A Ravine Opens

"Are you sure we should be going down this?", I asked nervously, as she traversed down the hill.

I, for one, had no hope of finding anything that we could take back. Still, I had no choice but to follow her. She seemed rather spirited, especially for someone who hadn't had any luck in the whole last week she'd been hunting here. I bet she knew too that there was nothing here for us. She just stubbornly insisted on going to odd places.

"We don't have to go that far, we're about to leave Agartha behind", I reminded her, for she seemed so lost as she progressed forward.

"Ah, are we?", she stopped and turned to face me, "Too bad, we can't afford to do that."

There wasn't any reason we couldn't but she seemed to have her reasons.

"Why are you going so far anyway?"

"I haven't had breakfast, I've at least got to find something I can eat."

She could be really honest sometimes.

"You're just saying...that you're hungry...?"

She nodded earnestly. It almost made me crack up but to be honest, I was getting too tired for that.

"You know, if its just you, maybe I can get you something", I had seen something as we passed by a house earlier. I wasn't exactly sure but I figured it was worth checking out. She beamed as she heard me and began following me.

We walked all the way back to town, it didn't take us long. Soon, we had found the house I was thinking of. At first, I wasn't sure entering unannounced like that was a good idea but then again, who knows how long the place had been empty.

"These are poisonous", she said as we stood before a cluster of mushrooms growing in one damp corner of the house. These were wooden houses so I had sensed such a possibility.

"No, they aren't. The caps are perfectly edible, you know", I said.

She stared at me in silence. I understood that she had found these before but always assumed them to be poisonous.

"Don't tell me you didn't know that?"

"Well...I've never been hunting or scouring for food like this so..."

She said that with utter indifference. I was a little shocked to hear that. There is something about learning things about people you think extraordinary. These are the moments when you realize they aren't as extraordinary as you imagined. At times like these, you either lose interest in them or you become even more fond of them. The former is perhaps in cases when you yourself are extraordinary without realizing it, people like Lady and Chopper, and the latter is the case when you are able to find the same normalcy in them that you yourself possess. It is a moment of relief that tells you that those people aren't so far away after all. That's what I felt.

We gathered the mushrooms, there were quite a lot of them. After cooking up something of a stew for her breakfast, we decided to gather more and head back. I could just imagine how happy the owner would be to see these. I would finally be worth his respect.

"You're a surprisingly good cook", she said before getting up and ready to head back.

"And you're surprisingly good at lighting fires", I don't know what it was that made me say that.

I wonder if I was beginning to think back on the cave, it came out before I could make sense of what I had just said. She didn't seem to grasp that, or perhaps she was really good at feigning innocence. Either way, I wasn't going to push it.

Our journey back was long. We talked a lot along the way and with our stomachs full, it was just easier to notice everything and say a lot of things.

Before then, I had always felt that she was in a world of her own. Like nothing else amounted to 'one' for her. Perhaps a quarter or even less, a bunch of people would have to come together to form a setting to be 'one' in her eyes. A single human being was just a part of the group, nothing on their own. To me anyway, this is how her world seemed to be. But walking back to the inn, I thought to myself, as she was talking to me about so many things, that I finally amounted to 'one' in her world.

"Regardless of how you put it, its not so easy going here and there in this snow. We'll be buried by the time we get back", I opined.

For some reason, we took a detour and were walking up an unknown road. It wasn't exactly the safest climb but we had to make do.

"Its getting foggy too...isn't it?", she said in a low voice, as we treaded through.

Indeed, it was getting mistier, but not too much. We'd be home before it spelled any trouble for us. Or so I thought.

Just then we heard a strange rumbling sound, growing louder and louder as it approached us. It was such a strange one that you couldn't tell if it was coming from above or below. We froze in our places, trying to anticipate the direction of the incoming sound and to discern what it was. The fog rapidly grew and we couldn't see much.

"Watch out!", she yelled before leaping onto me and pushing me back. I fell back into the snow and slipped down quite a ways, but fortunately, was unscathed.

Soon, as I got sense of myself, I looked up to find her. I didn't even know her name to call out. But she seemed fine, I soon caught sight of her. She wasn't really far away from me.

"Seraph!", she called to me instead, "You okay?"

"Yeah!"

A boulder had just rolled down that snowy hill. We looked at the top to find what sent it hurling towards us. It couldn't have just happened. Someone had launched it on us. And there it was, a figure standing in the fog. That vague silhouette wasn't much different from the ghost I'd seen on my climb, though I couldn't say if it was the same one.

"Hey you!", she called out to it, but I grabbed her arm and stopped her from either going after or trying to ask that shadow anything.

The figure disappeared along with the fog about as quickly as they had appeared.

"What in the world was that?"

"I haven't the slightest. But for now, let's just head back. We should grab our bags before they are lost in the snow", I suggested and went ahead to retrieve my bag that had drifted further away.

She nodded and went up to grab hers. I had barely touched my bag when another rumbling ensued, this time right beneath my feet. Before I could make any sense of what was going on, the ground beneath me caved into a bottomless ravine and I was going down its unending darkness.

"Seraph!", the last thing I saw was her hand stretched out, failing to grab mine as she screamed my name at the top of her lungs.