by Ryan Johnson
Sora stood beside Geraldus. “You have raised my brother in your family, and you have my thank you for his life and my symphony of your son.”
Geraldus blinked at Sora showing some sort of humanity to him. He remembered her mentioning no humans exited in the Second Generation of the Living Life. So how could this girl, who is looking human but isn’t, showing some kind of humanity to him. “Thank you for your condolences, but why show me these things when you can’t respect the Siren?”
Marina glared at Geraldus.
“You also had the choice to abandon him and leave him to die in the wild or drown him in the seas, but you spared his life,” answered Sora. “He spent his entire life with you, years of his life with you but he only spent months with his Siren wife.”
“You seem quick to rust,” said Geraldus.
“How trust works with me: it takes years to build up trust,” said Sora. “Since you raised Valverno for years, means I would trust you, but I still won’t trust his wife, yet.”
Geraldus walked beside Valverno. “Would you forgive me if I tried to convince her to join my family?”
Valverno smirked small. “If you can try to convince her to join your family, feel free to try.”
“I don’t want to join any more families or any clans,” said Sora. She strolled over to Valverno’s left side. “Valverno is the only family I am joining, and no one else’s. He’s enough for me.”
Valverno was smiling. This family bonding seemed to making him feel his was floating in the clouds floating high in the high. “Well, shall we continue on or should we just stand around her and talk about families.”
“I’d say we keep moving,” said Marina. The Siren was walking away from the group. She didn’t seem to like the new girl in the group. “I feel like I should be the only family Valverno deserves. After all, I am married to him.”
Valverno signed of Marina. He closed his eyes and his mind could feel Marina’s mind: jealousy was beginning to grow in the beautiful Siren again. “Sora,” said Valverno, turning to speak to the girl showing them around the city: “Care to continue again?”
Sora nodded her head and bounded for an alley. “The house we lived in, Valverno, will be this way. It’s going to be some distance, but we should make it with great ease.” Then she disappeared behind the nearest corner of an abandoned café-looking building.
Assuming there are no monsters down here, thought Valverno, following after her. While he walked, he saw Geraldus rushing ahead of him and strayed from him and closer to Sora. And Marina stayed near the Griffin.
W
It seemed as now a full day had passed but two of them felt an entire week has passed since they entered into this underground world. The Griffin was getting anxious from being underground for a long time. For a Griffin, born and raised to fly in the air instead of living underground like or an ant, he felt he was walking to his own grave.
The Siren was of a great help to calm the Griffin’s anxiety. Her singing voice helped calmed Flarefur’s nerves and put his mind at ease.
Valverno could sense Flarefur losing his sanity of being underground for so long, but that is how it is. Traveling underground for quick a long time could be disastrous, especially when exploring a buried city with no residents living in their homes. It was as if walking in a graveyard with dead bodies buried in the ground.
However, there were no bodies to be seen. The ten thousand years that have passed would have been long enough for any bodies to decay, grinded into bones, and the bones turning into dust.
Any sign of any a once great civilization would have been wiped clean in the dust brushed into the ground, though the group walking on the pathways didn’t have dust particles or ashes of dead bodies. It was just plain dirt, dried mud, and sand that fell from the rocky ceiling covering the city from the sun’s light.
It was quiet around every corner and silent as a starry night, not even a buggy fly was heard when the group was walking around the buried city.
Sora led them toward the inner city where they found the towers growing higher, which meant where the most important people had once lived when the city was crawling with life and energy. A city, which grew ten times bigger than the capital city where King Uragiru lived, must have been very livelier than the living beings on the two islands of Shimabellia and Isla Maeli.
Here and there, they would stop for some breaks of a few minutes before moving onward. They trailed slowly through the walkways, due to many crumbled rubble and fallen stones made from clay painted in the form to make the dry clay to look like brick and stone. Pillared clayed bricks lay across many walkways and made it hard to walk over.
One slip and it would have been a broken bone. A brick could easily fall over, and Marina and Geraldus had close encounters of bone fractures. Thanks to Valverno’s tail grabbing them before they could take a stumble forward or backward. Walking uphill and across some fallen structures was a bit time consuming and even more trying to walk downhill. Walking on stones that could slip very easily was like walking on a slobbery hillside with rubber stone and slippery rocks.
The walkway they walked upon was wet. Sounds from water droplets dripped from the top onto rocks like cave water.
Among the people walking for a long period of time, Marina was starting to get exhausted from the walk. “Is it much further?” she asked. “I’ve been walking nonstop now and I need some water.”
Valverno stopped, swirled his body around to face Marina, and raised his hand. A small puff of a raincloud sprouted from the palm of his hand. Then Valverno blew the cloud over Marina’s head and with the other hand made it sprinkle and rain.
The little puffy cloud rained down on the Siren. Since the Sirens are part of the fish family, they needed water to stay hydrated. Sirens could go some days without water, depending on what temperature the weather would be. With the fireballs in the sky and making the underground city roasting warm, Marina’s fishy-scaly skin was beginning to dry. Now with Valverno casting a raincloud, Marina felt at ease.
“I better keep that cloud there for a while,” said Valverno. “I don’t want my wife dying from dehydration, not on my watch.”
“You’re still watching over me? I thought you watching over this girl more than me.”
“I’m watching over you both, equally. You could say I am a family man.”
“More like a family man-dragon-hybrid-demigod,” said Sora.
Marina laughed of Sora’s name calling for her brother. This was marking the first time Marina had shown anything positive for Sora.
Valverno looked at Sora. “Calling me a hybrid now, huh? And you made Marina laugh. Now this is starting to become a family reunion. A family reunion underground, that is. I am starting to like it.”
Sora shook her head and resumed walking. “We’re not that far. It’s just around this corner.” The young female warrior wandered around the furthest corner of three cornered buildings.
Valverno rushed up to Sora, keeping the raincloud over Marina as her skin could absorb the water her skin needed to stay alive.
Sora heard the footing and slivering tail dragging on the ground and walked a little faster. She stayed ahead of Valverno putting some distance between her and the demigod hybrid.
Valverno could see Sora trying to run faster and coming across two more alleys. He saw Sora taking the right alley, so he decided to take the left side and he ran in that direction.
Then Valverno could feel a small flickering erupting in his mind. He could see himself as a child from the long distant past when he and Sora were kids. He could see Sora as a five year old girl running in one direction while he (in a smaller body size of a thirteen year old boy) would run in a different direction.
In this memory, Valverno could see himself running very fast, passing across human figures he was seeing with snakelike, scaly skin instead of the human skin with a mixture of rocks.
At the same time, Valverno could see his younger self running through the same alley,
as he was doing in his adult form was running at the current time. Valverno could see this was the same alley he turned in when he was younger: a trip down memory lane. He smiled again, seeing how it was the same alley he went running some ten thousand years ago and swirled around a sharp corner; he remembered doing this when he was a kid and went down this alley toward his old house: he was starting to remember where he once lived. This memory caused Valverno to remember what fun he had with Sora when they were kids.
After making the turn (and seeing the memory ending with him surprising Sora but caught her when the shocked Sora collapsed) at the same time, Valverno dashed down this alley and jump to a roof of a building. Then he would jump to another roof and so on.
After some a few seconds of jumping, Valverno gazed at a big mansion-sized house, nearly looking like the same as Geraldus’s mansion but five times bigger. It also took the form of a castle but without any towers. A single pillar (not a domed tower) stood on the central part of the mansion, and it stood up three hundred feet high.
And there was very little memory of this coming up in Valverno’s mind. He barely had any memory of this building he stopped at: other than him stopping from behind Sora and surprising her when they were kids. Other than those fun-loving memories, Valverno couldn’t remember what this building was supposed to be.
In one wide open corner, he saw Sora come running through the nearest buildings. She halted after running. She turned her head up the walkway she came running in. Apparently, she is waiting for Valverno to come her way. On the other hand, she didn’t know Valverno was diagonally to her right side, which made Valverno had the element of surprise.
The hybrid slowly climbed down the building on its walls. He crawled down the walls and tried not to make any noises that Sora won’t be able to hear him come to surprise her if he was a predator stalking his prey. It took him about two full minutes to creep down the walls without making a sound. He succeeded to do so.
With his feet touching the ground, Valverno vilely smiled and walked slowly to her. Valverno had crept very close to Sora. Doing this was bringing back the happy memories to him. He could not resist trying to surprise her again. As he neared a few inches from her, Sora quickly spun.
She spun on her feet very fast, drawing out one of her daggers. She had quicker reactions than Marina on an empty stomach.
Valverno reacted faster than his sister could. The claws of his wings swiped away the dagger from Sora’s two hands holding it, and Valverno used a foot to swipe against Sora’s feet.
Sora tripped over Valverno’s dragon foot, seeing how her attack had failed her. As she fell, Valverno bent his legs and caught Sora with his arm grabbing onto her back. Their eyes were sparkling each other. She was fainting for some air, and she didn’t seem surprise when Valverno tried to sneak from behind. “You always liked sneak attacks, brother.”
“And you always forget I have two more arms and a tail that moves like a snake, or make that.” Valverno pulled his sister back to her feet. His tail moved the kukri knife to Sora feet.
Sora grabbed the kukri knife and sheathed it. She turned her head away and looked at the mansion. She was drawn to the building, if it was the old home for her and Valverno.
“Is that it?” asked Valverno. “Is this tall castle, pyramid thing our home?”
“Not really,” answered Sora. “It served as a temple built to worship the Three Gods. I spent a lot of time here more than you ever did. Basically, you never have been inside this temple.”
“Alright. Where is the house then, if this large temple was never our home?”
Sora looked grim. Not for a second, she looked toward her right.
Valverno studied Sora’s eye gazing of a pile of stone rubbles. He walked closer to the strange ruins. There was a long building with long walls stood high. A small tower lay in ruins on what remains of the roof. The building itself was in ruins, and all of it was covered in black, burnt marks. The house was in complete ruins.
“I see.” Valverno signed to see the original house, which he thought to be place he lived in with his mother and sister, destroyed.
Sora walked beside Valverno’s side. “Like I said, Mother sacrificed her power only to save you and me. She couldn’t bear the heart to save anything else. She couldn’t let go of us, so she gave her magic power to save us both and she died with all the other city’s inhabitants. Thanks to her, we both are alive and made it back home.”
“But the house is crumbled and the entire place is buried beneath the islands. And I lived for seventeen years on the surface world. I really am walking in a coffin, where the dead are placed in and buried into the earth, which this city is now.”
Sora turned back to see the temple she mentioned about. “This served as another home to me. How mother and I always came to this building to worship the gods, and the people would do the same. They also worshipped you if you were a full god. The just didn’t understand you were a demigod. It was here you lived for some time, working as a king.”
“I have no memory of this place,” said Valverno.
“That is because you never went inside. And also, this is where I had awakened.”
Valverno blinked. “Awakened? You mean, this is where you spent your time in hydration?”
“Yes, but we can’t enter it now.”
“Why now, Sora?”
“Because the temple’s interior had collapsed. It is now just one giant block, and there would have been nothing in there. Trust me; I already looked for that bodily, godly armor that goes on one of your feet. It is not in there. The time I was spent awake I could have found the armor artifact, but you were highly more important to find.”
Valverno puffed smoke from his nostrils. He was hopeful to find his next target in this large temple.
“There was nothing really special in there anyway. It was just statues resembling the Three Gods. But we have to think first before we continue exploring this entire city. It’s going to take five days to explore the city. Where would the Shadow Men hide the part they took of your foot or leg?”
Valverno remembered holding the gauntlet in the cave of the Northern Region. It was placed on a high alter of the sort with a light shining through a hole from the high ceiling. He held it in his hands, right before one of his companions trying to grab an awesome weapon and suddenly waking two Dragons.
In his deep thoughts, Valverno’s dragon feet could feel the vibrations of people running to him and Sora. He never knew Geraldus, Marina, and Flarefur would be trailing far behind Sora.
Geraldus, Marina, and the Griffin came trotting behind a corner, relieved to be seeing Valverno and Sora standing close to each other. “We thought we lost you,” said Geraldus.
“Don’t be rushing ahead of us,” said Flarefur. “Some of us aren’t born or built for running on our paws, feet, or claws.”
Valverno wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the armor gauntlet he found in the north. He looked at the fireballs and he thought if he were to dim or make those disappear, there would be a light guiding the way to find the second piece. And then he was thinking about something else than besides the armor. “Now that I think about it,” said Valverno. “I wonder where those experimented creatures are. Those failed, undead creatures the two scientists brought to life using my blood as the main source of life.”
Geraldus stroked his chin. “Yes, I wonder that too.”
“What are you people talking about?” asked Sora.
“Here.” Valverno walked over to Flarefur, who released the book from his feathers. Valverno grabbed the book and walked over to Sora. He opened the pages and showed her several of the pictures of dead creatures brought to life using his blood as the same power source. He explained written in the notes of each creature being labeled “Project Failure.” And he went to say about his own experimentation in his embryo form on the last few pages, with him being named “Vaeludar” by the two scientists and him being described a “Project Failure” as well.
Even listening to this again, Valverno couldn’t bear the thought of him being as lab rat. He spent seventeen years thinking Ralenskrit and Belverda were his parents, only to find out the two scientists were nothing but scientists experimenting on him and creating dozens of undead mutated-bodied creatures.
“Another reason you must reclaim those body parts of yours,” said Sora. “They hold parts of your half, godly power the Shadow Men ripped from your foot, arm, and chest. Godlike power only and only you can process, my brother. Without your godly-body parts on your body, you won’t be able to annihilate this ancient Shadow King. Lord. Or whatever ancient beings are called these days.”
“And the question is where to find those?” Valverno gave the book back to Flarefur, who placed the book under his wings. “One armor artifact is for certain going to be down here. But the final one is going to be somewhere down in the southern part of the island.”
“How to you propose we find it?” asked Flarefur, folding his wings. “It is not like it is going to find us. Is it?”
Valverno already knew the answer to that and willing to risk dimming the fireballs in the ceiling floating above the city. He raised his hand toward the soaring, flaring fireballs and his mind reached out toward it.
A soft wind gushed from Valverno’s hand. At first, the wind started out as a weak presence around the group then grew stronger three times the amount of energy gushing around them.
The fireballs above them, floating in the air and lighting the dark city, started to grow smaller and smaller with each passing second. As bright like the sun, the fireballs shrunk and darkened the room.
“What are you doing?” asked Marina. “You’re going to leave us in the dark.”
“The last time we found this thing,” said Valverno, raising his right hand to show the other people. His right arm that had absorbed the gauntlet he found in the other underground cave. “We were underground, and there was a light from the surface that somehow pointed to where this gauntlet was. And there is a crevasse up there, which would mean the light from the surface world will light our way.”