A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 7)

“There you are! You see, just because you swore an oath does not make you any less needful or deserving of recuperation,” Nemora said, pausing to sip from her own goblet. Sigrid, meanwhile, had nearly drained hers. “So. I trust that your first time on-duty today brought you some new experiences, Sophia?”

“To say the least!” the newbie Guardian practically spewed, her mind immediately flashing to the sight of her miniature former neighbors congregated around her boots like ants drawn to dropped bread crumbs, scrubbing rags and even pieces of their own clothing over her dusted footwear in a self-debasing manner that made the giantess ill. Taking a hard swallow to avoid awkwardly gargling the wine in her repressed yet agitated state, then, Sophia fished instead for what felt more like the correct answer: “A dracus majoris! I… was prepared, of course, for one to appear, given what I’ve learned of their presence for larger incursions, but still it was… a novelty. And I took care of it, just as you trained me.”

Again Sigrid and Nemora shared that same sedate but knowing look, and Sophia was beginning to detect a pattern.

“Oh, young one,” the tallest Guardian among them sighed. “After all you have learned, I’d no more expect you to have trouble with a majoris than with a sparrow who’d taken a liking to bits of your hair. You needn’t tell us about your fight. That battle is ended, you claimed victory, and there will always be more in the future. We do not question your handling of vermin.”

“What I meant instead to ask you, Sophia, was regarding new experiences for which you were unprepared,” Nemora softly corrected with a tilt of her head, then refilled their mentee’s newly-empty goblet, dumping in a fresh cellars-worth of wine. “If… there were any you wish to mention?”

Sophia blinked, looking between the two giantesses, and then immediately felt a wave of strange relief, followed by oblivious foolishness, overtaking her. Of course she’d been missing the point all along, and these two veterans of the Citadel were simply too cautious and kind with her to push the issue until she gave them no choice. They weren’t asking about the impotent hordes of beasts she’d slain, but rather the events today which had more sincerely unnerved her. Taking a deep breath, her palms turning clammy as she tightly grasped the tree trunk-like stem of the goblet, Sophia slurped through half the fluid, then setting it down on the table again, exhaled her tightly-bottled angst:

“The people… those who’ve known me all my life, my friends, the elders, my family, they… the way they spoke when they approached me after the fight. The way they… looked at me. Not with any displeasure or fear, of COURSE, but not just gratitude or joy, either. This was beyond gracious. They cheered for so long. Some even began… w-washing my boots. Right as I sat, well, above them, and I did not know how to give them permission to stop. Almost like they, too, had accepted a duty, and it was their only choice. Like they had to do it. Like they OWED it to me. I… I did not know what to say, or what to do, to reassure them that I required no payment or even thanks, only their safety and happiness. They were treating me as someone, or some thing, that I am not, as though I am not still me, albeit in different garb and of… different height. I have always known that the Guardians are held in high regard, but this… was wrong. It… it had to be. Because it wasn’t just what I saw in those who only knew me from afar, as a neighbor or as the blacksmith’s apprentice, but in the faces of my own family. As though I was a separate being altogether from the girl they raised. And then when Elder Varkas insisted that the entire village feed me, in gratitude simply for doing what I swore to do, using food that I know for a fact my people need for themselves to survive the season and so CANNOT afford to waste upon someone who requires such a selfish quantity to reach satiation, I… I did all I could. I promised them I would think on it, and reminded them again that they have nothing to fear, and… I ran away. Not by… actually running, of course, but… a part of me did wish to sprint as fast as I could.”

Sophia, startled by her own longwinded outburst (in fact the greatest consecutive string of words she’d ever spoken to either of her mentors), quieted herself abruptly to slap her palm on the tabletop and guzzle through the remainder of her wine goblet contents, hiccupping softly at the end. With an empathetic sigh, Nemora placed a hand on their newbie’s silken-armored shoulder and massaged. Sigrid, however, followed this example using her own drink, polishing it off with a smoother glug than Sophia had, then after wiping her wrist across her lips, gave a wry smirk:

“Then I suppose a second round of congratulations is in order,” the tallest Guardian said. “You have more officially joined our ranks now. Welcome to the fold.”

“W-What?” Sophia sniffled, feeling a lump in her throat now the size of a horse.

“What Sigrid means…” Nemora drawled more delicately, still stroking the girl’s shoulder. “…is that you have experienced for yourself a more complete perspective of what, exactly, your duty as a Guardian entails.”

“You… you mean this… that… what happened with the people, their b-behavior around me… is included in the vow we all took? How could that-”

“Certainly it is not,” Sigrid replied, now resting her chin upon an upturned fist. “But, the people will tend to make it so, nevertheless. And believe me when I say that your pact with them can be every bit as binding as the commitment you made here at the Citadel. In fact, you might find theirs to be stricter than ours.”

“I’m… I’m sorry. I just don’t understand,” Sophia said, the angst rising in her voice in tandem with frustrating incomprehension. She looked incredulously between Sigrid and Nemora. “You’re… saying that ALL people, in all villages, treat their own Guardians in this way?”

“One people will vary from another,” Nemora reticently offered. Seeing Sophia becoming more anxious, she wrapped her arm around her mentee’s side and drew her closer. “Just as they are unique in language, culture, works, and passion, so too will every village respond differently to their protector.”

“The answer to your question is ‘yes,’ young one,” Sigrid more bluntly stated.

“Oh.” Sophia slumped her back against the behemoth chair, processing this information as best she could, but still mentally struck roadblock after roadblock. While it was a mild if unexpected comfort to hear that she evidently hadn’t somehow mistakenly, subliminally, coaxed her own people into treating her with the combined boot-swabbing reverence of all history’s royalty rolled into one supreme being, and that both Sigrid and Nemora had anticipated precisely this outcome from the moment she reappeared in the Citadel because of their own presumed experience with it, Sophia still found herself feeling vulnerable and almost-helpless in a way she’d never again expected to feel following that day of her ascension. Even now, so very far away from her homeland, seated between trusted teachers in an otherwise-vacant refectory built for beings who stood a minimum of four hundred feet tall, she felt as though there was still a sea of tiny, eager, desperately-grateful faces looking up at her from the ground and silently imploring her to gift them some semi-sacrificial method of expressing their thankfulness toward her.

The wine really wasn’t doing much to help this gnarling sensation in her stomach.