54: Fragile
Bailey errantly kicked a small rock as she walked down the trail- moving a little bit slower than her normal gait. It was obvious that Leyla didn’t want to be slowed down by her injury, but Bailey could hear the older woman’s breath straining in her throat. Their examination of the winch and the reinforcements for the trap at the ocean proved that everything was perfect and precise to Eris’s diagrams, and a stop by the mine (along with some extremely rudimentary attempts at trying to communicate through a language barrier via interpretive charades) let them piece together that the shipment of Ichryte was well on its way to arrive soon.
However, even though the extent of their labour was walking around the small underground kingdom, Bailey could tell Leyla was struggling. The beads of sweat forming on her brow were point enough.
“Alright, let’s sit down for a bit.”
“I’m fine,” Leyla spoke flatly.
“Yeah, well my feet are starting to hurt like a bitch,” Bailey lied and pivoted towards one of the lightstone lantern posts, then plopped herself down next to it. “So I’m gonna sit down and give myself a little foot massage. You wanna keep going, go right ahead.”
Leyla narrowed her eyes, but stepped over to the other side of the wooden post and slowly lowered herself into a seated position. Ah, it was the oldest trick in the book. If someone else needed a break but refused to take one, Bailey just pretended like she needed the break instead.
It worked every time.
While Bailey kept up her end of the fib and took off one shoe to start rubbing her foot like it was cramping, Leyla let out a content sigh and unscrewed the top of her canteen to take a drink. Bailey gave a shrug.
“You know, we haven’t really talked much, you and I.”
Leyla raised an eyebrow. “We’ve talked plenty.”
“Pfft, about our escape plans, and Eris’s crafts and stuff, yeah. But about us? You and me? Not really. Plus, it’s even weirder since you apparently know almost everything about Eris and I, but we know jack-shit about you except your rank, name, the fact that you’re missing a couple fingers, and that you really like the ‘macho military lady’ vibe.”
Leyla sighed. “Nothing I say would help us in any way to getting out of here.”
Bailey rolled her eyes with a groan.
“And there’s macho lady again. C’mon, I get that you’re our commanding officer, but we’ve been stuck in here for two weeks and you’ve been spying on us since before that. You’ve seen me naked more times than I can count on my fingers and toes, I sewed your chest and back after Pravy-gravy turned you into a Syndi-kebab, and thanks to Pattycake’s mind-fuck shenanigans yesterday, we’ve literally made out while I played with your dick. I think that permits us getting to know each other on a personal level instead of professional.”
Leyla looked away, but Bailey could see a twinge of colour in the woman’s cheeks. Bailey let go of her foot and laid back against the stone, quarry-like floor of the cavern with her hair poofing around her.
“Don’t get all worried- I’m not asking to fuck. I just want to know a little more about you. Like… what’s your favourite colour?”
Twisting her head to look at Leyla, Bailey could see the woman raising a confused eyebrow. “My favourite colour? Really?”
“Uh, of course.” Bailey shrugged. “Everyone’s got a favourite. Mine’s blue, but not like, deep blue? Just a pale, soft, simple blue, like the sky in the middle of the day.”
Of course, the blonde’s eyes pointed directly upwards to the glittering, lightstone-embedded cavern ceiling of their underground prison. There was a moment of quiet before Leyla’s voice softly piped up.
“Light brown- like peanut butter.”
Bailey cocked an eyebrow while glancing back over to Leyla. “Peanut butter, eh? You like it that much?”
The woman, who was only a handful of years older than Bailey herself, visibly debated in her head before shoulders slumped in acceptance and defeat. The colour in Leyla’s cheeks deepened as she spoke.
“It’s gonna sound really corny and stupid, but it’s the colour of my wife’s eyes.”
Bailey felt her heart warm up and her face broke into a smile. “Aww…”
“Oh, shut up.” Leyla smacked Bailey on the arm, who flinched to protect herself and gave a little laugh.
“Okay, so your favourite colour is the brown in your wife’s eyes. Why don’t you tell me about her?”
Leyla furrowed her brow. “You want me to tell you about my personal love life?”
“Only if you want to,” Bailey said. Her lip curled into a grin. “Though, you have spied on Eris and I fucking for a couple of days before we all ended up in here, so I think that earns me a couple of privacy points to make us even, no?”
She watched Leyla roll her eyes, then give a small sigh.
“It was my third mission after graduating- a job to confirm or deny suspicion about intelligence agents working for the Geriege royal family trying to steal classified Syndicate information.”
Bailey nodded her head, blowing an errant raspberry. “Yep. Sounds like shit my dad would do.”
“Well, I ended up getting caught breaking into the house of one of their barons, and got shot with a crossbow when I was running away. I still lost the tail and successfully escaped, going back to the inn I was staying at in the meantime to patch myself up.”
“Forgive me for interrupting,” Bailey chuckled, “but what does this have to do with your wife?”
Leyla gave Bailey a deep side eye, then breathed out through her nose.
“That same night, a girl who was so drunk that she couldn’t even walk straight came back to the inn to sleep it off in her room. Except, she was too drunk to realize that she went into the wrong room, or to realize that there was another person in the bed she crawled into. Since I myself had taken down a bottle and a half to help me fall asleep through the pain, I was out.”
“Okay, now this is getting good,” Bailey grinned. Leyla rolled her eyes.
“We both woke up the next morning hung over and very confused as to why we were spooning a complete stranger. She invited me for breakfast, and I accepted since I needed to lay low anyway because the guard presence was up due to my botched break-in. Of course, she was smart enough to figure out almost immediately that I was the person they were looking for, and she helped me out for a few days until it cooled off a bit. Then, I snuck out of town and reported back to the Syndicate.”
Bailey could see the faint smile begin curling at the edges of Leyla’s lips as she reminisced.
“Whenever I had some time between missions, I always made sure to go back and see her. We became a thing, and soon she was moving in with me at my house in Madaras. We’ve been together for four years, but got married the day after we learned she was pregnant.”
Bailey rolled onto her side and propped up her head with one elbow. “You have a kid?”
Leyla shook her head, and Bailey could see the woman’s scarred right hand idly twisting at the silver ring on her other hand.
“Not yet, but it would actually be due any day now. We might get out to learn that I’m a mother.”
The conversation then fell quiet for a moment. Leyla muttered solemnly.
“I’m gonna miss the birth of my child.”
“Hey, we don’t know anything for sure, yet. Actually, the only thing we know for sure are baby names, because you and your wife had to have some of those cooking away. Lay ‘em on me.”
Leyla gave a weak chuckle. “Well, if it was a boy we were thinking of either Adrian or Victor. If it’s a girl, we were pretty set on Elodie.”
Bailey smiled, letting the nice moment linger. Eventually, she spoke.
“Keep twisting your wedding ring like that and you’ll set your finger on fire.”
Leyla looked down to her fingers to notice the movement, stopping once she realized. She dropped her hands into her lap. Then, to Bailey’s surprise, Leyla gave a tiny laugh.
“It’s not even the real ring. It’s a replacement.”
“What?” Bailey lifted an eyebrow in confusion. Leyla gave a sad smile.
“Two days after we got married, I was deployed on a mission at Dural to aid in the reinforcement of the blockade from Hailfire Island during the freeze.”
Bailey frowned, mind immediately going back to her old roommate. That icy coastline had held his last moments. “I’m familiar,” Bailey said. Leyla nodded.
“I wasn’t necessarily sent to be a part of the defense, I was sent as part of a specialist strike team that would strategically attack in key locations and focus on eliminating more threatening monsters before they could reach the garrison and cause real damage, since it almost fell the year prior. We did extremely well, and things only got rough during the fourth day of our skirmishes when we went to go take out a suspected corrupted dragon only to be ambushed by a legion of corrupted cyclopes instead.”
“Any casualties?” Bailey asked solemnly. Surprisingly, Leyla shook her head.
“No, unless you count my fingers.” She held up her right hand, the pinky cleft at the first knuckle and the ring finger completely missing, with a scar running down the entire length of her forearm up to her elbow. “One of the bastards threw his broadsword at me while I was distracted with other ones. I was just a teeny bit too late to react and make a shield to protect myself, and suddenly my arm was turned into a fork. The angle took off my fingers, and sure enough, the wedding ring I had for less than a week goes with it.”
Bailey furrowed her brow with a confused grin. “You were wearing it on your right hand?”
Leyla shrugged through a smile. “They’re worn on the left hand because it’s closer to the heart. I’m sure you also know about the myth that magical rings work better when worn on the left hand for that same reason.”
“I am.”
“I had my wedding ring, and then a legitimate magical ring that I was wearing. However, since I was going into a very dangerous place and we were planning to fight a dragon, I figured that even if it’s just a myth, the least I could do was entertain the thought of pulling out every drop of magic from my items that I could.”
Leyla then laughed- a single, short chuckle like she still couldn’t believe it. “The one day in the entire mission that I move my wedding ring to my other hand so that my magic ring has a chance of being stronger, and that’s the day my right arm is cut into two pieces. Unbelievable.”
Bailey couldn’t help but let out a laugh of her own. “Wow, you must have some pretty awful luck.”
Leyla nodded, holding her scarred hand with a smile. “Yep. I lose the symbol of my affection for the love of my life and bearer of my future child, but at least I saved a fucking ring of fire resistance that never ended up being useful once during the entire mission. I sold it the second I got back to pay for a new wedding ring.”
“Well, at least you didn’t lose it in some super lame way like dropping it down the drain while doing dishes,” Bailey said. “On a battlefield, fighting a world-ending corruption and getting a kick-ass scar out of it has gotta be the best possible way you can lose something like that.”
Leyla thought for a moment, blinking a few times. Eventually, she shrugged.
“You do make a pretty good point.”
As much as Eris couldn’t deny the benefits of doing pointless boosted crafting for the entire day just to funnel all of it back into her skills, there was still a definitive problem.
It meant she had to spend… quality time with Pravala. Naturally, conversation was inevitable- even as Eris tried to bury herself beneath wood shavings from the speed that she was carving the most haphazard, improvised, cheap items she could possibly make out of the pile of lumber that Bailey had wheeled in on a cart. Once both her and Elmas had decided to stay out of the way and leave the workshop to do other projects, it meant there were no intermediaries that Eris could count on to try and keep her from having to converse with the Summoner. At least she managed to burn a couple of hours by completely ignoring everything the woman said, but the sound of her voice was genuinely getting on Eris’s nerves.
“I must say, this is a far, far more efficient way of levelling skills than what I’ve been doing,” Pravala said, beads of sweat dripping down her brow. “Granted, my Jealousy gathering is entirely passive and requires no active effort on my part, but that also means it’s rather slow.”
“It’s only slow if you don’t have fourteen hundred slaves…” Eris grit her teeth, using a sawdust-covered arm to wipe away her own sweaty face. That made the woman behind her audibly sigh.
“You need to stop that, Eris.”
“Stop what?”
She could feel Pravala rolling her eyes behind her. “Being so pure. An Echo that only acts as a force of good is an Echo that doesn’t accomplish anything in the world.”
“And what is it that you’ve accomplished?” Eris turned around, whipping the woman’s hand from her shoulder as she turned to face Pravala with a sour look. “Because I’m looking at a woman that did things more terrible than pretty much every other Echo all in the hopes of saving the world, yet here you are stuck and unable to do the one thing you dedicated all that evil for. You enslaved an entire town, and for nothing.”
Eris turned back around with a sigh and tossed the finished, half-assed spoon onto the pile of random crap. Pravala gave a sigh that was shockingly tense.
“No. Not for nothing. I won’t let it be for nothing. I’m here now, helping you get us both out, so that we can save the world together. Everything always has a return.”
“Everything has a return?” Eris furrowed her brow while grabbing another piece of wood and readying her knife. It was a moment before Pravala spoke.
“The balance I spoke of, that we Echoes are destined to maintain- it isn’t just a concept. It’s a genuine force of the universe. Everything always wants to stay even, and the world will forcibly tilt back those scales if one side gets too heavy. We Echoes are the ones that make the minor adjustments to manually keep things balanced so that the world doesn’t have to do something drastic.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It isn’t about preventing evil and darkness in the world,” Pravala began. “That will always exist, no matter what we do or what we try to become. All we can do is control where and how that evil is applied in order to cause the least harm.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Eris breathed.
Pravala’s hand tensed on Eris’s shoulder. “It makes perfect sense, you were just born in a time that doesn’t know how to understand.”
The woman’s grip tugged backwards and her other hand went up as Eris was turned around to look back at the Summoner with a hand on each shoulder. Pravala’s face was serious. Unnervingly so.
“Bad things happen- that much can never, ever be prevented. Echoes have been trying for centuries. It took a long time to learn that sometimes, a tsunami is going to happen, and it’s going to hit a coastal town, and it’s going to kill a lot of people. Even if you know exactly where it will hit in advance and evacuate the town, the world will simply turn that tsunami somewhere else to kill just as many, if not more. If you evacuate every single coastal town, then the tsunami will just be replaced by a hurricane in the mainland that kills every single person you tried to save. Balance is cruel and unforgiving in that way. The only thing Echoes can do is guide how balance is kept and hopefully keep the scales from tipping too hard. It’s a lot like prophecy and foresight in that way. What’s been seen to happen will always come to pass. In different ways, perhaps, but the same result nonetheless.”
Eris paused. “Miknalor…”
Pravala nodded, a sad look in her face. “Like I said, the tsunami was going to happen. The old Echoes trapped Akkaru’um in the Obelisk-”
“Presumably.” Eris added.
“-Presumably trapped Akkaru’um, and by doing so, evacuated the city that the tsunami was going to hit. That just caused the tsunami to hit somewhere else in the form of the Hollow. But that’s just the large scale. Balance works in ways that not even Echoes can control. I believe you call it ‘Karma’, but you have it backwards.”
Eris furrowed her brow, but Pravala continued.
“Bad things don’t happen to bad people, and good things don’t happen to good people. Bad people bring evil into the world, that the world then forcefully balances out with good. A murderer kills three people in Kavala, parents with a deathly sick child find a bag of coin buried in their backyard in Kelopa. Sometimes, that good is delivered in the way of a bad person themselves finding misfortune, but that’s rare. In most cases, the return of that balance is spread elsewhere.”
A sour taste entered Eris’s mouth. “Are you saying that bad people make the world better?”
“No, not at all. Just…” Pravala let out a shaky sigh. Her entire demeanor was… off. Not what Eris was used to seeing these last few weeks. The stress was so clear on Pravala’s face that Eris would probably be able to peel it off like sunburnt skin.
“Just that the world helps to account for every positive and negative thing that happens. Not at an exact ratio, but it’s there. If the promise of our end goal isn’t enough to make Echoes feel better about the bad things we need to do, at the very least we can know that the sin we cause for preparation is already being paid off elsewhere.”
Eris watched the woman’s shoulders slouch.
“It’s normal to sin, but the lengths that we need to reach as Echoes goes against the fundamentals of human nature. That’s why only the most pure and direct of hearts are chosen to become an Echo- because we’re the only ones that can withstand the morality of struggle. Anyone else given the power would become psychotic, fully embracing the darkest levels of the sin with no remorse. We don’t have that luxury.”
Pravala backed away, removing her hands from Eris’s shoulders and slumping onto a stool. Suddenly, the long-haired, dress-adorned queen of this prison realm started to look far less regal.
“We’re given these powers because we’re the only ones so pure that we can’t succumb to the sin- no matter how much we indulge. Our hearts and instincts are fighting back as a natural self-regulation. We can’t embrace the deepest, most vile parts of our sin unless there is absolutely no other choice.”
When Pravala looked up, Eris could see the beginnings of moisture in her eyes.
“You have the sin of Lust, but you can’t truly believe that it only extends to fingering and blowjobs, right?”
“Uhh…” Eris began, caught off-guard by the normally confident demeanor of the woman changing to something much more vulnerable. Pravala’s hands were shaking.
“Lust extends to the deepest, most horrific and revolting parts of sexual infatuation. Rape. Pedophelia. Torture. Necrophilia. Chasing that sexual satisfaction to the lengths that no sane person on the planet would ever go, all so that you can become strong enough to bring back the good in the world you’ve taken away. That’s what we are. That’s what it is to be an Echo. If we don’t go that far, we can’t solve our problems. If we do, then we have to live knowing what we did because it was the only option.”
As the sick feeling in Eris’s stomach grew, she watched Pravala scratch at her wrists. It wasn’t gentle-either. Skin was turning red and starting to break open under the woman’s fingernails. Pravala sniffled, staring at the floor.
“I… what I’ve done? I need to make sure it wasn’t for nothing. I need to see the good that came out of it. If I threw myself off the castle- if I died in here, then it wouldn’t have meant anything. I would have done nothing more than make the world worse.”
A drop of blood, scratched out of Pravala’s wrists, fell onto the floor. It was met by another, and another. Pravala continued to dig her nails in further while Eris watched in confused horror. Pravala’s knee was bouncing at the rate of a thermo-arcanic motor, and she was breathing like she couldn’t quite get enough air. The sweat was starting to visibly build on her face and neck, dripping down to darken the blue of her dress collar.
“Everything I’ve done would have been for nothing if I killed myself in here, so I waited. And waited. And waited. Because everything has to have a return, right? Eventually, if I waited long enough, then I’d get the chance to make sure that I did some good after all. That I wasn’t the monster! That I did what I did because it actually helped in the long run! And-”
Pravala was panting, her chest fully heaving and trembles went through her body. “-And then you came along!” Pravala reached forward, grabbing Eris by the wrist with bloody fingernails. “And you can get us out, and then I can help! I… I can help!”
The smile on Pravala’s face was manic, and sent unsettling shivers through Eris’s chest. She wasn’t entirely sure who this woman was in front of her, but it wasn’t Pravala- not the one she knew for the last two weeks. This wasn’t the slaver filled with cold confidence- this was a woman genuinely losing her mind.
“Let go of me,” Eris said shakily. Pravala’s grip tightened, to the point of pain.
“Please,” Pravala begged. “Please- I need… it can’t be for nothing! I’m strong! I can fight the Hollow! I have to! I need- I need to fight!”
“Let go,” Eris repeated, pulling her hands back with more force. Pravala continued to hold on, even rising from the stool and stepping forward just so she could keep her grip despite Eris taking a step back.
“No, don’t leave! I just need to see it! I did it to help- I swear! Please-”
“LET GO!!!”
Eris ripped her hands back with all the force she could muster, slamming her own back against the corner of a worktable as she wrenched her body weight away from the insane Summoner. Pravala’s nails carved through skin as she did, dragging lines of pain through Eris’s wrists and hands before the redhead was eventually free. Instead of following forward and trying to grab back on, Pravala winced, backing away with a look of shock. She looked down at her hands with bloody fingernails, and that expression turned into horror while she fell to the ground, pulling her knees to her chest.
“I’m sorry. Please- I’m sorry. I can’t… I just need to help…”
Eris could only hold her own bleeding hands, raked open by Pravala’s death-grip she tore herself from.
Meanwhile, she stared down at the Summoner who began to violently sob on the floor of her workshop.