A Light After Endless Darkness

Chapter 6

Elizabeth couldn't help but notice that time passed much faster than it did in the Twilight Realm. In what felt like the time it would've taken to slay one many headed beast, an entire week had come and gone.

Of course, it wasn't like she hadn't spent it similarly to how she had spent every week of the last seven years. Every morning, at the crack of dawn, she would get up, grab a slice of bread, and take LifeSaver out to the massive field she could see from her room, only stopping occasionally to get direction for a new drill from master Sydney. She would then stay out there all day, training and drilling again and again, until she either grew too tired to continue or Sydney told her to come in and eat.

Sydney was very fussy about her eating habits. He refused to let her so much as miss a meal, or forgot to drink water between drills, a far cry from her old master. "You can eat when you win," the ex master had told her many times, when she would collapse to her knees and beg, panting, for water. Now couldn't have been more different. Come to think of it, it was almost funny how different he was from Zarix. That is, if she stopped to compare the two. She tried to think of her old master as little as she could.

If she just stayed outside, training, and never went outside of the safety of her training field, she could almost pretend this was how it had always been.

Of course, sometimes it was unavoidable, and Elizabeth just had to go into town. Either her stomach plead with her to go and see the local baker about a sticky bun, or Sydney would ask her to go and collect various things for whatever project he was working on (she could only assume it was some kind of dress; it was always fabric, string or needles that he was sending her out to get).

When this happened, oh how the good people of Gardenia would remind her what happened to her. Children would come up to Elizabeth and ask her for stories about the time she spent in the Twilight Realm and the monsters she had slain there. Typically, the parents would come up to them and smack little Timmy or Suzy and tell him/her to show the Mistress of Dark And Light a little respect. Other times, though, it seemed parents either didn't know or care that Elizabeth was being harassed to relive her personal hell for kicks. When this happened, she would just hurriedly half-recall something about demon dogs or dragons, then run off when the kid was distracted by their own awe.

And then there were the nightmares.

Sometimes she was lucky, and she would wake up sweaty and out of breath and not remember why. Other times it would feel like hours as she lived through every battle that left her nearly dead or wishing for death, or hear her sister crying for her, or that horrible laugh Zarix used whenever he found a failure particularly painful or funny.

But the worst ones were the good dreams.

The ones where she remembered reading to her sister, or eating a bowl of Hagen's potato soup, or even fantasies about her and her sister, just talking, that may not have even been real. She would wake from these, drowning in self-loathing that she wasn't out there, looking for Habe right then, or that she hadn't greeted Hagen properly upon meeting him at Master Dabir's. She woke from these with voices screaming at her in her head; you fool, you stupid girl, you little ditz, he must think you hate him.

She learned to sleep on her stomach, mouth buried in pillows.

But this appeared to work. As far as the old man was concerned, she hadn't had any nightmares for three days.

And she hadn't broken any of his bones in almost five days. A record that was almost broken one morning after a particularly rough night.

She released the old man's wrist the second she realized he wasn't Zarix, and said "Good morning, Master," with a shy smile.