Runesight

10 - Ayfel

That was how the days passed.

Eliax followed thin leads, explored anywhere that caught her fancy and read up on everything the hero had done with her life. Occasionally Hivren caught her at the library and convinced her to go to Nightwind with him, but most of her time was engrossed in her studies or practicing her dimensionalism. Before she knew it, she'd been in Reiaran for two weeks.

It felt like a small eternity as she pulled memory after memory out of the resonance. A memory of drawing, a memory of teasing some younger girls, a memory of loneliness.

The more memories she saw, the more she felt herself longing to be that person. She still saw them as separate people, but that gap was getting steadily smaller with every passing day.

Eliax felt like this was probably a decent, healthy thing, in fact she found herself feeling almost good. She hummed and doodled in the margins of her notebook, there was no problem with that, right? No problem at all with taking a moment to relax.

Hivren peered over her shoulder, "Whatcha doing?"

Eliax jumped and glanced at him, slightly panicked as if she felt like she shouldn't be doodling in the margins instead of taking notes on that latest memory she'd looked over. "I'm just ah...working on my thing, ya know?"

"Ah, the mysterious personal project you've been going on about forever. How long do you think it's going to take?"

Eliax shrugged and closed the notebook before he could absorb the numerous question marks and confusing rambles it contained. She felt like with each page these things were degrading."Hopefully not more than a month. It's been almost three weeks now and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface..."

"Well, you finally read everything on the Hero, do you need help finding anything else?"

Eliax cringed, remembering the hours wasted on all that dragon crap propaganda. She'd checked though, she could safely say she wasn't missing anything clouded by her hatred of the Hero. "I'll have to look into some other stuff, but I think I'm done with the Hero forever."

Ha. Ahah. Ahahahah. Don't mind me, I'm just laughing at her. "Oh, do you want to see the Ayfel?"

Eliax paused. "The...Ayfel..." The resonance stirred at the word. It hadn't done anything the numerous times she'd read the word in the propaganda. Which only really told her that the stupid thing had decided that until now, she wasn't ready or something. "Isn't that where the Hero grew up? You mentioned it before, there's a shrine isn't there?"

Hivren nodded, "I visit all the time, the lady in charge of the building is pretty nice, Aymiae, if you've heard of her."

Eliax blinked at the name, feeling a memory perk up. She shoved it down before it could distract her."Huh, I guess I'll check it out later, I need to finish something first."

Hivren shrugged, "Just tell her you know me and she'll probably give you a tour free of charge."

"Ah...thanks?"

Hivren nudged her with an elbow, "What're friends for! Even if the friend is insane or something."

Apparently humans had hard elbows, but not much else. "Ugh, you do remember that..." She'd been trying to figure out if he'd dismissed that as a joke for a while now. She still wasn't sure if he actually believed it.

Hivren grinned, "Of course! It's all anyone knows about your mysterious project."

Sparks, maybe she should leave some more 'normal' bits of her research out for him to find and see if he made a more reasonable assumption out of them.