she sat down on the blanket beside him. With how much time they’d been spending together over the past few months, it would’ve been surprising for her to choose anything but that. In her role as party leader, she needed a clear head, and their shared feelings were muddying the waters.

Hiral blew out a breath and pulled the thick book Odi had given him from his Interspatial Ring.

“All the more reason to be strong enough to make putting the Fallen back to sleep a non-issue,” he whispered, flipping the pages open.