Volume 2 Chapter 12 the Abandoned Village

Chapter 12 the Abandoned Village

I

Starsha and Aislina were sitting around the campfire, waiting for the siblings to come back. Starsha was looking at Aislina. Besides the pointed ears and blue hair, she looked just like normal human girls.

Aislina looked anxious too. Her legs were shaking and clearly she was thinking about Yanni. The relationship between Yanni and her had become considerably weird.

Starsha put her arm around Aislina’s neck tenderly and Aislina leaned her head slightly on Starsha’s shoulder. Aislina’s face was pale. Maybe it was because her anxiety, or maybe it was because she was in the desert which was far from the world of greenness.

“You don’t look well, Aislina,” breathed Starsha softly.

“I am worrying about Floria and Yanni,” murmured Aislina.

“Don’t worry about them! Floria is the most experienced huntress I’ve ever known,” Starsha reassured her.

The smoke produced by the campfire was cutting up into the sky but the blackness brought by the smoke was finally purified by the moonlight.

Glowing with greyish lights, the distant moon looked as bright as the sun … It was like a piece of silver jade embedded into the canvas of the sky. There were a few stars shining around the moon.

Many ancient poets had witnessed seas of stars in the desert because the air above the desert was said to be clearer than the air in other biomes. However, necrology had wounded this world and those pollutions were somehow irreversible, making the nocturnal sky nearly starless.

Necrology … Mechanics … Humans would always try to destroy this beautiful world. However, the stars themselves wouldn’t disappear. Astronomers said that the stars were living in corners of the universe far from earth.

Stars could be seen from the earth but the earth cannot be seen from the stars because the earth and what was happening on it were too small and meaningless from the perspective of the cosmos. The extinction of humans wouldn’t change this immense universe at all.

Perhaps there was even a bigger world beyond the universe and thus the universe was meaningless too. Everything was a part of the nothingness substantially …

“I haven’t told you the legend of Selene and Endymion yet, right?” inquired Starsha.

“No, you haven’t. What is that story like?” asked Aislina.

“This story is about Selene, the titaness of the moon. She once fell in love with a shepherd called Endymion. However, Selene is a titaness so that she is immortal. The life of Endymion, a mortal, is too short for her. Therefore, Selene used her magic to drag Endymion into the endless world of dreams. Endymion could thus live forever but he couldn’t wake up from those dreams … Every night, Selene would come to the world of mortals to watch Endymion sleeping and kiss him tenderly …” narrated Starsha.

“Those myths of humans are interesting,” commented Aislina.

“Many mythological stories were adapted from real-life story. Maybe there was once an elf falling in love with a human, and they cannot be together … The dream of Endymion might be a metaphor,” speculated Starsha.

“You really know a lot of stories, Starsha,” Aislina praised.

“I used to be a bard,” murmured Starsha.

“You can still be a bard, even if there are those music boxes trying to replacing you, because there are something in the music that machines cannot replace,” encouraged Aislina.

“What is that irreplaceable part?” queried Starsha.

“You shall find out that on your own,” encouraged Aislina.

“You’re like a philosopher, Aislina,” Starsha smiled.

“I’m not a philosopher. It’s just that sometimes elves don’t think like humans,” explained Aislina.

The instant her voice broke off, the figures of the siblings came into Aislina’s sights.

“They’re back!” exclaimed Aislina, waving her hands at the siblings.

Floria and Yanni waved back.

“I’ve hunted ten rabbits. Let’s store them in the Pocket Dimension,” proposed Floria.

Aislina conjured a small portal and threw all those dead rabbits into the Pocket Dimension. Foods wouldn’t rot inside the Pocket Dimension because there were no bacteria and oxygen inside it.

Freezing wind was gathering. The bushes and grasses in the oasis were shaking. It was already in the wee hours of the night now and the heat accumulated by the sunlight during the day had fully dissipated.

The air was cooling down and the temperature was dropping like a rock rolling down a steep slope … Muscles trembling, the four were defeated by extreme coldness.

Aislina had added some magical power to the campfire so that the campfire wasn’t put out by the chilly wind. However, the heat emanated by the campfire was far from enough to dispel the coldness for the four.

“I think we shall clutch each other and stay huddled while sleeping so that we can keep ourselves warm,” suggested Floria.

“Good idea,” Starsha nodded.

Gently, the girls clutched each other.

“Yanni, you can join us,” proposed Floria.

“But …” stuttered Yanni, his face reddening shyly. Clearly, this kind of intimacy was too much for Yanni.

Anyhow, Yanni still walked up to the girls, lay down and joined them. Yanni was having some physiological reaction and it was unstoppable, but the girls chose to forgive him.

“It was embarrassing,” stammered Yanni.

“If you were a girl, it would be less embarrassing. However, we have no choice,” sighed Floria.

“Yeah,” agreed Yanni.

“Jason, Perseus, Sigurd, Hercules … Almost all protagonists in the adventure stories were male, but we’re almost a girls’ team. Yanni is a boy but he is Floria’s little brother, so he is, uh, Floria’s attachment. We’re still a girls’ team,” summarized Starsha.

“Hey, I’m not Floria’s attachment,” argued Yanni.

“It’s just a metaphor, Yanni. You’re like a minion, or some sort of familiar of Floria. aren’t you?” giggled Starsha.

“Am I like a minion, Aislina?” queried Yanni.

“Kind of,” answered Aislina, tittering.

“Anyhow, we’re a team different from all other teams in those traditional stories. If history exists in the future, what we do may be recorded in the history book, but history means nothing in fact, given that compared to the great cosmos, humans have only existed for a shortest moment,” drawled Starsha.

“You’re right, Starsha. History means nothing … What humans are pursuing is so small …” consented Aislina.

“What we four are pursuing is small too. We want to save this earth, but from the perspective of the whole universe, and those universes beyond our universe, our earth is just a small dot, nothing more than a tiny speck of dust … However, being small doesn’t means being meaningless, because only giving small things meanings can fill the void of this world. Humanity, kindness, love, art… Those are all meaningless and hollow concepts, but only they can fill the void,” muttered Starsha.

The voice of Starsha was fading, because she was falling asleep gradually. A while later, huddling for warmth together, all four of them went into the world of dreams. They didn’t experience any nightmare, because hugging together was a good way to dispel anxiety, which was one of the main causes of bad dreams.

The sun rose from the east, and warmed up by the sunlight, the air soon became scorching again. The desert always acted like this: during the daytime it was as hot as the tropical archipelagos but during the night hours it was as cold as the northern lands.

II

In a grandiose mansion, Hetepasis and her family were eating dinner in the dining room.

All her families were playing with music boxes, which were like drugs to them.

They were absorbed in the melodies, as well as the lyrics. Although their bodies were here in the dining room, their minds had flew to another place.

Hetepasis looked at her family worriedly. She knew that the music she created was perfect and she was proud of it.

The melodies she created was impeccable, and according to a research, there were no other musicians whose songs could stimulate the secretion of dopamine better than hers.

Therefore, when people were listening to her songs, they would be bewitched by them. Not only other musicians but also novelists began to imitate her. When novelists used formulae and quantitative criteria to write novels, their works would go viral, though they might not be recognized by criticists and scholars.

She had been using formulae and equations to create melodies even before the Mother Matrix was invented by Macchina Gloriosa. However, computing with those numbers manually was exhausting. Fortunately, Mother Matrix was invented soon, which was a mechanical computer able to calculate with complicated data.

With the help of Mother Matrix, Hetepasis began to mass-produce music, and her songs were more addictive than any other musicians. She had become a legend.

Her families were listening to her music too. They were admiring her works, but she felt lonely …

In the past, when she and her families were eating dinner, they would chat happily, but now, everyone was absorbed in the music boxes as if they were drugs.

Sighing frustratedly, Hetepasis began to eat her lonely silence dinner …

III

The four had been travelling in the desert for two weeks.

They knew that Desertia was a patch of bleak and sapless land, but they had really underestimated its barrenness. In this two weeks, they hadn’t seen a single oasis.

There were only dunes, endless dunes.

When the wind was howling, the dunes would be reshaped and transformed: the desert was always changing constantly, and thus it was like a labyrinth, inside which people would get lost and never go back home …

Sometimes they would see an oasis in the distance. However, when they tried to approach, the oasis would disappear, because it was only a mirage, an illusion of fake hope.

Despair began to haunt them. Those food and water stored in Aislina’s Pocket Dimension were soon going to run out. Therefore, they had to drink less and eat less every day.

Now they felt extremely hungry and thirsty after these two weeks. Their heads were aching and they felt as if they could slip into a coma at any second.

Suddenly, something came into their sights. It was a desert village. Most mirages they saw were oases but this time it was not an oasis. It was a village.

They were not sure if it was a mirage or real. Anyway, they walked up to the village and the village didn’t disappear. Floria put her hand on the wall of one of the village houses.

“It was real! It was not a mirage!” exclaimed Floria!

Village meant food and water.

“אַיוּדַאצִי! אַיוּדַאצִי!׃” [Help us! Help us!] yelled Starsha in Desertish.

However, no one answered. The village was veiled inside dead silence. There was no one living in this village and this village had been abandoned.

There was a big well lying at the centre of this village. It hadn’t dried up yet and the water inside it could help them survive another two weeks. To their surprise, there were also wheat fields in this village. The soil was still quite fertile so that wheat was still growing there.

Clearly, this village had been abandoned and all villagers had moved to somewhere else. Luckily, they hadn’t harvested the field and the well was still full of water. Perhaps it was because they couldn’t bring too many items along with them while moving away.

The four baked some breads after harvesting the wheat and put all the breads into the Pocket Dimension. Those breads could feed them for three weeks.

Night was coming. The scorching sun set down and the air was cooling down.

“I am alive … I am alive … I am alive,” moaned Starsha after eating the dinner and drinking the water from the well,”

“This place is even better than an oasis …” commented Yanni, lying down on the ground.

“Two weeks! Two weeks, pals! Finally we find this heaven on earth. I wish we could live in this village happily ever after,” panted Starsha.

“But we have our mission. If the world is mechanized, there will be no heavens on earth anymore. Anyway, we can sleep on beds tonight instead of sleeping on cold sand,” sighed Floria.

“Bravo. I really hate this desert. It is really a sapless land. I feel as if I had been separated from the power of greenness,” complaint Aislina.

“We all hate this desert. I wish we had been moving in the right direction,” drawled Floria.

“We don’t have a map or a compass, and Aislina don’t know how to cast a navigational spell,” whispered Yanni.

“There are no such thing as navigational spell in this world,” giggled Aislina.

“Perhaps the assassins know how to navigate in the desert. It’s said that they never get lost in the desert,” speculated Starsha.

“Starsha, you know a lot of ancient myths, right? You must know a lot of stories about assassins,” questioned Floria.

“For sure I know a lot. By the way, have I told you three that Cuore Celeste was crafted by assassins?” asked Starsha.

“No …” answered the others.

“I thought I had told you. Anyhow, Cuore Celeste is not a normal gemstone. It contains enormous power and there’re rumours that it is a channel to another dimension, which is where the energy of Cuore Celeste comes from,” narrated Starsha.

“Another dimension?” queried Aislina.

“All the stories concerning assassins and Cuore Celeste are short fragments, just like the stories of the Sanctum of Life,” Starsha nodded.

“It’s whacky,” murmured Aislina.

“Yeah,” agreed Starsha.