She found herself by the rustic home by the forest trail, and knocked on the door. It’d been a while since she’d been here last, and it seemed the structure had definitely seen better days. 

The pink bob-haired researcher answered the door to her surprise and immediately brought her inside. “I did not anticipate you to ever come here on your own volition. What brings you here, love?” Adrienne asked as she brought Yura some freshly squeezed juice.

“Elais, he.. Left me alone at the house again, because of my powers,” Yura started. “There hasn’t really been much progress in helping me control nor figure them out. I feel like I’m just being trapped there.”

“You’re always welcome to visit, and I’m glad you’ve done so today,” Adrienne said. “Would you care to learn to sew? Perhaps it could distract you from your worries.”
Yura’s eyes lit up. “Really? I’d love to.”
Adrienne guided her to a room filled with dolls and mannequins dressed with half-finished outfits. As they walked past a room, Yura noticed a room full of television screens, one showcasing what seemed to be a velvet plush sofa. 

The walls were of a regal red ornate pattern, with a golden frame providing the room with an elevated grand atmosphere that seemed out of place in the rest of the home. The room was filled with an array of half-dressed mannequins, many wearing luxurious designs and gleaming with detailed floral embroidery, as well as a workbench consisting of shelves that carried rainbows of spools of thread and haberdashery that were neatly arranged by colour and size. To the side of the sewing machines were an impressive  selection of fabrics that ranged from textured patterns to smooth silky threads that felt luxurious to the touch. The stone plush carpet flooring gave an extra bounce to Yura’s steps, which also felt rather comfortable and soothing to tread on. 

Adrienne sat on the stool by her workbench and invited Yura to sit next to her. “So, what do you think?” she purred. Her topaz eyes twinkled as she held her hands together, tilting her head slightly as she beamed in excitement. 

“It’s amazing,” Yura replied. It was a breathtaking experience for her, as she had never seen anything so fascinating in her life, with the room itself having more personality than some books she had ever read. She shifted in her seat and turned to Adrienne. “What made you want to learn to sew to begin with?”

Adrienne’s eyes glittered in response. “I learned to sew because I wanted to make beautiful dresses and gifts for my beloved. She never understood the impacts of her natural beauty in this world and how it made my heart flutter.” She brought down a variety of materials from the shelves and a variety of threads and needles for the two to work with, and began cutting some shapes out from the fabric, handing Yura some of the pieces.

Yura eyed Adrienne’s lace dress, which was much more toned down from the carefully embroidered and adorned garments on the mannequins. “Did you ever make any for yourself?” 

She eyed her actions and attempted to thread the needle in front of her, to no avail.

Adrienne shook her head in response, threading the needle for Yura before handing it back to her. “I don’t care much for my own appearance. I just wanted her. She.. gave me the world.” 

She showed Yura a simple stitching technique with the needle, threading a dotted line into the fabric. “I was lonely for most of my life, you see, especially with the nature of my work dealing with confidential matters. I didn’t really have any friends I could talk to about it, vent to or such. My world was black and white,” Adrienne continued as she continued to thread the fabric. “That is, until I met her. She made me look at life in a way I’d never seen it before, filled with so much colour and beautiful things.”

Yura noticed that her face had become sullen with each stitch she threaded. “What happened to her?”

“My beloved… was taken from me. Bewitched, by my rival. They were treated as a god for merely existing. Despite having accomplished the same thing as them, I was completely unacknowledged,” Adrienne spoke, with her stitches gradually becoming less aligned with each thread. “She fell in love with him, and in doing so led her to a miserable life and ultimately her demise. Had she stayed by my side, she would have been safe.” 

Her needle left her hand, barely noticeable on the carpet had it not been for the bright thread tied onto it. “You know, my dear, if you feel Elais is trapping you there, you can stay with me instead.” 

Yura looked down, lightly swinging her feet in her seat. “I don’t know.. My teachers told me that he does care about my wellbeing and that he isn’t just acting for himself. I haven’t discussed my feelings with him either. If he truly doesn’t care about my wellbeing, then I’ll consider it.”
 

Adrienne’s eyes glowed. “You could ask him now, in fact.”

Yura raised and tilted her head in confusion. “How would I? He left a while ago.”

Adrienne guided her to the main room and lowered a screen, showing her a map. “He’s either on the way, or he’s here right now,” she said as she pointed to a red circle. “It’s not too bad of a journey to get there. Take a carriage. I’ll pay for the trouble.”

“Oh, I appreciate that a lot,” Yura smiled softly. She noticed that the screen was covered in clear thread to her surprise, despite the overall mess in the room. “You must work on your clothes a lot for there to be thread everywhere in your home.”
Adrienne chuckled lightly in response. “I suppose so.”

***

Elais found himself in an abandoned town in the rural area of the city, with weeds overrunning the worn down stone buildings that seemed to have taken a toll from harsh weather overtime, evident by the large cracks and musty scent of mould seeping through the walls. There was a large stone well in the centre of the town, indicating that no one had lived there for a while.

Elais walked towards the corner of the town, noticing a stone structure that stood out amongst the rest of the buildings. The building had no windows nor any gaps for any sunlight to peek through, and it had appeared much less run down despite its small size. It had been fitted with a heavy wooden door adorned with metal fittings, with the trim engraved with miniature runes on the metal. Its entrance was seemingly barred from the inside as well after Elais lightly pushed against it. Its description seemed to align with Adrienne’s intel as well as the nature of the cult itself. He forcibly kicked down the heavy stone door open with some brute force he hadn’t used in a few centuries, with neither the runes nor barricade providing much protection from him. There was a stone stairway beneath him, and he felt cool air that brushed against his skin as he stood before the steps.

As he made his way down the stone steps, his resonating footsteps and presumably the shattering of the door alerted the attention of two sorcerers in dark hooded gowns as they cursed to themselves. 

“How’d you get in?! You never should have come here!” they exclaimed one after the other. 

They readied their wooden staves as they started their incantations under their breath. Elais knew that there was no retrieving information from them through reasonable civil means. Before either of them could finish casting their spells, he rushed and broke their staves in half with his knees. He reached and grabbed them by the neck, hurling them into the stone ground as the snapping of their bones silenced them. As he continued his descent, he faced more sorcerers with ease, continuing to destroy their weapons as continued to hurl them into various parts of the stone structure. A terrible choice of defence on their part, he thought to himself. 

He found himself in what seemed to be a library, with leather bound grimoires and blackboards filled with complex equations scribbled onto it. The air was much cooler here, with the stone tabletops feeling incredibly cold to the touch as Elais looked through the various materials that laid around the room. Many of the grimoires were written in an ancient language that was outdated even for him, with Elais vaguely grasping slivers of the terms ‘world’,‘life’ and ‘formula’ in most of the texts. He attempted to decipher the scripts pinned by the blackboard to no avail as it was also written in a complicated code, placing them into his briefcase alongside the grimoires.

“The cults are supposedly looking for ways to transcend the natural order of life itself in order to control it, likely in bid of world domination.” The witch’s words echoed in his mind as he tried to figure out the equation on the blackboard. He decided to take a photo of it with his rustic camera, taking some more photos of the surroundings in case he missed anything. He definitely wasn’t expecting what he had found so far, considering that he’d studied for most of his life with his knowledge spanning many generations of languages transcending time. He had one more look around, taking any material that seemed insightful to hopefully discuss and investigate with Adrienne.   

There was a large clang in the distance, and it continued to ring down the steps. Another cult follower, he thought to himself. He wasn’t particularly concerned with how easy he was able to bypass their security. That was, until he noticed the faint silhouette becoming Yura. His eyes widened in surprise, and felt a surge of both confusion and anger rise within himself. 

“Yura, I don’t know how - spare the details, but you really shouldn’t be here,” he growled. 

Yura crossed her arms in response. “Well I’m here now. I’m frustrated, being at home all the time since you won’t let me leave. I don’t need to be protected, nothing’s happened in the last six years to prove that,” she fumed.

Elais felt his rage rise and bared his teeth, readying to scold her when he felt a sharp sting of magic pierce his chest. It was the first time in centuries since he felt pain, especially of that sharpness - it felt oddly, faintly familiar yet a completely foreign feeling, one that could almost be considered lethal. It was strange, considering his body was immune and desensitised to the effects of magic. He fell flat first to the ground to his shock, finding that his physical strength was waning as the wound continued to sting and paralyse his movements.

Yura let out a shriek as the cult follower snatched her by the waist and carried her over their shoulder as she struggled to free herself from their grip. “Elais!” she called in panic, tears filling her eyes as he became less visible in the darkness. He felt his strength leaving his body, struggling to move despite his desperation as Yura continued to cry for help.

The cult follower zoomed past through a hidden exit concealed by runes, almost fleeing into unknown territory when a flash of darkness followed them with a gust of wind breezing past them. Elais had shifted into a demonic form, his now black sclera eyes highlighting his vibrant violet pupils with black markings on his cheeks. His large dark wings with golden ornate edges beating violently in the wind as he accelerated to catch up to them, pursuing them into the long corridor as the sharp claws that emerged from his forearms cut through the wind. They took a sharp turn in the hallway, with Elais catching up to them as Yura became in arm’s reach. He reached for her before concrete debris fell before him from the ceiling, piercing into his body and temporarily stuns him. He noticed a cult follower waiting at the end of the corridor, throwing a spear in his direction. However, the trajectory intended for Elais was no longer intended for him as he had been stunned by the sudden activation of magic. Instead, it struck Yura’s chest, as she laid lifeless in the cult follower’s arms. 

“You idiot, the Puppeteer’s going to kill you.” 

“Oh, you mean us.”

Their feud drowned out in the silence as time slowed to a stop, his disbelief of the scene that laid before him leaving him stunned. She was no longer calling out to him, as blood trickled from her mouth, her eyes now dull. 

He lunged towards the cult follower that had been carrying Yura, striking through their throat with his bare fist as the claws on his forearms tore into their skull, ripping through their eye sockets as the blood stained his arm. He glared down at the other cult follower, snarling as they escaped through an unknown passage. 

Elais gently held onto Yura’s body, trembling at the sight as she no longer called to him. Her warmth gradually left her body as her skin became more pale with each passing moment. He yelled an earth shattering scream, one that he had never done in his entire time of living. The shattering of his heart tore throughout the entire structure as if it crashed down with him, the world falling apart around him with each second. He had failed to protect her. The one thing he promised himself to do, and could never forgive himself for. And once again, it was all his fault.