The air was thick with a palpable weight. It was like breathing in something more substantial than air, a medium that felt alive with a dormant, thrumming energy. A word surfaced from the vast archive in her mind: Mana. This place was saturated with it, to a degree that would have been considered extremely rare even in this world.
She picked a direction at random and began to walk, following the channel of water towards the trees. The sound of everything was so profound she could hear the blood singing in her own ears. As she walked, a vague, nagging sensation tugged at the edge of her awareness.
'I feel like I'm forgetting something.'
It was a specific absence, a blackout spot in the frantic reel of final moments. The police lights, the shouting, the impact of the bullets—that was all there, sharp and crystalline. But just before... a blur of motion, of sound, of a rage so profound it felt like it belonged to someone else.
'... No. Not just that. There was more.'
She brushed the thought aside. The chaos of death was reason enough for a few missing frames.
What was more disconcerting was the state of her own mind. It wasn't foggy now. In fact, it was terrifyingly clear, a pane of glass wiped clean. Her memories—both her own and his—were perfectly preserved, like artifacts in a museum. She was piloting a mind with millennia of added data. Yet, she could recall the specific weight of a childhood cat with the same fidelity as the sensation of unmaking a mountain. Additionally, the consciousness sifting through the archives, the 'I' at the helm, felt... new?
Her body, too, was a stranger. She felt no ache in her muscles, no leaden fatigue behind her eyes. The chronic, grinding exhaustion that had been the backdrop of her entire adult life was simply gone. Driven by a sudden need for confirmation, she knelt by the flowing water.
Her reflection stared back, sharp and unnervingly clear. It was her face. The same chin, the same dark, wary eyes. But the canvas had been restored. The permanent, bruised shadows she'd carried for years were erased. She turned to look at her wrists. The skin was smooth, unmarked. No scars. It was as if someone had taken her body and meticulously ironed out all the human wear and tear.
'How did I get here? In this world.'
The question echoed in the pristine silence of her mind. She began to assemble hypotheses, her curator's instinct for categorization taking over.
Well, he was panicking. In his final, desperate moments, scrambling to cheat true death, he'd cobbled together a plan based on metaphysical principles he only half-understood. He cast his essence into the void, believing it would find a compatible, pre-prepared vessel when the time came. He never considered it could be... Intercepted. That it could latch onto some consciousness, a soul already halfway out the door, in a universe 'magic' had never even touched.
She tried harder to tap into the moment of his 'divine revelation'. Unfortunately, despite having a clear state of mind unlike Virgil at the time, her own understanding of the ways of the cosmos was just as if not more limited and convoluted.
From what she could tell, his decision had been based mainly off instinct. Despite her being a passenger in his consciousness, by the end of the day—she was still a different person. She couldn't fully sympathize with him—her thinking was always a few steps behind his.
To add, Bituin's stolen data seemed to be corrupted, as she's unable to recall any of her history. She probably won't be able to conjure her magic, either. Virgil's memories after the merge was also vague, perhaps because of the sheer input of 'data' at the time.
She knew him like the back of her hand—having seen his entire life through his point of view. She knew of every micro-emotion, every primary and secondary thought, every experience. Despite this, she couldn't make full sense of him in his last moments. She could only recall the jumbled mess of pain, anger, panic, and fear behind his most surface-level thoughts.
Fear?
Fear towards what?
It certainly wasn't at the prospect of death. All throughout his life, he was never afraid of death. Especially in his latter years. Virgil was more so concerned about Mei's betrayal and the end of his legacy. His massive millenia-old ego, bruised, only wanted to get back at the rebels by not completely dying.
"..."
No matter how long she thought about it, she couldn't find an answer.
.
.
.