Lionhearts ||Skephalo||

41

"He's freaking out," Lum tells Assu nervously. The sow crosses her legs, seated on protrusion of basalt as she watches Lum pace and stalk around the path, gesturing as he speaks.

"He is?" She inquires, worried. Lum bites back a frustrated response.

"Assu," he starts, "The man has been unresponsive and irrational for a few cycles. But I tried to talk to him when he regained waking and he was almost feral. He was so scared of anyone being there, even when I said who I was, that he actively thrashed and fought against his chains to get away from me."

Assu digs a tusk into her lip a little, running her fingers over the fabric of her clothing nervously.
She doesn't respond to this, not wanting it to be true.

"Assu." Lum's voice is softer now, with a hint of sympathy. "He's a lost cause, nugget."

She shakes her head, desperation flickering in her eyes as she stands abruptly, pulling Lum down to her level by his shirt collar.

"Lum." It's said with a hint of pure despair. "I cannot let it be for nothing. He does not deserve this."

He can see the broken-hearted glimmer in Assu's kindly gaze, and he gulps. She's been determined to save this human in particular for some reason, he knows. She's been talking and planning nonstop in the band.
But he can see now that it runs deeper than some arbitrary choice, deeper than her feeling sorry.

"Assu, he's not Mika," he dares to say, and she pushes him away, hurt in her expression.

"I never said that he was." Her tone is bitter. "He may remind me of someone who is lost, but I am not a child. I do not confuse past and present and allow the loss to cloud my vision. He is special, Lum, and he must be kept safe. You know my family's trail for this kind of prediction."

Lum concedes that to her; he does. Her family is quite notorious for having suspiciously on-the-nose hunches and guesses. But he still can't shake the feeling that something horrible is going to happen.

"I still don't know what I saw in the cell that cycle," he argues, "Even if he's special like you claim he is, he's got something evil following him. Something that could kill us all."

She rounds on him again, her eyes narrowed angrily, snapping out,

"And that is why you must listen to me, you foolish boar!" She gestures to the landscape, and to the fortress in the distance, then to him and herself. "He is powerful, more powerful than we know. That thing may be trying to take his power and use it. Should he be used as a weapon, there is no telling what horrors it will wreak using his power." The guttural words of their native language are relieving to speak after so long forcing herself to learn the softer English sounds, and she continues to explain, "I can feel it, Lum. Something will shake all of our land to its foundations, and we will only have a chance at stopping it if we save him. You know as much as I do that our kind are hardly equipped to handle whatever the evil you saw is, when it has the powers of someone like Darryl."

Her eyes bore through him, and Lum's words catch in his throat at the memory of the horrifying figure leaning around the young man, its long and unnaturally bony fingers, wrapping his throat in its grasp as some sort of light faded from his beautiful green eyes.
She's right.

"...how?" He weakly questions, and she begins to pace the path, her steps knocking rocks into the lava far below their position as she digs her hooves into the stony ground.

"I have not received word from Philza. I feel he's too far, or perhaps too preoccupied, to hear me. So what I am thinking is..."

He can hear it before she says it, as though what she's saying was set in stone from the moment this ordeal began.

"Next cycle?" He guesses, and she softens enough to give him an approving grin.

"Indeed, Lum. Next cycle, we riot if we need to. I will kill to save him." Her tone is serious, and the younger piglin spares a skittish glance for the fortress.

"What about Maiu? Couldn't she help?" Assu shakes her head.

"Maiu's magecraft only goes so far. She may be able to help with some illusions, but we will need to take him from that place on our own or with Morou. Possibly unconscious, if he's as damaged as you say he is."

She takes Lum's hands in her own, and looks earnestly up at him, the gold hoop piercing in her left ear catching the dim glow from the lava as she does so, a faint glimmering reflection dancing over Lum's face.

"Lum, this is it," she says eagerly, and he murmurs,

"It's time to run away, then?"

She nods, releasing one hand so she can gesture widely to the world around them.

"There's so much world for us to see," she states dreamily, "We can go anywhere we want if we run! I know exactly where we can hide, as well. It was hard for me to make it safe, but Morou helped me..."

Lum eyes her suspiciously.

"You can't be talking about the deep chapel, can you?" She nods with a devilish grin. "Assu, nobody leaves those. They all vanish, mage or not."

"We fixed that," she assures him, "It was all the cauldron, it was all leading people there. We broke the curse, and spilled those souls on the floor, let them soak into the sand. And suddenly, we didn't have the voices anymore. It's safe now."

She's so certain, so eager. He has to admit that she's here, and so is Morou— so surely they did something right?

"And the demons of the depths?" He asks. She shrugs.

"I heard screams when we toppled the cauldron, and we found dust in the halls. But we took the flowers too, the ones that grew further in." She dangles a pouch in front of him, "They refuse to approach this. We can make a safehouse, and nobody will dare to follow us. We will be pronounced dead, and yet we will live. We'll finally be free."

Lum's swayed by her passionate speech, her determination...and her facts. Her evidence is sound, almost uncomfortably so. They never look for anyone who goes into the chapels. They're assumed to be taken by the demons, but if the chapel she speaks of is truly safe...

He claps a hand on her shoulder, and nods.

"Next cycle," he agrees firmly. "We riot."

Tonight.