384. Qualia, 5

(Licht)

I woke up maybe months after it all happened.

At first, all my memories were hazy.

I sighed for a long time. I could think first and only, that I did not die.

No, I didn't.

Not yet...

I lifted my body from the mattress where I had sunk over time. My shape was deeply imprinted into that foam.

I looked at myself, and my right arm. It moved. When I tried to lift a finger, another one was twitching, never the one I meant. I could almost clench my hand into a fist.

I could work with that. It worked.

That flesh is now mine.

The darker skin of that arm made a bright contrast around my shoulder where all the stitches had been made, and my very pale skin.

The threads themselves were gone. The skins were covered with scars and odd colour mixes, but had become one.

It healed. It was safe. I survived. I was alive.

The time when I urged that man to operate on me feels like ages and ages away. It all went fast, and now my awakening leaves me numb.

I really shocked him, asking him to do insane things to my flesh and pieces of the recently deceased.

I raise my eyes to a dusty mirror on the wall. I'm looking at myself.

It worked. My body changed, without needing to completely use the light in stone from the previous Licht.

Though, my face has aged badly, and my hair turned blond and grey. I've become Licht entirely now, physically at least.

Time goes fast.

My skin is patterned with darker patches here and there. My body absorbed everything with some clear delight.

Had I found only the deads that day back then... I probably would have eaten them...

I was so hungry.

I'm so much further in the path of daiûa.

Now some of them have become a part of me. I'm still hungry, but I've been fed through a pipe in my arm, and some other things left around me.

Some humans helped me. I was lucky.

I want to remember their help as well.

~

I ate everything they had left for me. My right hand was trembling, learning to obey my will, but responsive.

I dressed myself with what had been left in that room. Then I began leaving this dirty and grey hospital room and building.

The bed kept a deep mark of the shape of my body. I had a last glance at that room without window, dark and grey, with a mirror and a crate now empty. Almost a tomb.

In the corridor, a small window let me know it was daytime outside, but not much else.

Everything in here was dark and dusty.

I left the place and ventured inside the building, looking like it had been sunk into the ocean for a while.

Amidst the ruins I didn't recognise, I could still notice clues that once upon a time people lived and worked here. Now they're modern ruins.

Outside finally, I found the park and the graveyard, which I recall seeing when meeting the survivors.

Wooden sticks everywhere for the last ones to go. Some plants, normal or different, already blossomed over some of them.

I wandered for what was left of the day into that now dead city. More than clothes, more than food, there was something else I was looking for now.

Something on which I could strap the glowing stone to channel its power into inner matter, instead of my flesh.

I wanted a new sword.

I found it in the industrial area of the abandoned city.

~

Outside of museums, it was usually uncommon to find swords in this era of Europe.

But tools shaped like swords, you could still find in factories.

In a workshop on the outskirts, I found some of these giant machines used, I think, to print paper.

Large cylinders unable to rust, with tight edges attached close to them. One of these metallic parts was taken off but left lying around. A two metres long blade with heavy body. It has a shape slightly curved, asymmetrical, but with a clean and sharp edge. Only one edge, and a thin curvature.

It doesn't have handle to make a weapon out of it, nor a point to make a good estoc out of it.

But I could work with that as well.

I carried that bar of metal with one sharp edge back to another workshop with tools I could use to reshape it to my liking.

~

I reworked the shape of that industrial edge into a sword that fit my use. It went rather faster than I expected, and the result is better than I expected.

This metal also had an odd gradient of resiliency. The heart was much harder and heavy than the edge, the outer layer, as if they were two different metals. It made it light as aluminium, hard as iron in the middle but as soft as lead in the edges.

It wasn't two different alloys moulded one above another though, it was a solid solution with a gradient of properties. I never saw that in older times, and I wonder how you make something like that.

It allowed to keep supple use and rework with increased overall resiliency and elasticity. It's a sword that has a good spring to it for its length. A knife could dent it, but in a swift move, this blade would be able to cut clean the same knife without a shock. It's interesting science of materials.

It's amazing metals and alloys science. To be able to make and use the last of two normally incompatible worlds. Supple and hard, not too soft, not too fragile. The best of both worlds...

As I held my new sword, I was left with mixed feelings.

I was proud like a body with a new toy, but unhappy like a man knowing his duty called him to war.

There was no choice.

I couldn't let that Priest ignite a war.

That strife that Licht started, if not Rose Blume before, it has to end before it grows even bigger and worse.

I was a huntress before. I will hunt that demon down.

That was my unhappy choice of duty.

~

I spent a long time training and re-educating my new arm while travelling toward the summits of the nearby mountains.

I would see quite a landscape of central Europe from up there.

And I hope, from up there, I would be able to whiff or spot a hint of the Priest's whereabouts. I will use my sight on their side, and I will follow it to the end.

So I climbed the mountain, sword in my back, making me feel uncomfortable.

I'm not happy with the fate ahead of me.

~

I reached a peak. My right hand had the time to become steady since I got it.

I saw the skies of continental Europe like rarely before. I didn't quite recognise the far eastern landscape.

A few things were flying in the sky here and there. Small animals, but not birds.

At first, as I cautiously looked around, I couldn't notice anything to hint at the demon's trail.

Then, very faintly, I noticed it.

Something unclear, very far. So far it was hidden by the curvature of the Earth if only just a little. Just a finger below the horizon out there.

Something that made the Licht inside my blood begin to boil.

I'm not smiling at all.

But I have to go.

~