Chapter 37 - The Farsight

Skyle jerked back as though he’d been burned, his dazed gaze swimming back up to the surface of consciousness. Feeling like he’d been fired up in a furnace, then quenched in a wintry pool of ice, his teeth chattered uncontrollably. His whole body felt numb and exhausted, and his throat worked uselessly for a moment while trying to form a sound that would not come.

“What’s the matter? You need a shoulder to cry on, farmboy?” came Leon’s voice, his tone slightly mocking.

Skyle craned his neck blindly, his surroundings blurring into indistinct shapes within a reddish haze as his eyes refused to focus due to a burning pain that felt like daggers chipping at his brain from behind his eyes.

“Hey, you alrig-” came Leon’s voice, a touch more tentative this time.

Skyle’s vision finally came back into focus, just in time to see Leon stumble back a step with shock visibly written across his face.

“I’m fine, what is it?” Skyle croaked, his mouth slowly forming the words as though it were unfamiliar with the exercise.

“Your.. your eyes,” Leon muttered, staring.

“What about them?” Skyle grunted, still feeling the pounding headache crushing his temples. As he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, Skyle felt a warm liquid which had pooled unnoticed in his eyes dribble down his cheeks.

“I’m not crying, alright?” Skyle grumbled in mild annoyance at Leon’s gaping stare, dabbing absently at his face and frowning down at the tears he’d wiped from his cheeks.

Instantly, his jaw gaped open in surprise as he stared at the crimson smears that had been left on the back of his hands.

“B.. blood?” Skyle mumbled stupidly, staring at his crimson-flecked hands, then dabbing hurriedly at his cheeks once more.

“You.. sure you’re alright, Skyle?” Leon asked, this time dropping all pretense of cheerful mockery as genuine worry entered his voice.

“I’m.. I think I’m alright,” Skyle replied, turning his gaze back up in the other boy’s direction. “My eyes, well my whole head just hurts like a badger’s been gnawing at it all day, but I’m..” Skyle’s words slowly faded as his brows drew together and his eyes narrowed, cocking his head to the side.

Leon’s frowning countenance was one of almost comical concern, as the tall boy teetered on the edge of feeling guilty for his earlier mocking remarks, and unease at feeling genuine worry for his friend and not knowing how much of it he ought to show.

Any other time, Skyle would have thought of a way to put the big oaf at ease, but just now he was more absorbed in carefully studying Leon - all three of them.

Skyle could clearly see Leon’s true image before his eyes, but around it stood two blurry azure shadows that seemed identical in every way to the original. However, these two shadows seemed to be constantly shifting, moving around and engaging in various actions and assuming different postures. As Skyle squinted his eyes and focused his gaze, one of the shadows lost definition, growing more vague and incorporeal, as though it were made of mist.

The other shadow, in the other hand, seemed to grow more substantial at a similar pace. In a mere fraction of a second, it grew more defined and solidified into an identical replica of Leon, only it was shaded in a lustrous shade of blue. It moved forward with a deep frown, moving its mouth while lifting a hand. Then abruptly, it was kneeling in front of Skyle, almost in a supplicant fashion.

Then the shadows were gone altogether as his vision blurred once again and his head threatened to split open from within. A white flash of pain made him clench his teeth with a grunt.

Skyle shook his head to clear it, all the while wondering where the hell he could have picked up such ridiculous hallucinations from. Leon, kneel before anyone, let alone a mere farmboy like himself? A fat chance in hell of that ever happening.

The other boy’s muted groan of pain seemed to dispel Leon’s paralysis, and taking a deep breath, he lumbered forward to offer a hand to Skyle.

“Maybe you should let me take a closer look at your eyes,” Leon offered, though it sounded more like a command than a suggestion.

Skyle reflexively drew away from the touch, turning around with his back to Leon to hide the irrational embarrassment brought on by the image his fertile imagination seemed to have conjured up. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You have blood pouring from your eyes, cattleboy!” Leon countered more forcefully, laying a heavy hand on Skyle’s shoulder from behind. Or attempting to do so, at the very least.

His eyesight still blurred from the blinding pain, Skyle instinctively moved to avoid Leon’s grasp, taking the last clear image of Leon he had beheld as a point of reference. His conscious brain was more occupied in dealing with the massive headache he’d brought on himself, however, and he hardly noticed that his body was reacting to the movements of the shadow image of Leon from just an instant ago, instead of what the real Leon might be doing in the present.

Leon had obviously expected some resistance, but blind and pained as Skyle seemed to be, the bigger boy had expected to easily take hold of his friend. His concern overrode any misgivings, and Leon moved with decisive speed to stop Skyle while his back was still turned to him in order to take a closer look at his ailment by force if necessary.

Little had he expected that the smaller boy would not even bother to turn around to face him. Instead, as though he’d grown eyes in the back of his head, Skyle weaved his shoulder out of the way using a smooth shuffling step that left it just a scant inch from Leon’s descending arm. The move was so flawlessly executed, the timing so impeccably smooth, that Leon couldn’t help but gape in stupefaction as his disbelieving eyes watched his hand sail right past its intended target.

In fact, so astonished was Leon that his brain was left fumbling in a vacuum of inertia as the huge mass of his body carried through with its initial momentum. This left Leon hopelessly overbalanced and by the time he realized it, he tried to overcompensate, and altogether missed the tangle of branches by his feet that caught on his leg like a noose and brought him down with a great, resounding crash that shook the entire branch their camp was perched upon.

As Leon groggily tried to shake himself from his stupor, Skyle finally turned around. He gawked helplessly at the comical sight of his giant friend kneeling at his feet. The silly nobleman was shaking his head in a daze, clearly trying to gather his wits and make sense of what had just happened.

“And just what are you playing at, you overgrown oaf?” Skyle asked, a puzzled frown on his brow.

“What’s it look like I’m doing, I’m testing the structural integrity of this branch,” Leon growled under his breath, almost as though to himself. Was that blood on his lips?

“Nevermind that,” Leon continued in the same breath, gulping in a big breath and glaring up at Skyle. Skyle had to struggle not to giggle at that. For once, the giant had to stare up at the smaller boy. Up!

“I could get used to the view from here,” Skyle smirked inside his own head, then stopped dead as he recalled an image engraved into his memory from just a bare moment ago.

“Just how did you manage to..” The rest of Leon’s grumbling question was lost as Skyle called to mind the vivid details of the blue shadow Leon, the final pose it had assumed in particular. With a start, Skyle realized it was a similar position to the one Leon was occupying now. In fact, he realized with a shiver running up his spine, it was exactly identical.

Skyle reeled back in shock, his breath cutting off short as his already overburdened mind struggled to deal with this incredible revelation. The fierce ache in his head, the one that felt like a ragged saw brutally scraping against the back of his eyes, it only got worse as his thoughts tumbled and crashed together in a clumsy attempt to draw a feasible explanation from the morass of his mind.

“Just what are these shadows? Are they actually able to show me the future somehow?”

Before this, Skyle had been able to barely discern a hint of what others might feel inclined to do by carefully studying their auras. Even if it was something as minute as the direction in which their auras were turning or the shade of color which suffused it, that could serve as a reasonable basis for attempting to predict what that person might do next.

However, that was a whole different level altogether from what these shadows had been able to do. They had shown fuzzy but distinct images of Leon’s potential actions, but had steadily drawn clearer and more solid as his next choice grew more pronounced. That was something which Skyle could accept as part of the wondrous Infinite Eye, a technique left behind by a master such as Fierro Latimus. However, time manipulation? What else to call what had happened next? How could it have shown Leon’s action, calculated Skyle’s own reaction, and even gone so far as taking the gnarled branch underfoot into consideration as well?

What technique could be so impossibly powerful, so godlike?

“The Farsight.”

The sudden whisper echoed within his head, so soft that Skyle was almost tempted to believe he had imagined it. Almost. The words had been too distinct, too real to be a mere figment of his imagination.

As though the words had been a trigger, some sort of key left behind by a benevolent hand to unlock a vast, hidden mystery within his mind, Skyle was suddenly able to remember that there was indeed an incredible technique within the second layer of the Infinite Eye, called the “Farsight”.

Seeing Near as though Far seemed a concept so alien to Skyle’s regular way of thinking, going against what conventional wisdom seemed to dictate, that even now that he had reached this level, it still felt awkward. Perhaps, he thought to himself, it wasn’t so much predicting the future as it was taking a step back from the confines of his own limited perception of the immediate surroundings, and instead taking in the world as one single body, each component a small part of a much larger whole. It was the difference between watching a drop of water strike the surface of a pond, to seeing the entire river and reading its many currents as it swept down to the sea.

Was it really possible for such a relatively simple concept to reach such a terrifying height?

Watching Leon slowly dusting himself and unsteadily rising to his feet, all the while giving the other boy a dirty, offended look like he’d been conned but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what exactly the con had been about, Skyle judiciously decided that yes, in fact it was possible.

Very much so, indeed.

The smug grin that had been about to stretch the corners of Skyle’s mouth died in its infancy, however, as the throbbing in his head intensified and the splitting headache made its presence felt with a vengeance.

“Who cares, I can read the future!” Skyle crowed exultantly in his own mind, then winced at the pain in his head.

“I know this headache’s not going away anytime soon,” he finished lamely, almost groaning the thought out loud. “That’s future enough for now.”

Tentatively, almost as though he were afraid he might use the Farsight by accident, Skyle looked to Leon once again and tilted his head slightly.

“What?” Leon asked brusquely.

“You’re a royal pain in my-”

“Arse?” Leon cut in, finishing the phrase.

“Head, actually, but I guess it is all the same,” Skyle shrugged, smiling self-deprecatingly.

“You know,” Leon suddenly breathed, his eyes narrowing as he regarded Skyle. “They may have saved my life more times than I care to count, but your eyes sometimes scare the hell out of me.”

“They scare the hell out of me too,” Skyle admitted, idly wondering if the rest of the Desolate Star Technique would be as life changing. Somehow, Skyle couldn’t imagine what the higher layers of the Infinite Eye would bring, let alone the other four senses. And that would still only be the first stage. What of the entire Desolate Star Techniques? The sheer magnitude staggered him.

“You know one of your pupils somehow has turned blue now?” Leon pointed out suddenly.

“What?” Skyle spluttered.

“Yeah, your right eye is still grey as before, but your left eye is definitely blue now,” Leon continued, his tone heavy with a contrived calmness that was probably for Skyle’s sake.

“Are you sure you’re not just seeing things?” Skyle asked, and had to bear the long suffering look Leon gave in reply to the admittedly stupid question.

“Well, I never heard of anybody dying from an eye that turned blue,” Skyle mumbled, almost half to himself.

“Never heard of anyone whose eye suddenly turned blue, period,” Leon snorted, then punched Skyle’s shoulder.

“Ow, watch it you big oaf,” Skyle called out, but he couldn’t help but let out a chuckle in spite of himself.

“You know that you are engaging in the most heinous of injustices in your perverse attempts to draw an inverse correlation between the physical prowess and intellectual acumen of this here Lord?” Leon objected primly.

“Oh, me’s be sorree me lord, but me’s no git yer fancy whatcha call all that hogwash, snort snort” Skyle instantly replied, making a show of hitching up his pants and scratching his armpit.

Leon stared balefully for one long moment, during which Skyle returned it in kind. Then both boys’ expressions finally cracked and they burst out laughing at the same time, letting out great, long guffaws that left them breathless, tears streaming down their cheeks as their bodies collapsed in a heap side by side.

In the long silence that followed, as both boys struggled to catch their breath, then finally sighed deeply, each leaning against the other’s shoulder, they both sank into a deep, contemplative mood.

“You know I don’t really mean..” Leon began, uncharacteristically hesitant.

“I know,” Skyle cut his friend off. “But you know you can sometimes be a little..”

“I know,” Leon cut in this time, with a rueful shake of his head. “I know.”

Another long moment of quiet followed, during which both of the boys sat unmoving, each lost in his own thoughts.

“You think we’ll make it?” Leon whispered, almost as though thinking out loud.

“Yes, we will,” Skyle answered firmly.

“How do you know that?” Leon asked after a moment.

“I just know,” Skyle answered after another long pause, smiling.

“Yeah, me too,” Leon grinned as well.

As the first glimmers of light greeted the horizon, the new day found both boys sitting in the same position, still not looking at each other, but rather towards the distant future, and the solemn promise that they had just made to one another.

They would make it.