Realm of Monsters-Chapter 710: Forgotten, But Never Lost Part 1

Chapter 710: Forgotten, But Never Lost Part 1

Day after day, the world blurred by in scenes of trees and a village Stryg had always known, but not like this. There was one constant being in his memories that had never been there before. The goddess of the moon, the Mother Moon, the Watcher of the Ebon Realm, Lunae.

She had once mentioned that Stryg and she had met before, but this was nothing like a chance meeting. Every day that Stryg watched, his younger self had gone to visit her. Since the time he could barely walk, Stryg would seek out Lunae in the forest and spend time with her.

The goddess always seemed annoyed, if not outright angry, by his presence, yet the most curious thing would happen. She would spend her days with him, no matter what he wanted to do, even if it was to simply play with a ball or skip stones in a nearby lake. Lunae was always there.

She was his mother.

Stryg had thought Aurelia refused to tell him that she was his birth mother because she did not want him, but the truth was much more complicated. Lunae had claimed him as her own, and it seemed from the few interactions Aurelia had with the goddess, that she would never dare offend Lunae.

Rather, it seemed Aurelia loved Stryg as best she could, even when he snuck out practically every day. Sometimes he came back with scrapes from playing in the woods. Aurelia would wash him up, complaining about his antics, but she would always make sure his wounds were cleaned and bandaged.

Stryg may not have had a father in his childhood, but he had two mothers who had looked after him throughout all of it. He wasn’t unwanted. Despite all the terrible things the others in the village had told him to his face and behind his back, there were two people who had stood by him always. He wasn’t alone. He was loved.

“So why…” Stryg gripped his hand over his chest, “Why can’t I remember any of this?”

He watched on in silence as memories he did not know played out before him. Day after day, month after month, year after year. Lunae was in all of them.

He recognized some of the memories. He was ten or so, sitting crouched on the ground, writing with a stick on the dirt. Lunae stood over him, correcting his symbols and characters with a patient voice.

The memory was as clear as day to Stryg, but it had been the hunter Sigte who had stood over him that day. It was Sigte who had taught him how to read and write in the ancient arcana language. Hadn’t it?

What was going on?

This didn’t make sense.

Sigte wasn’t in any of these memories. Why…?

The answer mocked him from the corner of his mind. But to acknowledge it would open the door to a conclusion he could not handle.

The memory fell apart into darkness once more, with only the light of Archive shining down on him. Soon, another memory would appear, and the answer would mock him again.

“No…” Stryg mumbled in a shaky voice. He fell to his knees and clenched the darkness. “I buried you… I mourned you… You died and no one cared… It was only me… Everyone else pretended like you didn’t even exist. Were you just a lie, Sigte…?”

“Sigte?” Archive repeated the word and flared with renewed light.

Suddenly, the world shifted away to a different scene. Stryg’s younger self seemed upset and Lunae was playing with him to cheer him up.

She scooped him up in her arms, and he burst into giggles as he tried to escape her clutches. “~Nooo, stop! Stop it!~”

“Never!” she kissed his cheeks incessantly and rubbed her nose into his neck.

His tiny feet kicked the air and his hands flailed about as he cried tears of laughter. “~I give up, I give up!~”

Lunae pulled back and grinned, “Feeling better?”

He looked away abashedly, “...Yeah.”

She smiled, “I’m never going to abandon you, little one, do you hear me? Never.”

He looked back at her. “Really?”

“I promise.”

“Then,” Stryg swallowed. “Make the Sigte bond with me!”

“What did you say?” Lunae blinked in confusion.

The older Stryg watched the scene play out in disbelief. Tears burned in his eyes as Lunae cut her own palm and mixed her blood with his younger self.

“Repeat after me,” Lunae ordered, before muttering several unfamiliar words. “One Life Above All Others.”

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“One Life Above All Others,” both Strygs whispered at the same time.

Lunae nodded solemnly and stepped back. “Our blood is one.”

“Will it scar?” the child asked.

“Possibly.”

“I hope it does.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

He raised his hand to the sky with pride. “So I’ll never forget today!”

The memory melted away and Stryg was left alone in the dark. He stared at his hand, its palm unblemished. “I forgot…” he mumbled in a tight voice as tears streamed down his cheeks.

For the first time in his life, he could put a name to the feeling of uneasiness that had haunted him all these years. He had forgotten his mother.

“Why did I forget?” He slammed his fists into the ground, “I don’t understand!”

The darkness fell away into the familiar forest once more.

~~~

Birds chirped in the canopy and the occasional vulture squawked in the distance. A black fox scurried past and disappeared under a bush. The breeze blew quiet through the woods. A teenage Stryg closed his eyes, relaxed his shoulders, and listened for the melody of the forest. He knew the melody’s pattern, ever-shifting so slightly yet in tandem with the forest, like the land changing seasons.

It was easy to get lost in the overflowing melody. He couldn’t pinpoint a precise note in the endless song flowing past him, but he could tell where something was off. A hollow spot among the notes, where the melody shifted around instead of flowing through, Lunae. She lived in the forest but she wasn’t a part of the forest, her own existence was set apart from the rest.

Stryg tried to listen for her notes, her piece in the song, but he could never quite tell what it was. He could never directly listen for her, but he could listen for the dissonance of the forest’s melody that always surrounded her.

It took a little longer than usual, but he found the dissonance in the melody, and to his surprise, it was much closer than usual. Not far from the village at all, almost as if—

Stryg smiled wide. Lunae already knew. She had been watching him. She had seen him score each target. His smile broadened and he ran to her. The wind hit his face as the trees passed by. The songs of the birds slowly disappeared one by one and the breeze died in the air.

“Lunae—!” He suddenly ran into a clearing and stumbled to a halt.

Shattered trees speckled the clearing and thick dark blood soaked the charred ground. An amethyst dragon or what was left of it, lay still in the dirt. Its wings had been torn apart and its chest had been ripped open, broken ribs protruding from the bleeding cavity. The dragon’s serpentine neck was twisted and bent back. Its jaw was ripped off, hanging only by a loose string of flesh. The once brilliant deep purple eyes were now glazed over.

Atop the dragon sat a teenage girl about his age. She wasn’t a goblin, no, Stryg had never seen anyone like her. She had warm brown skin and pale green-almost white-hair and she was covered in specks of blood.

The girl was looking down at a small fox on her lap, casually chatting away as if it were an ordinary day and a dragon wasn’t lying dead underneath them.

She abruptly stopped talking and looked up at the goblin child standing at the treeline, frozen as a deer.

She narrowed her ever-changing iridescent eyes and her red lips slowly curled in a smirk. “Well, hello there.”

Stryg took a trembling step back. “Y-You’re not Lunae…”

“No. No, I’m not,” she chuckled. “And what might you be?”

The older Stryg witnessing the memory recognized those eyes and the person they belonged to. “Caligo,” he whispered, though his voice fell on deaf ears.

“I-I’m Stryg,” his younger self answered with an uncertain voice.

“Stryg, is it? Well, don’t be shy. Lin-Lu and I were just discussing a proper place to bathe. You see, I have a little something in my clothes, heh,” she chuckled at her own joke. The fox nestled into her jacket and disappeared.

“W-What did you do?” Stryg took a step back and stared at the dead dragon.

“Oh, this? I simply took care of a pest. He struggled a tad, pleaded for his life even. Can you imagine? The gall,” Caligo whistled and shook her head.

“How could you?” Stryg balled his fists and bit his trembling lip.

She cocked her head to the side. “You seem upset. Why? He was nothing but a foreign aberration that should never have existed in this world to begin with.”

“Syleth wasn’t a monster!”

“Oh? You know this creature.” Caligo leaned forward, eyes full of interest.

Stryg wiped the tears in his eyes and nodded. “Syleth was my friend. He protected my village from the big monsters that roam the forest. He used to sometimes take me flying on his back.” Stryg glared at Caligo, “And you killed him.”

“I did, yes,” she smiled wide, her iridescent gaze tinged with a hint of madness. “Does that anger you? To lose someone you hold dear? It certainly would anger me, wouldn’t you agree— Lunae?”

Lunae burst into the clearing, slightly out of breath. She shifted from her wolfen form into a woman of snow-white hair and dark, rich silver skin, and stepped between Stryg and Caligo. Despite her Divine Sight, she glanced back at Stryg, and searched him up and down for any wounds. Satisfied, she turned her attention back to the other goddess.

“Lunae, what a pleasant surprise,” Caligo gave a mock bow.

“You stepped into my forest and thought I wouldn’t notice?”

“Your forest?” Caligo looked taken aback. “You are not the only monster who claims this forest as your home. Luckily for you, I did you a favor and took care of this one.” She patted the dragon corpse underneath her. “You’re welcome.”

Lunae narrowed her eyes. “That dragon was under my protection.”

“Since when do titans take our mortal enemies under our ‘protection?’ Seems a bit odd, don’t you think?” Caligo made a face.

“What I choose to do in my domain is my concern alone. Or have you forgotten yourself, Caligo?”

“Funny you should mention. I find myself discovering new secrets quite often these days.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, you know. People forgetting themselves and choosing to commit the most treasonous of acts and expecting there to be no consequences to their actions,” Caligo gave her a flat stare.

“Are you implying something?” Lunae replied in a calm voice, though the way her eyes glanced at Stryg betrayed her worry.

Caligo caught the quick look in the boy’s direction like a shark smelling blood. “Implying? No. Nothing of the sort. Rather, I have a question that I hoped a fellow titan and old friend like you could answer for me. What. Is. That?” Caligo pointed at Stryg.