Cleo smiled, she could tell that Rose was trying to make light of the situation, but it fell slightly flat. She was better at rude than complementary, so the sound of her being such was odd. “What happened to him?” Cleo finally said, seeing ose slowly slip back into her shell.
“He died. I’ll get there soon enough,” Rose replied. “I was surprisingly happy back then. I don’t know if I’ll ever be that happy again. I don’t know if I can. Every day was a joy to be part of, every day was a wonder, every day was too good to be true. I didn’t have to pretend to be the controlling and arrogant person that I normally did. I didn’t have to pretend with Willis because he had known me for as long as we had both been alive. We traveled like that for six months, but when we arrived in the fifth floor, things started to get strange. About three weeks into the journey to the next gateway we came across a man who had killed three horses to escape something. He didn’t know what it was, but something had killed an entire citadel settlement. The corpses had all dessicated and the people had died, but they had not stopped doing their general day to day jobs”.
“We found a town like that. It... It was hard to deal with,” Winoa said, glancing at Cleo and remembering how she was the one who had to deal with the corpses of the devourer’s victims. It had hurt Cleo in a way that Winoa could not really understand, a way that was only beginning to show its edges now.
“It followed us. Every couple of weeks we would hear about towns and settlements that had been completely destroyed by this entity, this thing. It was following in the path that we took, it was chasing us and we had no idea why”. Rose began to shake and cry, but held her hands in fists as if to steel herself. “About a week after we arrived here, Willis decided to see which of us the devourer was chasing. He left me alone, and I haven’t heard from him since”.
There was silence as the two girls digested what they had heard. The devourer had harmed them all in some way, but they had no idea who or what it was. Cleo grabbed Rose’s hands and looked her in the eyes. “Do you know if it was Willis this devourer was after? Because if it wasn’t then we could hunt this devourer down. There’s no way that whatever this devourer could stand up to three saints, let alone peak saints”.
“I know he’s dead. He said he was going to come back in a week but he was in one of the regions of the festival of the dead when the killing happened”.
“The festival of the dead?” Winoa asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s something that happened a year ago, over a thousand people died in a single day. It was the single biggest massacre in the history of the neutral zones. Generally Bobbies keep the peace well enough, but that day they couldn’t. So many people died that day... Families. Innocents. People who shouldn’t have died. It was horrible, nowhere was safe. Panwood was one of the focus areas, the one hit by the devourer itself”. There was a catch in Rose’s voice. She was not sad, she was not even mournful. The night made her angry beyond belief. “I’m so tired of being scared, but... The thought of the devourer catching up to me makes me just want to run away and hide. I can’t go outside anymore. I don’t want to live like this, Cleo. I can’t”.
Cleo sighed as Rose broke down into tears. She had hated the girl when they first met, but this was something she would not wish on her worst enemy. There was such a huge weight over Rose’s head that even Cleo’s experience of dealing with the devourer’s waste could not compare to how the girl was feeling. She had been put under extreme stress for over a year, and she was well past her breaking point. A light breeze would break the girl, and Cleo had no way of knowing if she could be repaired.
“Why do you call it the devourer?” Winoa asked. She was genuinely curious. She had seen the corpses, she knew that they looked like they had been baked in the sun, but she could not understand why the name the ‘devourer’ had been chosen.
Rose could not look up; tears continued to stream down her face, but after a few moments, she tried to speak. “It’s... I... I know three things... about the devourer”. Every few words were punctuated with sobs and deep breaths as she struggled to get the information out. “The devourer is called the... devourer, because they devour the souls of... of their victims. They are male... and also, the only person who saw them and survived... They said the person was a child like us”.
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