The Sister, thanks to her training in the absorption of Nature’s energy, is able to passively absorb a part of the energy flowing through her. This wakes her up immediately. When she opens her eyes, she sees the dying hunter laying on top of her, she quickly uses her just refilled mana pool to heal him, but is too shaken by her sudden awakening to notice the ease with which she healed the hunter.

She pushes the hunter to the side and looks around. Every other members of the Tribe present when the stone exploded are no more than skeletons with only bits of burned flesh left on them. Save for the hunter lying on top of her, protected enough by the Huntsman’s body to at least survive the direct blast, he would still die in the following seconds without her help, the bones of his back open to the air. She barely registers that she’s performing a small miracle by saving his life as injured as he is.

She notices a strange shadow on the ground where the explosion seems to have originated. Perfectly in the center of the shadowy area, there are a few strange fragments of stone. Still off and not fully understanding the situation, the Sister does not notice the impossibility of the situation. However she senses that those stone’s shards hold power in them and that they are actually absorbing Nature’s energy from the air. She grabs the bits and stores them in the purse she has on her waist.

Sensing that the ominous presence is gone and that they have succeeded in clearing the monsters’ nest, she drags the last hunter back to where they fought the bears. There she easily heals the few tribesmen still alive. This time she notices how easy it is for her to heal people now. This makes her want to try something different.

She goes near the Chief’s body and tries to heal him. Deep down she knows it is hopeless, the injuries are too severe, and he has been dead since far too long, nonetheless she tries, pouring her mana again and again into the dead corpse. Then comes a time when she can sense the shards in her purse emanating mana, she reaches for them and brings them closer to her face. She looks attentively at them and senses a strange compulsion in her stomach.

Coming from where she stores the Nature’s energy in her body she feels a craving for those shards. Not knowing and even less understanding what happened to her earlier, she lets her new instincts and the growing craving and hunger in her take control of her body. She brings the shards to her mouth and, unlike the Gatherer earlier, she does not bite at them, instead she swallows them whole ignoring the sharp edges. At this moment a burning sensation runs through her whole body.

A feeling of overflowing energy comes from the shards the Sister just swallowed and power rushes through her body, it collides with the energy stored in her stomach and results in powerful waves of energy flowing through her entire body, ravaging and reconstructing it in an endless cycle of unfathomable suffering. The Sister is experiencing a feeling of pain like she never ever felt before, breaking down and rebuilding, again and again, her spirit, as well as her body.

The sole thing she can hang on to, to save part of her mind, is the love she feels for the Chief. So she focuses all of her will on her wish to save him, to bring him back to life, despite the fact that he is already beyond saving and that she herself is actually dying. But when her body and her mind are about to disappear for good in the whirl of energy her body contains, something else changes in her. The raging flow of energies starts to settle down. Slowly, little by little, the whirl loses its speed and the Sister begins to regain part of her lost consciousness.

But an idea reigns in her mind. The idea that she has to save her mate. She needs to do it. It is the only purpose of her existence. This idea is the only thing that’s allowing her to survive and following this obsessive thought, she resumes pouring her mana into the Chief’s lifeless body. She pours it into him again and again. Defying the common sense she uses quantities of energy unheard of till this moment, amounts of mana that will not be seen again for several more millennia. The unique combination of the Sister’s unwavering will to save her mate, her raw yet great talent for mana manipulation and of the shards of the first dungeon core to ever exist on this world creates an unpredictable result.

In a big flash of greenish light a not insignificant amount of her considerable mana leaves her body and enters the corpse of the Chief. The dead body reacts violently to the sudden influx of this strange and foreign energy. All his muscles are shaking, making the body look like it is struggling against invisible restraints. Seeing the body of her love moving again, even if incoherently, only serves to strengthen the will of the Sister and encourages her to pour even more mana into the process. If the body moves it means it is not dead, right?

Soon the body stops moving and settles peacefully on the ground. It suddenly opens its eyes. But, contrary to what the Sister expects, there is a strange light in the eyes of her mate. A light that was not there before, a light the same greenish color of the unnatural energy she used to bring him back to life. What seems to be the Chief raises its upper body and sits up in a straight and stiff movement. The Sister stretches her arm and touches the cold shoulder of the result of her actions. It turns its head in a slow movement to look at her and then she can see what she has truly done. The Sister understands what her beloved mate is now, because of her foolishness.

Tears start to flow on her cheek as she raises herself back to her feet. She holds out her hand to the thing and, when it grabs it, she leads it out of the cave and walks in the opposite direction from the Tribe’s valley. She walks in unending sorrow with the thing that was her love. No members of the Tribe would ever see them again.

The handful of Tribesmen witnessing this event go back home instead of following their previous leaders. After having checked the inside of the cave, of course. They report to the rest of the Tribe’s Council that the monsters’ nest is destroyed and that the other tribesmen will never come back. They will seldom talk about what they saw the Sister do, and only with great sadness in their voices and tears in their eyes.

Thousands of years later, when the Tribe would no longer be and its descendants would be called Humans, the story of the Sister being long forgotten to them, she would still walk the world, crying and holding the hand of her dead mate as its lifeless body would walk by her side. They would travel all kinds of lands, leaving behind them a trail of death and corruption that nature would need decades to overcome. And despite the danger that they would represent, they would wander in peace as nothing would be able to block their path. No great army, no mighty warriors, no powerful mages would be able to lay a finger on those forsaken beings.

They would be known as The Crying Death and as her Cursed Love and everybody would learn to flee at the news of their approach.

-

“But there is something else that happened. Something that nobody saw.” The old Pixy is starting to feel the fatigue of telling this story to the Pixies of every age gathered in front of him. Countless of them already know the story, but they still come to listen to him when he tells it, making lights magically dance in his hands to reproduce the scene he is describing.

“If we go back to the moment where the Sister’s body was torn to pieces and reconstructed again and again and if we look closely at the right spot we can see it. There is a small bubble of flesh being expelled, it is just as big as a bird head. But this little piece of flesh is of capital importance as it contains the unborn child of the woman. Indeed, the woman was pregnant and her mate was the father of the child.

“The child is too young to survive and is changed by the mana that flew through it. It should not have survived, but it still ultimately managed to do so, sustained by the mana. It is unable to grow as parts of the information contained in every living being are lost to it or too heavily corrupted to be of use, only the smaller splinters of the core are sustaining it.

“A few days later a bug comes near the child. An injured princess bee having lost the fight for its hive and fleeing for its life. Anyway, this bug is the first living being to approach the child in its flesh bubble and as it comes near it, probably in hope of sustenance, the bug succumbs to its injuries on top of the child. This allows the child to absorb the information from the bug and to incorporate them into its broken pattern. Still sustained by the mana from the shattered dungeon core this child is now able to finish its twisted development and to come out of the bubble of flesh protecting, but also entrapping it.

“This new being is the first of her kind, for it is a she. She has the memories and the knowledge of all her parents, all of them. The woman that bore her for a few weeks, the man that provided the seed, the dungeon that changed her and lastly the bee that provided her with what she was lacking to be born. Hence she knows that her strange allure makes her unique in the world.

“She leaves the cursed place of her birth and wanders the world in search of a place to live. Living in the solitude of her condition and she spies on the slowly developing cultures of sapient beings and learns from them. She craves for companionship, but is unable to find one. Until one day, five hundred years after her birth, flying in the direction of a strange burst of mana, she finds another being like the stone that started all of this story. Knowing the nature of this strange being of energy and innate matter she quickly understands that she is extremely lucky, for she just found a newborn Dungeon.

“This Pixy, for she is a Pixy, the first of us to be precise, ancestor to us all, managed to form the first bond between a Pixy and a Dungeon. She raised it to be a loving and caring creature and guided it to build this island where we are living now. Then, together, they managed to bring to life new generations of Pixies.

“They put in place the duty that falls to us all. We are to find newborn Dungeons and help them grow. Our sacred duty to our Mother and our Father is to ensure that those Dungeons do not act like the first of their kind. We are to protect them against themselves and help them in all the ways we can.

“Almost thirty thousands years ago, our Mother and the Dungeon, our Father, went to sleep, and we are still waiting for them to awake. You can all feel for yourself that they are still alive and still loving us.”

When the old Pixy ends his story he flies away to rest and leaves the other elders with the annoying task of answering the youngs’ unending questions.