Testimony Of Old

The first two days were uninteresting and quiet. During any rest, Abi, as I have taken to calling her simply because it pisses her off, keeps trying to spar with me. I learned my lesson after the first time – she's a monster who doesn't have any idea how to hold back.

Dom mainly sticks to informing us about the woods. From his account as a child, it seems the ancients cursed the forest. Ever since, no one has dared to trudge through it – no one save Domnis in his youth, foolishness to prove his worth. Evidently, he barely made it out alive, yet the details escape him as if a veil falls on his mind when he directs his thoughts back to those few days within the cacophony of evil.

Rose makes no attempt to talk to us any more than necessary while taking extra precautions to avoid even looking in my direction. For whatever reason, it seems the whole ordeal with Mimi weighs on her heavily.

When night rolls around again and sleep threatens to take hold, I hear someone escaping into the woods. When I follow them, I find Dom resting on a peak overlooking the forest proper, where we are to enter tomorrow.

I take a seat next to Dom and he doesn't even acknowledge me for a long time. In comfortable silence, we stare into the void of black night with only the light of the moon and stars to accompany us. Thirty minutes pass before a question finally escapes my lips, one I’ve kept to myself much longer than I thought I could ever bear.

“Where is the One King during all of this?”

Dom shifts his gaze sidelong toward me before resuming his previous fixation on the forest.

“Where indeed?” he muses and lets the question weigh heavily on the silence between us. "He is a coward, I would say. Hiding away in his ivory tower, enjoying another war." Disdain oozes with every word from Dom's mouth.

"I don't believe so," I tell him. "Can you imagine such a long life? The way you would become numb to living? The way no life would seem to carry any meaning? It's a saddening thing, methinks."

Dom stares at me for a moment – perhaps he had never given it so much thought. Mayhap his experiences never gave him the opportunity to do so. This world doesn't strike me as one in which such questions would even be thought to be asked.

"What if it's his own fear? That perhaps he’s too scared to come out of his shelter, to chance ruin upon himself as he is too used to longevity?"

"Maybe…I don't know. When you think about it, no matter his fear, he has to love this world of his. Millennium has passed and he hasn't been corrupted for power? There are no records of him even attempting to do so. Perhaps he has grown weary of this world now, but in the beginning, it makes no sense for him to have avoided the normal struggle of a living being’s need for power, unless he truly cared about this world."

Dom begins to look misty-eyed before turning away from me. He and I exchanged no further words, instead choosing to bask in a more complicated silence than I could fathom.

As the moon rises higher in the night sky, Dom tells me to get some rest, and I oblige him. Walking away from that aged man, his form seeming tiny and exhausted.