I Awakened A Divine Curse

Auren watched the two of them in silence, the weight of Meredith's words hanging in the air between them. She'd given only the bones of what had befallen them in the past few... days? His mind struggled to grasp it as anything but hours.

Two things had warped his perception of time: first, the eternal night that refused to yield to dawn, and second, that pit of absolute darkness—the realm of true darkness or perhaps the well of the night. Auren couldn't be certain, though he suspected both forces had entwined their fingers in this mystery.

Time either didn't exist in the realm of true darkness or it flowed by its own incomprehensible rules—concepts that slipped through Auren's understanding. His knowledge of such cosmic matters remained frustratingly shallow.

What he could grasp, however, was the stark contrast between his descent and return. The agonizing eternity it took to fall through the well compared to his sudden ejection stood very clear.

Then there was his confrontation with the polypheme—another stretch of time that had bent and twisted beyond recognition.

Though the well of the night had devoured hours swallowing him into the dark realm, Auren sensed that his battle with the polypheme had consumed even more. A lifetime compressed into moments—or perhaps moments stretched into a lifetime. Only now, listening to Meredith's account, did the true span reveal itself.

Auren stepped back from the dagger, its presence suddenly too close, too real. Meredith never wasted breath on unnecessary words—her terse explanation surely concealed volumes left unspoken.

His thoughts churned like a storm-tossed sea. Pain throbbed through him, not just physical but emotional—a weird mix of regret and shock washing over him in waves. His chest tightened at what they must have endured in his absence.

The missing pieces of their story yawned before him like gapinf holes, yet one realization froze his blood more than any other:

While they had fought and suffered and persevered, he had been preoccupied with the business of dying.

Meredith's gaze swept over him, her eyes glinting with a gentle light that betrayed her concern beneath the steel.

"We are fine though. For the most part, we each have learned to brace our terrors. But we still must find dawn and end the trial."

Auren met her stare, one eyebrow arching skyward.

"How does finding dawn end the trial? Kingdom of Heart follows darkness, while the Kingdom of Highrise follows light. Bringing dawn does not end things but rather tilts the favor of the battlefield to that of Kingdom of Highrise."

Meredith shook her head, strands of hair catching the dim light like threads of copper.

"It's not about the favor of the battlefield. It's about restoring order. For this trial to end, we have to put a stop to whatever is going on between the Kingdom of Highrise and of Heart. But the problem is that we are too inconsequential and too little to matter in such a large scale of war."

Auren winced as though her words had physical weight, folding his hands.

"So, what you are saying is... finding and returning dawn is our ticket to mattering to the Kingdom of Highrise..."

"And to the Kingdom of Heart."

A frown carved its way across Auren's face, deep as a ravine.

"How so..."

Meredith's voice fell like frost upon stone.

"They will hate us... more than anyone."

Auren smirked, a flicker of admiration crossing his face. He had known her for mere hours, yet her words carried the same biting chill as her ruthless dance of spearmanship he had witnessed.

And they were true.

Once they returned dawn, the scales would tip toward Highrise, painting them as saviors in the eyes of one Nation while earning the scorn of Heart. They would become relevant to both kingdoms—though for wildly different reasons.

Still, naivety clung to such thinking. These were matters of nations, titans playing at war. What guarantee did they have that they would matter enough? Auren suspected their significance would rise and fall with the tides of public sentiment.

Eventually, that might not be enough to place them on a platter grand enough to drive a war to its end.

More pressing still—how were they supposed to return Dawn? As far as he knew, the darned thing nestled somewhere inside him like a slumbering ember.

He exhaled, his breath hanging visible in the chill air.

"So, when you met this Priestess that captured dawn. Did she tell you any idea where dawn was? Or how she had done it?"

"Aynesa was rather tight-lipped. But I think she used something—an old relic scavenged from Sundered Spire."

Auren's boots scraped against stone as he slowly walked back to the dagger embedded in the worm's corpse.

"Sundered Spire?"

"A region or so, I am not sure."

Jasper leaned forward, Adam's apple bobbing as he gulped.

"It's a Temple. Every region has a subregion, each subregion is an anchor to the main region, creating a channel network of some sort? I'm not entirely sure what it does, but it's like the working ecosystem of this world. Quite strange."

Auren fixed him with a look as though seeing him for the first time.

"Strange indeed. How did you know these things?"

"Well, I love literary stuff a lot, so I studied runes, hieroglyphics and murals."

Auren winced, his brow furrowing in mild disbelief.

"You're suddenly sounding sensible. That is strange."

Jasper chuckled, fingers threading through the hair at the nape of his neck.

"So, Sundered Spire is where the relic was scavenged. And this thing was used to pull down Dawn. Would it be sensible that if we want to return Dawn, we need to go to this Temple?"

Meredith's head dipped in a firm nod, shadows dancing across her features.

"It's where Jasper and I were headed before we decided to take a rest here..."

"Oh..."

Words abandoned Auren momentarily, hovering just beyond his reach. Then he exhaled, his breath escaping like a confession.

"I see."

Silence stretched between the three of them, taut as a bowstring, until Jasper's hesitant voice sliced through it.

"Uhm, Master Auren... about the Sandworm... did you... kill... it?"

Auren cast a nonchalant glance at the massive creature sprawled in death before them. With a swift motion, he yanked off the chunk of meat he'd been carving as his fingers tightened around the dagger's hilt.

He sighed—a sound caught somewhere between weariness and pride.

"Well. Wasn't that much of a big deal really. But yes I did. But in fact, this is not even the most of my dangerous kill. I happened to be battling a Catastrophe Wretched while whatever was going on with you all was going on."