Book of The Lightborn: Rise

A grave mistake

"Do you think we should talk with him at some point?" Eraanel wanted to know from his sister, his right eye still missing, the complexity of regenerating the missing eye beyond him.

"There will be talk once we're safe; we should focus on the road and what lies ahead." Felemous responded instead. "I'm personally worried about the 'forest.' When we started to see glimpses of it, two suns after we left, it kept growing. Just how tall are these 'trees'?" he added, his face concerned with the view ahead.

The Gargantuan Forest's trees seemed as if they wanted to reach for the skies, their height half that of some mountains. From a sun away distance, no sounds could be heard, but the occasional mist could be seen up in the branches of the trees, some shadows moving with it. Whether those were simply the branches or something else, they couldn't tell, but standing outside exposed like this was no good. Out of the two hundred gravely wounded, another hundred died. The cause was the cold. While there were fewer storms over here in the Frozen Side, it wasn't named like that for nothing. The temperatures at night dropped so low you could see and hear rocks cracking. Those were called crackling rocks, as they would slightly crack by night, making these strange symphonies. Then they would warm up a bit in the morning, water droplets getting through the small cracks, causing more small cracks by night. It wasn't observed or known how these rocks don't shatter to pieces, but it's suggested that the water surrounding this piece of land they were at contained a large amount of minerals that would rebuild the rocks as or faster than the rocks from the bottom up. This gave the Lightborn the proper idea to name this portion of the Frozen Side, further East from the Frozen Passage, the Crackling Fields. Unbeknownst to the Lightborn, these rocks weren't cracking; they had a conductive metal inside of them. The sound that was akin to cracking was electricity surging through and jumping between the metal contained, something which only happened as a warning.

"I will talk with him. You two, keep leading them forward. Tell me if you notice anything strange or different." Manna said, her eye brimming with light, as she carried the remaining hundred wounded between her siblings through wind cushions, who aided them however they could. Her wind manipulation, although far from graceful, was much stronger and able now that she had all these lights attached to her. Manna then looked for Orvus, from her viewpoint noticing him at the very back, whispering to himself and seeing him, at times, walking between the wounded. She wanted to hate him, but looking at him concerned with the wounded sat between her hate and pity. He made a grave mistake, hundreds paying with their lives as a cost; he also ran away without looking back. Yet, because it was her brother, she wanted to forgive him. She was now looking for reasons to do so, although she couldn't find any. So, she decided to make some.

Manna sighed to herself, then approached him, her twin-pointed spear now too small for her large stature in her left hand. "Orvus." she said in a commanding tone, sitting at his right, which he either didn't notice or didn't want to show that he did, as he kept looking down and whispering to himself. "Do you really not have anything to say? After all that happened?" she looked at him, in her mind trying to hate him, her face betraying those feelings, with a look of pity and sorrow.

Orvus stopped his whispering. He listened to every word she said, then looked up at her, he'd been crying all this time, his eyes filled with grief. "What can I say, sister? That I'm weak? A coward for running? Damned forever to bear the weight of those we lost?" he sobbed, clenching at his chest. "I don't know what to say, I don't think that anything I say will make my mistake any less atrocious. I-I thought ever since we started crossing the Frozen Passage that you were right, that we should have returned to the Link and followed Kilon. After I ran away, I started to think of all the ways I could have done better, and yet again, you came to mind. My only solution was to run away, your solution was to try to lead the monster away, even though neither was successful. At least yours probably saved the rest. Truth is, I don't own the answers, because I find them only when I look at you. I just didn't have the guts to tell you." he confessed. His eyes frowned in pain, looking for forgiveness from his sister.