The Oracle

Chapter 9: With Bloodied Wings Do We Carry Ourselves

AKARI

The next morning, I head over to Sora's room to wake him up early to go on the mission I picked out for us both. Whenever missions are available, you're excused class time to go on them and they count as an extracurricular. I knock on Sora's door a few times and frown whenever he doesn't answer after a few moments. I go to knock once more only to be interrupted by a door opening off to the right and I raise my eyebrows whenever I see Sora irritably grumbling as he stumbles out of Merrick's room.

"That's one sight I did not expect to see," I muse and Sora notices me before he rolls his eyes.

"Trust me, I didn't expect it either," he sighs and brushes down his uniform. "I was dragged there against my will."

"Oh?" I raise my eyebrows.

"Don't look at me like that," Sora frowns. "It's not like that. Merrick got drunk and I babysat him. He wanted me to drink too but I refused."

"I'm impressed," I muse and Sora sighs.

"Whatever. Can we just go?" Sora asks. "I'd like to get away from him as soon as possible."

"Can do," I refrain from smirking. "Come on, follow me. And by the way, I know that you can summon your weapon, but you better not let other people seeing you do it. Nobody else knows the truth, so you might want to summon it now before we meet the others."

"Got it," Sora nods and glances around briefly before he summons his staff, my scythe already being draped across my back.

"So, what classes did you choose?" I ask as we make our way to the dispatch area.

"I chose to go for defense," Sora starts. "I figured it might, you know, help my cover to not be on the frontlines as much. And for my other classes I chose to go with Alchemy, Herbal Medicine, and Ancient Script. I saw some of the class listings for next year and I think I wanna take Forging once I get there. Also, I noticed something strange that I wanted to ask you about..."

"What is it?" I ask and glance over at him.

"The colors are supposed to correspond well with their pairs, right?" Sora starts. "Envy is green, Greed is purple, and so on. Well, wouldn't Merrick work better as scarlet than magenta? I mean, scarlet is supposed to be seduction and magenta represents love and devotion, and Merrick seems to wear a lot of scarlet. So..."

"Well, truth be told, the color for Lust centuries ago used to be scarlet, but..." I trail off with a frown.

"But what?" Sora frowns in return.

"But then Merrick fell in love," I say quietly and Sora's eyes widen. "The true final form color for Lust was always magenta. Once Lust reached its highest power potential, the energy color would turn to magenta, similarly to like how fire burns different colors based on the temperature."

"Merrick loves someone? You're kidding me, right?" Sora says in disbelief. "I have to meet them."

"You can't," I say, my lips tugging into a slight frown. "Not anymore."

"What happened?" Sora's breath hitches as he asks quietly.

"He..." I trail off.

"Reverence!" Merrick shouted as he leaned over the cliff side and reached down a hand while rain poured down in the jungle, his wings tattered and bloody, stuck full of arrows and knives, broken by the enemies so that he could no longer fly.

I watched with fear written all over my face as I knelt next to Merrick, only thirteen at the time while Merrick would have been sixteen in his human form and Reverence seventeen. Reverence was hanging from a tree root that jutted out from the rocks and the dirt a few feet down the cliff, his golden wings covered in blood and blood running down the side of his face from a cut on his cheek, dirt smeared across the bridge of his nose, his brown eyes wide and his orange-sandy hair tousled, and his sword lying somewhere down along the rocks at the bottom of the cliff where the river ran between the valley.