A single candle lit a small room which only contained a simple bed, a wardrobe made of plain planks, and a desk with a chair on which the candle stood. There was a single open window with not much view as the fog was thick outside. The wind was settle, making the candle flicker, but the flame held strong.
Each flicker of the flame sounded different, yet for a person sleeping in the bed, it was the same screaking sound. Bones rubbing against each other. Navia’s eyes snapped open as the flame flickered once again; her breathing was heavy and rapid. The unfamiliar surroundings didn’t help at first. Once she looked at the candle, she calmed down. There was something about the flame and its warmth.
How could a single candle warm a whole room with an open window and not go out with a gust of wind, which Navia felt every now and then? Coming to her senses, she looked around, trying to gather as much information as she could about the place.
Navia didn’t have her clothes on; instead, she wore a white robe. She first noticed the wardrobe, but as she passed the window, she couldn't resist it and tried to see what was on the outside. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t tell much of her surroundings besides something that could be walls and small watch towers.
“Last thing I remember… Is darkness… Not darkness. It was a dark place and gross… Leviathan.” There were holes inside her mind that slowly patched themselves. Each gap in her memory became clearer. Even though she passed out, she knew that the people she tried to save survived. “I wonder… Where am I? Does Sie have some kind of base? Stronghold? She said once there are more of us.”
Moving to the wardrobe, she placed her hand on a cold metal handle and pulled. Since everything was silent, the screech of the wooden wardrobe was as loud as a howling wind in the mountains. Or it did sound like that because the wind outside picked up for a moment.
Inside were her clothes, clean and sewn up. As if she didn’t fight any monster, and it was all just a nightmare. Thinking back to it, she did lose a lot. Looking at her left hand, her pinky finger was missing. Her right arm looked skinny because of the robe. Lifting the sleeve, she could see a chunk of her flesh missing, a mark of a bite. It regenerated a bit, but not enough yet to recover the bitten-off muscles. She couldn’t properly move her fingers because of that.
Waving her hand in front of her face from left to right, she could see it very well. There was no mirror, but she could see which meant her eye had healed.
Feeling odd in the robes, she changed into her previous clothing. Looking closer at her sleeves, she couldn’t tell where the holes had been. As if someone brought her brand new clothes.
A light knocking came from the dark wooden doors. Navia flinched as she didn’t hear anyone approach. Her senses a bit dull after waking up and still recovering. Before she could even answer, the doors opened. An older man let out a surprised gasp at the sight of Navia, standing in the corner of the room instead of the bed.
“You’re finally awake.” Quietly said the old man with a cane, or rather a branch of a tree turned into one. The elder was almost bald with only a few hairs remaining on his head. Because of his tanned skin, his thick and bushy white eyebrows were even more visible to the eye. The man wore white robes with wide sleeves. The robe was tied together by a dark green wrap belt.
“A green belt… I am at the Monastery.” Navia suddenly bowed to the elder, her head very low to show respect to someone with a higher belt than hers.
“I appreciate your manner, but you don’t need to bow so low. After all, you’re still healing.” The man bowed his head lightly and clasped his hands, with elbows spread widely.
“To be honest, I don’t feel like I am injured…” No matter how hard Navia tried to hide it, the elder quickly noticed the twitching of her right hand and something which was on her face.
“While you can hide your hand, it’ll be impossible to hide that eye of yours.” The elder tried to smile, but he couldn’t hide his sadness at the sight of Navia’s eyes. “At least it looks better than previously.”
“What do you mean? I can see well.” Navia didn’t understand what the old man meant.
The elder left the room for a moment and came back with a small mirror. He placed it in front of Navia’s face so she could take a good look at it. There was no scar on her face, and she had both of her eyes, except one of them was black instead of white.
“Whatever you fought… Might have poisoned you. You were covered in a dark liquid, and there was a lot of it inside you…” The old man tried to calmly explain, thinking that Navia would panic knowing that inside her was some weird liquid.
“It’s no poison…” Navia slowly took the mirror from the old man’s hand and took a closer look at her eye. “It’s a… curse of some sort. My blood is no longer red. It’s of a black color.” Navia put the window down, showing her eye to the elder. “My eye is black because it's covered in my blood, slowly healing…”
The man silently agreed with Navia, letting the truth sink in. “So it’s not a poison… At least that’s good to hear… I think.”
“Are there other survivors here?” Navia wondered if the rest of the people were alright. Having experienced something like that could either build a character or worsen their mental state.
“Survivors? The only people who came here were a young man without an arm and the elder who held you in his arms.” The elder explained as he placed the mirror on the table, thinking that Navia might want to use it.
“August and that guy… Where are they? I need to speak to them.” Navia asked, ready to leave the room and head to her companion.
“They left a few days ago.” The elder quickly said before Navia could reach the door.
“A few days ago?” For Navia, it was just a moment, but she didn’t know how much time had passed. “How long was I unconscious?”
“Unconscious? I would say that you were dead… Or at least so close to it that it seemed like you had passed away. Nearly a month had passed since you came to this temple.” It was like a cold knife to the ribs for Navia. She knew some time must have passed, but a month wasn’t what she imagined.
She leaned against the wall, feeling a bit weak, shocked by the fact. “I was out… For so long… Did they leave a message?” Navia looked at the elder, ready for another surprise she could hear.
“They did. Two messages, actually.” The elder reached for something hidden in his robe. He took out a letter with Navia’s name on it. “This one is from the young man.” He handed the piece of paper to Navia, and as she sat down on the bed, he continued, “And the elderly man said something among those lines… The lady said that she needs to heal her world. Until she does that, she is to stay in the Monastery.”
“The lady… Huh… Right… I had nearly forgotten.” The Monastery was the destination for the ship that Navia took, before it got swallowed by the Leviathan.
“The request wasn’t formally sent to the elders because you were imprisoned in bed. That is why I was appointed to watch over you. I may only possess the green belt, but my knowledge of gates is worthy of a purple belt.” The elder explained as he nodded his head to Navia. She nodded back and turned her back to the old man. He placed a hand on her back, and both of them began to meditate. Navia was first to enter the inner world.
Looking around, she looked for cracks, for a sign that someone had tried to enter her world. Hearing a rustle, she quickly turned and dashed toward it, falling onto her knees. There was a crack in the ground. Navia thought she would need to dig a way for the monk. Yet as her fist was about to crush the ground, it went into the crack, the floor being not as hard as near the Blood Gate.
She could feel the grasp of the Elder, so she pulled; the soil began to move away like sand from which the man appeared. He coughed up the dirt that landed in his mouth on his way here. Opening his eyes, he couldn’t believe how her world looked. As his eyes moved toward Navia, she could see sympathy in them.
Navia realized that he was taking the wrong idea about her, so she quickly said, “This used to be a green forest. I believe that the curse somehow damaged my inner world and my previous gates… Leaving me only with this one.”
The elder looked toward the gate Navia pointed to, as the “guest” in her world, he could only see the gates that Navia unlocked. Making it harder for the outsider to solve the puzzle of the gate.
“The door does match the current world… But not the one you used to have… And it is in the ground. Yet I can see it. So you did open it.” The elder noted to himself as he checked the gate itself and looked around the world.
“Forcibly. When I was close to death.” Added Navia to help the monk understand her predicament.
“That may be the reason why it wasn’t fully open… It's rare, but it happens. The gates either fully open or crumble after being forced out to use. Which I suppose is good that the latter didn’t happen.” The elder knelt by the gate, looking at the dirt which Navia had dug out.
“I thought that breaking gates was just a theory. At least that's what I thought in order.”
“It was a theory a few years ago. The people who claimed that their gate broke happened to find them later. We thought that the gate appeared only in life-threatening situations and potentially hid again in the inner world. The more we studied this theory, the more truth we found. The gates they found were a bit different… Similar but not the same. It’s as if the inner world tried to rebuild them. Which was also an astonishing discovery.” The man stood up and began to look toward the horizon as if looking for something.
“We didn’t have much… Research Objects to work with, but we found two interesting people. One was a woman whose gate was literally broken into bits, and even the visitor could see them. Which meant the gate was unlocked, and then it crumbled. The other one was more… How should I put it? What occurred was at the same time interesting and terrifying. A gate appeared in a dire situation, but instead of it being destroyed… The original gates began to break. Before his death, the man claimed that ‘this gate devoured my awakened two gates.’ Quite a claim, don’t you agree?” The elder turned around, wanting to hear Navia’s opinion.
“Then you have another research object here. I have awakened four gates, and there is no trace of them.” This seemed to pique the interest of the elder as he hummed, reflecting on that matter.
“I may have two theories, which would be the closest to the truth. At least I think… Both of course are connected to…” The elder let out a gasp as he looked all around at the barren wasteland. “To whatever had happened to your inner world. First one is that your world had been damaged, and so were the gates. The other theory is more optimistic. When your world changed, the gates didn’t recognize your inner world as the same and went into hiding.”
“So you mean there is a possibility of getting them back if we heal my inner world?” Even if it wasn’t certain, Navia had hope. She was attached to her previous gates as they were part of her. One was her first accomplishment, the second was her great step forward, the third was a proof of her mastery, and the fourth became her trump card. “It would be nice to have them back…”
“It’s just a theory, but even those theories can give us hope. I think I've seen enough of your inner world to report it to the master. You can rest easy, as I think he will grant you aid.” The man kneeled down and closed his eyes. His body slowly sank into the earth, and he disappeared without any trace.
Once Navia opened her eyes, the man was already standing by the doors. “I guess you might be hungry. I could show you the way to the canteen.” The elder smiled warmly, thinking that he was right about her hunger. He was caring just like a grandfather.
Navia couldn’t feel hunger as she didn’t need food to live. “Can’t get better on an empty stomach, thank you, elder,” Navia remembered Sie’s instruction to eat food properly so her body could grow stronger, but what was first on her mind when she answered the elder was that she couldn’t deny his generosity.