Clarisse woke up first that morning, opening her eyes to a wistful, chilly breeze running past the mouth of the mine. A shiver ran up her neck as she tried to get up, preferring the warmth of their blankets much more over the weather outside. A subtle weight above her head reminded her of Nikolas sleeping beside her.

  Keeping herself curled around his arm, the redhead gradually shifted to glance at his eyes. After confirming they were still closed, she let herself sink into the blankets again. Her mind wandered back to the dream she had just seen, uncomfortably mulling over his circumstances. A laboratory where children were experimented on… it seemed outlandishly cruel to her, even during the war. Each dream she had seen so far only confirmed why Nikolas remained so distant, so jaded, why he was always on edge. It made the altruistic facet of his kindness seem that much more suspicious. Even after their previous discussion, she had her doubts regarding his true motivations.

  Unconsciously, she gripped his arm tighter. It was hard to get used to the warmth of flesh under cloth, yet with no pulse or noticeable movements. Resting her cheek against his shoulder, she closed her eyes and let out a complicated sigh, feeling both admiration and pity for him as time idly passed them by.

  When Nikolas woke up, it was impossible to tell, but eventually he glanced down at Clarisse with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Morning, firefly. Feeling clingy today?”

  “N-Nik!” Clarisse almost jumped out of her skin, letting go of his arm and pushing him away in panic. “Only my Dad called me by that name…” she protested with flushed cheeks.

  “Yeah? I saw him… The resemblance is definitely there.” Nikolas chuckled, pushing the harrowing jealousy he felt for her far behind the facade of his mask. “Did you want to rest for a little longer?”

  “Actually, I’m feeling hungry. We should get going.” Clarisse groaned, stretching her limbs. Her back ached after sleeping in that awkward posture, but she only had herself to blame for that.

  “We brought rations,” The hollow reminded her, rummaging through his potion ingredients for anything edible. “You know why I don’t need mine, so… you can tell me what you were dreaming about.”

  “I uhh…” Clarisse hesitated, feeling her skin crawl and her tongue turn heavy as she recalled the laboratory. “It wasn’t nice… Thanks for the food though.” She sat down on the coagulated lump of blankets she had nearly jumped out of, fishing into her bag for the rations they had bought. They were meant to be for emergencies, of course, but a glance back at the collapsed tunnel behind them constituted enough of an incident for her stomach to accept them.

  “Where was I this time?” Nikolas asked, naturally curious about which of his memories she had to indulge overnight.

  “Some sort of lab. It looked very posh, marble floors and well lit,” Clarisse recalled, but any further details evaded her recollection. “There were lots of rooms, and children behind bars.”

  “Mhm,” Nikolas nodded along, recognizing it instantly. “They kept it pretty well maintained during the war.”

  “I saw you in a room with a lot of other kids, and you tried to escape,” Clarisse frowned, his screams still lodged in the forefront of her mind.

  “Ah… did I try to force myself through the door?” Nikolas asked, his gaze downcast in regret.

  “Yeah… you got stuck partway,” Clarisse paused before chewing down on the rations, sensing a reflux rising from the image of tattered skin and flesh.

  “Wasn’t the dumbest thing I did while I was there,” the hollow shrugged. “Focus on food. You’ll need the energy to make it today.” Nikolas got up, peeking out of the mine entrance to investigate. It was about as quiet and still as always, save for the wind running ripples across the lake’s surface.

  “Is that where they turned you into a homunculus?” Clarisse prodded further, getting up with rations in hand to follow him.

  “Not for the first few years,” Nikolas muttered, trying to avoid eye contact with her. “But eventually, yes.”

  “What happened to the others? It seemed like there were so many…” the redhead took her spot on the opposite wall of the mineshaft, leaning against the wooden beam at the entrance.

  “They…” Nikolas tilted his head upwards, stopping just short of speaking.

  “They found freedom. That’s what you want to say, hah! Why stop?”

  “Is that really freedom?”

  “Neither you nor that oathbreaker have an answer. How hypocritical, I love it!”

  “They were spared of my fate.”

  “Mhm… Let’s talk about something else?” Clarisse muttered. She had learnt to treat the occasional pauses and awkward blanks from her mentor as lies, white as they may be.

  “I’d like to not talk, if that’s okay.” Nikolas spoke without turning to address her.

  “Oh-kay…” Clarisse coughed as a bite almost passed down her windpipe. She had spent comfortable spells of silence with Nik before, but it was the first time he had asked her like that. She slinked back into the tunnel, sitting by their bags to finish what little rations they had brought.

  While escaping the cavernous cavity that was the Old Atrii quarry was easier on a half-full stomach, crossing the distance to the nearest city on foot and unseen posed a far greater challenge to the pair.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Clarisse asked, watching as Nikolas led the way off the main road and into the loosely forested highlands. “Safe for me, I mean.” She adjusted her question after remembering what he was, seeing as most paths would hold no hazard for him to traverse.

  “Should be,” Nikolas replied, not lifting his gaze from the map held in his hands. “People might be expecting us at Atrii, so we’ll walk parallel to the main road until we get to Mystogann.”

  The sparse shrubbery made for worthy hurdles for the redhead, and far less so for the false kitsune she tried to keep up with. Perhaps it was the dry rations or the gradually scaling altitude, or maybe just her inquisitive nature, but Clarisse felt another tinge of curiosity festering within her belly.

  “Hey Nik… how did you die?” She asked, only realizing the bluntness of her question once it had been spoken. “Y-You don’t have to answer that-! I was j-just wondering…”

  The hollow gradually slowed his pace, arriving at a complete halt while Clarisse was still retracting her intrusive thoughts. He simply looked at her with blank eyes, lowering the map in his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Clarisse muttered, casting her gaze to the scattered foliage below to avoid his. “It just… came out. Let’s keep going…”

  “It’s alright,” Nodding, Nikolas tucked the map under his arm and continued walking. “I was just… thinking. Sera’s the only one who’s asked me this before.”

  Yet again, Clarisse felt as if she had narrowly dodged an arrow. “It’s just… hard to imagine someone like you actually… You know. Even though I’ve seen some memories… you seem very different in them.”

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  “I never gave Sera an answer,” A somber tone left the hollow’s mask, the same as when she had asked about Sherly and learned about the nature of the broken blade. “But I’ll tell you a story to help pass the time.”

  Clarisse remained quiet, sensing yet another pauldron of trust being lowered onto her shoulders.

  “There was once a young boy. Ambitious, passionate about life. He wanted to be someone respected, someone feared. Really make a name for himself. He was naive like that… He had friends he would’ve died for… life felt like it was going somewhere.”

  A crease sneaked onto Clarisse’s forehead, confused if he was talking about himself or if this was a genuinely made-up story.

  “Those few friends were people he cared about, but the only way he could care was by keeping them beyond arm’s length. His was an unpleasant responsibility in that sense. One day, he saw something truly unfortunate happen to one of them. It confounded and frightened the boy, made him question why people would do such things. It must’ve been because there was no one to punish people for doing those things, he thought. Even so, he couldn’t be the one to punish them.”

  “And his friends?”

  “More friends began to leave his life. Some were taken from his grasp. Others, he pushed away… He told himself it was to keep them safe, but the truth was that he couldn’t bear to remain the same after what he had learnt. The boy wanted to save his friends and escape, but he never found the way out of that deep labyrinth. Days and nights blurred together, and he stopped minding the constant floodlights bearing down on him. He was blind to the greater machinations at play in the middle of that labyrinth, that no one there was ever truly going to be free."

  Clarisse clutched the straps of her shoulder bag a bit tighter as the story became more reminiscent of the kind of person she was learning Nikolas was.

  “One day, or night, he could no longer bear it. In the darkness, he found an answer. The only answer he could grasp at, like a frog stuck in a well while swearing it was in the ocean. Finally, he thought he could free his friends. Finally, he could punish the people who hurt them. It was the one secret that gave him purpose in those days.”

  “Did he do it, then?”

  “He did, in a way. Freeing the first was easy… it was quick. The ones after that were harder. A dreadful noise permeated his ears as he continued, making him question his motives. Was he doing it for them, or really just for his own sanity? It’s an interesting dilemma. He punished their captors in the only way he knew how. Still, the cries from that day would remain for years to come, hewing his memories to etch themselves into his mind. It hurt him deeply, but he went through with it.”

  “And did he free himself?”

  “I wonder if he did sometimes… but that’s not how the story goes. The boy had achieved what he wanted. Everything that he wanted, or so he thought. He realized, far too late, he still had to answer to someone. He couldn’t judge right from wrong, differentiate innocent from guilty. It was beyond his purview to do that… When he was caught, the boy was thrown into the depths. At first it was safe, cozy even. A little cold, maybe. Then everything was streaked in red. The boy thought he could keep swimming, that he could keep wading as it brought him closer to the ceiling…”

  Clarisse wrapped her arms around herself, fighting off a dread so chilling even her flames couldn’t keep her from recoiling as she thought about it.

  “He had forgotten about something very important. The memories of his friends, the lives of everyone he had freed… Phantoms that mimicked them soon joined the boy. They weighed heavy on him, dragging him into the depths like cinder blocks chained to his feet. He couldn’t escape, no matter how much he flailed and swam. There was nowhere to run from the exsanguination and mimicry but the pitch darkness, and so he closed himself. He closed his eyes, his mouth, his mind and his heart that day.”

  Of course. Clarisse chastised herself for not expecting that kind of an ending to the story. She had been hoping beyond hope yet again, but her optimism never belonged when Nikolas was the one in question.

  “He drowned that night, Clarisse,” Nikolas sighed, but there remained a somber joy in his voice. “And with what they dredged up, whatever little was left of that boy, they made us.”

  “Huh…?” The redhead squinted at him with a puzzled expression. From the beginning, she had been expecting for the story to be about him. Every memory and dream she had seen, she had assumed it was him she was watching. “What do you mean, they made you? And… who’s us?”

  Nikolas slowed his pace, turning his head slightly to address her as they walked. “PH:OV and I… we weren’t always there. Not entirely. Perhaps we agreed with each other too much to differentiate. Nikolas gave up his life under the surface, but passing wasn’t up to him either…”

  “So wait… you’re also Nikolas, right? And the one before was him too?” Clarisse fiddled with her fingers pointing either direction in an attempt to visualize the timeline.

  “Sorry, this must be pretty confusing-” Nikolas chuckled, looking at her with the cadence of a consoling smile after that gruesome tale. “It confused us too at first. I still remember every memory as vividly as if they were my own… and I know PH:OV does too. He was given a name by the man who made us, but I wasn’t. I call myself by the name of that boy, since I have no other, but time and time again I think… I must’ve been a mistake. A leftover from his first success.”

  “A malignant tumor, more like. If not for you, Father would have never thought to discard us!”

  “I’ll take that as an com–”

  Clarisse grabbed the homunculus’s forearm, siphoning his focus back to reality with a stern expression all of a sudden. “Don’t. Don’t call yourself that. You’re a person, just like I am. By Svaha, you’re a much better person than I am!” she exclaimed, and embers embellished her hair as she scolded him. “Every single night when I close my eyes, I learn more and more about how you’ve suffered, and yet all I see when I’m awake is that you still choose to help people, even besides me, who I don’t think will ever know who you really are.”

  A pang of uncertain joy rippled through the hollow. “I’m glad you think that way, but reserve some judgement,” he clasped her palm between both of his, “I’m beginning to get concerned with how okay you are, associating with the likes of me.”

  “It’s your fault for getting me involved in your life–” Clarisse huffed, retracting her arm from the smug fox. “Why’d you open up to me, anyway? Instead of Sera, I mean…”

  “Sera works for the person keeping me on a leash, and besides, you let me into your life first.” Nikolas replied bluntly, putting an arm around her shoulder and prompting them to continue walking. “I doubt any of this would have happened if you hadn’t sought me out.”

  “What, so you would’ve left Junnhaven and we wouldn’t have seen each other again?” Disbelief dripped from Clarisse’s tone, but she accepted his arm resting on her at the same time.

  “Yes, very much so,” Nikolas nodded in a matter-of-fact way. “The only reason I was staying there was for the frequent quests. I had my eye out for anything that could’ve given me a lead to another shard of Tegor’s soul, that’s all.”

  Clarisse glanced down, thinking about how different things might’ve been if they hadn’t met again… she hadn’t imagined this much could happen in just two weeks. “Thanks for… bringing me along. Searching for a dragon soul… I imagine there’s a lot of people who’d want to go on that quest.”

  “Hah, good luck finding someone who would do it alongside a hollow!” Nikolas chuckled, trying not to think about it too hard by directing his gaze upwards to the monotone sky.

  “What about alongside a friend?” Clarisse asked, trying not to jab at his self-degradation even though it peeved her quite a lot.

  “. . .” Nikolas froze for just a moment, blinking a few times before returning her glance. “That… that would be nice. Thank you.”

  “Do you… have other friends?” Clarisse asked, perplexed by her discovery of a way to make him stall.

  “I have exactly one,” Nikolas nodded, showing no embarrassment whatsoever in his cadence.

  “Really? Who is it?” The redhead’s skepticism exceeded curiosity, and before he was able to answer, she was already thinking about the kind of person it could be.

  “Ah… it’s hard to describe… but I can introduce you if you’d like,” Nikolas shrugged, “We just need to get to a town or city. Anything established will do.”

  “Are they from Atraxia too?” Clarisse asked, but her hesitation soon blossomed into a tinge of jealousy. “It is a girl?”

  “Yes, and– why do you care?” Nikolas accusingly asked, shaking his head in playful disapproval. “He’s a pretty chill person, don’t worry.”

  “So, we’ll meet him at Mystogann, then?” Clarrise, looked away to hide her involuntarily reassured expression.

  “Unless we run into him before that, yes. Although, he’s much more likely to tease me about you…” Nikolas sighed, shaking his head before picking up his pace. “C’mon. We can make it before nightfall if we try.”

  Thank you for reading!

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