Two Years Later
She could hear the bustle.
She could hear the cacophony of footsteps as scores of nameless citizens walked from one place to another, conducting business after business, conversation after conversation, life after life. She could make out the collage of words, hundreds of words, being spoken by the second, all meshing together into a tapestry unlike any imagined by even the finest artist. She could smell the odors of the city, of kitchens and homes, of storefronts and markets, of the bathed and unbathed.
And she could see them. People. So many of them, and so many different kinds, each engulfed in their own little worlds, each one oblivious to the spider web of humanity of which they were but a mere strand. It is what she saw, what she wanted to see, and it is what made her smile.
But it was only through memory's eyes that she could see.
"I want to see you," she whispered to an unseen companion, her eyes locked silently and sadly upon the ruins of the city. A city. She had forgotten the name.
No maps could ever tell her anything now; most every marker, natural or otherwise, had blended into the charred remains of Earth, and most every city, like this one, that would likewise indicate approximate location, had become a burnt, nameless tombstone.
Like this one.
And so, the name of the city eluded her. She stood there, oblivious to the passage of time, and thought what this place might have been. She had been here, she could discern that much, and the silent, phantasmic images conjured by memory told her of the things that had once existed here. But, like the past three cities she had come across, its identity would be forever effaced, at least in her mind.
Unthinkingly, Lina sat down on what used to be - she remembered to have been - the city's busiest road. She no longer paid mind to the black, ashy film covering most of the ground. If, on occasion, she felt the hard sharpness of broken chips of bone jarring into her flesh, she merely brushed them aside. Wandering from city to city had become that routine.
But she would do this from time to time, for reasons even she couldn't figure out. Sitting at the imagined center of once busy cities, she would strain and listen, sometimes for over an hour, to see if she could hear past the silence. Indeed, the silence was all that would meet her entry into a city; the silence had become its final apocalyptic symphony. Sometimes, she would try to listen for wind. Sometimes she would strain to listen for rustling objects, manmade or natural. Other times, she would strain to listen for any sound whatsoever, so long as it cut through the deathlike silence.
Today, she listened for anything. Hoping for what she knew was now impossible, she longed to hear the sound of human voices quietly echoing through the decimated city. She wanted to hear the clanking of utensils from the remains of the restaurant fifteen meters away from her. She wanted to hear anything to tell her, convince her, that she was still alive, that she was still human. For days now, a nagging thought had occupied her every waking moment, and it was certainly one that, if unchecked, would be the harbinger of insanity: was she still alive, walking through the ruins of the continents? Or had she too died without realizing it and was now left wandering across a surreal nightmare?
"I want to hear you," she whispered anew, her eyes closing and forcing trickles down her dirty cheeks.
But there was no answer to her pleas. Lina Inverse sat there, alone, until the ruby darkness of the apocalyptic night had consumed the dead city. By then, a single sound had answered to her summon, though the sound of her maddened scream was hardly the comfort she had sought.
The crimson embers of daybreak upon the city found Lina gliding from house to house, or what was left of them, searching for anything of value. Even in her state, she could appreciate the irony of it all; considering that vultures, indeed the bulk of all animal life on the planet, had been wiped out during the initial months of the war, she realized that she, and survivors like her, had assumed the role of scavenger. Thankfully, she had yet to find the need to pick the remains of a corpse, even though she knew not everyone had faired as well. She would, on occasion, find scraps left behind by a now departed settlement. Once or twice, she had found, among the remains, a small supply of spoiled wheat which, with the proper spell, could still furnish a decent meal. More often than not, the continents' depleted vegetation would provide several days' worth of food, and it was through this measure that Lina had been forced, by circumstance, into near vegetarianism.
Never did she complain, however. The unimaginable horrors produced by the first year of war had tempered her notorious appetite and eating habits; any semblance of pleasure she had for eating withered away with the death of her husband. If she ate now, it was merely to survive on a corporeal level.
Among the ruins today, there was nothing to be found. She could tell by the extinguished fire logs that a settlement or two had already been here about two weeks ago. No doubt, what little value remained in the city had been claimed by them. She was hardly disappointed. Scavenging like this through ghost towns had yielded, at best, modest trinkets with limited practical value; she found a bent sowing needle two cities ago, half of a drinking cup several cities before that, and a faded handkerchief before that. She hoped, with each city, to find usable articles of clothing, now that her tattered shirt was already living on borrowed time, to say nothing of her pants and leggings. Curiously, it was the truly impractical objects she sought the most. She kept hoping that she would someday find something as simple as a book, no matter the subject. Maybe a letter or a painting, to feel, if only through paper, the presence of human emotion. She would settle for a doll, or even the head or eyeball of a doll, if only to feel it and remember the time and person to which it once happily belonged.
The only thing left in the city was an overwhelming solitude, a solitude made all the more agonizing by Lina's realization that she had, in fact, come here before. She and Gourry. Together, they had stopped here for a two day rest. She was certain of it. Yes, though it might have been another town, especially since they now looked all alike. But no, this had to have been it. It had to. The pavement, the way it split open across...but then, so did the other town's roads... It could have been it. Yes. What was the name of the town? What was it?
Abandoning her hunt, she returned to the spot on the road on which she had passed out the night before. She went into that restaurant now, knowing that she and Gourry had shared a meal there at one point. Triple portions, no doubt. He always ordered triple portions. Of course, he'd be hard pressed to get an order now, especially since only a third of the restaurant's infrastructure remained standing. As her feet waded through the rubble, the glass, the remains, her eyes remained locked upon a single spot, a spot where a wall should have been but that now lay exposed to the elements. It was there.
Yes. There. That's where they sat for dinner that night. That's where they had both made pigs of themselves before a gaping public. And that's where...
Lina fell to her knees. Her mind elsewhere, her body simply slumped onto the pile of rubble besides her. Her eyes never moved from the spot, and it was again through memory's vision that she could again see the missing wall, the painting of the Glave seaport, the table cluttered with dinner plates, and Gourry, being his goofy but wonderful self, becoming serious for the first time she could remember.
And without realizing it, Lina stayed there, slumped next to the dead debris, for the rest of the day. Had her faculties been in place, and had her mind been receptive to pain, she would have noticed that, by the end, her legs had become hideously pale, an aftereffect of having been sitting in a single, cramped position for hours. But she never noticed. Her mind was as closed to pain as it now was to the world around her. The only things Lina noticed that night were the conjured images before her.
Six days later found Lina forty kilometers away, walking across blackened fields and the wooden carcasses of burnt trees. Her steps were brisk; only four kilometers back, she found freshly burnt fire logs and equally fresh prints along the ground.
A settlement was only a few kilometers ahead of her.
And she longed to see another human face. She had not seen a fellow human in over twenty days, and though nowhere near her longest stretch of isolation - forty seven days - the solitude had become unbearable.
The heaviness of her shoulder armor, which in her weakened state had become a problem more often than not, seemed hardly to slow her down as she quickened her pace. Perhaps in as little as ten minutes, she would run into their rear picket lines. She hoped that, this time, they would talk first and shoot at her later, if at all. It was difficult coping with the situation at hand without having fellow survivors mistaking her for a monster. Maybe she should have followed Amelia's advice and ditch the big black cape.
As she looked ahead of her and saw nothing but the blackened desolation seemingly stretching forever, her spirit slumped. In past times, the woods would have done a good job of hiding everything beyond forty meters or so of visual range. Now, with only an emptied landscape hiding nothing as far as she could see, she realized that, perhaps, the settlement was farther off than she imagined. Worse, she could have misread their tracks and headed the wrong way. She knew that settlements had become increasingly cunning; the monsters' advance necessitated the ability to hide one's tracks well.
But she was certain she had read them correctly. They were probably a bit farther off, but she knew she'd run into them sooner or later if she just kept up her pace. If she could just...
Movement. She barely caught it. Coming from under the ground. Her hands began to rise in reaction.
But the arrow was quicker. It had been launched from a very well concealed spot; its master's aim was perfect.
Lina's left hand never did rise. The fired arrow ripped through her upper left arm, slicing through flesh and muscle, and Lina, in pain and instinctively, dropped to the ground. Gritting through the pain and realizing that the arrowhead had gone cleanly through, she snapped the front of the arrow off and pulled the rest of it out through its tail. She could hear approaching footsteps, hurried footsteps, and several shouts of alarm. She clutched her wounded arm, trying to stop the bleeding, and yelped in pain. And it was that single pained sound that made it clear to her attackers that she was anything but a marauding monster.
"Hold it," she could hear a man's voice bellow. "She's human."
The alarm in their voices subsided, giving way to a new, if milder, sense of alarm over their attacking a fellow human survivor. As Lina lifted herself to her knees, she looked up at the group of six or seven men, all, in turn, scrutinizing her. One of them offered to help her up, but Lina shook her head and got up, slowly, under her own power.
"Quite a way to sneak up on us," one of them said. "You're lucky Lars is as bad a shot as he is."
"Hey, remember last time we looked into that?," another spoke. Lars no doubt.
"So what? You only shot better than me because I was drunk."
"What's the matter miss? Can't talk?" she heard another one ask. Suddenly, all six of them fell silent.
Lina had not spoken to anyone in over twenty days. In all that time, her vocal chords had lain dormant and unused; now they were being asked to jumpstart themselves.
"Nice...shot," she muttered slowly, surprised at how heavy her tongue felt uttering that simple phrase.
"I'm sorry, miss," Lars apologized as he holstered his crossbow behind him. "You just looked so much like one of those sap suckers from a distance."
"A leech?" Lina said, her vocal chords cooperating a bit more. "Are you kidding me? How...do you confuse a woman with a leech?"
"We are sorry, Miss," another one offered. "Can't be too careful, you know."
"No doubt," she answered as she looked at where they had jumped from. Interesting. Well concealed holes in the ground from which to spring upon unsuspecting intruders. No wonder she hadn't seen anything. Humanity was truly becoming elusive.
"So what's your name, Miss," the first one asked, "by the looks of it, you've been in a few scrapes yourself."
"And that insignia?" Lars continued. "You were with..."
"Yes," she nodded, taking a knee as the pain began to get the better of her. "the Dragon Army. Lina Inverse is the name."
It genuinely surprised her that their reaction was such. Surely, the passage of time and the aftereffects of the war had worn out the legend behind her name.
"THE Lina Inverse?" they seemed to gasp in unison.
"What's left of her," was her solemn reply. The events of the past two years had certainly worn out her once boastful attitude.
"Ms. Lina," the first one offered anew. "We are honored by your presence. I am Bresin, and these are my companions Stannard, Valke, Bial, Pallemon, and of course Lars. We are the read guard of the Jenna Settlement."
"Didn't know there had been any survivors from the Jenna Massacre."
"There were," Valke jumped in. "And there are."
"The main encampment is about four kilometers ahead," Bresin continued. "One of us can escort you, though you'll probably meet up with our runners along the way."
"I'll be fine, gentlemen," she replied, "just point me in the right direction."
The excitement of meeting the Lina Inverse, sorcery genius, seemed to distract the six warriors from the fact that Lina's injury was worse than it seemed. As she continued to clutch at the wound with her right hand, she realized she had to unsavory choices: keep the pressure on the wound, thereby making it more painful to bear, or release the wound and risk losing too much blood. Either way, the next five kilometers promised to be an endurance run for her.
As she walked away from the picket, and as they all began to slowly resume their lookout positions, she tried to get herself thinking about the nearby settlement in order to forget the pain. She wondered what food, if any, they would have. She wondered if their reception would be as friendly, and as painful, as the picket's. She wondered if she'd be able to trade some of her goods. She wondered if they had a blanket or two she could borrow. She wondered if they'd mind her staying with them for a day or two. And she wondered if any of them would spare the time to talk with her. Twenty days of complete solitude had pushed her to the edge, and she knew that some time spent with a human settlement was about the best thing for her.
Twenty minutes later found her in company of the Jenna Settlement, all together totaling about one hundred and sixty people. One hundred and sixty from a city of over twenty three hundred. This figure she found out after talking with the settlement leader. She also found out, moments after she reached the main encampment amidst a hearty welcome and what might be considered jubilant commotion, that this settlement had devised an extraordinary early warning and defense network. For how else would have the picket gotten word through the runners that Lina Inverse was on her way?
She could see them. People. So many of them, and so many different kinds, each engulfed in their own little worlds, each one oblivious to the spider web of humanity of which they were but a mere strand.
She stood there, silently looking at them, trying to follow the activities of one before becoming amused with the antics of another, and then another. And then another. She began to smile.
But there was something wrong. The people, they were there. The buildings, all standing. The ground, its normal coloration. The sky, blue. Her smile broadened. There was something very wrong. She strained to figure out what it was. And then she heard it.
The silence.
The scene in front of her was playing out in total silence. There wasn't a sound to be heard but her own breathing. All the while, the people continued to carry out their business, with only one or two passerby's wondering what the red-headed woman in the black cape was doing shouting out silently in the middle of the town square.
And then she noticed another abnormality: there were no adults anywhere to be seen. The town's inhabitants were all children. They conducted themselves in a manner unbecoming the ten year olds they seemed to generally be, but they were physically children all the same. Some bartered. Others ran to and fro. One pointed a finger at Lina and laughed. Only she didn't hear the laugh. His mouth shook and moved in silent merriment.
She could hear herself screaming at them. Her eyes, no doubt, now lay wide open in terror, a terror at knowing what lay ahead. She had seen this image before. She had seen them all before. And she tried to warn them, as before.
"Get out, please!" Her maddened cry seemingly went unheard. All of them continued on, oblivious to her pleas and her warnings.
And then, they all stopped. Every one of them stopped in their tracks and turned, in unison, to look at her. Their eyes locked onto her not with the anger she had come to expect; rather, they looked at her as if to say, through the silence of their stares, "we too are sorry."
Sorry for whom? She heard herself asking that, but again, her words went unheard. She was sobbing by now. Why couldn't they hear her?
As if to answer her, the children lifted their hands in unison and pointed towards a single solitary figure standing ominously in the distance. It was at least ninety meters away from her, but the profile of the armor and the cape gave the figure's identity away. Lina squinted her eyes trying to discern the details of the dark figure, but the tears in her eyes had blurred her eyesight. Her feet seemed dead; they refused to move her closer towards the figure. Yet the children continued to point. Their jaws moved together, voicing a silent word that even Lina could make out: mother.
It was then that a single image flashed by Lina's eyes. For one brief moment, the distance between her and the figure had been collapsed, allowing her to glimpse at, if only for a microsecond, who it was at the other end of the town. The features seemed familiar enough. The aquiline nose, the large, saddened eyes, the gentle roundness, the faded bangs and red hair. It was gray, actually. It was Lina, Lina as an older woman, tired with her life and with the lives she was entrusted with. The heavy armor, guilded with the faded insignia of the Dragon Army, seemed to overwhelm her haggard physique. Lina, the older Lina, seemed moments away from her own death.
Lina gasped. That minute glimpse at the figure ahead of her had sent a surge of terror through her. Terror mingled with confusion as the children, still silently chanting, "mother," began to converge upon the older figure. Lina's tears fell unchecked. She did not understand. But she knew what was to come.
The eerie silence was broken. Not by a word or a human sound, but by a single shrill burst that could have shattered every window and ear drum on Earth. It was horrifically loud, so loud that Lina fell to her knees and tried desperately to cover herself from an unseen terror. There was nothing there, but the screeching seemed to engulf her, threaten her, like an ocean of blackness smothering her. She couldn't breathe, even though there was air to be breathed. She felt as if the noise could drown her, would drown her.
And then it stopped. The silence returned as quickly and as suddenly as it had been broken. She opened her eyes and cautiously moved her arms away from her face. She lifted her face to see if the children were still there. They were.
Or what was left of them.
Lina couldn't scream. There was no physiological reaction that could have responded to the horror of seeing the ground turned red with the rivers of blood spilling out of the beheaded little corpses. No reaction was known that could embody the horror of seeing every one of the children lying dead, their bodies ravaged by unseen mouths. Nothing in Lina's experience could tell her how to react to the sight of this carnage amidst an eerie, overwhelming silence.
Her eyes lifted beyond the bodies and realized that her older self was still there, standing, shaking, crying. She stood there, surrounded by several piles of mutilated corpses, in apparent shock.
Lina began to walk towards her. Her mind was frozen with the single intent of coming face to face with her older self; she therefore didn't notice the moisture of the ground or the occasional stump her legs would bump into. All she noticed was the decreasing distance between the two of them.
And then, she was there, standing only a meter away from 'mother.' The older Lina said nothing, did nothing, but stare sadly at Lina. Lina thought of speaking, but she didn't know what to say. She didn't know if her voice could cut through the silence engulfing them both.
The blue sky suddenly blackened. Not black like the night sky. Pitch black. As it did so, both of them were plunged into an impenetrable darkness.
And Lina, staring directly at the other, saw it.
Just as the sky and their surrounding darkened, she could see her older self fading away into it as if she were closing her eyes and banishing her from her sight. But the older Lina was no longer standing by herself.
A microsecond before the darkness had engulfed them both, Lina saw a huge, demonic form appear behind older Lina. For the microsecond before her sight became useless, Lina saw the frozen, silent scream of her older self as the form ripped into her.
And then it was over. The silence was now accompanied by total darkness. Lina could not hear or see anything. Nothing except for her own frantic breathing. She had never imagined a terror so pronounced.
And she never imagined that the sound of unseen claws ripping into her could be so gruesome.
Lina awoke in a panic. As she looked around, only to find herself within the makeshift safety of an animal-hide tent, she slowly began to come to terms with reality again. Her breathing was still heavy and frantic, her body was drenched in perspiration, and her eyes and cheeks were moist. She was alive, however. And by the sound of a snoring woman next to her, so was everyone else. It was dark, yes, but the soft glow from the stars above and from a nearby fire or two gave her all the light she could have asked for. She could hear the muffled conversations and laughter of a group of men; the lookouts, no doubt, were trying their best to keep their spirits up.
Lina's dream - her nightmare - had become a recurring affair. There were times when, while still on her own and outside the companionship of a settlement, Lina would awaken from her nightmare and be unable to fall back asleep. The combined terror of her dream and her isolation was overwhelming, and at those times she would seriously consider staying with a settlement on a full time basis. Now, as she awoke to the company of strangers, but friends nonetheless, she was able to cope with her fear and her mind more effectively. At least she could lie back down and try to resume her slumber.
Tonight, however, something snapped. Maybe it was the sounds of the men nearby, conversing as if all were normal. Maybe it was the sound and sight of the woman next to her, the woman to whom the tent "belonged," if indeed any sense of private property remained. Maybe it was the realization that she was now amongst the sad, representative remnants of humanity, forced into survival but ultimately aware of its own imminent demise. Whatever it was, Lina lay back down upon the cushioned ground and huddled herself up. Covering herself with her arms and bringing her legs closer to her chest, she began to cry to herself, quietly, but painfully. Her former friends of years past probably would have gaped at the sight of Lina Inverse, powerful sorceress and warrior, crying to herself as she did. But it could not be helped. Lina was, ultimately, human, and no human could, at this point, remain oblivious to the state of things. Humanity had taken its last fall from grace. It was now, in all probabilities, entering its final phase of existence. There would be no generation to survive the current. Everything would end within a year.
And Lina, scarred as she was from the events of the past two years, realized at that moment the magnitude, the finality, of everything. Nothing would ever, ever be the same again. Humanity would no longer know the comforts and stability of towns and cities, no longer know the pleasures once taken for granted, no longer know a life without the lingering threat of demonic annihilation. And she realized that she, and humanity, would never again know what it was to live a carefree, happy life.
She found herself missing Amelia, thinking about how innocently she jumped into even the most dangerous endeavors, of how enthusiastically she would commit herself towards anything she deemed just. She found herself missing Nagha and her ability to overlook even the most evident danger as if it were frivolity. She found herself once again missing Gourry and how, one way or another, they'd both emerge out of any scrape unharmed and lightheartedly ready for the next. She found herself missing her former life. She found herself mourning for all of it.
Lina cried herself back to sleep, and it was only the jarring intrusion of two small hands that woke her up from her next nightmare.
"Wake up, Miss Lina, wake up!"
Still thinking about the children in her dream, Lina felt, at once, shock and relief that one of the children had survived. One of them had somehow escaped the marauding, unseen demons and could now provide Lina with some much needed answers.
Only by the time Lina's faculties were up and running, she realized that the little girl asking her to wake up wouldn't know a thing about anything.
"Miss Lina, you're finally up!"
"What?" Lina moaned, slowly sitting up and wiping the moisture from her eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"You slept past breakfast, Miss Lina," the girl continued. "They wanted to wake you up, but you looked like you could use the sleep."
Line couldn't disagree. Between the nightmares and the dangers of her wanderings, Lina could catch, at most, four hours of sleep per night. Since her last stay with a settlement, she hadn't had what might be considered a good night's sleep, even by current standards.
"Thanks for letting me sleep," she finally said. She looked at the girl, surmised her age at no more than eleven, and began to come out of her covers.
"So is it true?" the girl persisted. "You're Lina Inverse?"
"Why would that make you so happy?"
"Because I've heard stories about you. About how you beat those bad monsters many times."
Many times. Except for when it most mattered.
"You shouldn't think too much about those stories. They happened a long time ago."
The girl sat herself closer to Lina, caring little about the latter's apparent lack of enthusiasm. "Is it true that you and the Dragon Army beat the monsters outside of New Sairaag?"
Lina, mending her tattered leggings with a makeshift sowing kit borrowed last night, stopped her work as suddenly as she had started it. "Is what true?"
"My father told me that the Dragon Army beat a bunch of monsters near New Sairaag, and that they would come again to beat the rest of the monsters soon!"
Lina looked at the girl for what seemed like minutes on end, unsure as to what to think or to say to her. It didn't take a genius to figure out that this girl's father had told her a rather different version of the Dragon Army's destruction, no doubt to keep the little girl from the reality that humanity's last hope had been extinguished. No doubt, most of the Jenna children held similar conceptions of the state of humanity's existence.
"What's your name?" Lina finally forced out.
"Myra," she answered. "So, is it true?"
Precocious Myra, Lina thought. She looked down and continued to mend her leggings as best she could. "Some of it is."
"What do you mean?" Myra insisted.
"The Dragon Army met a large group of monsters outside New Sairaag."
"And did they beat them? Is it true that you beat them all with your Slave spell?"
Lina worked the needle faster. Anything, even needlework, had to keep her mind off of it. "Yeah, I used my spell."
"That really big one? I forgot the name."
Giga. Nearly killed myself in the process. Never try it yourself, Myra.
"It's not good to know the name," Lina said, trying to appear non-chalant. "It's bad luck."
"But why?" Myra's inquisitiveness seemingly knew no bounds.
The needle pricked her finger. For the fourth time. "Because it's a forbidden spell. Only the most skilled sorcerers can use it."
"Can I use it?"
"No, Myra."
The girl seemed dejected for all of three seconds. "Can I help you with that? I help my mother with it all the time."
No doubt. Every article of clothing had to be made to last for far longer than they were made to, even if it meant hundreds of mendings.
"I'd like that, Myra," was Lina's relieved reply as she handed Myra her tattered shirt. It no longer mattered to her being half undressed in front of her, so long as she stopped asking questions about a revised history.
By the time they were done, however, Myra had asked her questions about every other aspect of Lina's life. How did she learn magic? When did she beat her first bad guy? Was it true that she used to be a bandit killer? How long had she wandered around by herself? Why didn't she stay with them? And so on, and so on.
The years had made Lina patient, a far cry from her volatile self of years past; Myra's barrage of questions had pushed her to the very limits of her patience. However, just as Lina was finishing getting dressed, and just as she was about to tell Myra to go back to her parents, she noticed something sticking out of the girl's pocket.
"Myra, can I see that thing in your pocket?"
"This," the girl seemed incredulous, "it's only a letter from my grandmother. She's not with us anymore, but my mother tells me that this letter is very important."
Lina could hardly believe her eyes as she saw it, or her hands as they handled the faded piece of paper. The writing was barely legible; the letter had been put through water and who knows what else, so the black ink on it seemed smudged in some parts, outright faded in others. But it was a letter. A real letter. And Lina was holding it in her own hands.
She took her eyes off of it. No, she didn't want to read it now. Not here. She wanted this to be right. But first things were first.
"Can I have this, Myra?" Lina's voice held an echo of her once mischievous self.
Myra's innocent, wild-eyed eleven year old demeanor morphed into an expression far too mature for her years. Gone were the wonder and the enthusiasm; in their place were seriousness and worry. "I can't, Miss Lina."
"Why not?"
"Because mother told me that this letter was very important. I can't give it to you."
It had been a long shot. Maybe Myra wasn't as naive as she seemed.
"All right," Lina resumed, "what if I traded you something for it? Something as important to me as the letter is to you?"
"Like what?"
So the girl knows a trade when she sees one, Lina thought to herself. What looked like a smile flashed across her face. Her right hand reached for a red ribbon with golden embroidering attached to her left shoulder armor.
"This is what they gave me the day I joined the Dragon Army," she explained. "I was very proud to wear it, prouder still to wear it into battle. It meant that I was a high level sorceress, and that I would be at the front of the attack. Only a few of us got them."
She wasn't being entirely truthful. She had despised the idea of joining an army of sorcerers. She hated even more the idea of uniforming herself. But Myra wouldn't know. At least, she hoped she wouldn't.
But the stories Myra had heard about the Dragon Army became, at that point, Lina's greatest allies. For just as the child's face had become serious with the start of the trade, so too now did it revert to its childish enthusiasm.
"You'll give me your ribbon for this letter?" she asked incredulously. "You mean it?"
It was Lina's turn to control her emotion. She had never been this close to having something she so desperately wanted. At least not since...
"That's what I said. Take it or leave it."
Myra's hand, holding the letter and outstretched towards Lina, sealed the deal. As the two exchanged the items, and as Myra looked upon her ribbon as the grandest treasure to be had, Lina knew that she herself had gotten the better of the deal. The letter was too important for her to place it in her knapsack with her other few possessions; this one she placed in her pant pocket. She would read it the first chance she had.
Nightfall came with no event. Lina had done the best she could to extend the life of her clothing, had spoken to several of the Jenna survivors about the conditions of the territories ahead of her, and had come to the conclusion that, come daybreak, she'd be on her way again.
It hardly had anything to do with the people there. Truth be told, they were polite to her, more polite than many had been to her since her bandit-killing days, and they seemed to genuinely respect her. They had furnished her a good meal: fire-roasted sweet potatoes, or at least some shriveled up lumps that resembled and somewhat tasted like them. They had offered her a chance to live with them for as long as she wished. For the duration of the afternoon hours that Lina spent by herself simply looking at the encampment, the idea had held a certain appeal.
Depression, however, sank in. Once again, she found herself missing her former life, her former friends, and the former state of things. To stay here, in an encampment where everything existed as a reminder of humanity's doom, would only compound her already miserable state. Not that she resented the pitiful state of the Jenna settlement; she found herself loving the Jenna folk because in their kindness, they had reminded her of what humanity was capable of, even in the worst of times. However, she also found herself pitying them, for it was known that the average life expectancy of a settlement was about a year at absolute most. That's about as long as it had taken the monsters to annihilate four separate settlements, or so she had heard. Considering that the city of Jenna had been destroyed about nine months ago, that didn't leave them much time. She found herself wishing she could stay behind to defend them however way she could, but she knew that she would only fail again.
As she had failed in New Sairaag.
But nightfall came. And Lina saw something that sparked a bit of life in her. Little Myra, having shown off her new ribbon to her equally young friends, was now playing a sort of wizards and monsters game with them. Lina watched them as they played, heard them as each one took turns chanting spells, laughed lightly as the children pretending to be monsters threw themselves on the ground from the shock of the imaginary spells being hurled at them. She saw Myra, ribbon fixed on her blouse, running after one boy, raising her hands, and yelling out "Gill Slave!!" Lina laughed. Either she had forgotten the name of the spell, or she had believed the bit about it being bad luck to say it's name. Either way, the boy was quick to fall to the ground and groan in mock agony. The rest of the wizard children cheered.
Despite all that was around them, the children continued to be just that: children. Somehow, despite the death and the coming extinction of humanity, they found the heart and the will to play as if all were right with the world. Moreover, in their own minds, they had found a solution to the monster problem and would implement it the first chance they got. In their minds, the defeat of the monsters was as simple as casting a Gill Slave. That was okay with Lina. Even though she knew better, she sensed a certain courage in them all, for if they believed that a monster defeat could happen, then they hadn't abandoned all hope.
And maybe she and the rest of those like her had. Maybe it was the adults who had sulked in the horrors of the apocalypse and surrendered to a path assumed inevitable. Lina looked at her left arm, which was merely bandaged and unhealed. She felt her left calf area, where it was still sore from an injury she had sustained months ago but had never bothered to heal. It was in her power; it had always been. There was no need for a bandage around her left arm if she recited the proper spell. Yet she hadn't.
Lina realized then, as Myra was about to unleash another Gill Slave, that the apocalypse had gotten the better of her. She had committed herself towards a slow and gradual death by negligence, by depression, by the recklessness with which she wandered aimlessly. She had stopped caring about her own life the moment her husband's ended; she hadn't admitted to herself that she no longer wanted to live.
But in looking at Myra and the other children, old emotions came flooding back. Shame. Guilt. Anger. Others followed close behind. Dedication. Courage. The will to live, to fight, and to defend that which was most important, even if it meant figuring out what was important now.
It was at that moment that Lina realized that two years of semi-suicidal sulking had been enough. There was work to be done, nothing short of the salvation of humanity. There were people to be found, for although Gourry and Amelia were gone, Zelgadis and Sylphiel might still be alive. She would need all the help she could get.
Lina's thoughts carried her well into the night, well after the children were called to sleep. There, alone and in the semi-silence of the now sleeping settlement, Lina looked back down at her injured arm. She closed her eyes and recited the necessary spell.