Re: Duality

A Friend

   The protagonist enters right on stage and plops down seemingly tired. She wears a bored expression on her face and with great displeasure opens the story once again. She has heavy bags of regret under her daunting eyes of red; but the listener cares not for her comfort. They only crave entertainment and knowledge.

   Dead....? What the hell was she talking about?! Nothing about her comment makes sense, clearly she was just being an asshole. That's what I keep telling myself at least as I step around the horrid mouth planted in the ground. Her whole conversation with left me with a massive migraine, and I rub my temples in pain. I quickly leave such a nightmarish place, but find my vision growing dim and out of focus. It is as if I'm traveling back to the past I once had as the scenery around me shifts into a village of fire demons.

   She has to be lying. 

   There's no truth to her words. 

    Closing my eyes for a brief moment before welcoming another hallucinogenic vision of the past. 

   I'm unable to discern when I am in relation to the last memory, but it feels like it's a little bit before the events of the other memory. I can see the young fire demon girl, possibly just hitting her early teens, talking with a bunch of other girls her age and a boy slightly older than her. She notices me staring at her and she casts a sharp glare in my direction, which the other youths notice. They giggle among themselves and spread mocking rumors about me to one another, none of which are true in the slightest; yet I say not a word towards them. 

   "You know you should be back home studying. Your arithmetic skills are lacking a great deal, what's going to happen when you have to buy food and clothing, but you can't count out your money correctly?" I hear myself speak in a familiar manner to the girl. 

   "I don't want you judging me when you're the fucking coward of the village. Go back into hiding with your shitty math and your shitty books. When has a book ever killed a soldier?" She scolds me and I flinch as all of them snicker in my direction. I feel ashamed and pissed, but this is interrupted by the appearance of a young fire demon boy grabbing my leg. He appears to be in his early youth, possibly nine or ten years old. The girl whistles at him, gesturing for him to come by her side and away from me. Before he moves over to her he whispers something up at me comfortingly. 

   "It's ok, I don't think you're a coward-" He's about to finish his sentence, revealing his relationship with me, but someone taps my forehead snapping me out of my daze. I jerk straight up with an infuriated glare at the person who interrupted my memory. Smirking right in my face is a young man, at least I think it's a young man, it's honestly hard to tell with demons sometimes. This demon has dusty sand colored hair and hazel eyes, his skin is a light tan and his garb indicates that he's from the far off desert. His midriff is right there out in the open, and I can the contour of his muscles along his limbs. His attractiveness is offset by the playful foolish nature dancing in his eyes. It is apparent to me that this man is a demon of sand and a merchant one at that. On his back he carries a fancy looking rifle and a large bag of supplies that some would kill to take possession of.

  Behind him is a young boy with icy almost white blue hair and matching eyes. His skin is a frosty pale color and his clothes are a size too big for his small frame. He also carries with him a bag of supplies and items, though no gun appears to be on his person. The older demon winks at me and changes his smirk to a more friendly grin. I bite my lip upon realization that we are relatively the same height as one another; I never really even bothered noticing how tall I actually was. He extends a hand and I hesitantly take it, apart from interrupting my vision he hadn't done anything to explicitly warrant a good punch to the gut.

   "Hello there miss, my name is Dez Armel. This here is my travelling companion, Erek Driskel. I apologize for waking such a beautiful woman from her stupor, but this is hardly the place for drunken daydreams." He holds my hand in his rugged hand and a faint blush reaches my cheeks. I laugh it off awkwardly and rub the back of my head with my free hand; a little compliment like that is nothing to get all worked up about. Yet at the pit of my stomach I feel as though not many men in my past have ever made any kind of compliments towards me. Erek nods his head in my direction and places his stuff down so he may sharpen his knives.