Some time passed between them in silence, and Aelfric got a very drawn, exhausted look.
It was clear that he was thinking about something very difficult.
When he spoke again, his voice was very low.
“When I was leaving the quarantine zone of Annarrow, I—”
Aelfric looked away, at the wall.
“I—” She saw one of his hands briefly tense against his trousers. “I made a miscalculation.”
He was silent for a moment before he quietly continued.
“I encountered that abomination when it was in the process of consuming a party of high-level adventurers. It was foolish for me to get involved, but I thought—” He stopped short and was silent for several seconds. “I thought that I might have saved one of them.”
The event had cut him keenly, she could see that, far beyond the awful physical wounds he had carried away from it, and they had been such that they would have ended him if she had not intervened.
“Aelfric—” she began gently. She wanted to tell him that he did not need to tell her, he did not need to tell her if it hurt him this much to even speak about it. It looked like he was reexperiencing the trauma as he spoke.
But he cut her off.
“I was wrong,” he said bitterly. “It took all of them, and then it came for me.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Even after all this time, I’m still such a fool.” He laughed, and the sound was raspy and thin, the sort of laugh that dances at the edge of agonized tears.
This time, she moved without thinking about it. She leaned across the space between them and covered both of his hands with her own.
“Stop,” she said with more force. “You don’t have to tell me this. You’re hurting yourself.”
He moved back slightly in surprise, but then he froze. He trembled briefly under her hands, tense and conflicted, but then he closed his eyes and sat back in his chair so hard that it creaked. He leaned his head back and was very still.
He sat that way for a very long time. Demi kept her hands on his, and over time, gently began stroking the backs of his hands. It was a simple movement, calm and sure, but delicate, like stroking the fur of a wary animal.
Little by little, he relaxed.
Who knows how long he’s been like this, Demi thought to herself as she watched him wistfully. Strung so tightly it seems he might break under the strain of it.
Finally, he sat back up. In that instant, their eyes met, if only for a moment. He gave her an unguarded look: hard, intense, difficult, painful. It was terrible, terrifying, and yet somehow splendid, true and real and wonderful. It struck her straight through the heart and she smiled at him, because that was what she wanted to do.
He was the one who looked away.
“I didn’t mean to come here,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to go anywhere at all. But something happened,” he said, shaking his head. “Something happened in the last moment, when I knew that everything was over.” He closed his eyes. “I saw something. And then I saw nothing. And then I was here,” he said, indicating the bed with a brief wave of his hand.
He sighed again and then dryly admitted, “I thought that I had died.”
“Really?” Demi asked, tilting her head to the side, perplexed.
“This place was so much like paradise, I was willing to believe that I actually had died.” He laughed again, and while it remained dry, it wasn’t as painful as it had been before. “Then I thought I had maybe skipped through time and realities to find myself in a different place from where I had started. It was so peaceful here, warm, nostalgic.” He shook his head. “It was a world that I hadn’t seen in centuries—” He stopped, then corrected himself. “It was a world I had never seen, honestly, at least, not that I remember. I was lulled into a state of ease and comfort. I was somehow alive after I had been certain I was dead, and this place was so good—I told myself that I had done enough, that it was all right if I rested here. And despite having infected me, that thing never came.”
“If it had, I would have unmade it then and there,” she declared, because this, she felt, was an unquestionable truth of the world.
This brought a rare smile to his face.
“I appreciate that,” he said wryly.
Her cheeks got very pink and she covered them with her fingers, ducking her head. A smile so rare was very potent. She squirmed in place.
But then he continued.
“And I couldn’t keep from watching you,” he said, words that would have surely set any young lady’s heart to pitter-pat, if he hadn’t sounded so exasperated. “You were so inexplicable that I couldn’t help myself. After the first day, it became clear to me that I had somehow managed to accidentally fulfill my initial mission. If there was a goddess on this planet, then it was certainly you,” he said, pointing at her as if indicating a criminal in a courtroom drama. He shrugged. “I decided to stay. I had no idea where I was, but I was absolutely certain that there was no possible way that I was anywhere near any place I had ever been in my entire life. I had somehow found the goddess I had been looking for, and she had invited me to stay in her house. At first I stayed close to you because I had a lingering fear that the invader might still attack, even here. You are very small, and look as if a strong breeze might carry you away,” he pointed out frankly. It did not sound entirely like a compliment. “I doubted you would last even a minute against such a thing.” Here he laughed again, and it sounded both exhausted and incredulous. “What an idiot I was. But after it became clear that the invader wasn’t coming, I kept watching you because you were always doing absolutely absurd things.”
“High praise,” Demi laughed wryly. “I was just doing whatever it was that I thought I ought to be doing,” she admitted. “It’s not as if Hollyhope gave me much direction. She just told me to go and ‘do farming things,’ so that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“I have a feeling that that’s the reason why some of this information was kept from you,” Aelfric said with a slight move of his body. Demi recognized it as his shrug. He made a quiet, disgruntled noise. “The more I observed you, the more I became certain of it. Your personality is such that the moment you heard that the blightwood was the main source of troubles to the people around you, you would have certainly gone charging directly into it, even at level one.”
Well, I can’t really disagree with that, Demi reflected weakly. I guess that’s why all of the history books I read started becoming very vague at around a hundred years ago. There was nothing much about current events so I wouldn’t suss out what was going on and then get myself into trouble that I couldn’t get out of.
He had her to the last atom.
He closed his eyes again and his brows drew together. When he spoke, his tone was unmistakably incredulous. “None of us, the goddess included, could have imagined that you would deal with the blightwood in the way that you did. Everything you did contradicts the logic of this world. You have brought new logic with you, and it is already having an effect on the fabric of reality.”
“I still don’t fully understand what that means,” Demi said honestly. “The logic of this world.”
Aelfric shook his head. “No one understands it fully,” he admitted. “Not even me. I doubt even the resident divine administrators completely understand the logic of this world and how it functions. I just have some perspective on the subject.”
That wasn’t really what she meant. Although she did want to understand what “the logic of this world” in particular might entail, because it was bound to be useful, given that this was the world that they found themselves in, what she really wanted to know was what the word “logic” meant when he used it in that context. She had a vague sense of it due to her understanding of the general definition of the word and could make inferences based on how and when he used it, but there was certainly a clearer definition that simply escaped her.
But he continued speaking before she had a chance to ask him exactly what he meant, and revealed some devastating information that pushed the thought from her mind. “The invaders have been attempting to terraform this planet for the last hundred years, primarily through biological means.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, they have been largely successful. If we don’t begin to reverse the process soon, it may become impossible to restore this place to the way it was before.”
“A runaway climactic change,” Demi murmured to herself. It had happened in her own world multiple times in the geologic past, and every single time it had resulted in— “A global extinction event,” she finished, covering her mouth with her hands. “If we can’t stop this from happening, then most of the life on this planet will die.”
“Yes,” Aelfric agreed grimly. “That is what will happen. This place will become unrecognizable, a hellscape for all but the creatures that came through the rip, and those that they have changed.”
“Those that they have changed?” Demi asked hesitantly, then she balled both of her hands into fists. “That parasite!” she realized. “If I hadn’t been there to pull that parasite off of you—”
“I would have changed,” he confirmed, his brows drawing together. He paused for a moment, then said, “The same has already happened to most of the people on this planet.”
This revelation caused Demi to lean back hard against the bed.
“Most of the people—” she echoed in a whisper.