7 | White Butterfly

Arid sands were not unfamiliar to Laven in the old world—the time before she grew up to a family in the thickest of deserts near the Pakistani-Israeli border. While vegetation was sparse, there was a small patch of field that grew flowers of many different colors on the other side She was shielded of much of the world's politics due to her sheltered upbringing.

Her father always desired a male child as his eldest, and when Laven was born, she could swear that she hadn't felt anything but contempt emanate from her father since she's known him. It was a contempt hidden so poorly that sometimes the act of pretending just didn't exist. From this contempt a complicated relationship between father and daughter began to bud—toxic like a rose stuffed deep into cyanide. If one were to try to remove the rose from its newfound home, the thorns would inject the deadly poison deep into the veins—and so once it began so it stayed.

Her father hid her away. Restricting her from the world like a jewel to be kept, not displayed. Laven felt a yearning for anything else than what she had. It ate away at her like a child of darkness hollowing her out day by day. Like any captive kept in a prison, freedom was the ultimate goal of her desires.

A year before the world ended, she found herself especially yearning more from life when her father was out. She didn't entirely know what his profession was, just that he worked for people who never visited their home—on her father's insistence. Something inside her knew it was because he was ashamed of her. A man who had worked as long as he had and as hard as he did felt ashamed about very little, but the little they did they felt in great amounts. Her father's shame was the icing onto the disappointment cake that comprised her life.

He didn't talk much to her outside of parental commands. She ate, prayed, and existed in the same home, but there wasn't much about her father that she actually knew. What she did, she gleamed from stolen words from eavesdropped phone calls. The walls of her childhood home were not thick, and so casual conversation—especially in her father's booming voice carried quickly. It was so strange...a voice so deep to come from such a short man. But she knew well enough that he could carry a conversation in as loud a voice as he chose. Screaming matches with participants on the other end of the line were not infrequent, and she did flinch from time to time in horrible memory of past times where they'd been directed at her.

Her mother passed during childbirth. It was as sad a fact as any natural tragedy, and unfortunately, it carried the same amount of emotional weight. She never met her mother, so she didn't feel any sort of way in specifically losing her. It was just...a void that was never filled.

She sat in her familiar lonesome and stared out her barred window. The field outside her home lay alluring with multicolored flowers blowing in the breeze. Her eyes sat and focused on a small fluttering butterfly as rested on the edge of a large red flower. She visualized the wall between them broken and her freedom to sit and stare at the butterfly could go uninterrupted. She envisioned the freedom the butterfly must have had—how it could fly anywhere it wanted to. Away from all its problems...away.

The image of the butterfly was burned into her brain when she ran away a year later—just two months before the time of The Collapse. She saw no respite in her home-life and no safety in the security provided. She felt little sense of self and desired above all else to be free. She hardened her spirit and threw away any feelings of nostalgia for her old life. The feelings inevitably rose to the surface after her first night away—she wondered if her freedom was truly what she desired. Guilt struck her dreams as visions of her father—however awful he may have been—feeling the immense distress over her leaving. She vowed to kill those feelings, stabbing the ground in frustration.

When the world turned over she was alone, nearing death in the sands from a terrifying shift—the land she had been walking on had one second been fine, and the next been thirty feet lower. With one step she fell, hurtling toward the new earth. She hadn't realized the fall until she was halfway hurtling down. Her body slammed hard against the ground and she was convinced in the half second she was conscious that it was the end.

It wasn't, but her body shot up with pain. When she had awoken several hours had passed. She couldn't move from where she lay. She was sure her legs were broken. If she remained she was going to die—it was that simple. It was pure luck that brought travelers across her path—they had been weary travelers that had been making an on foot journey to Pakistan before the world turned over. The land where they'd come from had been much lower—so they didn't experience such a fall like Laven had.

They stared up at the cliff above then down to the fallen girl, sensing the terrible fall and taking the girl into their camp.

She was delirious, the blood loss quickly taking its toll on her. The travelers heard her mumble distracting talk of flying. They thought the poor girl may have tried to throw herself off the cliff. Over a course of three days it seemed her condition wasn't getting any better. They had set her legs into splints, but she had lost a lot of blood. She also had been out of herself for a large majority of those days. When they had come to the end of their rope they left her and continued on their way.

In her delirium, Laven envisioned a great hallway. The logical part of her mind made the connection that she was on her deathbed—and this was the symbolic life flashing before her eyes, but that thought was supressed down under the subconscious surface.

She stared down the hallway into a massive void that swirled like a luminescent galaxy. It seemed to entangle all of human creation within its many arms. She took a few hesitant steps toward the end of the hall where she could see the depths below, clearer. Petals blossomed across the spiral toward the center. White blossoms bloomed from each singular petal in the shape of a constellation—one she'd never seen before. The stars comprising the two wings shifted and swayed to imitate the flapping of a celestial butterfly. There seemed to be a face hidden underneath the depths, but she couldn't get closer to see. It spun within itself and she could see closer that the spiral glowed to a form underneath. The wings were the only thing that were from a butterfly—the shifting and swaying form underneath was that of an elongated dragon.

A voice entered her mind speaking a language she couldn't reciprocate, but still finding the underlying meaning. She accepted the voice's proposal, and with a powerful gust of wind her eyes opened to the red skies above her. Blood coursed through her veins at a speed previously unknown. Her heart rate increased and her screams echoed into the night as the pact was formed.

When she came to herself she opened her eyes. She stared out and saw LUCAS looking at her, concerned. He had reached out his hand and helped her to her feet. Suddenly through him she saw an infinite galaxy above their planet, the wing-beats of the figure in her mind flowing the air around them. Like vapor, LUCAS vanished and inside himself he felt...odd. He was more sure than of anything that he wasn't here during these events playing out, but he felt compelled to interact—to help her up. It was as if it was a necessary function of his being—like he was created and this moment was lead up to for that intersection.

By the next morning, her legs were mended. The pain twice over of their breaking necessarily felt, Laven moved to fulfill her end of the bargain—a never ending search for power. A lust for scouting out the world for those with power and keeping balance so that humanity avoid annihilation.

Laven set out to ensure the pact of the dragon remained strong.

~...~

LUCAS was...confused. Even after his understanding of his interaction, he had zero record of any sort of creature that which revealed itself to her in her confused state. He couldn't push it off as a delusion as he wasn't sure he would have been able to see such. It had been real, and it hadn't been a Creature of the Night. He...felt like there was some relation, but the exact bounds of such eluded him. He despised information as important as this eluding him.

He needed more info.

In his attempts to dig deeper into ICARUS's records he found he was unable to break through the barriers that blocked his entry. It was hard to tell if they were deliberately placed or existed as omissions of necessary data between the large bridges of information. Large swaths of information blotted out the whole. His system was placed into a temporary recovery mode, but as he worked, what little information he could gather came to him.

~...~

Long ago in a world of fiction, twelve souls were recovered from a deep darkness that categorized and stored them in a similar manner to ICARUS in this world. These souls were recycled, repurposed, and restored to the new world as it began anew. From these souls they split into...

And the information fragmented from there. Words and letters break as if the bounds by which they exist similarly fragment. LUCAS cannot gleam any further information about the strange force.

He rerounded back to see if he can locate any further information about Laven in the time between when he last saw and her joining the guild.

He skimmed her recent and not so recent history—twenty years of information flying through his mind. Suddenly, he felt a brush against his shoulder and his front mind returned and he was staring out directly at Gavin. He was shaking LUCAS's shoulder and asking if he was okay. He had to blink a few times to clear his mind and pull himself back to the present.

LUCAS centered his focus and returned fully, upset at his inability to sever his research from his front mind. He looked to Gavin and nodded his head, slowly and then surely when his efforts were successful. "Yeah, I'm fine. I was just thinking about some things. Just got a lot on my plate, you know?"

Gavin nodded, his eyes seemed to scan his expression reading for any double meaning to his words. LUCAS noticed and studied this himself—like a pair of students bid to follow one another's train of thought without knowledge who was to begin and who was to end. Beyond his gaze LUCAS could see that there was an immensely studious mind that would work to understand as much as he could. If he ever intended to lie to Gavin—should the situation call for it for his own survival—he would need to remember that anything less than fully convinced tales would do no good.

If he had to lie...what kind of strange paranoia was this...to think of the people you spoke with in such contexts on how easy it would have been to lie to them. Was this evidence of a guilty conscience, or of a protective mind? LUCAS couldn't help but think it was both, but in this scenario it was probably best he shelve the idea of planning his probably betrayals. He would at least like to believe that he wasn't so cruel a being.

And with that, his concerns were assuaged. Gavin stepped forward to speak to Laven—about what, LUCAS wasn't listening. He used his free opportunity to dive back into his thoughts.