The Stories of Latia, Vol. 2: Demon's Curse

Chapter 13: The Fallen Dunes / People Like Us

Chapter 13: The Fallen Dunes / People Like Us

The Narrator

Knock, knock, knock.

The crack of dawn the next morning, Cassidy is pounding on Jayme's door.

He isn't answering.

Knock, knock, knock.

Still not answering.

Knock knock-

The door swings open before she can knock again, revealing Jayme, his eyes half closed and his usually fluffy hair a mess, standing behind it.

"Hi," Jayme groggily greets.

"Hi," Cassidy echoes, her voice a whisper.

"I decided that it's worth a shot... but we have to leave now. I don't want Avery to see us leave, okay?"

"Yeah... yeah, okay. I just gotta get ready first, give me a couple minutes," Jayme mumbles, slowly shutting the door, leaving Cassidy alone again in the hallway.

The growing sunlight piercing through the window in her and Avery's room, bleeding out into the hallway through the door that was left ajar, and Avery's soft snores coming from the same room, eventually drag Cassidy back into their bedroom. She finds Avery just as she left her, laying on her stomach, her left arm extended and draping off the bed where Cassidy once laid mere minutes ago. Her shoulder length, sage green hair flowing loosely across her pillow, obscuring her eyes and most of the many freckles that spotted her ivory face. Cassidy can't help but stand at the foot of the bed and analyze every gorgeous imperfection that constructed her lovely face, wishing she could see her golden brown eyes that she knew rested behind her heavy eyelids. She wondered what they'd look like behind her circular glasses that she wore when she was too lazy to put in her contacts instead, as if she hadn't seen that hundreds of times already. She looks over to see those glasses on their nightstand, also spotting a blue notecard beside them, the same notecard she had seen Avery fidgeting with earlier.

"Cassidy? I'm ready to go when you are," Jayme whispers, pulling Cassidy's focus off the notecard and onto Jayme, now standing in the doorway, wearing his usual outfit plus a backpack instead of his pajamas.

"Okay. Let's go," she says, turning towards the door, but taking one more long look at Avery, peacefully asleep, before stepping out of the room and closing the door behind her.

Cassidy and Jayme barely make it out the door, before being stopped by James, who was just reaching to knock on the door they had just opened.

"Oh- James? What are you doing here?" Avery asks, puzzled.

"Oh, hi... I was coming to check on Cassidy and see how you guys were doing?" James replies.

"At 7 in the morning?" Jayme questions.

"Are you guys not up at 7?" James asks, immediately followed by soft, yet slightly frantic footsteps coming down the stairs.

"Cass? Where are you going?" Avery groggily asks, her hair thrown quickly into a bun, her glasses resting on the end of her nose, and her eyes glazed over. This isn't exactly what Cassidy had in mind when she wanted to see her brown eyes behind her circular glasses.

"Oh, uhm... Jayme wanted to... uhh," Cassidy stammers, annoyed that James had woken up Avery.

"We're scoping out something that might be able to cure Cassidy," Jayme bluntly interrupts.

"Oh... why didn't you tell me?" Avery reaches the bottom of the stairs, her bare foot and the wooden floor creating a soft thud.

"I... I didn't want to get your hopes up in case it was nothing or if it doesn't work out," Cassidy confesses.

"Well, I guess we'll find out. Where is it?"

"The Fallen Dunes," Cassidy groans, unhappy with the idea of Avery going.

"Okay, I just need a minute to get ready, okay? Don't leave without me," Avery orders, rushing back up the stairs.

"I guess you want to come too, huh?" Cassidy sarcastically gestures to James, who is still standing awkwardly in the doorway, confused as to what just happened.

They walk the dunes in silence, only broken by one of them occasionally drinking water from the steel water bottles they had all brought with them. They reached the desert that covered most of Latia's northern coast fairly quickly, but once they got onto the cold sand, they didn't see anyone. No one, but a single small town they saw in the distance, that Avery grimaced at when James pointed it out.

"Ow!" Cassidy softly exclaimed when she had tripped on a dead tree branch and fallen over.

"Woah, there. Are you okay?" Avery asks, rushing over to help her to her feet, lifting her up by her hands and noticing something different about her eyes.

"Is your eye... blue-r than normal?" She asks, skeptical.

"My eyes are always blue," Cassidy quickly dismisses, pushing past Avery and continuing walking.

After that, they continued to traverse the barren dunes for hours, finding nothing but dead trees and the occasional abandoned horse carriage.

"We should set up camp by that carriage, the sun is starting to set," Jayme suggests, pointing at a left vacant covered horse carriage that looks straight out of an old western film James would watch with his family.

Jayme, Avery and James started going around, bringing back whatever dead branches they could find to start a fire with.

"Hey. How are you feeling?" James asks Cassidy, who was sitting by the pile of sticks they'd gathered, added to by James.

"I'm feeling like I'm going to die in a few months," Cassidy soullessly responds, still sounding annoyed.

"Fair, enough I guess." James sits in the sand next to her.

"Listen..." James softly begins.

"We all want this to work, but..."

"'But'?" Cassidy impatiently asks.

"But maybe it doesn't. Maybe... maybe you won't make it and you'll leave her alone..." James struggles to nail down how to phrase what he wants to say.

"What are you trying to say, James?" Cassidy snaps.

"I'm just saying... you should spend as much time as you can with her. Because no matter what, whether it's you lying on your deathbed or her on hers... you'll wish you spent more time together."

Cassidy ponders for a moment.

"Well, what does it matter? I was going to outlive her by a matter of decades anyway. Regardless of whether this works, it's either her watching me die and needing to go on without me or the other way around..." Cassidy explains, getting choked up.

"No matter how you slice it, our story was never going to have a happy ending."

"And you're okay with that? Is she okay with that?"

Cassidy sighs "I've made peace with it. And she knows, but she prefers not to think about it. It's easier that way."

The two sit in silence for a moment.

"Did you ever think about that? When you met, uhm... met Kara," Cassidy softly asks, carefully mentioning her name.

James shifts around from his seat in the sand "yeah... yeah, I guess. I guess I just assumed she'd outlive me somehow, and Death would eventually come for me some other way, but... I guess she just barely missed me," James tears up a bit.

"Well... I guess that's just life for people like us. Cursed in more ways than you'd think." Cassidy's eyes are glued to Avery, still wandering around, picking up loose branches of trees that haven't stood in millenia. When Avery glances up to meet Cassidy's gaze, she gives her a wide, loving smile that is just so contagious.

"I guess so," James sorrowfully replies, staring at the sun setting on the dunes.