~ 66: The Night of Blessings and Curses - Part 11 ~

My mind worked on its own. Its instantaneous response was to grab onto the rope before it drowned with the man. He had already reached the destined area and yet he didn't come out. Not letting my terror get the better of me, I pulled with all my might against the river current.

Every prolonged second reminded me of how he was already drowning or dying from the electric shock...

That did it. As soon as I remembered the torment of the shock I had to go through, I tugged him so hard that I was pretty sure I had given him something more than a bruise.

Relief and joy painted my face when I saw the body resurface. With another pull, I drew him towards the river bank. After picking up his limp body with my forearms locking his underarms and shoulders, I lay him down on the soft grass beside the roaring river.

My face lost all its light delight once my ear touched his damp chest. There was nothing I could hear. Nothing at all that said that he was alive.

I swallowed air as I tried to get the water out of his system. Still, there was no change. I did everything I could: administering CPR, giving him air through his mouth. Everything was a futile effort.

I clenched my jaw as the tears started to blur my vision. I couldn't believe that this could be the end. I tried to think hard as a sixth sense told me to unbutton his shirt, which I did. There lay on his bare chest a branched figure etched under his skin in red. It confirmed to me that the eel had struck him.

I covered my mouth and sobbed. I couldn't accept the moment to be his death. I beat his chest with my fisted hands and screamed his name. Still no response. I tried reaching out to him through the bond binding us. Only silence and the echoes of my voice were heard.

I cursed my horrid self for not having asked his forgiveness earlier, even though he was at fault for not listening to me. I laid my forehead on his chest, letting the tears plop on his wet skin.

"Please," I beg to the heavens. "Bring him back. Give me a chance to live with him and beg him to accept my apology. I will do anything you ask of me. Anything that you will, I shall do it."

When that didn't work, I screamed and wept, promising to give myself to any service that was required of me. I swore and implored and cried until my voice became hoarse.

His trunk jerked. Through my sobs, I heard a familiar beat that I had once heard when I had laid my head in a similar position. My hand circled his waist and I gasped loudly with relief.

His still body began to move and the first thing his conscious mind did was hug me back. I cried harder as I felt the presence of life again.

"I am sorry," he said softly, making me hug him tighter. "I should have listened to you and not got you worried or in trouble because of me. Forgive me, Lest."

"I am the one who's sorry," I said in between my gasps. "I should have never spoken the truth so crudely. It hurt you and I deserved my punishment for not apologising earlier."

I looked at his face as I finally spilt out the guilt that was eating my heart. He looked slightly weary as his eye was half open and his arm loosely held me in place on his chest.

"You will always be forgiven in my heart," he responded as he caressed my head and calmed down my sobs.

"Then I truly don't deserve your friendship and alliance."

"You deserve it because you're knowledgable and smart. I don't think I could make this journey halfway without you."

I laid in his embrace and enjoyed every second of it. After holding each other for five minutes or so, we let go of each other and surveyed the other for injuries.

"A new badge of honour, I see," he said as he looked at the branched bramble-like figure on his exposed chest. "It was all worth something."

"Yeah, sure," I said as I rolled my eyes. "Scaring me to death was a 'perfect' gift for me."

He laughed so beautifully that my heart had no reason to reprimand him. We got back on our feet after he buttoned his shirt and we tightened out laces. Then we walked back to the spot in our squelchy shoes without a complaint.

After discarding the old leg cases and creating new ones from the Detrochia tree, we readied ourselves in our places, with me going first. We took our sweet time to take off carefully without a worry in the world. Without a worry that even in this trial, we could die if it weren't for the confidence in our team.

~

We positively stared up at the tall structure in front of us and sighed in disbelief. The slanting L-shaped rock-like structure was inclined far steeper than any mountain I had ever been to in my whole life. I gulped at the increase in difficulty.

'On second thoughts, maybe the earlier task was easier,' I whined at the jutting pointed rocks that looked like bricks from below.

"That is the way to the cliff?" I questioned with terrorising amazement.

"Yes, most unfortunately," Lucas replied. "Seems like this climb is going to be a very tough one. I can already see how many deaths and bloody hands this place has suffered."

We undid the ropes around our waists, and after shortening the loops, we tried to figure out if it would be best to mount alone or to do it together.

"If one falls, the other should be able to help the person up," Lucas said thoughtfully. "Hence, we will tie a rope to each other. We will have to bear the other one's weight until the person gets up, even if it will be difficult."

"That seems wiser than completely losing the other in a fall as both the people are essential," I remarked. "We will have to hold onto the rope though if we ever fell."

We tied the emergency rope from earlier to both of our waists so that we remained at par with one another while climbing. After winding the other two ropes firmly around our hips, we threw the noose and started to climb, ensuring that our palms were well-covered. Lucas had only just remembered, instead of doing so in the first task, about his extra pair of large, fingerless gloves which I fitted onto my small hands.

We climbed the very steep parts slowly and cautiously. I was better at climbing as I had a bit of experience in doing so when I went to visit my cousins at their home at the foothills of the mountains close to the sea. Lucas would be lagging only slightly by three steps or so.

The first fall occurred when we were about ten metres off the ground. Lucas lost his footing and as he was moving his arm and leg at the same time, he had nothing to grab onto. I fell one step below as his heavy bodyweight pulled me down too.

With one hand pressing on the rope and the other bleeding one fixed on the sharp point stone, I patiently waited for him to climb up as I clenched my teeth to bear his weight. Luckily, he wasn't scraped by the spear-like stones too badly.

When we were halfway up the spiky wall, the steepness of the structure started to reduce. The decrease felt too sudden for me and while focusing on seeing how I must climb, I missed a step. I shouldn't have let go of my arms, but in terror at looking down to search for the step, I started to freefall perilously, somehow missing being skinned by the peaks.

Lucas held on the rope a second later, pulling me up with only one arm. I quickly got back up, glad that I wasn't injured at all thanks to the way he had handled it. He was extremely strong to have held me even for merely a few seconds.

We journeyed silently, concentrating hard to reach the flat, stony land. We were glad that there were no more slip-ups as crawled our way to the broad area on the surface of the cliff. Our legs and arms were exhausted from the nearly half an hour-long climb, and our bodies were glad to have found a place to rest.

We lied down opposite to each other such that only the tops of our heads were touching each other. The stars were disappearing and the sky was changing colour as each second passed. We closed our eyes and breathed the salty breeze deeply to recover ourselves as soon as we could.

"Only the ritual remains," uttered the seer in a tired voice. "Only then will our promise be truly complete, and we would be the strength of the other."

"And where are we to have that?" I enquired as I moved the top of my head away from his and touched that to his shoulder instead so that we had direct eye contact.

He looked into my cornflower blue eyes as he removed the cover on his left eye. With his mismatched eyes on me, he answered, "On that hollow where blood shall be spilt."

He got up and like a gentleman, lend me a hand to pick myself up. Then we walked up the little slope, slipping once in a while, with me coming to stand on the slightly raised side, my back facing the sea. We both let down our hair to appear as natural as we could.

Then Lucas spoke his oath after he cut his hand with my penknife and dropped his blood in the hollow between us.

"I, Lucas D'Silva," he declared in a strong voice, "do hereby pledge my allegiance to the Descendant of Astoria and promise to be her faithful servant until the end of my days."

Hearing him take an oath like that of an unordinary person like me brought tears to my eyes. I blinked them away and clenched my jaw as I felt a spot of warmth below my collar bones. I touched the place where the pendant met my skin and saw that it was glowing red. The oath had probably been heard by it.

As my turn came along, I cut my hand with his precious dagger as I watched his eyes gleam and turn blood red as the other eye. What should have been the whites of his left eye was still pitch black.

"I, Celestine Thesia Dixon," I announced, "do accept the seer's loyalty and do hope to be under his protection and dispensible to him whenever his body, heart and soul shall need it."

"You will now have to lick the blood of the other person off the knife, Lest," he said as he passed mine. "Be careful to not cut your tongue."

We licked it clean until not a drop remained. Then he grabbed my bloody hand with his stepped with me to the edge of the cliff.

"The last part of the ritual is to spill the blood here as we take oath in the name of the Almighty," he told me as he stood two metres in front, squishing out the last pint of blood from it and spilling it on a stone located far below.

We switched positions when he was done. I squeezed out the blood from my hand and saw the blood drops trace their path to the sharp stones below. The few seconds, during which I stood on my toes, made me wish that time would just turn around so that I would have never done a risky operation like that again.

Peeking over the sharp, projecting edge was a huge mistake. A mistake that could never be unwound.

I swallowed my fear so hard that I forgot to scream. My head felt dizzy with it recurring the vision of me standing at the edge of a similar precipice. The image was shaky in my mind, but that was likely because of looking at the dangerous stretch of rocks and sea and getting vertigo.

I felt the ground below me shift as I drooped my head and tried to maintain my balance. The vision was strong, letting me see something like a gorge below with a similar shore of sand and water hiding away some treacherous rocks.

It was only when I heard him call my name that I could emerge from the headache and realise that I was plummeting to my certain death.