Lapsus Memoriae [Rávamë's Bane: Book 1]

Part III : Chapter 25 ~ Rávamë

She answered that one quicker, and with more strength.

"We are," she said firmly, and I heard the familiar notes of disapproval and sharpness mix with the more unusual weariness."Though that's relatively speaking. You knocked us down pretty good with what you did, boss. That fight, that heroic shambles of a rescue, and I'd be amiss as a survival instinct if I didn't point out that was a hell of a lot of power you poured into that antacuilë. We're all but running on fumes now."

I turned to regard her thoughtfully at that, an eyebrow slightly raised.

"You think I should have done it differently? Let him go without trying anything?" I asked without malice or anger. I was too tired for that, and so was she I think.

Tink didn't answer me immediately. She sort of shifted beside me, swaying like one of the hundreds of yellow flowers swaying in the gentle breeze. I watched the conflict on her face with an odd soft of fascination and narrowed eyes, waiting for her to respond.

She wasn't behaving how I'd been expecting, or how I'd known her to react to my past rash decision making before.Anger, sarcasm, a lecture stuffed to the gills with biting wit — any of that would have been perfectly within her character. But this...

Her gold eyes met mine again as she chewed her lip — a nervous mannerism I recognised as one of my own.

"Boss, what you did..." She began in a voice that was unsettlingly sombre, and faintly nervous as she looked at me,"you must know that letting that much energy into a antacuilë should have killed you. It would have killed anyone else. You know that."

I hadn't know that actually.

Oh I'd suspected that might have been the case, but that hadn't seemed all the important at the time. There had been a chance to save Boromir, and I'd taken it. Nothing else had mattered. However, now that I was hearing it said aloud, it sounded as if there was another point she was trying to make by telling me that — beyond how foolish it had been of my to try. There was something else I wasn't seeing...

I looked around at the bobbing heads of the flowers, and up at the swirling constellations overhead, as if to remind myself of where we were.

"But it didn't," I murmured slowly. "We're still here, you said it yourself. We're still alive."

"We are."

"Then how? If what I did should have killed us, how are we still here?" I asked, looking back to her, as if her face could provide me with the answers that she couldn't. But her expression and bright gold eyes were a mask, one behind which I knew there was something struggling to get out. I continued to watch her, feeling as though there was something in her expression I should be looking for.

"Was that you? The reason the antacuilë worked and I didn't die?"

Tink didn't quite shake her head, but she did incline it slowly but pointedly in a negative gesture.

"That was all you, boss," she told me soberly, and sounding honestly just a little impressed — that was definitely a first."I just... gave you a little extra help powering the battery, I suppose."

"You... how?" I asked again, not fully understand how something like that was even possible, let alone doable. "You're meant to be a part of me Tink, a survival instinct. Anything you draw upon, power or knowledge, it's supposed to come from me... doesn't it?"

I was met with only a blank stare. A half exhausted half frustrated sigh escaped me and turned to face her squarely, almost nose to nose.

"Please Tink, try and help me out here. What are you really trying to tell me with all this?"