[Valerianne Yul]

“Oh! June! You’re alive.” I sat back down, trying to return to the deep serenity of calmness, breathing in and out as slowly as I could. I was still trying to process Nox’s final letter to me. She had given up trying. She wanted to stop the universe from cooling, whatever that meant. She wanted to help mortals, in her own weird, highly questionable, murderous way and had failed miserably, making things far worse than they had ever been.

“Yeppers. Got far enough from the mech, then realised that none of this is an illusion.” June muttered, sounding very annoyed. “Far too much of an elaborate trick to play on a fox over a stolen melon. Also, I checked my status. I’m a level 36 Shadowmancer. Last time I checked myself I was level 1 Shadowmancer. How in the hell did I get 35 levels? What have I done? What have I forgotten? What is this [Bond]: Reiu soul-debt contract thing?”

“Don’t come close to me and don’t touch me, please,” I said.

“Eh?”

“I’m afflicted with a Curse of Misfortune caused by the Oggberry wine. Any physical interaction with me is very inadvisable.” I said.

“Uh-huh.” June squinted. “You sound pretty crazy, you know. Also, your voice… it’s a bit different. And your eyes aren’t as purple now… they’re a touch more blue. What’s up with that?”

“Stop pacing around, sit down and listen. I will tell you everything I know. You can believe my story or you can think that I’m insane. It doesn’t really matter. We’re stuck in this together, a level 36 Shadowmancer and a Level 2 Healer."

"Right." June agreed.

"I don’t know everything," I admitted. "Nox might have lied to me. You might have lied to me. This is just a story from a farmer girl who dreamed of being an adventurer. A girl that’s been misled by those she had trusted the most.”

June nodded.

“A long, long time ago, there was a very selfish Goddess. Her name was Nox, or the All-mother as the dryads called her. She had murdered all of the other Gods, forged this moon, devoured the light of day, created the voidstar, made the Rewards System, and gave birth to nature spirits…” I began.

When I started recounting recent events, June listened patiently, stretching periodically to prevent herself falling asleep.

I finished by reading the final Quest letter of Nox to June.

“So. This Nox... ghost thing is sleeping inside of you now,” June muttered when I was done. “Losing me is too painful for her to endure? She sounds like a little teenager who lost her first love or something. Not like an ancient divine entity or whatever.”

“Well,” I nodded. “You’re the only person she ever cared for in a very long time, it seems. If I understand it correctly from her letter, selfishness is the natural flaw of every Necromancer - the ultimate goal of which is the continuous preservation of self and rejection of human connections. Maybe by finally admitting that she cares about you she stopped thinking just about herself and lost her consciousness, went to sleep permanently. I have no clue whatsoever how to wake her up. I’m not a Necromancer and I never will be.”

“I see,” June said, biting her lip.

“I guess it’s just you and me now, buried under Gaia knows how much sand, Gaia knows how far away from Europa and no divine assistance from Nox.” I sighed.

“Hrm. You control this mech thing right? Start digging us out! Seems like we’re wasting time conversing while the air in here is running out. You have a pure White aura, right? The purest in the world, designed by the Dryads. Therefore, the Curse of Misfortune should not be affecting you as much as Nox. Sneaky-ass tree-mongers planned all of this, it seems like. I do wonder if the Dryads planned for us to get to Magraterra or if that’s just Sextants doing what Sextants do, trying to colonize continents or whatever.”

I nodded, walked to the center of the cabin, put on the other three control rings and started to move the mech, pretending to swim up, trying to dig us out with its enormous hands and feet.

“What’s the plan… after you unbury us?” June asked. “Without Nox we can’t find these ancient weapons or whatever. Barely any meat left in this food preservation box too.”

“We’re going back to the Sextant camp.” I told her.

“Uhh… How are we even going to find it?” June inquired. “I didn’t see shit when I was running around the desert. Tons of white sand though. So much freaking sand. I don’t like sand. I have sand in my everything now. Bleh.”

“While I was meditating I noticed that the mech was pulling me in a certain direction. Not physically… more like mentally. It wants to go somewhere. I think that it’s designed to return to base camp, if it's lost. Probably some sort of rune in the walls doing that.”

“Mmmmkay and once we get there... then what?”

“We have an advantage over the Sextants.” I answered. “They don’t know that our collars don’t work. Nox broke both of them. I didn’t feel like obeying their commands at all and the runes on yours are blackened and cracked and you can use Shadowmancy now. We have a mech with a gun. I think we can take them by surprise. It’s our best chance anyway.”

“Gotcha.” June nodded. “I can work with this. So healer girl, you're okay with murdering Sextants?”

“Not really.” I said. “I’m not a supreme murderhobo like Nox.”

June made a “Pfffff!” noise at me. She was clearly fine with Sextant murder.

“You’ll be the one doing the murdering,” I told her. “I’m the driver, you’re the gunner.”

The mech emerged back into the desert. The storm wall had passed while I told June about my life, her and Nox. The voidstar was slowly setting and the desert became shaded in pink and orange tones of evening. I started to march the machine towards where it was being pulled to. I hoped that this was the Sextant camp and not some ancient ruin from wherever the Sextants found these damn things.

After a bit of walking I had arrived at the possibility that I was able to move, while not moving the mech. It took a very specific way of thinking about not moving while moving! I presumed that Nox had designed these machines for her human followers, so it stood to reason that she didn’t pilot these herself.

There was no Sextant camp in sight, only endless desert. After taking several bathroom breaks and having eaten all of the available rations of meat with June, I realised that I was walking for far too long already. Continuously casting heal on myself was erasing my tiredness. The evening didn’t seem to fade away, either. It seemed that the moon rotated far, far slower than Europa.

I saw something shining in the distance. It couldn’t have been the camp. It was something else. I knew that I should have turned around, but I was curious and kept on walking. The shining thing increased in size, becoming enormous crystalline mountains.

“Oh wowza.” June said. “This is some magical looking shit.”

The mountains didn’t look natural. They looked like enormous architectural masterpieces, gargantuan cathedrals of glass, the crystal formations interlocked, intertwined in various whimsical, bewildering ways.

I kept on walking, amazed and bedazzled by the surreal beauty of this place. I didn’t know why the mech had led me here, but I guessed that this was just my luck or lack thereof that drove me here.

I suddenly noticed that the structures… the mountains weren’t static, they were moving! Enormous crystalline legs supported the cathedrals of glass, slowly and meticulously stepping through the white sand. The setting light-ring broke through them, casting brilliant, dancing rainbows all over the desert as they ponderously moved towards me.

I realised that the mountains were encircling me, crawling towards me from three directions.

“Uhhhh… this isn’t good.” June whispered.

I nodded. Mountains weren’t supposed to have legs.