Probably the worst thing about Therilon's jungles, in Zelgadis's opinion, was the noise. Animals, monsters, even some of the more ambitious plants, filled the night with eerie sounds. The violet-haired girl sighed helplessly, tried to shift herself into a more comfortable sitting position, and continued staring out into the gloomy night. It was her job to keep watch, to make sure no wandering creatures would amble along and make a light snack of this group of sleeping travellers. It's just noise, after all, she reasoned. There are bigger things to worry about. But still the nighttime sounds were hard to ignore.
A rattling scream erupted suddenly from some inhuman throat. Piercing the air, it startled Zelgadis a little; she looked around the tiny clearing in which she and her friends had camped for the night, as it sounded far too close for her taste. It filled the air for second after agonizing second, then cut off as abruptly as it had begun.
Huddled in his blankets, Gourry shifted in his sleep, almost woken up by the sound. All four friends were getting better at sleeping through such things, but the jungle's usual after-dark activity cost them all a great deal of sleep. Zelgadis glanced past Gourry, to Amelia's small blanket-covered form. She managed to sleep right through that one. That's good... she really needs the rest...
Beyond the two sleeping figures sat Lina. She, too, was on nighttime watch. It was safer that way; the jungle was too vast, and its inhabitants too unpredictable, for one person to keep watch over it effectively. The redhaired sorceress was still glancing up nervously at the dark, cloudy sky every so often. No wonder, thought Zelgadis, if what she told us about Wyrms was really true...
Yawning, the violet-haired girl went back to watching her surroundings for any signs of danger. In the meagre moonlight, she could see the outlines of trees, their branches waving in a light breeze - or were they moving by themselves? She could never tell - and an awful lot of darkness. As well as the occasional monster to be fought, of course. The relentless sounds of the jungle surrounded everything, screams and wails and hissing, loud and soft, near and far; after a while, she barely noticed as they faded away...
"Fire Ball!"
Flames crackled around Zelgadis, and a blast of heat almost made her spring to her feet in surprise. "What the..." she began to say, then noticed the rather large, rather menacing scaly creature that was burning beautifully on the outskirts of camp.
"Zelgadis!" said Lina angrily. "You fell asleep!"
Again... thought the former chimaera, mortified.
"You're lucky I turned around and saw that thing approaching before it could take a bite out of anyone," muttered the sorceress. "You'd better stay awake from now on..."
"Sorry," mumbled Zelgadis. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the sleepiness from them. All she saw when she opened them again was trees, the lovely warm monster bonfire, and more darkness. Moments later, another yawn overcame her, despite all her efforts to stifle it. I have never felt so tired in my life... she thought, and to her horror realized her eyes were closing of their own volition. No! I will not doze off again! she thought vehemently. The next time might be fatal... Having no other choice, she quietly said, "Lina?"
"Yeah?" came a grumbling reply from the other side of camp.
"I can't stay awake..."
"So try harder," interrupted Lina curtly.
"And I was thinking... if we talked, I might be able to at least keep my eyes open."
Lina kept silent, apparently considering this idea. "So," she finally said. "You want to talk?"
"Yes."
"Um. Sure," answered Lina. "About what?"
"Uh..." Zelgadis was too tired to think of a topic. "I don't know... Something. Anything."
"Anything?"
"Yeah..."
"Uh..." said Lina. "Just wait, I'm thinking..."
Inwardly, Zelgadis winced. What a sparkling conversation... She shifted herself, trying to sit in a more comfortable position, ignoring the small part of her that insisted that lying down and closing her eyes would be much more comfortable at this ungodly hour of the night. "I wish we'd found another inn tonight," she grumbled. "Then we'd be able to get a full night's sleep..."
Lina muttered, "There just aren't any more inns, not this close to the castle. I asked Dame Thornar when we left her inn."
"Was it really a week ago?" asked Zelgadis tiredly. "I miss that place."
"You mean, you miss the bed."
The violet-haired girl grinned sheepishly. "Yup."
"And I miss the food!"
"Yeah... Those rations we picked up two days ago really are something awful. That other inn where we bought them was pretty bad."
"Well, it was better than nothing. It's not easy finding good inns and places like that in Therilon, you know. They're hidden well, if they exist at all," reminded Lina.
"And staying at even the cheapest, most rundown place would be better than camping out in the jungle like this," sighed Zelgadis.
"You got that right. But you know, if I had a choice, I'd rather be staying at Dame Thornar's."
Zelgadis smiled, saying, "I noticed you two seemed to know each other pretty well. You must have been one of her best customers when you were travelling here before, right?"
"It wasn't that," said Lina. "Well, not completely, anyway... It's just that... well... it was kind of embarassing, really..."
"Really?" said Zelgadis, suddenly interested. "Tell me!"
It took a couple of minutes of concerted effort, but Lina was finally persuaded to tell what had happened during her first trip to Therilon. "Well... it was after I'd killed the Wyrm. I was tired, I was hurt; all I wanted to do was sleep. And eat. But I knew that if I stopped to rest, I wouldn't be able to wake up in time if something else attacked me, so I had to keep on walking.
"Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. There was a group of boulders nearby, and a few trees surrounding them; I figured that they might hide me from any monsters that came along. So I walked in among the boulders, fell down a hole and landed in the inn's lobby.
"I was so happy - and so hungry - that I forgot how tired I was. I ended up in the dining hall, and ordered one of everything on the menu. I was halfway through dinner when I blacked out. You remember that 'scuthy' stuff that was in some of the dishes at the inn? Without realizing what it was, I'd eaten a whole bunch of it. And it was poisonous. Not to people from Therilon, of course, but for me it could've been deadly.
"Dame Thornar realized what had happened just in time. She got some healer to fix me up, and I stayed at her inn for a week, recovering. She took care of me the whole time."
Suddenly, a ghostlike wraith, its oversized fangs glistening with poison, dropped out of the sky with a flap of its ragged leathery wings. "Die, Amethyst!" it hissed. Between a simultaneous "Flare Arrow!" and "Fire Ball!", it didn't stand a chance.
As the monster's corpse lay, charred and smoking, next to all the other carcasses that had unwisely chosen this particular group of travellers for their next meal, Zelgadis returned to the prior topic of conversation. "So you're telling me that you survived a full-scale attack by a Wyrm, one of the most destructive creatures in this whole country, but you were almost killed by food poisoning?"
"That's about it," replied Lina glumly.
"That's... that's..." Zelgadis tried desperately not to burst out laughing. "That's hilarious!"
"Knew you'd appreciate it," muttered Lina sourly. "Anyway, by that time, I was sick of Therilon. I left as fast as I could after that. I never thought I'd come back here again."
Zelgadis said quietly, "I never thought I'd come here, ever." Her thoughts turned suddenly to the cruel trick of fate that had left her, beyond all expectation, with a woman's body. There would be no hope of a cure for this curse, though, because this was who she truly was. Princess Amethyst, of Therilon. Of this horrendous country, populated by little more than hideous monsters and a few unfathomable people.
Zelgadis's thoughts warred within her, desperate to find an outlet after all this time of keeping silent. She knew that Lina was worried about her, had been worried ever since that fateful wish had changed her life forever. She'd be even more worried if she knew all the awful things Zelgadis had been brooding about for weeks. But the violet-haired girl couldn't stop herself from speaking; her mouth seemed to open of its own volition. "The worst thing," she said, her voice trembling just a little, "the worst thing is that I can't understand how any of it is possible...
"It doesn't make sense. How could I possibly be Princess Amethyst? What about my family? [Author's note: I don't know anything about Zel's family other than Rezo is a part of it. I don't know whether they're alive or dead, where they are, how many of them there are, or how much is generally known about them. So I'm making them up. So there. :P] How can I be a princess of Therilon and a boy from a village halfway across the world from Therilon? And what does Rezo have to do with any of this?" Her voice was rising steadily. "As if it wasn't bad enough that he's both my grandfather AND great-grandfather, as if it wasn't bad enough that he cursed me with stone skin and made me his puppet... he's been screwing up my life ever since I was born!"
"Hey, Zel, calm down," said Lina. "You're waking up Gourry and Amelia..."
"He made me sick," continued the violet-haired girl, not caring any more. "Whenever he visited, all I could think about was how... how we were related. I even confronted him about it, and he didn't deny it! He said it wasn't important. Not important! How could he just dismiss something like that?
"My sister never let me forget it. She kept on teasing me, about how disgusting it was to be related to him like that... Even though she was my sister, so he was her grandf..."
Zelgadis's voice trailed off. She sat in complete silence, mouth hanging open in shock.
"Zel?" came Lina's voice after a few seconds. "Are you alright? Zel? Say something, already..."
"But... he wasn't her grandfather too," said Zelgadis slowly, as she realized the awful truth. "My family... they... they weren't... Damn you! What did you do to me?"
"You're not making any sense. Calm down, Zel," said Lina, sounding concerned.
A hint of tears stung the violet-haired girl's eyes, and her voice trembled as she said, "They weren't my family. They took me in. I just realized..."
"You just figured it out? It took you this long to..."
"No. I knew. I always knew, and so did they, but I forgot. I was made to forget. I was under a spell. I just felt it crumbling away." She wrapped her cloak tightly around her, to ward off a sudden chill. "All these years... Whenever anyone mentioned that I was a foster child, I just didn't hear. I forgot that they weren't my real family. All these years, I thought I was really a part of... Damn you, Rezo. Damn you!"
"Well, that would explain how it'd be possible for you to be Amethyst," said Lina, sounding a little stunned at this revelation. "If you were a foster child you could've come from anywhere. But how do you know it was Rezo who..."
"Who else?" said the former chimaera bitterly. "Everything else that went wrong in my life was his fault, so why not this too? And remember how that monster in Masaoc City, the first one that ever attacked me, mentioned his name? He's tangled up in this, I'm sure of it. Maybe he was the one who destroyed Therilon fifteen years ago. I wouldn't put it past him."
"C'mon, maybe you're being too harsh," said Lina. "He did help us defeat Shabranigdo in the end; he couldn't have been all bad."
"Ha!" was Zelgadis's curt reply.
"No, really. And the monster said that Rezo was hiding you, probably from whoever's sending all these nasty creatures to kill you," said Lina, indicating the charred monsters surrounding the camp with a sweep of her arm, barely visible in the darkness. "If he was evil, why would he do that?"
"How should I know?" snapped the violet-haired girl. "And if he was hiding me as a boy... if he knew I was Amethyst... why did he change me into a chimaera?"
Lina had no answer to that.
"And if he was so good, then why did he..." Zelgadis stopped, noticing movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned abruptly, just in time to see a mass of dark wormlike things rapidly advancing on the camp. Individually, they were tiny, but there were thousands of them, forming a dense, squirming carpet that covered the jungle floor. They were eating everything in their path, leaving nothing but bare twigs and skeletons behind.
Lina immediately began murmuring a spell, but Zelgadis cut her off, saying, "Please. Let me." In a second, she'd cast a powerful Digger Bolt, and took a grim satisfaction from watching the ever-hungry worms fry.
When that danger was dealt with, Zelgadis returned to her task of staring out into the night, keeping watch for danger in the surrounding gloom. She had a lot to think about now as she kept watch, a lot of unanswered questions that clamored for her attention, and new, strange ideas to brood about. I don't feel like talking, she thought, thankful that Lina too was keeping quiet. Luckily I don't feel sleepy anymore...