There is a lot about me you don't know -Tales of Arcadia ENG

15-Xiāngsheng

TRACK 15

So put your best face on everybody

Pretend you know this song, everybody

Come hang, come hang

Let's go out with a bang

Bang! Bang! Bang!

(Bang!- AJR)

********

Claire was quite tense. More than tense, even. The waiting, as usual, could be very stifling and unnerving.

She could only stand there, leaning her back against the wall or sitting on her mattress, which seemed to have become inexplicably hard. She could only try to keep her senses as active as possible, ready to sense the signal on the back of her hand -which she hoped would not come, really- but her almost complete lack of information made her feel even more anxious.

She would have liked to know what was happening. She would have liked to enter the Nest too, but she had no motivation to do so, not at that moment. If she had, she probably would have screwed everything up -or almost. And she didn't want to be the cause of a possible disaster. They had tried to plan far too many things in a couple of hours or so, and it had all been done very seriously. To blow the whole job to hell was something she would have a hard time forgiving herself.

Claire chased the thought away with a small snort and a hasty shake of her head, going to rest her gaze on Blinky, absorbed in reading and already flanked by Aaarrrgh, who was instead looking around carefully, keeping an eye on the outside.

She moved closer to the two and sat down, ignoring how cold the floor was. She took a deep breath and then threw it out, hoping some of her frustration would come out with it, beginning to fiddle nervously first with her cape and then with a few strands of hair.

She glanced at the pages of the volume Blinky was holding after a couple of seconds when she saw the Troll turn the page.

The writing was always illegible, but there was a drawing of a woman with strangely short hair. Strangely because, if she did not remember wrong -she had read it somewhere or someone had told her,she did not remember well- that both women and men kept their hair long in past China. But she had her hair cut very short, in a simple pixie cut, part of the locks covering her left eye.

She was in a traditional Chinese dress -she had no idea how it was called-, of a dull green color. Her hands were barely raised,with a big eye-catching ring adorning the index finger of her right hand and a skull resting in both. An all-white butterfly stood just above the skull.

"That's..." she croaked with difficulty, the beginning of the question escaping her lips even before she realized it -perhaps motivating how her voice came out- failing to complete it anyway.

She could not help but dwell on how young she appeared. She barely looked 20 years old, just like Douxie -although that could have been the fault of the depiction itself, which was quite stylized, albeit in color. It had its charms as a drawing style, she couldn't help but admit that.

'From the story I had imagined her to be aesthetically much older than that, if it is her...' she thought.

"The necromancer witch, Xia," Blinky expounded, thus confirming her hypothesis. He went to look at her after a while. "It seems she was one of the oldest witches. Very famous and loved before she started resurrecting the dead."

Claire bit her lower lip, a certain curiosity rising to the surface. "Does the book say why she did it?"

"Not clearly, no. There are... a few assumptions. That she stumbled upon a volume or scroll of Wugu magic on a quest outside her town and that by touching it she became possessed by it." A pause. "That it was simply her desire for power that drove her to experiment in impure magic. That she feared dying to such an extent that, even in her immortality, she decided to try to cross the boundary of balance... and many other possibilities, though they are quite similar to these."