Fascinating World - Fiery Girl - Part One

With a breath—light began to return to his world.

It was a faint aquamarine hue, the subtle glow of a sort of crystal in whatever kind of abyss he had fallen into, that he adjusted his eyes for.

Cobalt had fought against his own fate, and within the span of just a few days, had crossed the line into completely uncharted territory in this strange new world. His head was a mess, but he didn’t remember hitting it on anything. The feeling was much more comparable to fogginess, and he wasn’t sure how much of what floated around in his turbulently distant mind he had dreamed, if any of it.

And having jumped into the mouth of a snake, his surroundings were less than welcoming. Unnerving, if not ethereal.

Panic started to settle in the more he became aware of this. The cave seemed to stretch forward, but not in any direction other than that. He was facing away from a dead-end, and couldn’t go up either. That is to say, there’s only one way out.

“And that’s gotta be straight ahead…”

His voice wasn’t too hoarse, so he hadn’t fallen asleep. Had he been summoned? Was he now in another world, inside of another world? He had questions, but he pushed on ahead.

Cobalt was perceptive. A little naive, but perceptive, nonetheless. Given that most of his experience with life was through the DIVE games he played, the highest hope he could present himself with was that a beautiful woman had summoned him, and now he was to be sent on some sort of quest.

He shook his head to snuff out his delusional expectations before they could fully form, and briefly thinking of Bismuth for a moment, he shook his head even faster.

“But still… If this is some kind of summoning…”

Thinking about the frail white-haired man from the mountain made his skin crawl from the inside out.

“I need to be cautious. No way in hell I’m letting my guard down again.”

Amidst his declaration, his dragging feet passed by some glowing crystals which littered the linear cave in large deposits. If not for these lights, Cobalt would be practically blind right now. He stopped, brought his foot all the way back past his upper thigh, and—

CRACK

Surprisingly, the brittle ore shattered on impact, breaking into two main pieces, along with a few other smaller chunks. He knelt down, and snagged a palm-sized glowing rock, pocketing it as “loot”.

Hopefully this stuff comes in handy, he added as an afterthought, and kept on the path. Seeing a bend in the cave, he approached the new segment, peering around the corner, and…

Suddenly, the world became brighter.

The mist lay heavy in the rounded cave ahead of him, seemingly glowing in harmony with the strange rocks surrounding them. The mist lifted itself off the ground slowly—and working their way off the ground and up the shadowed visage in front of him, Cobalt’s eyes caught a bare foot hanging slightly off of the cold ground. Tracing up the leg of the mysterious figure, another leg fell across the first through the misty collection of dark and light translucence, crossing the two legs as if expecting a greeting. Fingers outstretched, a hand lay gently across the bridged thigh, and the figure seemed to straighten itself in pride and anticipation.

A snakelike silhouette brazenly whipped itself parallel to it, and analyzing this, Cobalt gulped at the realization. He was eyeing an arrowhead shaped tail. Or, in other words, a demon tail.

His eyes automatically followed upwards through the thick mist surrounding the two, from the hips, to its midriff, to a remarkably flat chest that seemed to contour the curvature of the rib cage—although the mist was too heavy to show any further detail. Then suddenly, he caught the sharp glint of two eyes, which caught his own in return.

Despite being cloaked in shadows, its eyes seemed to have their own kind of light to them. From yellow, to orange, to red, Cobalt’s interpretation of those eyes were but one word: fire. And nestled quite a way behind those eyes were horns which protruded from off the temple. At this observation, the fiery eyes narrowed under thick eyelashes, and the mouth which shared the host of these eyes curved itself up into an ominous grin—a grin which bore sharp teeth and plastered the lightly freckled face with a veil of sinister obscurity.

In the center of all of that mist, was a single girl.

But more than that, if Cobalt’s own interpretations were to be correct…

Then the opposing component of this assembly could better be classified with another title…

That being a demon.

Before Cobalt could even formulate an instinctual response to this encounter, be it fear, intrigue, or otherwise, she leaned forward intently, shaking away the distant atmosphere in place of her own. Her smiling teeth gaped slightly, as if she herself was coming to terms with the situation as well, and was formulating her own way to bridge the misty gap between them.

Her next question would seem incredibly simple at face value—a natural response to this particular encounter that could lead to discourse between the two. However, her words carried much more intent than that face value.

“Who are you?” was all her soft voice asked of him.

Cobalt couldn’t grasp anything resembling a read on this girl. Was she calculating? Innocent? Deceptive? Or all of those clues at once? He had a hundred questions he could ask her, but the question in question was posed to him first.

A conclusion was made.

He would cling to the clue that she was deceptive. Pushing himself back away from the realm of trust, he thought hard to his encounter with Irvelle. He would sooner die by his own hands than extend his trust to someone else so far that his own life could be called into question. Be it paranoia or just plain ignorance, he installed that narrative into his own mind, and clung to his distrust like it was the last belief he had left.

“My name is Cobalt,” formally, was his reply.

Her eyebrows raised slightly, before narrowing again. At least—her was what he was assuming. The mist was too heavy to make out details, and with the demon’s legs crossed, it was anyone’s guess, so he was going on voice.

Right on time, as if sensing his confusion, she stood up from the large rock she had sat on. The mist collected and swirled around her feet as her toes touched the cave floor. Casting the dark and light translucency around her like wind to a witch, she stood audaciously against dispersing mists. And from that display, being completely unable to resist the movement of his own eyes southward, he could be fairly certain the pronoun her was correct.

He could feel the sudden rush of blood flow all the way up to his ears, and embarrassed, he took a step back. However the distance between them—spanning seven meters or so—would soon be closed by the incautious girl, who stepped towards him.

“No… I do not mean just your name. Really, who are you?”

She insisted on this dialogue and approached the sheepish boy who stood his ground, albeit, not very courageously.

She was asking more than what the face value of that question implied. And after dealing with the likes of Irvelle, he wasn’t prepared for what her subtleties implied.

He then had the overwhelming urge to respond—the sudden type of jolt in his brain which welled at his tongue and compelled him to answer the question provided. But he bit at that realization, holding his tongue back from hastily blurting out his honest answer, of which he was bluntly unsatisfied with. It was then that she came to the same conclusion—the exact same answer which he refused to give to her.

“You do not know… Do you?”

And with that conclusion, she had essentially plucked out that honesty verbatim.

She closed her eyes for a moment, still three or four meters away, before opening them candidly with a sigh. Her grin returned, but the meaning behind that grin felt different.

She was about to ask another question, but Cobalt wouldn't let that happen. Standing his ground, he leapt on the offensive, hastily reaching towards the first opportunity to say something that wasn’t an answer to something else.

“Where am I?”

A much easier question to answer, truthfully.

And sensing his bravery—if you could call it that—she validated that.

“I suppose… Where we are now, you could refer to it as a Tomb. This Tomb spreads its influence through quite a chunk in the surrounding Nunam mountain range, including the cave which you jumped into.” she paused on that, and ensuring her usefulness, added, “Does that answer suffice?”

A Tomb? That was the first word that tripped him up. He only had a vague concept of what that meant—and this glowing cave didn’t exactly fit the description of that. She had also added that the cave he jumped into was connected to this “Tomb”, however, he didn’t see any way to enter this cave from any angle other than towards her. He thought for a moment before replying.

“Yeah, but, follow-up question… I jumped down into a pretty big drop, but I didn’t see anything going up when I arrived here. So, how did I actually get here?”

Her grin raised higher at the corners, indicating this was likely a question she had hoped he would ask her.

“Ahh… The answer to that is quite simple, and I am glad that you noticed what did not line up. That drop into the cave was connected by a rope ladder. However, you never saw that. By jumping down into that abyss, you would have fallen anywhere from fifty to one hundred meters. Without a doubt, that fall would have crushed your bones on impact, killing you almost instantly.”

She spoke so candidly, so bluntly, and to top off that ambiguity her unreadable grin juxtaposed all the flags she sent his brain.

He couldn’t hide the bead of sweat which dropped from his forehead.

“And so, I rescued you from that horrible fate, teleporting you here, so I could get a look at you for myself.”

“Get a look at me, why?”

“Would it be too blunt to say that you are intriguing to me? You yourself have fought against fate numerous times over the past couple days, and despite how pathetic you may look in the process, you always worm your way out of harm’s way before life can snuff out your light, even though—from what I can see, at least—you do not have any reason whatsoever for doing so.”

He recoiled, sharply inhaling through his teeth as he had no clue how else to respond.
Being “too blunt” would be a cruel understatement…

All the things about Cobalt he forced himself away from facing, all the aspects of his character that made him tick, all his flaws and broken hopes that he had tried so many times to throw away by making himself numb to it. All of that, she had revealed after only seeing his face for under five minutes.

Another question welled itself up inside of his chest like a swirling vortex of uncertainty and paranoia. Grabbing at his chest and clenching his lavender sweater, he reluctantly released the words away from the fears which built the question.

“Just… How much about me do you know?”

She turned around and shrugged in an eerily cutesy gesture before stretching her arms behind her back. Through the dispersing mist, he watched her tail whip across the mist earnestly, briefly uncensoring her back and her relatively wide hips against her small upper body.

Although still not being able to make out that much, he had blushed again. Then in turn, had bit his lip in frustration against his own spinelessness. There was definitely something about this girl he couldn’t quite grasp. Her mannerisms in particular led him so far astray from the answers which could have been right in front of him.

Throwing her arms up overhead and completing her stretch, she rotated back around her large rock, and through the dark unreadable mist, he watched her narrowed eyes reply back to his with the appearance of fire itself.

Whatever answers he would have been able to grasp had now slipped away from him as she once again crossed her legs in a settled tone. Their game of twenty questions had ended with that, as she excused herself back to her solitude.

“I believe that my assumptions about you were correct. There is certainly something about you… Something that intrigues me more than you could know. Something tells me we will be seeing a lot more of each other…”

That last remark made him anxiously question his position. What business would Cobalt have in a Tomb like this? Just what kind of world had he stumbled himself into if exploring a Tomb like this is commonplace? What had he initially missed that could put that into perspective? Or was there something else she meant by that entirely? He had no idea.

There was so much he didn’t know, and so much more he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to know at all. However, concluding their little meeting, she added:

“I will see you soon… Cobalt Aspire.”

At first he tried to resist the enormous weight that had thrown itself onto him, constricting him suddenly in some sort of magic. But seeing the futility in that, not a second went by before the ominously grinning girl in front of him hazily fell out of focus, and all at once, he found his world upside down.

He had somehow been cast away. Away from the Tomb, away from the caves, and away from that girl.

Or rather…

That demon.