Kitsune of the Blue Sun

Chapter 47- Trial of Knowledge

[Pram POV]

Seeing Keeno kneeling next to the Well as I and the Spirit looked on at her, she scooped more water into her hands and drank it.  A few seconds later, she went rigid and started to fall over.  I ran over and caught her before she fell into the water.

{KEENO!}

[Please calm yourself, Goddess Amaterasu, your Fated One is safe, she is just undertaking her Trial.]

{I…*sigh* Can you figure out what her Trial is now that it is started?}

[I can try.  Permission to touch her forehead?]

{Tentatively granted.}

[I thank you.]

The spirit shrunk in size and floated closer to Keeno before a small protrusion appeared and tapped Keeno’s forehead.

[I see.]

{Well?}

[Her trial is one that, in order to complete it, she must unsupress memories she has suppressed.]

“What memories is she suppressing?”

{Ah…Keeno…}

“Amaterasu?”

{Her death…Aside from the initial shock from when it happened, she never really mentioned it and never really talks about it unless it’s important for some small context of something…}

[Yes, it seems she has something to learn from those memories that she hoped to never remember.]

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{Keeno, whatever happens, please come back to me safely.}

Hearing the worry in Amaterasu’s voice, I could only look down at Keeno with worry as well.

[Keeno POV]

When I felt my eyes open, all I saw was darkness.  My head felt a little fuzzy and instinctively I felt around for something.  When my fingers brushed against something hard, I picked it up, and with practices ease, flipped the switch.  A single beam of light lit up the room, revealing a somewhat circular room of stone with a large slab in the middle.  The walls of the room seemed strangely blurry, and I tried standing up.

When I stood, I immediately felt something off.  I reached my hand behind me and didn’t feel what was supposed to be there.

“Where is my tail…And why is my voi-”

I couldn’t even finish my sentence.  I dropped the light and tried snapping my fingers.  Nothing.  No fire, not even a small spark.  I fell to my knees.

“A-Ama!?  Amaterasu!!!?  Pram?  Huginn?  Muninn!?”

I felt tears start to roll down my cheeks as nobody answered me.  I fell to my side and curled up into a ball.  I cried at the sense of loneliness that I hadn’t felt in a long time as well as the fact that, for all I knew, everything was just a dream from a desperate girl dying alone in a dark cave in the middle of nowhere.  At some point all the tears were gone, and my consciousness faded.

When I awoke once more, I felt worse.  The loneliness was crushing, and the darkness wasn’t helping.  I moved over and sat with my back to the stone slab in the middle of the room as I stared blankly at the blurry walls.

“…”

An unknown amount of time passed as I just sat there, staring with no thoughts in my head.

“…”

Time that felt like days had passed.  It was then that I started to feel a sense of strangeness to this place.

“I should feel hungry…and the flashlight should have died by now…”

I sat there, ruminating on the weirdness.  This whole situation was weird.  There is no possible way to dream up 18 years’ worth of memories, interactions, and love, at least not without being insane or having an extremely active imagination.  It was then that I remembered.

“This is a Trial…Why did I forget that?  Doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that I figure out what it is I’m supposed to do.”

I picked up the flashlight and stood up before making my way over to one side of the room to inspect the wall.  It was still blurry even when I put my face so close my nose touched the wall.  I then backed away and started to pace around.

“Hmmmmm.”

I put my hand to my chin and looked down in thought.

“Uuuuuuggggghhhh!”

I got frustrated when nothing came to mind.  I sat down on the slab in the center of the room again and, out of habit, tried to bring my tail to my lap, only to remember again that it was no longer there.

“…!!!!”

I jumped up again with a sudden revelation.

“Why am I so dumb sometimes!?”

Clearly, this was a hint at how I was supposed to pass this Trial.  I looked down at my body, the proportions were both familiar, yet foreign.

“Damn, old me could have stayed in shape more…Anyway, if I look like this, then this room should be where I died…But…something is missing here.”

I started to pace around again.  I dug into my memories as hard as I could to try and figure out what was missing from this scenario.

“Think, Keeno, think…What were you doing here in the first place…”

I thought long and hard on the question.  I looked at myself once more, the flashlight in my hand, and my general surroundings.  It was then that the memory, foggy as it was, started to resurface.

“Ruins…Scandinavia…Archaeology…Cave…Darkness…My death…RIGHT!!!”

I frantically moved over to a wall and, scrounging around for anything I could find, found a loose, sharp rock on the floor.

“I think I get it now…I don’t really get why this is my Trial, but I hope that question gets answered when I finish this.”

Finding a good spot on the wall, I started to chip into it, carving out Runes.  I was surprised at just how clear they were to me, even though 18 years had passed as well as the fact that I was apparently repressing the very memory of them.  What may have either been hours or days passed as I meticulously carved the Runes for the nine realms on the walls at as equal a distance from each other as I could by just eyeballing the spacing.  It helped that I didn’t really get tired in here, at least, now that I realized that this was a Trial and most likely all in my head.

Once I was finished, I moved to the center of the room and sat down.  I looked over my handiwork and felt some pride swell in my chest.  I then sat down and waited, and waited, and waited.  Hours passed and nothing happened.

“What’s missing?  I have the Runes that I remember…no wait…don’t tell me I have to carve every single one of them!  I CAN’T REMEMBER ALL OF THEM TO THE SMALLEST DETAIL!”

The panic that was taking over again was threatening to put me back into that catatonic state from before when I remembered another thing from that day.

“…There were Seidr Runes as well, weren’t there?”

I once again stood up and picked up my rock before trying to picture what the Runes I needed looked like.  I started to carve out the ones that came to me, and the further I progressed, the clearer the memories became.  My work got a little faster and, as the hours or days passed, the walls became filled with more and more Runes.

“Ugh.  I may not be getting tired, but my arms and hands are sore…Stupid weird Trial for being weird.”

Though I was done, still nothing was happening, so I dug deeper into my memories.  While I knew for a fact that all the walls were carved with the most important Runes from that times, it seemed like there was still something missing.  Something that I needed to add my own personal twist to in order to get them all to work.  I looked over my work and, as had now become usual in this cave, I dove into thought.

“Well, I have the Nine Realms, Seidr Runes for…whatever they were used for…maybe I need some protection Runes?  I can try that, but I get the feeling that I’m still missing something.  Hmmmm.”

While I thought about what I could still be missing, I carved out as many protection Runes as I could remember from all my studies and research.  I carved them into the walls, the floor, the slab, the pillars around the slab.  I even carved a giant one on the top of the slab.  Once that was done and still nothing happened, I started to get really frustrated and just started to carve random shapes.

Small suns, things that represented life, and what I best could picture as just magic.  Things that I would associate with Ama.  Then I started to carve Rune-like shapes that would associate with me.  At this point I was in a sort of trance that I didn’t even notice some things started to change.  A few of the Runes in the room started to glow, just not enough for me to really take notice of.

“Heh.  Hehe.  Hehehehahahahahahahahaha!  AN EPIFANY!  A perfect representation of mine and Ama’s relationship!  We share an Authority of Suns!  We oppose each other with Life and Death!  And finally!  We empower one another with Magic and Runes!  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

I fell backwards onto the stone slab, only to feel something on my lower back.  I jumped up and felt around to find my tail had at some point returned.  I felt on top of my head to feel two fluffy fox ears.  Excitement started to grow in my chest.  I snapped my fingers, and a small ball of cerulean fire came into existence.

“Ku.  Kuku.  Kukukukuahahahahahahahahahahaha!  *Cough, cough*”

Once I calmed down enough to stop coughing, I climbed onto the slab and started to channel mana into the Runes.  The mana flowed into them, and they started to glow with a mix of electric blue and black light.  Soon, the rest of the Runes on the floor and the walls started to glow too.  It was then that I figured out what the point of the Trial was.

“So…I had to unreppress the memory of Runes, probably get over the trauma, and now I need to make Runes a reality in my new home…and make them my third Authority.  Hehe.  Share, opposite, empower.  I like that dynamic.  I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it, but I have a feeling the process will come to me after I get a few Dead Zones under my belt.”

I felt a wide, almost vicious smile spread across my face.

“Look out, world, your future Goddess of the Blue Sun, Death, and Runes is going to take you by storm!”

I pushed even more mana into the Runes all around the room until I heard a cracking sound.  Then, my vision went dark once more.

Chaos Realm:

Order: …

Order, you are not responsible for Keeno’s small mental breakdown.

Order: I know…but I can’t not feel a little guilty since it is something caused by something I made.

*Pulls Order into a hug*

Not your fault.  This is a Trial of Knowledge, it brought many things to Keeno’s attention that she now knows she needs to work on.

Order: Payto…

Atmos: …I’ll just head home…