This is not treachery.
This is freedom.
In the middle of Heaven and Hell, the days of rain and mist are long gone. Now, the Gap World is a kingdom of light and darkness, goodness and evilness, sunshine and clouds. When clandestine forces weave toget...
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THE MORNING HAD BEEN A BLUR.
I'd slept for so many hours without a single disruption that I hadn't even been awake to notice Denfer's absence the whole morning. When I'd finally woken up, the first thing catching my attention had been the limited light in the bedroom. At first, I'd thought it was just another rainy day. Soon enough, I'd realized that it was just late in the afternoon and the midday sun had started dimming.
Then, I'd found Denfer chilling in the garden, a book in his hands and his formal clothes still on, his dog—Stam—sitting on his feet. Finding him in a black uniform, richly decorated with gold thread at the parts of his shoulders and wrists had felt quite contradicting. Especially when everything around him had nothing to do with royalty. He'd quickly explained that he hadn't changed into his casual clothes yet because he hadn't wanted to wake me up.
So after he'd changed into a pair of loose pants and a crimson shirt, we'd sat in the garden until the night had fallen, doing nothing, eating, playing cards and talking about random things that revolved around the village, its history and its residents. Only fifteen people lived here, most of them old and without magic. The few young ones made their living by breeding sheeps, chickens and cows, hunting and farming.
As for Denfer, he'd found that village only a month after he'd come to the Gap World. Since he'd been one of the first ones to arrive in this kingdom, he'd had plenty of time to wander through the few towns and villages that had just started forming. Kyparissi had been one of them. Back then, he hadn't had many responsibilites in the capital, something that had drastically changed when the Gap World had started overflowing with people and the limites resources Denfer had been given to rule the kingdom had started ebbing.
That was when most of the village's residents realized that they would have more opportunities for wealth and success in the fertile flatlands. So they'd traded their lives in the mountains for the luck they had hoped to find in the capital. And this village, amongst many others, had ended up being nothing but a speck of dust and snow, hiding in their forests the rarest beauty of them all.
When we'd gone inwards, I'd been more than happy to find that Denfer had brought most of my things from the Castle of Sunlight here—something I'd highly appreciated.
Now, sat on the wooden floor of the bedroom, we debated going to sleep or staying awake for a few more hours. The clock that was placed on the green nightstand never missed the chance to remind us of how quickly we were delving into the midnight hours. Its sound vibrated through my body, echoed through the silent room and made Denfer stand up, grab it and hide it in the wooden closet that could barely fit all of our clothes.
When he sat down again, I took the deck of cards in my hands and started dealing the cards—four to each one of us—hoping that he would finally win since while we'd been in the garden, he'd been miserably failing.
