News

There was a clear, but not too loud, knock on Ui’s door that eventually woke her up. She struggled to open her eyes and nearly stumbled on her way to open the door.

Ruitt was standing there. To Ui’s embarrassment, his looks were far neater than hers and there was no trace of his hard night of work. “There’s news from the capital. I thought you’d want to know.”

Her eyes opened wide. She’d been waiting for news every day.

“The King has fled the island by boat, and a group of rebels seem to have taken over an airship.”

“An… airship?” asked Ui. She remembered having seen one in the capital.

“Yeah. I don’t really know what that is, and it’s none of my business. If the nobles want to fight each other, I say we let them. There’s food downstairs if you’re hungry.” Ruitt turned around and started walking away, but stopped suddenly. “I don’t want to know what happened to you. But people often come here to run from things that are perfectly fixable… Mother used to say: ‘If you can fix it, fix it.’”

Ui knew she couldn’t let her shock last for too long, and as soon as she processed everything she ran downstairs towards the brothers.

“You’re not worried about Prishu?” she asked, catching her breath from her long leaps downstairs.

The brothers looked at each other. Only Aro bothered with a response. “You’ve seen how… strong Prishu is. I think they’d need a whole army to stop her.” Ruitt just kept enjoying his food. “Are you worried about your brother?”

Despite knowing deep down how capable Cro was, she couldn’t stop worrying about him. “He’ll… be fine. He’s with two very smart people, too.” Ui consciously tried to believe what she just said.

“Listen.” Aro stopped eating to wrap a piece of fruit and bread. “Inns aren’t made as places to stay forever. Other than us, people come here, do what they need to, and move on.” Aro handed the wrapped food to Ui. “And when they come back, we’re happy to see them again.”

“Do whatever you need to do.” Ruitt’s words of encouragement were the final push that Ui needed as she instinctively reached for the food Aro was offering and ran upstairs. She felt like the chains that held her in that town had been broken. She grabbed the Duke’s letter and jumped up to the rooftop once more.

She looked towards the south and took a deep breath, knowing she’d have to use every bit of her strength. She gobbled her food and started leaping from building to building, and then from tree to tree, cutting through the skies and over the forests.

The warm, daytime sun that punched through the winter winds felt as liberating as it had felt during her childhood. Jumping from tree to tree at the foothill of Auremaru brought back memories of a time when she still hadn’t met Umans, before learning about the Song of the Mountain, and before Lullaby. That forest was at the same time far larger and far smaller than she remembered.

Her precise leaps took her further and further south. Eventually she found herself, tired, right outside the port town of Hyuni.

◆

The silence of the town was the first thing Ui noticed. The unpaved streets were just as desolate as before. The dust was just as loose, too. But the side streets eventually gave way to paved roads that were just as empty.

The plaza, once full of life, was almost as quiet as when she sang the Song of Dreams. Except there were no families, and no children, Udari or not. There were no flowers in sight.

Ui, who had slowed down due to how unfamiliar it looked, gradually started accelerating her search. After roaming the main streets and finding them empty, she jumped atop the buildings, realizing they were just as empty, before heading towards the docks themselves. The docks only barely showed signs of life, signs of a life she couldn’t stand in that moment. The more lifeless she found the town, the more her anger grew. Her steps grew desperate until she found herself running into the first person she saw: a confused, Uman-looking man. She blamed everything she had seen in that town on that man. Ui charged straight at him, and knocked him into the ground. His body offered little resistance to Ui’s strength combined with her anger.

“Where is everyone?” she looked down at the man and stepped on his chest. He was small and weak, and a coward. Her anger turned into confusion when he started uttering words in a language she didn’t understand, trying to cower from her strength. She looked around her to find only scared Uman-looking people like the one she knocked down. But none of them spoke Udari or Uman. Foreigners?

Ui backed off from the man she knocked down. She looked in every direction, spotting the foreign-looking people. There were barely enough people there to load the boats that were docked. The man on the floor started slowly retreating, away from Ui, visibly afraid. Ui let him stand up and go. He was just a small part of something else, something that even Lullaby couldn’t stop, as much as she wanted to.

Sweating, breathing heavily, she walked through the docks and the boats. There were only a few boats left at the once thriving port, and within the boats she found large quantities of what she believed was at fault: Those stupid rocks…

Realizing the futility of what she had done, she turned her sights towards Auremaru. The mountain had never left her side ever since she got to Rurein. It was always watching, waiting for her. She started walking towards it with firm steps as the few Uman-looking people in town looked away and cowered in fear, appearing to ask for mercy as she walked past them. She slowly broke into a jog towards the mountain, and fueled by her anger, started running towards Auremaru at full speed.

She jumped over branches of trees, but instead of leaping gracefully, some would snap as she jumped through, leaving fallen branches in her wake. The last time she had been there, she had stopped the mining operation. She had taken the blame to preserve peace. She had helped the Udari of Aure. The last time she was there, it was in Cro’s arms, sleeping peacefully. So how could things end up as ugly as this?

Auremaru towered before her as the dense forest tried, and failed, to slow her down.