A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 182: A Wounded Duo

"I'm telling you, I'm fine."

     But I didn't look fine at all. It was hard to "look fine" when forced to imitate a sacrificial figure from another religion with stakes riddling your body, and a giant basin below to collect your blood as your body tried to heal itself, failed, activated the enchantment of the stakes, got even worse, tried to heal itself, failed...

     But all I could do was say those words, seeing the look on my familiar's face. A face that never usually lost its cool, not even when I came back beaten and battered after a fight with a god. A face that stared up at me without moving, with shock enough to resemble the woman's behind her. Naive, almost, as if disbelieving that I of all people could be hurt.

     Even though she knew better than anyone else, in the whole of existence, how easy it was to hurt me, how deep I could let the wounds afflict me, and how long they could linger in my heart before I let them go.

     "Uh...Kiki?" My throat was scratchy from all the screaming of earlier. I blinked away the images that tried to summon themselves to the forefront of my mind, pushing them down. They could be dealt with later. If I lost my cool then, in the middle of the city, sure - I could take down the Church and kill a lot of its members, as I really wanted to do in that moment. But it would come at the cost of all the innocent sheep in its surroundings, and all of the territories far beyond the walls of Leonera as well. So, later, it would be. Somewhere I couldn't risk damaging anything, or anyone, at all. Not even myself.

     Because if I was damaged any more in that moment, without the chance to heal even a little, I was sure to break.

     Only for the pieces to be put back together again...like kintsugi.

     But unlike kintsugi, I was not sure to be beautiful even while patched together again.

     No. I would only have more scars to my body, and wounds to my name.

     "Do you think you could help me down...? It's kind of...uncomfortable...?"

     Well, uncomfortable was one way of putting it. Searing, absolutely agonizing, was another. They were holy stakes after all, and I hadn't had enough time to change my race from "Demon" to anything else to avoid the purifying the thing was attempting to do on me. I wasn't quite sure why I wasn't purified yet, despite having been up there for long enough. When Lady Lilly purified the curse wraith so many years ago using her own holy magic, it was instant. I would've expected the holy magic of a god to wipe me out in an instant, especially seeing how much stronger he was than me.

     The strength of one of the top three gods really was something else.

     River was the form she took on then, with her crushed, yet somehow relieved, appearance, walking forward up the steps to the altar, to stand below me. Putting her hand on the edge of the basin that blackened at her touch, before disappearing into her storage. There was no way we were leaving something almost full to the brim with my blood there - not only was it weird, there was no telling what kind of weird things those weird folks would do with it if I carelessly underestimated the extent they were willing to go for such a trap.

     "Oh, wait," I shook my head, sweat flinging off the ends of some short hairs framing the sides of my face. "You might be affected by these, since they're not ordinary holy stakes, Kiki. Let's see...do you think you could drag Keir over here instead? Sure, that means owing him a favor, but I'd rather not see you get hurt-"

     Instead of her hand blackening the thing, it blackened her, while wrapping a tight grip around the edge of one jagged white stick that looked like it'd been torn off of a bare tree branch from one of the trees in front of the Koraco estate. The light blue bangs of her hair fell in front of her face while pulling the thing out of my chest, where it had been staked right beside my heart. Right besides the other thing they had stuck into my chest, not that long ago. The one that had me at his mercy earlier, forgetting the conditions that triggered its control over me in my blind fury...