There was a short silence of us three all just looking at one another. It was pretty awkward, yes.

“I, eh… I should get going.” I finally said.

“Wait, before you go… You’re going to The City under The Mountain after your visit to The Ethereal Plane, right?”

“That’s the plan. Yes.”

“Could you ask The Dwarves something from me? Could you ask if ‘The Dwarf Who Betrayed His People’ is a real thing?”

“The Dwarf Who Betrayed His People?”

“I don’t know much about it myself, but it’s mentioned in some older Dwarven books. I once asked Aeldrich about it, and he only told me it’s ‘one of the biggest reasons as to why he hates the Dwarvenkind’.”

I found this ‘traitor’ of the Dwarvenkind an interesting given. The Dwarves seemed to live in a well-functioning society under The Mountain to The North-East, and I just assumed it always was like this. It came to me that there’s probably a whole unexplored part of the Dwarven Kingdom I had yet to see, a seemingly more… sinister… part of its history – if The Dwarf Who Betrayed His People wasn’t just a legend, that is.

“I’ll ask them about it.” I said intrigued. “But I can’t promise you an answer.”

“Thanks!”

We hugged Chaele one last time before leaving her tent.

“I’ll come back for you.” I said to her. “That’s a promise.”

She released us, and we went out through the exit of the tent, facing Aeldrich’s house in the center.

I could faintly hear Chaele still say to me, “Remember: Ethereal Temples are to the south!”

In front of the door there was a withered away, wolf-like creature waiting. It had a mouth which was torn on one side all the way to his ears, and one of his shoulder blades was just about visible underneath some sort of rotting skin – which was supposedly made from earth and stones. His eyes were glowing with the same remarkable, light blue as the man next to Aeldrich’s throne. He sat upright in front of the door, and had a reasonable size: about the size of a small child with the age of around five or six years. I remembered Chaele saying to me Aeldrich had patrolling undead slaves all over the place, and I reckoned this was one of them.

“Wolf!” I shouted at it, causing it to look in my direction with bloodthirsty, blue eyes. “Tell your master I’m gone, just like he ordered me.”

I turned my back at him and we floated away, to the south, to the Ethereal Temples.

We were floating back to the place where we found Chaele in the circle of inextinguishable fire, to the south of the settlement of Necromancers, like she had told me. Sadly, she hadn’t been all too clear in her instructions where it was exactly, leaving us wondering if it was a long walk (or float, really) or not.

“Valentina…” I broke an enjoyable, and much needed, moment of silence while hovering over the grass in the little forested area we had hovered over less than half a day-night cycle ago. “Why is it that we’re always on our own?”

Her ever-comforting deep purple hue darkened. The fact she couldn’t express her emotions, except from through a set amount of colors, made it slightly harder to interact with her than with any other being who could speak or had facial features. It didn’t help that due to that, she probably also had to reuse some colors for different emotions, with their difference only in change of tint. It was a minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless, and though it hadn’t caused for any miscommunication yet, I was fully aware of the fact it could in the future. With her purple darkening, I presumed she wanted me to elaborate more on the statement; as if she didn’t fully understand what I meant.

“Why are we always wandering around alone? We were left alone on our way to The Mountain, and inside The Mountain. Granted, we found Feldir fairly quickly, but he pretty much abandoned us after visiting The Library.”

I say “abandoned”, he did come back for us in the end, but still…

“And even after having visited The City for a short time, we were sent away again.” I took a deep breath. “Then we met Chaele, but she didn’t want to come with us either… Why are we always so alone, Val?”

Her dark purple turned to a denying red. She didn’t know either. Afterwards, she turned back to the normal, neutral, deep purple, as she started hovering closer to me.

“You’re right. At least we have each other.” I looked at her, though she probably didn’t notice that. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you here. I’m so grateful for you being here.”

I don’t think I ever told her that. I don’t think I ever said to her I was grateful for her existence. Actually, I don’t think I ever told anyone I was grateful for their existence. Not even James, when I still trusted him.

Then again, nobody ever said it to me either. Not many Khaei said something nice to me, really. It was because of who I am… “One of them”… Dear Gods, I hated that title – I still do. It isn’t even something you can do anything about: you are born as a mutation due to a gene still left in the Khaei since the second generation. And just for you being born you get a title which instantly makes you inferior to basically every other Khaei… Everyone looked down on us… Even my own father for crying out loud! I…

I was only ten years old when I heard my father shout again. I very clearly remember playing with a toy horse that day. It was a toy I got from Grandma for my sixth birthday. When I first got it, the horse was like you’d expect a horse to be: four majestic white legs connected to a strong white body. His tail and manes both were silver-colored, and the latter fell right in front of his eyes.

But the older I grew, the more bedtime stories Grandma told me about the mysterious horses she once saw. The horses she had seen had wings made of golden feathers. She always told me the wings were as wide as I was long, even though I kept growing all the time. They were connected to their backs, just between their front legs. Right in the middle of their forehead, they had a curving horn which glimmered with a bronze shine. Grandma said they used this horn to cure any disease and to heal any wound, both physical and psychological. She claimed this horn was the biggest reason why we could also destroy all malicious viruses and bacteria. Somewhere deep inside I knew the story wasn’t true, that it was only to get me to sleep well, or to shape my creativity and fantasy positively; but I always enjoyed listening to them just before sleeping. My parents didn’t like the stories though, I heard them – Dad more than Mom – fight several times with Grandma about the stories she told me.

Due to these fantastic stories, I decided to “improve” my horse by gluing two goose feathers I found lying outside to it, as well as breaking the point of a fairly blunt pencil and attaching that to the forehead of my horse. To anyone above the age of thirteen, it probably looked terrible… I mean absolutely horrendous… but for me it was like I was actually playing with a miniature version of the mystical horses my grandma always spoke of.

“Charles, please…” I heard my mother say. “She’s only ten years old…”

“Don’t you see it, Madison? There’s no future for our Kate! She’s too busy drawing pictures of nonexistent lands, playing with absurd and nonsensical creatures! Look at her, Madison! She’s ten years old and still so naïve, so ignorant of the world around her!”

“Give it some time… Please.”

“I’m done with giving her time. She’s one of ‘them’, Madison! She’ll never get a decent job, she’ll never get decent education. She’ll fall behind in every single way compared to the rest of the Khaei.”

Tears began welling up in mom’s eyes. “There’s always a mathematical chance. It’s been calculated thousands of times.”

“Why are you crying, Mom?” I said to nobody in specific. Valentina next to me had heard it, and I subconsciously saw her changing to a blueish color. She was confused by the nonsensical words coming out of my mouth in the real world. It was not the first time my mind had reaped me from reality with a spontaneous memory coming back since I had been put into The Subject, but that didn’t change the fact Val kept worrying every time it happened. I kept floating forward, dragged away in the flash-back, while Val suddenly kept halt – which I obviously didn’t realize due to the memory happening. She started to pull on my arm to try to get me to come to a stop, which did work in het end. However, she couldn’t pull hard enough to drag me out of the memory.

“The chances are near zero, and you know that as well as I do.” My father went on in his frustration. “The only child we could ever have, and it’s one of ‘them’… What a disgrace for our family!”

“She’s your daughter for the Gods’ sake!” Mom started to scream at him.

“A daughter who will never achieve anything important in her life. She’ll never be loved, she’ll never be praised, she’ll never know what life really is like…” Dad’s rage made place for sadness. “Why does this need to happen to us? What did our family do wrong?”

After having overheard the conversation, I made my way downstairs with tears in my eyes, still holding Grandma’s magical horse. I didn’t go to the kitchen where they were arguing, though. No. I went straight out of the front door, towards the house of my beloved grandma. When I arrived there, she first of all got really upset with the whole situation, but she did try to ease the pain by telling me Dad didn’t mean it, that he was really stressed due to work and he had a deadline coming up very soon and that the pressure had made its way to his head. She said everything would be better tomorrow, when I wake up. She told me I could spend the night over at hers, and she even made me hot chocolate with marshmallows to cheer me up!

Dad passed away a little under three weeks after that day, sadly. He died in the hospital while trying to recover from several stress induced heart attacks, along with age getting the better of him. Don’t get me wrong, we did make up in a sense, but our bond never fully got restored. I remember the last words he ever said to me very well. He lay in his bed, barely able to keep his eyes open from sheer fatigue. I remember him grabbing my hand very closely and looking me straight in the eyes with his very small, brown eyes.

“Kate, I might not have very long left. Could you do me one more favor, sweetie? Please, please, prove me wrong. Prove me wrong when I said you didn’t have a future. Prove me wrong when I said you won’t ever understand life. Prove me wrong about all those terrible things I said. Could you please do that for me?”

“I… I’ll try my hardest, dad. I sincerely mean that. Promise.”

I saw his lips curl into what slightly resembled a smile (for as much as a dying person could find the strength to still smile). “That’s my girl…” He closed his eyes when one of the doctors came inside the room.

“I think it’s time for you to leave, your father needs some rest.”

I stood up from the chair I was sitting on, looking at the mystical horse of Grandma in my hands. I was walking out of the door when my father said one final thing to me.

“Make me proud, Katie.” I saw a tear roll down his cheek when I closed the door behind me.

“I will, Dad... Sleep tight.”

I awakened from my memory with a terrible feeling inside, and with Valentina holding my hand very closely. I could physically feel her shivering, the same way she was shivering when we first used the Dwarven Teleporters.

“How long have I been out, Val?”

A quick, red blink as a means to say she didn’t know, after which she turned back to her worried blue.

“Hey… It’s alright, I’m back now.” I took her closer to me, to comfort her. “Nothing’s wrong, see?” That was a blatant lie. But I couldn’t stay an emotional wreck; I know it would hurt Valentina as much as it hurt me, and if there’s one thing I didn’t want, it was hurting Val.

Though not really noticeable, her color shifted very slowly from the blue back to the deep purple. After about fifteen minutes had passed, there was little sign of blue still to be seen.

I didn’t know what caused the extreme reliving of memories exactly, but they only started happening from the moment I was put inside The Subject. Maybe they were a bug in the system where it would arbitrarily play a memory in front of your eyes, or maybe it was The Subject’s way of dealing with extreme emotions, the kind that would throw an error in the coding. Either way, I assumed it wasn’t an intended feature. That’s what you get when you use memories as a driving force for a probe, I guess…

When we arrived at the open fields where we found Chaele trapped inside a prison of an everlasting blaze, I was surprised to see the fire had stopped burning. Even stranger was the ground not even having any sign of a fire that burned there; all grass was still green and lively, no ashes were to be seen, and there wasn’t any smell of burning anymore.

The most prominent thing hidden behind the now-extinguished fire was a big structure, roughly in the center of the open area. The structure was made out of something that looked like white marble. In height, it reached way above the tents in the settlement of the Necromancers, yet it didn’t quite reach the length of some bigger trees – definitely not The Tree of Life, that’s for sure. The building had a shape of a regular pentagon, oriented in such a way that one of the corners pointed roughly towards The Tree of Life, and with a pillar the size of an oaken tree trunk on every corner. The width of the building was about one and a half times bigger than its height. The five pillars all supported a dome which exactly covered the pentagon so its center was always standing in the shade.

The center was higher than the rest of the construct, with a small staircase leading up to it. On this higher part, there was a strange, obsidian, gate-like thing: it was completely circular, and was supported by three small legs.

From the top were coming five obsidian vines, which each made their way to the top of a pillar and entwined it. The gate had a strange organic look to it.

Around the structure – which I assumed to be the Ethereal Temple – were five minor constructs, each in line with the corners of the central pentagon. The two constructs on the northern side were both made of marble, the two on the southern side of obsidian. The centrally placed pillar – in line with the corner that pointed straight towards The Tree of Life – was made out of a combination of both; it wasn’t even just half marble, half obsidian, it was a mixture of the two, flowing into and out of each other throughout the whole structure, but the northern side of the pillar consisted of mostly white marble; likewise, the southern side consisted of mostly obsidian. On every pillar stood a horizontal ring, standing on four little legs, and a fairly big, yet short, cone-shaped hole in the center.