The Trio Odyssey

The Trio Odyssey

Part 1: Soul to Soul

Chapter 1: The Void

In a watery realm shrouded in darkness and mystery, a lonely soul, which is a lady, murmurs.

“What just happened? Just now, I happened to be on the boat.”

The lady’s wearing an expedition suit from some organisation.

But, she seems to be a castaway, being all alone in the void.

Her eyes open while looking up and her vision is crystal clear, neither blurs nor blindness.

However, the obscuring darkness, with not even a glimmer of light, makes her curious about what’s going on outside of it.

She can’t move the slightest bit since she feels numb all over her body, sinking in toward the depth of the void, deeper and deeper. And, she can feel the water she’s in, but she doesn’t feel like drowning at all.

The only body part she can move is her head. So, she takes the advantage to look around, expecting that she could at least find a clue.

However, everything remains muted and pitch black.

For the moment, her expression is null all the time.

Not until her memories of her crew mates flash by her head, sparking her concerns about them and hopefully adding some life in her face.

“Hah—, what about my expedition team? Are they okay?”

A sudden feeling of entanglement chokes her like actual hands warping around her neck, and she immediately reacts to it, taking her hands to cover her neck in panic.

“Ak—! Ugh—! What is this!?”

She doesn’t know what’s going on, and who’s actually choking her.

The entanglement persists, and she still suffers from the pressing pains.

However, no matter how long and how hard she’s eating the pain, she just doesn’t cease to die.

As she gasps and groans from all the pains, her soul stubbornly refuses to come out of her body, holding her from experiencing death, but letting her experience the persistent process of death with an end she knows nothing of, instead.

“Am I descending—to the abyss?”

The pain’s intensity increases even further in a way she doesn’t expect: her entire body vibrates violently in a resonance.

She starts to remember an asking, gentle woman’s voice, whom she doesn’t recognize.

“What shall we name her, darling?”

She reacts to the woman’s voice, while holding in the painful entanglement.

“Huh—what?”

A man’s calm voice responds to the question, clarifying the name. She doesn’t recognize this voice either.

“Raeké. Means ‘Veiled lass’.”

The woman comments in a low tone, but sounds excited.

“Raeké Issocelle Cazdae befits her, just like her mother!”

The conversation ends there, leaving her with a lot of questions, weighing her mind in all of her swarming thoughts.

“Whose memory—did I just listen to?”

But, her stakes are too high for now. So, she had to forget them immediately.

Then, she undergoes a severe agony, with her body disintegrating into separate body parts, and is being compressed from all directions forcefully.

She’s holding onto the only memories she has in her mind to face her anguish: her crewmates.

She tensed the muscles around her eyes, keeping them sealed off tightly, while holding both of her hands to her neck, covering it because of the continuous pain.

In her ears, she clearly hears a thud, from a falling metal object, clashing onto the sand.

Unexpectedly, within the narrow space between the skin of her eyelids comes a tiny, crimson red light coming from the horizon from afar.

As she opens her eyes slowly, she witnesses a coastal area unveils before her eyes, as her ears receive the swushing sounds of the waves of the ocean.

The coast is unlike anything she had ever seen before.

The sky is bathed in the sunlight with a dark magenta color.

The ocean’s shape doesn’t stretch across the horizon looking flat from end to end. But the water forms a visible, huge tidal bulge in the middle.

The pain that has been entangling her neck for a while now, suddenly disappeared, taking her hands off her neck in a gradual relaxation.

She starts to take a deep breath, and glimpses around, but everything else is dark for the time being.

Then, she notices a strange source of light at the coast, lifting her head aloft.

The sky has a faint, moonlight-like light sourcing from a crimson reddish to grayish, thick, vertical line standing in the middle of the horizon. And, the tidal bulge looks almost too perfect to be under the vertical line.

She mumbles around in her head.

“Huh—, what? I’m back to the coast?”

“How do I get here? What just happened? I was in the ocean just now, ain’t I?”

“I don’t know that I’m standing here all this while.”

But now, she’s standing, with a lot of strange sensations; her body feels too light, her hands look too small, and her height from the ground feels too close.

“Huh—”

Her voice is too babylike.

“Huh—?!”

She assesses her situation and realizes it all too late, in the most panicking sense she could ever feel with murmurs aloud.

“I became a child?!”

Her thoughts and emotions intensify and her moves become so fidgety.

She mutters as she drowns in skepticism from assessing her unfamiliar memories.

“Strange, my head is literally remembering things I’m not familiar with. But at the same time—this body is familiar with them.”

A quick, cold swash of the seawater submerges her feet and ankles, while pushing a sharp, solid, metal object. She pants and twitches from the chill and from the touch of the object to her feet.

She faces down, and sees a fine looking, thin knife. She picks it up out of curiosity.

She hears a woman’s shout resounding through the shore. It’s the same voice she hears in her memories: her mother, Raesha Issocelle Cazdae.

“Raeké! Raeké! Where are you, honey?!”

However, her words are barely heard, let alone understandable.

Raeké Issocelle Cazdae, the unknown body that the soul from the darkness was transmigrated in, reacts to her mother’s voice: she looks back to the direction of her mother’s voice on impulse.

Raeké is in ambivalence with two simultaneous thoughts converging in one.

“Is she calling me?”

“It’s Mom!”

She knows she’s holding a knife she knows nothing about, so she tosses it away into the seawater immediately. And the toss is not so far from her, submerging into the saline.

Her mother shouts again, but with louder, longer vocals, embodying the sound of frustration and misery.

“Rae—ké!”

Raeké’s feet start to shuffle to the front. The friction between her feet and the sand cause hissing sounds.

She’s leaving the seawater area. Going away from the shoreline and reaching higher lands.

Her mother shouts once more, but with lower pitch, because she’s likely strained by a sore throat.

“Raeké… Rae—”

She coughs as she tries to release more of her voice.

Raeké feels a spark of guilt, spreading to her chest entirely. This feeling is also not what she recognizes.

She stops moving, feeling the absolute blankness obscuring her head and chest at the same time.

She doesn’t know what to do anymore, but she mouths her feelings straight from her chest.

“I can feel it, the guilt—of my own doings that have caused many of the people of Heto Palace to be ordered for my search.”

From afar, to the land, she sees a legion of moving flames among the trees.

And, at the forefront, the same, shouting mother in an ivory white, veiled dress, calls for her daughter, running and approaching her daughter.

“Honey!”

Raeké stands in the same spot there like a stone, while her mother reaches her, kneeling with a hug.

Raeké’s struck by her thoughts, while mumbling about her mother.

“Why does Mom even come here…?”

Raeké stays quiet not just because of guilt, but of shame.

Raesha’s releasing all of her repressed concerns towards her daughter, Raeké, all, in a single breath.

“Where have you been, honey? I’m worried about you. Are you okay, hurt anywhere? ”

Raeké’s face turns red, and her tears slowly flock on her eyelids, while she mutters her words in her head.

“Mom… I’m sorry! It’s all because… I tried to…”

And she bursts out crying, while no one hears what she wants to say.

Raesha pulls her daughter closer to her chest softly, and she pats her daughter’s back a few times to tone down her cries and provide comfort.

“Eh—here, here. Don’t cry, my baby.”

In her mother’s presence, the scent of honey dew that feels soft to her nose, and the touch of silky cloth textures of her mother’s dress that comfort her daughter.

It’s Raeké that clings to her mother, curling her fingers over the fabric of her mother’s dress and her cry diminishes as she murmurs.

“Strange… I feel safe, like she’s someone I’m very close to. Why would I ever feel like this with a stranger?”

Nevertheless, she remains shy and keeps her face sticking to her mother’s chest while sobbing.

Raesha smiles softly, and once she senses some sort of presence from the seawater, she becomes a little startled.

The presence comes from a knife, and she mutters about it.

“Hm—, that knife emits some Occult Synthesis…”

Raesha reaches her hand out slowly to pick up that knife, while holding her daughter in the warp of her arm.

“How and why would such a thing be here?”

She extends her front to reach that knife with her left hand.

But she pauses for a moment with one thought that runs down her guts, with her eyes filled with shock: perhaps, her daughter tried to harm herself, or others.

Despite that, a strange looking animal with the combination of separate animals, appears from Raeké’s back, to not show it in front of her baby and scares her off.

The animal consists of a sinuously moving, small snake with multiple bird’s wings, skinned in the dark color of space and the glitters of the stars.

Raesha points her hand toward the knife again, and she conceals it to clear it out of her daughter’s sight and levitates it carefully.

Raeké wipes her tears on her mother’s long skirt with a lot of hiccups.

“Everything’s okay now, dear.”

A tall, burly, armored man without a helmet, and has a tree root scar around his neck appears at Raesha’s back around three meters away, while riding a three-headed, six-legged, hovering, transparent horse

“Your Majesty, Your Highness, sorry for my interruption. May I report in?”

Raesha looks back and nods, letting the man proceed while handling two things at once.

“Speak up, The Sovereign’s General, Khaymi Nan Suga.”

Then, the Sovereign’s General gets down from his horse and proceeds with his report while rendering his hand salute.

“The Sovereign orders to escort Her Highness back to Heto Palace posthaste.”

Raesha stands up while holding her daughter’s hand, and she hands the knife through her levitation to the Sovereign’s General while saying a few words.

“I’m informed. Take this for investigation.”