“But it couldn’t have,” Lovebird said. She was just refusing to believe the truth although she knew well that our defeat was the truth.
I grabbed my hair and pulled it. This was frustrating. Why did we have to chase the blasted deer into the pond? Heck, I was getting angry at the AI of the world itself. Why hadn’t it informed us that the pond was actually a time machine? After all the AI had wanted to get rid of Death13, which is why it had created the quest to awaken Ravana in the first place!
“So what do we do now?” Lovebird asked me, and from her face I could tell that she really wanted to do something, anything that would make her feel like she had some control over the situation. I decided I would let her have the feeling of control. I didn’t want to see her break down.
“First off, let’s find out more about what changes came over this world,” I said.
Lovebird looked at the pond, a sudden glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“Would it be possible for us to return to our own time?” she asked me.
That was unlikely. The deer didn’t seem to sound like it was possible earlier. All the same I decided to give it a try. The two of us jumped into the pond and went into its depths. But the water didn’t change into the magical breathable substance. We returned to the edge of the pond, exhausted and disappointed.
“I think it was the deer that activated the time machine,” Lovebird said. It was likely. I checked my map, hoping to see if it was possible to trace the deer using the map. But there was not even a single red dot in the map. It was as if the Rak villages had all disappeared. I told about this to Lovebird.
“I wonder if players remain or if we are the only ones left,” Lovebird said.
“Hey, let’s go back to Kapilpura,” I said, “we can see if any changes came over it.”
Lovebird nodded. We began to make our way through the scrawny trees in the direction in which we hoped the town of Kapilpura was, for in the map nothing really was showing.
After sometime of walking, I heard a noise behind us. I turned but saw nobody. It had been a strange high-pitched noise.
When I turned forward, I saw a very pale Lovebird pointing ahead. I frowned seeing a small orb of light a few metres in front of us. I let out a gasp.
It was a woman. A really tiny woman with wings.
Chapter 33
“Is that a pixie?” Lovebird said.
Light emanated from the body of the pixie which was what created the orb of light around her.
The pixie flew around us. Despite her rather macabre appearance, I had a feeling the pixie was harmless.
“I have never seen anything like you,” the pixie said in a feminine voice.
And I have never seen anything like you either, I thought.
“Who-Who are you?” I managed to say to the pixie.
“I am Sgathia,” the pixie replied.
That was one weird name, I thought. I happened to focus on Sgathia and I was surprised to see that she had tens of thousands of Karma.
“From where have you two come?” the pixie asked, flying around us. “Both of you are so bigger than us… almost like it was told in the ancient prophecy.”
“Ancient prophecy?” I said, exchanging a glance with Lovebird.
“Yes, it was told in the prophecy that two individuals would come one night and they would liberate us from the Pain.”
“The Pain?” I said. How the pixies were even supposed to feel pain? They just had bones after all. No flesh or skin or even nerves.
“Would you like to come with me to our city?” the pixie asked. “You can meet our queen who will tell you everything.”
The pixie didn’t look like she had any evil intent. And on top of that, there was nothing we could do at the moment to return to our own time, if that was even possible. I turned at Lovebird and asked,
“What do you say?”
“Let’s go,” she replied. She seemed eager to have something to do than to sit idle lamenting all that had happened. Plus, we would be able to know more about the world.
The pixie led us through the forest of leaf-less trees.
“Where did all the Raks go?” I asked the pixie.
“Raks?” the pixie asked. “What is that?”
“The Rakshashas,” I said, “Demons who have big canines and horns and otherwise look like ugly humans.”
“I am sorry,” the pixie said, “I do not know of what you are talking about.”
“Okay,” I said, “at least tell us what lives in this world anymore, besides you… you are a pixie, am I correct?”
“Yes, I am a pixie,” Sgathia said. “However nothing really lives in our world except us… and the Pain.”
“The Pain you are talking about is a creature?” I asked, because that was what Sgathia sounded like.
“Not exactly,” the pixie said, “nobody knows if it’s living or not. It just falls from the sky on particular days and makes us miserable. The cycle keeps repeating.”
“Tell us about the Prophecy,” Lovebird said to Sgathia.
“As far as I know it says that two strange individuals would come and help us catch the white deer. Then once the white deer is sacrificed we would be forever liberated from the pain,” Sgathia replied, so that my ears stood up at the mention of the white deer, “but I don’t really know much about the white deer. I guess our queen would be able to give you more information about the white deer.”
It took us about an hour, slowly making our way through the forest. We could have moved faster, but the pixie flew slowly. There was one thing that kept bugging me. The entire idea of time travelling in the game world was absurd. I had a feeling that the time travel thing more or less was some kind of a quest.
In about three hours we finally arrived in the river of blood.
Except there were no canoes.
While Sgathia could easily fly over the river, there was no way for me and Lovebird to cross it… unless we swam. Swimming in the pond had been one thing and swimming in the fast flowing river was an entirely different thing.
“So let’s swim?” Lovebird said to me, seeing that our options were non-existent.
I bit my lips.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said. Lovebird leapt into the river and waited for me to join her, Sgathia the pixie flying over her head. A tingling sensation came over my feet and my heart began to beat faster. I wanted to jump into the river, but I just couldn’t will my feet to do it. It was like I had lost control over my feet.
“What are you waiting for?” Lovebird asked me.
I decided to tell her the truth.
“I don’t really know how to swim in a fast flowing river,” I said to her, with an almost guilty look. She grimaced.
“I am here, don’t worry,” she said and there was much reassurance in her voice. “I won’t let you drown.” However, even I could see that she was struggling against the flow of the river.
I nodded. I swallowed and this time I jumped into the river. The moment I did so, I could feel the current of the river all around me, and it tried to take me along with it. But Lovebird was quick and she grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to her.
“Keep kicking your arms and legs, all right?” Lovebird said to me over the roar of the river.
“Okay,” I replied. We started making progress. It was a good thing that the Blood River had shrunk in size, even though it had gotten more violent. Had it remained the size it was before, then our difficulties could have increased ten folds.
I didn’t know for what length of time, I kept kicking my hands and feet, Lovebird swimming beside me, one of her hands holding my shirt so that I wouldn’t flow away. But eventually we reached the other bank of the river. Both of us lay down on the soft sand and drew in deep breaths, I felt spent and quite exhausted. I took out a couple of health vials from my bag and handed one to Lovebird, while I drunk the other one myself to restore my health which had fallen due to the exertion.
We climbed up to the road. Well, it was barely
a road any more. Very few of the stone slabs that formed the road remained. However the trees without leaves hadn’t grown in the middle of the road, which was a good thing.
“What is the name of your town?” I asked Sgathia, as she led us in the direction, where the town of Kapilpura had stood a long time ago.
“Kapila,” Sgathia replied. Well, at least half of the name of the old town had survived, I thought.
When we reached the town, I was rather surprised to see that all the homes and buildings and anything else in the town of Kapila had a maximum height of five metres. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, considering the size of the inhabitants of the home, which were the pixies. When the pixies saw us first, they were frightened and began to scatter, but when they noticed that Sgathia was with us, they seemed to calm down.
One of the braver pixies flew towards us. I noticed that the particular pixie was among the very few who possessed a sword. Maybe he was some kind of a soldier? Of course, his sword was barely the length of my smallest finger.
“Who are these… creatures that you have brought?” the pixie asked in a rather angry voice. “I thought the queen had asked you not to fly away to distant places without the company of other pixies?”
“I am sorry,” Sgathia replied, “but at this moment, I really must meet the queen.”
The soldier laughed.
“Are you crazy?”
“No,” Sgathia replied defiantly, “you are crazy. Can’t you see they might be the ones who can complete the prophecy?”
At the mention of the prophecy, a wave of gasps passed over the thousands of pixies gathered below. The soldier looked down and then back to Sgathia.
“Are you sure that they are the… ones?” he said and I noticed that even he was awed.
“No, I am not,” Sgathia said, “but they just might be. And it is for this reason that I want our queen to meet them.”
The soldier nodded.
“I guess I will bring the queen here, even though she might be sleeping now. Poor lady only ever sleeps and when she does she must be woken up. A pity.” And saying so the soldier flew away.
In a few minutes the queen came along. She was accompanied by about a dozen guards who flew around her in a protective circle. The queen seemed very eager to meet us.
“I cannot believe this!” the queen said. “The saviours have come!”
The pixies that were below in the town gasped and cheered and clapped. They seemed to be at the top of the world, seeing that their queen had officially announced the coming of the saviours. The fact that neither me nor Lovebird had any idea about how we were going to save them didn’t seem to matter at all.
The queen also carried what looked like a small magical staff with her that had an orb at the top, and the orb was glowing a greenish hue, its intensity brightening and lowering all the time.
“Um,” I said. I didn’t want to give the pixies any hopes that me and Lovebird couldn’t possibly fulfil. “I am not sure however, if we are indeed your savours.”
“You are,” the queen reassured, “see how my orb glows! You are the ones who would catch the white deer and then sacrifice it, so that pain would never again rain down on us, and we would live in eternal peace.”
“Is the white deer a monster, queen?” Sgathia asked.
“It is,” the queen replied, “a great monster, much bigger than us pixies.”
“Can I ask you a few things?” I said to the queen.
“Of course, anything!”
“Can I know how long this world has been like this? A thousand years?”
“A long time, that I can tell you,” the queen replied. “All that we pixies remember is that there was a great explosion and there was a great fire everywhere. What caused the fire, or what caused the explosion we do not know or remember. We do not even remember how we took birth upon this cursed world. Every day is the same one here. The Pain is always the same as well. We cannot even die, for us pixies do not die.”
Suddenly the queen stopped speaking and she put one ear next to the orb of his staff, as if she was listening to it.
“I see,” the queen said after a moment, as if the orb had spoken to her. “My staff says if you want to learn everything, you must go to the ancient library, which is the greatest store house of knowledge in this world. Unfortunately, we pixies cannot decipher the script in which the great books have been written, perhaps you will be able to read the books and know for yourselves everything about this world. It will ultimately aid you in capturing the white deer and in sacrificing it and freeing us from the Pain forever.”
“Where is the great library?” I asked, though I had a feeling I might know where it was already.
“In a place called Karlung,” the queen replied. “But it is a long way away.”
Yes, I was probably right. Karlung… Karthulung. The same library where I had found the book of immortality. How on earth would it be possible for us to go to that place? It would definitely take us a really long time if we just walked to it.
“Is there any way we can go there fast?” I asked the queen, though I was not sure if she would any give any hopeful reply. But perhaps the new world had means of transport that had not been possible in the old world of Prithvi?
It was a moment before the queen replied.
“There is. We pixies can create a kind of gateway for you to the library. But you must promise me that you would return and save us from the Pain.”
“Of course!” I said. “We would return once we have acquired all the knowledge there is in the library.”
The queen nodded. She turned to her soldiers and whispered some words to them. The soldiers at once flew away towards the masses of the pixies that were standing in the streets of the town below. Only a single soldier remained with the queen.
“I have asked them to make the preparations for the gateway,” the queen said to me, “once you return we will create another gateway to the place wherever the white deer is.”
“But we did try to make a gateway to the white deer in the past, queen, but it never worked,” Sgathia said.
“My staff says it will this time,” the queen said and there was much optimism in her voice, “the saviours have come and I can say without a doubt that the monster needed to be sacrificed has come too.”
It has, I thought, recalling the white deer. I wondered if this quest was part of the greater quest to destroy Death13. It was just a hunch, but you never know it might be right.
Chapter 34
The pixies all began to march out of the little town towards the old road, which was like a really wide open space for them all. And then they began to assemble in concentric circle, at the very centre being the queen with her staff, the orb of which was blinking rapidly. Even Sgathia went and joined the circles, so that only Lovebird and I remained standing outside it, observing intently all that was going on.
The pixies began to sing. None of their words made any sense to Lovebird or me. First they hummed and then they chanted and their voices combined perfectly such that it felt like only a single pixie with an unusually loud voice was singing. The pitch of their voices kept becoming higher and higher, although it never reached the point which would have been discomforting to our ears.
A fiery circle started to form in the air, even as Lovebird and I watched in awe. Soon, the space inside the circle began to twist and change and eventually we could see the library of Karthulung straight through it, almost as if we were standing only a dozen metres in front of the library. It was the same library that Mastermind and I had been to before.
“Go into it,” the queen said from below. I nodded, and then Lovebird and I went into the portal. The moment we had reached the other side, the portal behind us closed. But a circle formed in the grass that was about the same size as the circle that had formed in the air earlier.
“I reckon it won’t be hard getting back through it,” I said to Lovebird, looking at the circle on the ground. While we couldn’t s
ee the pixies on the other side, I was sure that the circle on the grass was some kind of a marker using which it shouldn’t be very hard to get back.
Lovebird and I began to make our way to the library. The last time I had come to this place, it had been pretty much in ruins. A thousand years had passed since my last visit; however the library was in the same state. It was as if the library could only be corroded so much by time. Why, the ground around the library should have overgrown by trees and other plants, yet it remained a clearing, as if someone regularly drove a lawnmower over the ground when nobody was watching. Whatever had destroyed the rest of the world had failed to do anything to the library.
It wasn’t hard to get through the great oaken door.
The last time Mastermind had used his spell the entire first floor had collapsed. The inside of the library remained in the same state as we had last left it. Great volumes were strewn about the floor, and there were also the half destroyed book shelves lying in odd positions all over the floor. However, a part of the first floor hadn’t collapsed and the staircase still led up such that the first floor was still quite accessible.
“So what do we do now?” Lovebird asked, looking at all the books strew everywhere with confusion.
“Pick random books and read,” I said, smiling for the first time, thinking about the time when I had stumbled upon the book on immortality, “it’s how you acquire knowledge here.”
We began to go through random books. But even after an hour, we failed to find any book that dealt with the great destruction that had come over the world. I even found the same book that I had read in my first visit on the marriage rituals of the Rakshashas. I began to read it again. Suddenly Lovebird gave a shrill cry such that I was pulled out of the book.
I looked around to see Lovebird staring in astonishment at a particular book on the floor. The book seemed to be glowing.
“What?” I asked to Lovebird as I approached her and the book.
“This book appeared out of nowhere,” Lovebird said.
I frowned, recalling the last time when the book of immortality had appeared, though that hadn’t been as abrupt as this one.
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