The three debated how they would carry the pot and the metal tripod. Aside from it, Nefaaya had many other things that she thought she might need on this journey. She tried to remember all the things that her father told her when he kept talking about his journey. She wished that she had listened more carefully.

"The houses in the lower west of the village weren't that badly hurt," Ettran said. "This is where I managed to find these clothes."

Nefaaya scanned him and nodded. When he saw her do it, he made a face that Nefaaya wasn't quite sure how she would explain. The boy left the house, the two glanced at one another and immediately kept pace with Ettran.

Renaeril sneezed. The wind kept bringing them the smell of ash. From here she could see the forest, the fumes had stopped from further developing. Nefaaya hoped that it would stop sooner

They descended the stone stairs and passed broken houses and leafless trees with smoke still rising from the remaining embers.

This path was the one close to the huge tree where Renaeril and her used to play. She wondered what happened to the tree and to the glade that Renaeril kept rebuilding when she kept destroying it.

Ruins sprawled on either side of the dirt road. She had little to no memory of this part of the village despite being here yesterday as she collected the remains of the villagers.

The wind kept blowing at them. At this time of the year, the terraces of wheat that covered almost half of the village were nowhere to be seen. There's nothing left but the burned ground where it used to be. Anyone would think that it was a drought, but the blackness left by the fire would let them think otherwise. She wondered absentmindedly if the small field that Nefri kept behind their house jad suffered the same.

They descended a stair and reached a platform surrounded by houses with no scratch of what had happened to the rest of the village. Instead the houses was marked by the passing of time: green lichens growing from stone walls, broken windows and cobwebs. She felt envious and at the same time rageful.

She kept looking around, what she was trying to find she didn't know. Perhaps she was expecting people, a survivor even. But as she observed the buildings closely she realized that this part of the village had been abandoned for a long time.

"Where are all the people in this place?"

Ettran's face darkened as he shook his head, "the people who used to live in those houses were all gone."

"Why?" She asked as she kept glancing around. Wooden windows stood open, hitting on the wall as the wind kept blowing on it.

"You know about your father being a traveler, yes?"

She nodded.

"Well there's a tradition, more like a law, that no one was allowed to leave this village. The same rule works in the other villages on the outskirts of the Kingdom, especially those who live close to the Adral mountain."

Renaeril sighed, "the villagers are all obsessed with this concept that they are the descendents of the Fenrain and that they must stay in the place where the Adrina'lanar used to be."

Ettran nodded on him

"Do they forbid not going back?" She asked. It's the same as blood purity. Where nobility in the past would rather marry one another than be married off to another person outside of the Royal House. I wonder if this is how the aristocracy of this world works.

He shook his head, "no, no one forbid them to go back but they would be considered as an Asindae or someone who's not part of the village... an outcast. That was the same for your Mother. Your mother left this village to study and had later become a Mage in the war 10 years ago. While your father, Master Learo, left the village in order to become a caravan knight. When they returned here to settle everyone treated them... as if they're a foreign creature. It's also the reason why they don't like you. Your parents were considered traitors. One's the law was broken it cannot be remade again."

He said sadly and looked at her, "that's why when she said about the glint that caused this tragedy no one believed or listened to her aside from Reina. Well, Reina was someone that she had managed to save from slavery. And brought back to this village herself. So she was thankful."

Nefaaya tried to process all the information in her mind as she found herself stopping before the warehouse that Ettran talked about.

Asindae? Outcast... that's why I saw no one visiting us aside from Renaeril's mother. The reason why they kept looking at father with indifference.

"What about the people who live here?"

He shook his head, "they just left... carrying their wagon. No one knows what happened."

There's a pathway made of rocks that leads to an old wooden wooden door. Ettran pushed the door open. The dust hiding inside the house burst out as if in a hurry to be outside. Nefaaya turned away and started coughing at the intensity of the dust on her way.

"That dust was so bad," Renaeril said.

"I have never been in this place for a long time," Ettran said as he covered his nose.

The house was not something you could call a house but more of a storage room.

"What do we need?" Renaeril said.

"If our goal was to find the closest village then we need at least a bag to carry those cooking utensils and blankets that could be used as a cloak in the day and something to sleep during the night. We would be doing lots of camping from here on," she said as she tried to remember all her father said about what she should bring in camping.

She flickered his eyes back at Ettran, "we need a new cloth to wrap on that wound of yours. We cannot risk it getting infected."

The boy touched the cloth wrapped around the half of his face and nodded as if he too was thinking about it.

"We have a knife but I think we need two more," she said.

The two looked at her.

"For bandits," she said.

Renaeril agreed. Ettran scoffed and said that a kitchen knife would not help them if a group of bandits would attack them.

"I would just kill myself," he said.

"Why?" Renaeril said.

"It's better than being a slave."

In the end, what they managed to get was three bags and three blanket rolls. It was decided that Renaeril would carry the steel tripod while Nefaaya was the pot because the two of them are much taller than Ettran.

The day drifted to afternoon. There were no clouds above, the sky was revealed in warm blue. Birds flew above and other creatures that she cannot name. The three checked on their things and shouldered their bags. Nefaaya grunted on the weight of the pot.

They started descending the stairs that led to the foot of the hill. And as they did, the three kept glancing back to the village, as if expecting that only if they looked closely, the village that they remember would suddenly appear before them. But those things don't happen even if this world has some weird things that weren't possible in her world.

She had taken the last step out of the village. Below, the sprawling lands were flat and stretched as far as she could see, straight and strange, covered in fields of small grasses and some random trees rising somewhere in the flat lands.

Nefaaya felt uneasy and uncertain, she hadn't thought that she would leave this village in this kind of situation. She had always believed that she would left the family when she reached eighteen. The same age when she left her family in her previous world.

She chuckled. What causes her to be uncertain, in her previous life she had been living alone for almost ten years. What should she worry about? She was supposed to be tough, teachers like her should be someone who can be versatile at all times.

She shouldered her bag. And wondered how long before they would see the village once again. She shook her head and glanced once more, expecting to see Nefri and Learo waving her goodbye. But there was nothing, only the hills and its crumbling ruins.

Nefaaya turned to where the boys were. Learo. She wondered what would happen if her father found this village in this situation. Would he be able to find the letter that she left for him?

This world still had no clear sense of communication... She thought. Maybe I could get to him first before he could get here.

As she thought of him, Nefaaya found herself stopping midway as she realized that meeting Learo was something that she hadn't considered before. Well, Ettran was sure that his uncle would let us stay but what if he wouldn't...

The journey first started smoothly but that didn't last more than an hour when the three realized that this landscape wasn't as goo as it seems. There are less trees than grass in this flatlands. When the sun reached its peak, they were left with no choice but to cover their heads with nothing but their hands.

Nefaaya cursed.

The two turned abruptly at her when they heard it. She threw her bag and immediately searched for the blanket that she folded earlier.

"We would die of heat stroke" she said as she put the blanket over her head. The two imitate her before they resume their journey.

She thought that having this dusty blanket over her head was much better than having nothing at all. She didn't know how long they had to travel in this sprawling flat lands, but based on what she could see on the horizon, it would take a long time.

On the course of their journey that afternoon, Nefaaya only looked back once. And when she did, she couldn't see the village's hill. She figured out that this land was slowly sloping downwards. How come no one built houses here was something that puzzled her. Because in her world this kind of land was a necessity.

She later realized why it was when they ran out of water. Despite the vastness of this land, there was little to no natural water source in this land aside from small ponds and shallow streams that they had passed.

Slowly but certain, the world around her turned into twilight and as it did Nefaaya realized the gravity of their decision. This far in the village that used sheltered them, they were left to attend to themselves. She realized that it was all up to them to survive.

Nefaaya looked at Renaeril, despite the fact that he had come from the same world where she had been, he was acting more of a child who had been born in this world. Nefaaya also realized that the longer she was in this body the more she acted and became a child herself. The thought scared her.

Around her the wind was blowing wildly. Ettran had spotted a dead tree and decided to spend the night there.

The truth was Nefaaya had been slowly forgetting her world. Sometimes a thought about Newton's Law or the things she used to teach crossed her mind and it would have taken almost a minute before she could remember what it was. There was also the time that she was forgetting the Alphabet of her world and its language. It was as if she was having her own Alzheimer's.

The uneasiness brought by oblivion scared her.