The truth behind a fate

Ametrine struggled to get free again, but after a few moments she slumped, utterly dejected. “Why does it always have to end like this?” she murmured. Opal didn’t know how to answer her, or if answering her was even a good idea, but she was kind of sorry for her, even though she had shown to be so dangerous.

Celsian, on the contrary, didn’t create so many problems to herself. “Try again, maybe you’ll be luckier next time.” She smiled, breathless. “Hey Opal, could you maybe give me a hand?”

“Ah, sure.” Opal shook herself and nodded, willing malleable stone trunks to envelop the knight’s figure, so that Celsian could finally make her branches retreat back into her pockets.

Ametrine followed the exchange with veiled attention and a displeased expression on her face. “… why are you with her?” she asked in the end.

Celsian shrugged. “Well, she’s an interesting-”

“I was not talking to you” the knight interrupted her, impatient, her animosity towards the thief neither dampened nor forgotten. She made a quick gesture in Opal’s direction, fixing her piercing gaze on her. “Why are you, the new Saviour, with someone like her? I cannot understand.”

Opal looked at her, forcing herself to hold her stare. She had a few false starts, opening and closing her mouth, hesitating on an answer, but, at last, she settled on a simple “… Because I chose to.”

Ametrine made a frustrated sound. “But why?”

Opal frowned, beginning to get annoyed. “I don’t want to remain here, I want to return home. It’s as simple as that.”

The knight shook her head. “You are the new Saviour, the second advent of the Saintess” she said, her voice slightly breaking with a touch of desperation. “Do you have any idea of what an honour that is? To be the Saviour, to have the necessary power to fight against the Golem and protect the people? You do not, now, do you?”

At that, Opal definitely lost it. She’d nurtured an amass of displeasure and discontent for some time already, and she’d had enough. “Everybody’s constantly telling me how much of an honour it is, how I should feel about it, but if you’re all so eager to go and die on a battlefield, you can be my guests!” she exclaimed, making a step forward and a sweeping motion with her hand. In the periphery of her perception, she heard Celsian whistle.

“I would fight!” Ametrine shouted. “If I could, I would fight!”

What was stopping her? She was so strong, she was so skilled to even be capable of standing up against the two of them alone – and granted, they were a team formed by a foolish researcher and an inexperienced so-called saviour both bad at hand-to-hand combat, but they weren’t exactly weak either –, so what was stopping her? Just the fact that she wasn’t some sort of magical saintess? How stupid was that? She could literally cut the stone as if it was no more than some type of vegetable! In any other situation, Opal would’ve given her a pep talk or something, but in that moment she was too angry. “Well, at least it would be your own decision! But if it wasn’t for Celsian, I wouldn’t even have been given a choice! So yeah, that’s why I’m with her!”

Ametrine looked like she wanted to reply, but after a moment of holding her gaze she was the first to lower it, her mouth becoming a thin dejected line.

At that point, walking next to her, Celsian put a careful and gentle hand on Opal’s shoulder. There was a minute tremor coursing through her body that she hadn’t even noticed. “… Opal, come on, we should go now.” It was a tone of voice she hadn’t heard Celsian use before, soft, as if she wanted to envelop her in the warmth someone would with a fledgling fallen from its nest.

Opal blinked away the angry tears threatening to spill from her eyes and took a deep breath, nodding wordlessly. When they were on the point of leaving that place, however, she turned back.

Noticing that she had stopped, Celsian did too. “Opal? Everything okay?”

Despite herself, she was worried. “… What about her? Are we leaving her here, like this?” That idea made her feel more than a bit guilty.

Celsian shrugged. “Yes, but when we’ll put some space between us and her that stone creation will crumble on its own.”

“I see…” That made it a little better.

“… Do not rest too much on your laurels, though.” Opal looked up to see that Ametrine was staring at them again, with a promise in her eyes. “I will find you for how many times it will take, mark my words.”

Celsian smiled lopsidedly. “Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less, coming from you.” She made a two-finger salute at her, and after a few minutes they had disappeared from there.

“Where will we go now?” Opal asked, once that they were resting in a nearby forest.

Celsian crouched down, ignoring for the time being the cuts that criss-crossed her skin and clothes – thankfully, they seemed superficial wounds and had stopped bleeding –, and picked a wooden stick between her fingers, beginning to draw something on the earthy ground. “Ideally, I’d like to go to Palladium, for its library. It’s one of the few places, apart from the Cathedral of the Saintess in Kruos, where we could find some information or clues about, well, your whole deal.” She tapped the stick on the centre of her drawing, that now Opal, who had crouched next to her, recognised as a simple map. “See, now we’re here.” Then, she tapped it on a point in the south-eastern part of the drawing. “And Palladium’s here. The cities aren’t that far, as the gull flies, from one another, but the problem’s that we can’t travel by conventional means of transport, and right now we risk being recognised very easily in the bigger cities.”

Opal felt terribly out of her element. “What can we do then?”

Celsian shrugged. “We’ll travel by foot, or by cart if we’re lucky, and move from village to village until we reach the outskirts of Palladium. There, we could see the situation and think about something.”

Opal frowned. “Won’t they expect us to avoid the bigger cities, though?”

The other stood back up. “Maybe, but we’ll have to risk it if we want to get actual supplies.”

“I see…” It made sense. She got up too, but when she noticed her friend looking away and hugging herself lightly, suddenly pensive, she got worried. “Celsian? Is everything okay?”

“… there could also be… another problem.”

“What is it?”

“… Apart from its library, Palladium is famous for another thing, and that’s its university.” She hesitated for a second, but then went on. “That’s where I studied, as well as where I was expelled from, so they’ll be waiting for me.” At that point, she looked at Opal. “I think we could find something valuable, but we’d have to be extremely careful.”

Opal wasn’t expecting that, but she took a breath. “… Well, at the moment it’s our best chance, but, as you said, we’ll see the situation once that we’ll be there, right? If it’s too dangerous, we’ll think of something else.”

At that, Celsian relaxed and smiled again. “You know what? You are, effectively, right.” She dusted herself off, erasing her drawing of the map of Kristallia, and extended a hand to Opal. “Let’s not lose any more time, then.”

Opal mirrored her smile. “Okay.”

On that note, after treating Celsian’s cuts as much as they could, they began their travel.

They made sure to remain under the radar for a few days at the very least, which gave ample time to Celsian to happily show Opal a vast array of her tricks, know-hows and skills, and to Opal to greatly regret all the times she’d complained about something malfunctioning in her family’s apartment. The moment she returned home, she would start a cult in honour of induction cooking and of all the other wonderful pieces of technology that were there. She loved technology, she really did, long live technology, she wouldn’t have complained about it ever again, she promised.

Apart from the little detail that they were travelling on the road and she’d never even gone camping, though, everything went well. That is, until they got ambushed in the forest near a village, at night.

Among all the bad things, the only good one was that Celsian was on guard duty. Of course, that meant that Opal woke up with a start when the other shook her vigorously by the shoulder. She opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was a flurry of arrows falling all around her, while her friend protected the both of them with her magic. She couldn’t see their attackers, their features and silhouettes alike merging with the trees surrounding them, but only hear voices and the sound of darts being nocked.

“Celsian, what-”

“Don’t get up!” she shouted, with an authoritative tone that betrayed her fear. “Can you create a dome, or something?”

The true answer was that she had no idea, but she knew that she didn’t actually have a choice in that situation. As an old sage had once said: “Do, or do not. There is no try.” She imagined being the fated protagonist of an epic saga and channelled all of her emotions into her magic. Fuelled by her desperation and the focus that could only be developed under that amount of pressure, her power answered her and the stone emerged around them, from a circle on the ground: rocks piled themselves one on the other, creating first round walls and then merging together to form the ceiling of a dome that engulfed the world in complete and suffocating darkness, cutting off even the thinnest ray of moonlight. Opal, who had barely breathed while she did all that, let out a sigh of relief and slumped, her arms falling on the sides.

Celsian sat next to her, huffing and sounding utterly exhausted, and after a few seconds her pebbles started glowing softly, bathing their features in feeble but warm light. They didn’t exactly give a great impression though.

From outside, they could hear a few arrows breaking on the stone, and then some blows coming from the blades of swords. Since no-one out there seemed to have the same type of weapon as Ametrine, however, the only result was a cacophonous ensemble of disconnected sounds.

Celsian sighed, shaking her head. “In all this time, I’ve never met quite so many people determined to make my life so difficult. And I say this having spent the last few years as a criminal in the eyes of the law.”

Opal circled her folded legs with her arms, putting her chin on her knees. “Do you think they’re just really angry with you? Or is the Saviour’s figure truly this important?”

The other put her hands on the ground and leaned back. “The Saviour’s figure is truly this important.”

Opal felt incredibly guilty for even thinking that, but she would’ve preferred the first option. “But- why?”

“I guess it has less to do with the Saintess and more with the Golem. I imagine someone has already told you the story?”

Opal got reminded once again of that uncomfortable conversation with the king. She nodded. “The Golem is the big bad guy that destroyed cities and terrorised people and the Saintess is the one who defeated it.”

Celsian snorted at her summary. “Basically, yes. The thing is, the Golem can, among other stuff, absorb in its body the soul stones and their powers, so the grand majority of the people fighting against it are destined to lose their magic, if not their life too.” She took one glowing pebble and twirled it around her fingers, creating the illusion of thin filaments of light. “So, you see, the Saintess, with her Untethered Magic, is the only one who can successfully fight it on its same level.”

“I see…” Opal felt tears beginning to gather in her eyes and desperation in her heart, her sudden, intrusive thoughts and emotions threatening to engulf her with their force. She hugged her legs tighter, without looking at the other. “Celsian, I’m so-” A loud clang crashed on the rocky surface, reverberating across the dome and making Opal flinch. “I’m sorry-”

“Hey, no, none of that.” Celsian interrupted her before she could even build a full sentence, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Opal, look at me.”

How could she refuse her anything, when she used such a soft tone?

“None of that, okay? What do you even have to be sorry for?” She smiled. “I was the one who literally came searching for you, wasn’t I?”

Despite everything, Opal let out small bouts of laughter. “You were.” Their moment of levity, however, was quickly shattered into a million pieces.

“Celsian Felspat, surrender!” intimidated a voice from outside. “Opal Niji, you have to come back to the castle!”

Opal shuddered, abruptly returning to the situation at hand. “Celsian, what do we do?”

The other made a face, looking at the dome. “We can’t stay here for long, that’s for sure.” Her lips thinned, and her gaze refocused on Opal. She didn’t really like that look. “… Opal, how do you feel about doing something very dangerous?”

‘Isn’t everything I’m doing very dangerous, since I took your hand for the first time?’ she would’ve wanted to ask, a tongue-in-cheek reply, but she didn’t: that had been her decision, and she stood by it. “Is it necessary?” she asked instead.

“Tragically, I think so.”

“… Let’s do it, then.”

Celsian nodded. “Okay, in this case, I need you to make the dome explode outwards, and then run. Think you can you do that?”

No? It seemed folly. But, then again, if that was their only option… “Yeah, okay.”

“Wonderful, amazing. When I say ‘go’, do your magic.” She crouched, looking at the curved wall and beyond it. Her stone branches began to slither out of her pockets.

Opal was terrified, but readied herself nonetheless. “On your mark.”

“Okay, well.” She took a deep breath. “Ready… steady… go!”

A movement, a thought, and the dome answered her wordless call. Many among those she now recognised as knights fell on the ground, being hit by heaps of rocks, but they didn’t stop to ascertain their well-being. Opal ran, as Celsian had instructed her, while her friend cleared a path for them as much as she could.

It was only a question of time, however, before one of them tripped over something – there was an ample variety of obstacles to choose from, in that forest – and fell unceremoniously on the floor. The fact that it was Opal was just a minor detail.

In a matter of seconds, they were basically surrounded.

“We repeat: surrender, the both of you!” one of the knights menacingly shouted, their sword held high. “Surrender, or else-”

And then, something that Opal didn’t even think it was possible to dream of happened: “Or else what?” a familiar and angry voice interrupted.

Ametrine was suddenly there, in all her furious glory, like a damn miracle given form, and seemed to have a lot of opinions about what was going on.