Chapter 374: A Nameless End

All-too familiar stone walls take the place of the lake. Quest appears a moment later right on my heels, its brow furrowed in deep thought. I motion for it to go ahead to wherever it has to go, and it nods once before disappearing into the wall. Before I even have to call for her, Fleur’s brooch starts to glow.

“Did you find them?”

I grimace. “Yeah. It didn’t end how you’re hoping, though.”

Salt seeps in through the cracks in the floor, basking the hallway in a warm glow. Fleur forms herself out of the errant crystals and stands right in front of me, eyes trailed towards the floor as her inner light pulses slowly. It looks like she already knows what happened.

“Who was that?” Pearl asks. “All the green… all the salt… were they actually a halsia?”

Fleur’s light pulses bright for one sharp moment. “I’m not really sure myself. When I found them they were already like this, but… worse off. Far more hostile and despondent. All I could do to calm them was to tell them stories of my own creation and the hand that you had in it.”

I bristle for some reason. “And that seemed to help?”

“Help… no, no. There was no helping them,” Fleur laces her hands together and stares off into the distance. “They didn’t know it, but they were already gone. If they were, indeed, a halsia, being dissolved completely in water as corrupt as that was a death sentence. Once they calmed down enough, they were… relieved.”

My teeth grind softly together. Fleur turns back at the sound and shifts her light to offer an apologetic smile.

“I didn’t mean to put all the burden on you. All I wanted to do was help them, but when they proved beyond help, they simply asked to see you,” Fleur explains. “As for why I didn’t tell you right away… um… you were busy. With Jumble.”

The bitterness in Fleur’s words is almost too much. I take a deep breath and pinch the bridge of my nose, then shake my head in disappointment.

“Fleur, I know you don’t really like Jumble all that much, but you can’t let it affect important things,” I start to say.

Fleur nearly snuffs her light in shame. “I know that. Every second you were with her, I knew that. But… I just… no, no explanations. What I did was wrong and I apologize; I won’t let it happen again. I promise.”

Somehow, her apology both rings hollow and sounds completely heartfelt. I stare deep into her eyes for any other signs, but there’s nothing else there. Just apologetic shame and her distaste for Jumble.

“Alright. As long as you prove it, I’ll believe you,” I say with a reassuring smile. “But Jumble’s my girlfriend now. I’m kind of attached to her, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Can you promise me that won’t get in the way of us saving the world?”

Fleur nods ever so slightly. “I promise. Even if… yes, I promise.”

“Perfect, thank you. Now, is there any more information you can give me on this maybe-halsia?” I pull out my Class Card and swipe to a blank space. “Was that green obelisk there when you first went to the lake?”

“It was,” Fleur confirms. “It stretched all the way into the sky and was slowly dissolving into the lake. Without intervention it would’ve taken close to a month to fully dissolve, but when I went to leave, the dissolution was already speeding up.”

Pearl raises an eyebrow as I write down Fleur’s account. “So after you told it about Shelby, the halsia started killing itself faster? That doesn’t sound like it wanted to live very much.”

“That’s because they didn’t,” Fleur insists. “Once I told it that it could die, it sped up the process by magnitudes. The only reason it didn’t end its misery right away was out of the hope that you would eventually meet it. I was intending to return, but when I did, the air was so thick with purifying magic that I couldn’t communicate with it.”

“Yeah, we saw that. It didn’t bother us, but it made everything feel really weird. Right, Shelby?”

Pearl looks back to me for confirmation. I glance up from my Class Card and nod, but before I can say anything, Pearl turns back to Fleur and gestures an open hand at me.

“We didn’t hear anything from the halsia until it pushed us high enough into the air. Probably because it had to get higher than the purification before it could talk to us.”

I nod again. “Makes sense to me. But why did it dissolve? Quest thinks that they were fighting the cataclysm, but that’s just it making assumptions. Did you get confirmation?”

Fleur makes a soft grinding noise. Almost exactly like the one I made grinding my teeth a moment ago.

“They confirmed that they were fighting something, and that they had to purify the entire lake to stop it from getting out. I… they didn’t know it would kill them, Shelby,” Fleur almost whispers. “Once they stopped the threat, they thought they’d just walk out of the water and reform normally. When it didn’t happen, they panicked. The obelisk was because of that–a last-ditch effort to stay alive. When it didn’t work, it became a countdown to their inevitable demise.”

Pearl makes a soft, saddened noise. I finish tapping out Fleur’s words on my Class Card, then stare at it with a deepening frown. Some of the explanations are there; the obelisk, the purification, and why the halsia couldn’t just reform. But it’s missing everything before the fight. No solid confirmation of what the halsia fought, no confirmation of what they actually looked like, and–hell–no confirmation that they were actually a halsia.

For all I know, this could be something completely different. Another salt elemental evolving just like Fleur did, but not in exactly the same way as her. It’d mean a pocket of magic as strong as the krarig with enough salt to make elementals appear. Nothing from that lake ticks either of those boxes, so… hrm.

I send my Class Card away and turn my frown towards Fleur. “There weren’t any signs of a struggle around the lake, but both you and Quest seemed damn sure the maybe-halia fought for their life. How’s that possible?”

“As I told you, I’m not sure.”

“No, no, I’m looking for theories right now, not an actual explanation. Like…” I purse my lips in thought and spread my arms. “What if that lake wasn’t actually there before, and the fight somehow made it?”

“And we’re just ignoring the fact that thirty-year old maps have that lake on them?” Pearl asks with a smirk.

I sigh and roll my eyes. “It was just an example. All I’m looking for here is ideas; anything that could be proven wrong, might be proven wrong, or even stuff that’s just completely out there. Anyone got anything?”

Pearl lets out a hum as she drums her fingers against the bottom of her face. Fleur softly glows and dims to a steady rhythm of thought. The fact that neither of them can come up with anything right on the spot is almost reassuring; it means I’m not missing anything too obvious, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re missing some crucial pieces. Right at the time where everything else could scream ahead if anyone makes a breakthrough–either on our side or the Preservation’s.

A soft snap of electricity accompanies a brightening Fleur. I blink in surprise at the sound, her body thrumming with both magical light and electrical snaps at the same time. Pearl shifts from thoughtful introspection to join me in staring at… whatever the hell is happening to Fleur.

“Did I miss something?” Pearl whispers directly into my mind. “She didn’t have electricity in her arsenal before this, right?”

From how the lines of raw, dangerous power arc over Fleur’s salt and leave behind thin lines that almost look like tattoos… no. I’d say she didn’t have this before. Something else must be doing it, but that something else isn’t triggering my awareness at all. I nod at Pearl to go back into my head, and halfway through the motion I feel our awarenesses merge into one hypersensitive mass of sensation.

Except there’s nothing to feel. Just empty space, filled with the magic of the city… and nothing scything through it like a thousand bolts of forked lightning. I reach out a hand without an ounce of self-preservation and run my fingers through the area of nothing. All of the city’s magic disappears from around my hand in those exact places, but as the nothing shifts, the city’s magic rushes to fill in.

It’s… familiar. Really damn familiar. Almost like I felt the same thing a few minutes ago, but because I didn’t have any magic to compare it to, I couldn’t pinpoint it. Now that the city’s magic is here to take the brunt of the assault, though… it’s blatantly obvious.

“It’s the same purification magic from the lake. But… how?” I mutter in disbelief. “Did it follow us through the relocation?”

“That’s impossible. Or… improbable,” Pearl corrects herself as we both watch the nothing etch itself onto Fleur and react with insane voltage. “But if it wasn’t following us, then that’d be a much better explanation.”

I turn my gaze inwards and raise an eyebrow. “You mean the halsia left something time-release to go to Fleur when it died?”

Pearl nods. “That’s my best guess, at least, since it’s completely ignoring us. And if the halsia did it when Fleur was there, it’d be doing exactly this. We should stop it just in case.”

Probably for the best, yeah, even if it was the halsia’s dying wish. I can’t let it possibly hurt, possess, or manipulate Fleur in any way. She’s not reacting at all to this, even though it’s leaving behind what look like permanent lines. That can’t be safe. I summon a purification, beef it up to the best of my abilities, then take an infusion to back it up in case that isn’t enough.

Fleur’s light flickers in recognition as I take a step towards her.

“What if… the fight didn’t happen at the lake? It could’ve happened somewhere else, and the halsia took whatever the emerging cataclysmic thing was out to the closest large body of water they could find?” Fleur theorizes, her light growing brighter by the moment. “I didn’t think to do it before, but there might be some damage to the landscape or a nearby city. If we pinpoint the lake on the map and draw a circle around it, then all we’d have to do is… Shelby? What are you…”

I motion down at her arm. Fleur’s light flickers in confusion as she tilts her head to look, then flares mind-numbingly bright in shock.

“What what what what?! What is this?!” she cries, flailing her arm like she’s trying to fling off a raccoon that’s biting her wrist. “Get it off me! Help! Please!”

My expression hardens as I grab her by the wrist to steady her flailing. Fleur’s breaths come quick and short, accompanied by a dulling and brightening of her light that’s reminiscent of a bulb right before it dies. I grimace and put that unfortunate image out of my mind, then press my infusion coin to her arm–skipping right over the purification out of a fear for her well-being.

The electricity snaps between her and my coin. Then my coin and my fingernail. Time skips a beat, and when I come to, all of the nothing is coloured a brilliant emerald green. Not the dull colour from the lake, but something full of vitality and power. It all contracts, as if drawing one final breath, and aims itself directly at me.

…there were two…

I steel myself at the words that etch into my mind.

…and i only managed to kill one…

The voice and the lightning die out as one. Leaving behind an intricate and lovingly designed tattoo of vines with flowers encircling an obelisk on one of Fleur’s many arms. I draw my fingers through the air, expecting to feel something, but there aren’t any disturbances at all. This last message was just that–the final thing the halsia sent before the purification stopped its own magic from leaving the lake.

A message filled with implications that have some damn unpleasant possibilities behind them. One of which directly puts what happened at the Preservation into question.

And makes everything so, so much worse for everybody.