The Root of the Suffering [Blair]

[schrodinger]

i.imgur.com/ruAAwkz.jpg

i.imgur.com/mXMzoos.jpg

Several days have passed since Kye had had left Blair that day. With the aid of Memoria, she had managed to safely find her way back to the school that night. However, now she lay curled up under her bed covers, the day reaching noon by now, staring apathetically at her wall. She did not study her grimiore, or hardly give Saya any orders, and had barely slept or ate. She couldn't bring herself to.

Since her return, Kye had locked herself inside of her private room and refused to come out. On days where she had classes, she would send Saya to conduct the lessons in her stead. With her sensitive hearing, she could sometimes hear with confused whispers of students passing by. What had happened to their teacher? Was she alright? When would she finally come out?

She wondered, bitterly, were they actually concerned, or relieved?

For the first couple days that she had shut herself in completely, she kept thinking back to what happened that night between Blair and a student, Fenrei. That Blair was an assassin, a killer this entire time. Kye shuddered as she realized that she not knowing this, she let herself grow close to this person, vulnerable even. While Blair had insisted she no longer followed that profession, how could she possibly know for sure that was the truth?! For all Kye knew, she could have been sent to monitor her while she recorded her research on the grimiore, and take it from her corpse when she was no longer of use.

And the cold look in her eyes Kye saw the last time she faced her. Was that really the sort of person Blair was?

All these sorts of dark thoughts spiraled through her mind for days, forging a weight of heartbreak and a chain of paranoia to bind her to this room. This small, dark room of hers.

It was lonely.

~~~

It was almost a week before before her mind had begun to fully process the shock and fully examine what she actually knew. She sat up from her bed, her brow furrowed in thought.

Of course...no matter how you look at it...how could I have overlooked it?

After a moment, she pulled out her phone and checked its calender. She found a reminder made for herself. Today was her day to go and visit...her.

"..." I can't just stay here forever, Kye thought to herself.

The door opened, and Kye looked over to see Saya return from teaching the class for the day again. Looking to her master with concern, she asked, "How are you feeling?"

"I have something I want you to do for me."

~~~

After having showered, dressed in her typical informal attire, and gulping down a cup of coffee, (she had been off the stuff for the last few days) Kye had finally left her room and had gone to the Administration Building's infirmary, and waited at the front desk.

She had sent Saya to ask Blair to meet here, but did not provide her with any more information than that.

Kye sighed to herself. She hated being in places like this. An infirmary was no place for a necromancer.

[Rikka]

The first day was not bad. The purple haired cat had returned to class and taught as if nothing had happened. Of course there had been a few detentions. Most kids felt that it was just a bad day for Blair. Over the next couple of days they soon found her sweet smile was not her normal one and began to stay silent. Many wouldn't move for fear of getting detention. By the time the week was through many complaints had been given to Chrystaline saying Blair had been replaced as by this time 3/4 of all of Blair's students had detention. The reason was insubordination. She had even given poor little Apple a detention.

Glaring at the clock her yellow eyes returned once more to the board where she was continuing with the basics of english class. Chalk clicked as Blair sweetly asked her remaining students to tell her why certain rules were exempt in certain sentences. No student rose their hand. They didn't even dare to breathe. When the bell rang they all charged from the room as if a fire had been lit behind them. With a sigh of relief Blair started cleaning up her classroom manually rather than with her magic. She was just buying time. Time until she had to go home have dinner and then cry herself to sleep at night.

Hearing footsteps at her door she looked and almost darted out the window. Instead she propped a hand on her hip and looked at Saya as the child looked at her and said that Kye required her attention at the infirmary. Blinking her mind took her down a dark alley. Had Kye been hurt? Had Fenrei decided to take her vengence out on the one Blair cared about? Trying to pump Saya was useless as the purple haired woman went running down the halls at a blur.

-------------------

Arriving at the infirmary she found Kye whole and safe. The breath left her lungs in a rush and if she hadn't been who she was, she might have collapsed in a heep. Straightening her low-cut purple shirt and shorts as she calmly walked over to Kye now.

"Did you need something Kye?"

[schrodinger]

i.imgur.com/ruAAwkz.jpg

Kye looked over in bewilderment as Blair burst in, panting an gasping. "Blair," she acknowledged her awkwardly. Did she run here at top speed? Kye felt a little guilty for some reason, but decided to keep that feeling to herself at the moment.

She stood there in silence for a moment following her question. Was there...something she should've said that she was forgetting before she got to her reason for calling her? Ask how she was feeling? How she had been? How her lessons were coming? They were all the sort of topic starters she would usually go for whenever they spoke to each other before but now...

"...I...There's something I need to..." No, she corrected herself. "Something I want to talk to you about. And there's someone I'd been wanting you to meet."

That's good enough, I think, Kye thought to herself with uncertainty. This thing started off better in her head. "So..." she went over and opened the door, to the infirmary's hallway. "...It's this way."

When Blair got to following her, Kye led her through several halls of rooms for patients. She didn't say much at first, and it was clear that the grimalkin was rather uncomfortable here and almost forcing herself not to make eye-contact with any patients that were here at the time. She didn't even seem able to make eye-contact with Blair since the moment she ran in.

Finally, a few turns in, she spoke. "I ran away." It wasn't much of a speech. Or a sentence. It was hardly more than a statement, a confession maybe. She fell silent again for a beat, before finding more words. "Heels suck."

Her head seemed to hang a little, her eyes tracing the tile before her as she walked. "I never told you how I got to being a teacher here, did I?" It seemed as if talking was becoming harder a task for Kye to perform by the second. "It's weird...I don't even like kids that much. I think they like me a little less, too."

[Rikka]

Blair looked away as she was caught running in at full speed. Knowing that Kye was safe, she kinda felt a little silly. Trying to hide her embarrassment she clasped her hands behind her back and looked back at Kye. Golden eyes roamed over Kye's face as she searched for something. A clue, or something to tell her if she still had a chance with Kye.

Blinking she found herself nodding at Kye's request. Slightly concerned she followed after Kye and stayed far enough back she wasn't in the pink haired womans bubble. Her mouth kept shut as she tried to look everywhere but at the woman before her. Though she found it hard since her eyes kept traveling back to the Grimalkin. After a few turns she spoke. "I don't blame you." Her voice was kind as she gave a return statement.

Blair watched her hand her head a little and wanted to pull her into a hug. To push away the heavy air that seemed to drag the Grimalkin down with every step they took. "No you haven't. The kids like you well enough." In fact they would love her after the hell Blair had put her kids through this past week.

[schrodinger]

"I doubt that," Kye replied flatly at Blairs comment. She approached an elevator and pressed a button to call it down. "...Did you know," she started. "I didn't go dig up the Grimiore in some ruins or anything special like that. I just sort of had it left behind for me to carry. By my father."

"...It's funny," she continued, monotonously. "Before it came to my hands...I didn't give two shits about magic. It was way over my head. I'm a part of a race genetically full of arcane potential, and I couldn't even fathom nor care how to draw flames from an ice cube."

The elevator beeped, and the doors opened. "All I cared about was taking care of what remained of my family since as long as I could remember. My father, and my twin sister. Aylia."



Kye walked inside the elevator and turned around to face the button panel, and incidently toward Blair's general direction. She still wasn't looking her in the eye however. In fact, judging from her gaze, it looked almost as if she weren't looking at anything at all as she waited for Blair to follow her.

It was like she was just staring somewhat downward at empty space, not fully focused on her surroundings, a stark contrast to the norm, which was that the grimalkin typically scrutinized everything caught in her field of vision. For a necromancer, her expression seemed almost dead itself as she spoke of her past like this.

When Blair would have finally joined her and the elevator doors closed, Kye slowly drew up her hand and pressed a button. "I think we were maybe six, maybe seven...yeah...seven. Lucky seven. Aylia had developed a disease centered in the bodies veins and heart that gradually eats away at the hosts Mana...y'know, the life force energy living things have in order to live and transmute to perform feats unexplainable by reasons of physics or natural law...'Magic,' is the more appealing word for the phenomenon. This condition she developed, Nidhoggs Disease, the call it...there's no cure. Not one we as a universe are aware of yet, be the method be based on science or magic. We only have a treatment for it, where another entity supplies the patient being treated with the sufficient amount of mana to offset the amount of Mana consumed by the disease. Restore the life force that is lost, basically."

"Trouble is, it's only a temporary fix. The disease lives on, and keeps eating. And the kicker? The more the Nidhoggs eats, the stronger it gets. And the stronger it gets, the rate at which it eats the hosts life force away increases. It begins to affect the body in the typical ways an expense of Mana feels. Exhausting in some degree, like lifting a weight, or jogging a certain distance. But unlike simple expending of Mana, resting doesn't ease it when it comes to the disease. It started to affect her psychological state, memory, and sleep cycles. Sometimes Aylia would go days without waking up whenever she slept. And in the meantime, we needed to have her hooked up to tubes feeding her nutrients and water to keep her body from starving or dying of thirst. When she would wake up, she'd find that she was forgetting things, like they dissipated with her dreams. She'd have trouble staying aware of a passage of time that passed. Sometimes she'd forget who she was, who we were, or think we looked like someone completely different. She was always confused in some way. She couldn't seem to comprehend what was really happening to her. And she was almost always so tired."

The elevator finally came to a stop, beeping as its doors reopened. Kye, her feet visibly dragging now as she exited and sluggishly proceeded down another long maze of halls and numbered rooms. 

"As for her physical symptoms that developed over the next year or so, her hair lost the color it once had, pink, like mine...cuz, y'know, twins, right? It faded to white, her skin flushing to a pale tone, kind of what you would expect from a flu. As the disease would...later become stronger, it actually slowed her aging process to a near complete halt. Silver lining to everything, huh? Here I am with the wrinkles around the eyes, but she gets to still look like a kid. Not before the coma set in, though. I'd be jealous if the whole thing weren't so f*cked..."

"...In those days, my father would be the one between the two of us to transfer Mana to her to offset her loss of energy. After all, I was too young, and I couldn't understand how to perform magic in the first place. All I could do, for two whole years, was watch helplessly from the sidelines as the disease only grew stronger. Useless...I would give anything, just to do something...anything but be useless to my family. To Aylia. Anything. But I was already doing all I really could do, taking some odd jobs here and there, delivering my fathers research notes back and forth between his associates studying the mystic arts, shopping, cooking. It wasn't hardly enough. I know it couldn't be. There had to have been something more I could do without relying on magic. If I had looked a little harder, do you think I would have found it...?"

"...Then one day, one of my fathers associates had me deliver a sealed parcel for him. Its contents originating from some ruins of a old civilization they were investigating, one that was so mystically advanced, some records claimed they could bend the will of the universe to their liking only to disappear without a trace. They were called the Jabrawoxsi, and the artifact found, that was inside the parcel?"

"It was a record of what's believed to be all of their advanced knowledge. The Obsidian Grimiore." 

"When he wasn't tending to Aylia's disease, my father would trust me to look after her while he racked his brain against the pages of the Grimiore, doing all in his knowledge to piece together whatever he could from their language and magic. He figured that if the Jabrawoxsi knew how to manipulate the fabric of the universe, they'd have had the means to cure something like the Nidhoggs."















((to be continued. If you'd like to put in some input as a reply, Rikka, you've my permission. I will work on the next part of this later and am posting what I have now.))

[schrodinger]

img.wikinut.com/img/2jlhiv7b9mml-0qr/jpeg/700x1000/The-Magic-Book.jpeg

"Try as he might however, he couldn't translate the contents of the book to anything meaningful, and after several years, was beginning to lose all hope. All the while, Aylia's condition would continue to worsen, and the periods of time in which she was able to remain conscious were reducing to mere minutes."

"Desperate, my father undertook a controversial arcane art in order to call forth the creator of the book and seek their help, by summoning them from beyond the mortal plane of existence, Necromancy."


A flicker of emotion could be seen in the grimalkins eyes. Pain. Anger. Hatred.


"I snuck over to the door of his room that night and quietly looked inside to check up on him. He hadn't eaten all day, after all. And that's how I found him performing the ritual. If I had known what he was about to do, maybe I could have intervened...maybe things would have been better than they are now."




"He used the book as the catelyst in calling forth the soul of the Jabrawoxsi author, but what he contacted in the summoning ritual was not the savior he asked for. It was something else, something dead and sealed inside the pages of the Grimiore itself, that much I know because I came across the seal in my own studies of it. The spirit claimed to sympathize with his plight and suffering, and offered to lend his aid willingly, without repayment of any favor."

"His hopes soaring that he had finally found the miracle he searched for, my father made the necessary contract with the spirit in order to bring it into the mortal plane. That was the mistake he made, where everything went horribly wrong. The spirit emerged as a black haze from the books pages and instead of taking the mannequin body that was prepared for it to inhabit, it took my father's, possessing it as he cried out in agony."

"I remember screaming in horror, crying that what I was seeing could only be a dream, a nightmare. I remember him turning to me, with the cruel, twisted eyes that could never belong to the man who raised me and tended for my sister, that sneering face. I couldn't speak. I could hardly breathe. I turned from the doorway and ran to my sisters room."

"He laughed. He laughed and laughed, and as he did, I felt the burst of heat explode through the house behind me. He was attempting to burn it to the ground with my fathers magic. I picked up Aylia from her bed and fled our burning home as fast as I could. I almost didn't make it out with her in tow. I remember the stairs giving way underneath my feet and trapping us in a hole where the front door was in front of us, but blocked off by burning rubble, the air engulfed in smoke."




"I remember my first spell ever made, channeling and bending the heat and flames all around me into a single blast of destructive force. To this day, I still don't know how I pulled it off. I'd ever succeeded in casting elemental force in my life prior. But what I remember clearly about that moment, was the pain, both of my body and soul. Cuts and splinters that bled from the house crumbling and burning around me wrought my physical pain, but the anguish, despair, helplessness, sadness, anger, and fury I felt in that one moment where Aylia and I should have died, all focused as sunlight in a magnifying glass into my first successful transmutation of Mana."

"The blast disintegrated all of my obstacles in my path to the door, through it, and miles beyond it, blazing across the sky and pushing aside the clouds in its wake, alerting onlookers from all around to the crisis at hand."

"Limping from both my injuries and the aftermath of the cast spell, I had just made it outside with Aylia hanging from my arms when the house gave in and collapsed in on itself, continuing to burn behind me. From there, I slowly made my way towards a hospital, up until help finally came to aid me on the way. My injuries were treated easily, and Aylia came out without hardly a scratch...But even after she was hooked up to a system to support her life force, she hadn't woken up since that night. She'd fallen into a coma, and is still trapped inside of it."


(part 2, still need a third part, but again, you still have my permission to insert a reply to what's here so far, Rikka)

[Johnathan]

(Plot Mod post: Consider this an echo planting a worm in the back of Kye's mind, attempting to gnaw at her already frayed nerves. It's not consciously heard, but considered nevertheless. If or if not you choose to let it impact her and by how much is completely up to you.)

A flash of pink played across her peripheral vision: pink, easily written off as Kye's own hair. As she laid her story bare and familiar emotions welled to the surface once more, a lilting voice sing-songed at the edges of her subconscious mind.

"It must be hard, huh? Pouring your entire being into something, only to find that you're not good enough.

She'll continue wasting away, and you'll only end up going with her. After all, you are a finite being. There is only so much there for you to pour into a pursuit before you end up running dry. While your sister withers away, you'll be fated to impotently wither beside her.

You're not good enough on your own.

You need help.

Isn't that why you humored this obnoxious girl, who claims to be your peer, in the first place? That's why you were so disappointed to find out what she really was. She's an individual who takes away life, not one who helps to restore it. The moment you become too troublesome to deal with, she might get rid of you too.

People are all the same. They only look out for themselves. No one willingly helps anyone else out of the goodness of their hearts. They always have an agenda. You can't solve your own problem, but certainly that power of yours, which is only good for destroying, could be exploited for someone else's gain.

Of course, there has to be at least one person who'd be willing and also able to help. So what if there were a cost, so long as it saved your precious sister.

Would you do anything for that chance?"

There was the faintest image of a too wide smile, with wide eyes that reflected ruin and despair.

"Because I can give it to you!

All you need to do is say the magic words.

Do you even love her at all? Would you do anything?"

I know I would."

The figment that was and was not Desdemona leaned over Kye's shoulder and slipped a single additional page into the Obsidian Grimoire. A page that could be deciphered with three simple words.

"I'll do anything."


(As familiar as Kye is with the Grimoire, I expect that she'd eventually notice there was an extra page, but in terms of authenticity, it's existence is indecipherable from the rest of the Grimoire. As far as reality is concerned, it is and always has been a page within, Kye's memories are the thing that's wrong.)

[Rikka]

Blair followed Kye as they headed toward the elevator. Stopping about two feet away from her as she called an elevator Blair watched her. She didn't seem as lively and it hurt seeing her so monotonous. Following her into the elevator Blair looked her up and down. The grimalkin didn't even look as if she was looking at anything as she stared into empty space. When the button was pressed Blair leaned back against one of the walls keeping her eyes on Kye the entire time.

The tired Kye made Blair's heart feel as if it was being squeezed but still she listened. "I'm sure you were doing all you could to help." As she continued on about how she got the Grimiore she followed Kye out into the hallway. Hearing abour the necromancy gone wrong and her burning house made Blair want to cry for her.

Stopping her sluggish progress Blair pulled her into an embrace. Gently she held the tired Grimalkin as she paused to take a breath. "There is still plenty of time to find a cure. I know it must hurt to watch her. Your doing all you can and that is good enough." Taking a breath herself she took a step back and looked at the Grimalkin with serious eyes. "If...ah.. If you will still let me be beside you and even if you don't I would like to help you. Even if all I can do it make sure you eat to keep your energy up I would like to help you through this while you do your best to help your twin."