When the Final Seal Breaks

After that

Hope had called for Orleris.

When he closed his eyes, Orleris saw Hope, calmly sitting as usual in his clearing. Hope raised an arm and beckoned him.

"Can't you just tell me now?"

"Please, Just Come Here."

"When I'm awake?"

"Yes, Please Come Here. I Promise That You Will Not Be Disappointed In The Trip."

He opened his eyes, finding himself thinking that perhaps being close with a God was a little more inconvenient than expected. Maybe this was the price to pay for his right arm being healed by their God, even if his left hand had been lost. Still, every time he so much as blinked, he heard a little "Please" echo in his head.

"Fine, but please stop that. I can't head there right this second, and you'll drive me insane like this."

"Thank You."

It had been about a year since Lil had returned. One of the first things the central council had decided they needed to handle was addressing Orleris' role in society. As the last king, he had fulfilled his role well enough, but with the pathway to Lil's world in the sealed forest being closed, there wasn't really a need to guard the forest. As a joke he had offered to guard the Sky Domain, since there should have still been a pathway there, but once they started seriously considering it, he had revoked the offer and asked to continue to live in his sealed forest home.

It was Lilia, who had returned to Central not long after Lil left that offered herself to stay in the Sky Domain. On probing, she admitted that her powers of prophecy were only the ability to see what was going to happen inside the sky domain, and she had seen herself having a fine time enjoying life up there. Even a warning from her elder cousin about the effects of solitude weren't enough to convince her otherwise. As it turned out, she wasn't planning on being alone anyway. She had fallen in love with someone she met in the small village she had been hiding in and planned to take him somewhere even more secluded. She still seemed a little bit on the delusional side, so Orleris didn't bother asking how they planned to get up there together and just hoped her prophecy had foreseen a good ending.

"You've done enough, thank you for taking my place. I think its my turn to do something worthy of these eyes," she said with a wink, then left Orleris behind.

Orleris had shared his method of getting up to the Sky Domain with her, and it turned out that the young man she had fallen in love with could manage it as well, so he just carried Lilia all the way up and they had been living up there for 10 months. Once teleportation coordinates were sent down, they began to live just as Orleris had in the forest, teleporting out notes, and requests and orders. All were funded by the Central Council- Lilia already knew nothing was going to come through that pathway, but Orleris had also asked Hope to close it as well.

The question of whether it was safe because simply nothing was ever going to happen, or because Orleris was fated to ask it to be closed hung around in his mind, but none the less he decided that he wasn't going to rely on an prophecy over confirmation that no pathway remained.

Eloitte remained at Central. As she always had, she spent all her time at her workshop, inventing things or fixing things brought in. She was currently working on creating a cell phone. She had all the inspiration from holding Lil's, but her workshop simply didn't have the tools. She grumbled, wishing that Lil had brought a toolkit with her too, so she could have understood what had been used to make it, but resigned to mixing in as much magic as possible to take as much work off the hardware and make it all magic based software. At least, that's what Eloitte had said out loud, the words barely meant anything to Orleris.