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He woke up screaming. The sweat pouring off him felt like he was submerged in the ocean once more. A dream...
No, a memory.
Nyxis clutched his head, steadying his breathing. He remembered something. A palace, a family, a battle. The Palace was his home or it had been. Something happened judging from the hatred he felt towards that place. What was he supposed to feel in the memory of a man and a boy who looked so much like him and a woman who held so much greed in her eyes?
They were his family—that much he could remember. What happened to them that made him revile but, at the same time, pity them? They all perished in the battle that happened in the Palace. He recalled butterflies, for some reason. There were tinkling shards and a voice as well. A small gasp tore from his lips. It was the same voice that belonged to the woman who fell with him.
The Heiress.
Dear gods. He should know everything about her and why he had to fight her but his stupid brain couldn't even remember why he had to haul her off the cliff. It just reminded him that he was stupid enough to fall off a cliff. His memory showed him another girl whose face his brain kept failing to show. The girl with the warm, brown eyes...who was she?
He sat up, his body feeling less burdened. Some of the tension in his shoulders had eased; he could move his limbs without much strain and pain shooting into his head. How long had he slept? His stomach growled. Oh. How long had he gone without food?
He edged off his rock and trudged to the curtain ahead of him. He pushed it back just enough to see the blue-haired girl bustling around on a counter on the far side of the room. A pile of chopped firewood stood to his left, beside yet another curtained doorway. Above it perched a cauldron hanging from a pole supported by braces that were stuck to the rock.
Nyxis watched as the girl chopped orange crops and dunked them into the boiling cauldron in smooth, graceful movements. She must have been doing this for a long time now. He spied more kegs to his right, piled on top of each other as if there's nothing in them.
The roar of the ocean was so strong that he could hear it in this cavern. How come he hadn't heard it from when he first woke up atop his rock? Was that how damaged he was?
"How much longer are you going to stand there?" the girl's voice tore through Nyxis's thoughts, going from soft to high-pitched. She's annoyed and rightly so.
Nyxis pursed his lips and turned away. " I am not hungry," he lied. Perhaps he can find some edible roots in this cave and—
Water slammed into him from behind. He whipped back to the girl who had an arm forward. She's smiling, albeit a little wickedly. Nyxis frowned, feeling cold droplets slither from his hair to his clothes. He was dripping.
"We both know that to be a lie," the girl said, blowing on her hands and dusting them off. "Sit down and start eating. I redacted the sustenance from your treatments so you are naturally hungry. Come."
