UNFINISHED: Prince of Madness

~ Chapter 10

The golden sand brought with it flashes of vivid memory. Agatha reached to touch her Mobius band, just to check it was still there; and with her touch, it fell, inexplicably as before. She caught it before it touched the ground.
She'd obtained it somewhere here, back when they had been lost. Lost and scared. And the emotions were just as fresh, if not more so, in her heart and mind as she examined the way the sun caught the yellow shine.
"Ruben?" Marcel made to tap the other young man but stopped himself short - flinched, even. Ruben was staring at something on the horizon, though there was nothing of any worth Agatha could see other than sand, sand and more sand. She could've sworn she heard Ruben whisper ever so faintly under his breath, "You're out there somewhere. I'll find you if you don't find me."
There was an expectant silence. 
"Your pendant fell," Ruben said, not turning his head to face the young woman behind him. "Do you know why it does that?"
Agatha shook her head before realising the other person couldn't see her, but as if she had spoken "No", he continued. 
"A mystery, then. How fun."
Another pause, before Ruben finally faced his companions. "Sorry, I do know where we're going."
And then he turned to the left and walked, and the other two followed.

"You've yet to explain our destination, my friend," Marcel laughed. "I'm sure the rest of this area is just desert. And furthest north is an abandoned kingdom..." The sentence, originally intended to be humorous, trailed off awkwardly.
"My home," Ruben replied.
"What, you live in Skotadis?"
Skotadis - the kingdom of perpetual darkness, Agatha remembered from ancient history. Turned into a ghost city overnight closely following the outbreak of war thousands of years ago. Ever since, no one had been able to enter its' walls.
"Lived - past tense. I've been locked out."
Marcel stopped walking for a moment and stared at him, wide-eyed, waiting for an elaboration. "I- I was joking, you know, Ruben?"
"I'm not joking."
"But I swear that place wasn't even occupied by humans!"
"Then that..." Agatha smiled. "Your speed is seemingly superhuman for a reason, isn't it?"
"Indeed, I must admit to it. It was a kingdom populated with... well, humans, yes, but not homo sapiens like you. We called ourselves cimmerians."
Marcel gaped. Agatha, however, took a moment to consider it; of course, it seemed impossible, but she couldn't deny the fact that she'd seen the man move from one place to the other - twice - too quickly for other eyes to catch. 
"And... the ghosts." She said it not fearfully, but cautiously. "Your visions of ghosts. Because of that too?"
"Yes." Something that could have been the beginning of a laugh left Ruben's lips. "We had quite a close relationship to the dead. Spirits included."
As if in response, something to Agatha's left rustled. She turned to look, finding a forest that stretched far into the distance in front of her. If she walked twenty paces in that direction, she would find the point where dry sand met lush forest floor.
"The forest that surrounds Astalis," Marcel breathed. "From this point, it looks like a desert oasis."
"There's an oasis somewhere," Ruben said. "But I can't remember exactly where. It was a long time ago."
"Roughly two thousand years," Marcel snorted. "How would you define a long time, Ruben?"
"One hundred years is a lifetime." Ruben replied in his normal voice, but dropped to a mumble to say, "It's really been that long?"
"You sound confused." Agatha said this, examining his face. "The lost city was abandoned about two thousand years ago, after the war began. You said you came from there - do you not remember what happened?"
"I haven't been alive these past two millennia. I've been..." there came a sound that was a mixture between a wince and a sigh, and the sentence stopped short.
There was a tense pause. Everyone had stopped walking now.
"I was... frozen, wasn't I?" Ruben said, almost in doubt of himself. "I was..."
"H-how?" Marcel stuttered, his face now filled with a sudden bright, boyish curiosity with traces of confusion.
"That's a story for another time, I think." Ruben's breathless laugh was faked - Agatha knew it. But she didn't feel that now was the right time to question his emotional state.
"Let's keep going." Ruben pointed and exhaled. "Maybe you two could tell me more about your lives as well."