The stranger’s words cut short with an audible gasp of surprise. Lunafreya’s own breath caught, too. Blood should have been pooling below her arm, but the flow had already stopped. Instead, the gaping wound emitted a sickly purple glow, along with telltale black flecks. The skin closed over before their very eyes.
“What the hell just happened?” the stranger demanded, voice suddenly ripe with mistrust.
Lunafreya could hardly blame the woman. They’d both seen black flecks like that before. The sight of them could only lead to one line of thought: Miasma. Daemons. Suddenly Lunafreya was against the ground, the barrel of a pistol hard against her cheek.
“What are you? Some kind of monster?”
After what she’d observed of her own body, Lunafreya found it difficult to argue otherwise. Her silence brought a harsh jab of the gun.
“I asked you a question. What the hell are you? Answer me!”
Lunafreya didn’t know what to say. But if she failed to speak at all, her fate was apparent.
“I’m . . . ”
She trailed off, unsure how to continue. Her mind was muddled. And then the feel of cold metal was gone, and she heard the thump of a body hitting the hard surface of the road. Lunafreya hurried to right herself.
“Miss? Are you all right?”
The stranger had clearly been full of murderous rage. Now she was crumpled on the ground, body limp. Lunafreya put a hand to the woman’s throat and found a stable pulse. She removed the woman’s goggles and saw slight twitches of movement under her eyelids.
The stranger must have fainted from the hits she’d taken during the fight. Lunafreya loosened the collar of the woman’s jacket, taking care not to jar her body.
She spread a hand, thinking to ease the stranger’s discomfort with her powers as Oracle, then hesitated. The way she’d brought down the daemon―what was that power? It was bizarre and unsettling. What if it happened again now? Did she still have her powers of healing at all?
Lunafreya looked down at the palms of her hands. She ran her gaze along her arms. The gouges in her flesh had been deep, but now not even a scar remained. The wounds had healed over so cleanly it was as if they’d never been there at all. She had encountered no curative power like it before. In fact, she hesitated to think of it as curative at all. There had been those awful black particles, clustered over the site of the wound. Could they truly be what she thought they were?
Lunafreya had no answers. And one mystery still troubled her above all others.
“Why am I alive?” she wondered to herself again.
In that darkness that was not night, Lunafreya’s hopes, too, seemed bleak.
The young woman was a walking armory. Lunafreya was half disturbed and half amazed. When she unfastened the stranger’s jacket, intending to check her over for wounds in need of attention, she found an astonishing amount of weaponry. Her eyes involuntarily darted over it all: spare magazines, several knives she could only assume were meant for throwing, grenades hooked to a belt, and numerous cylindrical containers of varied sizes, whose purpose Lunafreya could not begin to fathom. On the woman’s shoulders were several holsters, a gun carefully secured in each.
Given the stranger’s tone before fainting, confiscating the weapons seemed the reasonable precaution to take. Lunafreya was not anxious to find a gun pressed to her head again. But the quantity of weapons and munitions posed a problem. Even if she were to take them, where would she hide them all?
In the end, she resigned herself to not tampering with the stranger’s belongings. She might find herself staring down a barrel once more, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
Eventually, the stranger woke. Her first action was predictable: she quickly distanced herself from Lunafreya and readied one of her many guns.
“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” she demanded.
The fact that she hadn’t shot first and asked questions later was promising. She had even asked for Lunafreya’s name. There seemed to be a small glimmer of hope.
“My name is Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.”
The stranger continued to glare at her, but Lunafreya noticed a small, uncertain shift in her gaze.
“That’s . . . That’s the name of the Oracle. The one who’s been dead for ten years.”
So I did, in fact, die, Lunafreya thought. But aloud, she found herself questioning the claim.
“A decade ago?” she asked.
The question reminded her of another pressing uncertainty. She withdrew from her dress the bit of newspaper from earlier, unfolded and smoothed it out, then held it aloft.
“Please tell me, do you know anything about this?”
Perhaps the young woman could shed some light on the article’s contents. Gun still leveled, she approached close enough to snatch the paper from Lunafreya’s hands, then stepped back and studied it warily.
“Weird thing to ask,” she muttered. Then, “Geez. Weird thing to carry around, too. If they’re saying the king’s been gone for three years, this must be, what . . . six or seven years old?”
“The king is gone?” Lunafreya’s thoughts whirled. Noctis, missing? How? Why?
The stranger continued, “Yeah. Nobody’s seen a trace of him for a solid decade.”
Lunafreya felt herself grow dizzy, on the verge of fainting from this new revelation. It seemed impossible. Her last memory was of Altissia. The covenant with Leviathan. She’d been prepared to sacrifice her life that the king might receive the Tidemother’s blessing. Lunafreya had already realized the weakness in her body. She knew the ritual would mean the end for her, even had Ardyn Izunia not come with dagger in hand.
But death had not mattered. She’d opened the way for the future of their star. The king would dispel the darkness that plagued Eos. The promise would be fulfilled.
But now . . .
She looked up. Darkness shrouded the sky. This was not the black of night. It was sinister. Ominous. What had happened to their world?
The rider’s patience was wearing thin. “Are you really the Oracle?” she demanded. “Or are you some daemon posing as a human? If you’re really who and what you say you are, give me some proof.”
“I do not know that I have any,” Lunafreya responded.
She pressed a hand to the scar in her flank. Even over the cloth of her garments, it was easy to feel the raised flesh. There was no pain from the wound, though it seemed so recent in memory. If this wasn’t the scar from her stabbing, what was it?
“I don’t know anything,” Lunafreya confessed. “Why I’m here, what this power is, or why I’m alive.”
She cupped her hands and covered her face. Just one answer. That was all she wanted. But she’d received nothing. No one could explain what was going on.