The Trio Odyssey

Part I: Soul to Soul

Chapter 1: The Void

In a watery realm shrouded in darkness and mystery, a lonely soul, which is a lady, murmurs.

‘Uh—… Why has everything become so dark? Just now, I happened to be on the boat…’

She’s wearing an expedition suit from some organisation, but she seems to look like a castaway, being all alone within the void.

Her eyes are wide open, looking up, and her vision is crystal clear, with neither blurs nor blindness. 

However, the obscuring darkness, with not even a glimmer of light, makes her curious about what's going on outside of it. 

Since she feels numb all over her body, she can’t move even the slightest bit, except her head, and she’s just sinking deeper and deeper.

The water that’s been surrounding her is cold and full of volume, though she doesn’t feel like drowning at all. 

In her wake, she does whatever she can, looking around, only to see that everything remains muted and pitch black.

For the moment, her expression is so null and lifeless, until the memories of her crewmates come flashing by, her concerns spark, drastically adding some hope in her eyes as she gasps. 

‘Ha—argh, what about my expedition team? Are they okay?’

A sudden strangle, like actual hands, warps around her neck tightly.

Instinctively, she groaned in bubbles, panickingly taking her hands, and then covering her neck. 

“Ak—! Ugh—!”

‘What is this!?’

She can’t even tell who’s choking her as the forceful sensation persists, and yet, death doesn’t come.

‘Am I descending… to the abyss?’

The strength of the pressing pain increases even further.

And in a way that she doesn’t expect, a new sensation invades: her entire body vibrates violently like it’s getting crushed by an abrupt resonance.

A remembrance of an asking, gentle woman’s voice, arrives in the middle of her suffering: a voice of whom she doesn’t recognize.

“…What shall we name her, darling?…”

She reacts to the woman’s voice while her body’s all messing up.

‘Hu—uh, what?’

A man’s calm voice responds to the question, clarifying the name, while she doesn’t know this man’s voice either. 

“…‘Rae’… means ‘Veil’, ‘Ké’… means ‘Lass’. That’s it, Raeké; ‘Veiled Lass’!…”

The woman comments in a low tone, but sounds excited.

“…Raeké Issocelle Cazdae befits her, just like her mother!…”

The conversation ends there, leaving her with a lot of questions, weighing her mind in all of the swarming thoughts.

‘What, whose memory did I just listen to? I don’t ever remember being named Raeké.’

She instantly stops overthinking as the vibration around her body escalates, and as she keeps groaning. 

This time, her body’s experiencing rough compression from all directions. 

The only memories she holds dear to, which is her crewmates, is the only factor that supports her facing her anguish.

While she’s holding both of her hands around her neck, she tenses the muscles around her eyes, keeping them shut.

Through her ears, a clear thud is made from a solid, metal object that clashes onto the sand.

From the narrow space between the skin of her eyelids, enters an unexpected, faint, crimson-red light coming from the far, wide horizon. 

As she opens her eyes slowly, a coastal area unveils before her eyes.

And her ears, too, receive the swooshing sounds of the ocean’s waves. 

What she perceives by that time is a rather strange but spectacular looking coast.

The entanglement of the atmosphere doesn’t bother her much, since the only thing she cares about is her safety.

She thinks again, realizing that the strangling sensation is now gone.

She relaxes her hands, gradually taking them off of her neck with relief, sighing as heavily as her body needs. 

With her glimpses around the coast, for the time being, it’s super dark.

While not as dark as the void she was previously in, the light that’s casted around the coast gave her little-to-enough visibility.

She mumbles, not thinking too much about the strange view. 

‘Huh, what? I’m back to the coast?’

‘How do I get here? What just happened? I was clearly sinking inside the ocean just now, ain’t I?’

She looks down as the cold, seawater splashes her barefoot till the height of her ankles and submerges them, repeating for as long as she stands there.

She sees the bright color of the soft gown that she’s currently wearing, which is not what she originally wears and she also notices the peculiarity of her feet becoming smaller.

The distance between her chest and the ground is also too close.

‘I don’t know that I’m standing here all this while.’

What’s even stranger than the coast is how her body becomes too light than it usually is.

She lifts her palms, staring and wondering why it is too small.

“Huh—…”

And her voice is overly babylike too. 

“Huh—?!”

That’s where she realizes it all, in the most panicking sense ever.

‘I became a child?!’

Her thoughts and emotions intensify and her moves become so fidgety, looking away from the waters. 

She’s screaming in her head, drowning in skepticism from looking into many unfamiliar memories she has.

‘Strange—… Strange!’

‘I’m literally remembering things I’m not even familiar with in the first place.’

‘But at the same time…, I feel physically familiar with them.’

While the swashes of the seawater remain harmless, one swash pushes a solid, metal object, touching the skin of her toes.

She pants, twitching her bare heels from the chilling touch of it, even though it’s slow. 

‘Ha—h, what the hell is that!?’

She faces down again while a fine looking, thin knife catches her eyes.

‘A knife?’

She picks it up out of pure curiosity. 

At that exact moment, a woman's shout resounds through the coast; it’s the same voice that she hears in the memories, which is coming from her mother, Raesha Issocelle Cazdae. 

"Raeké! Raeké! Where are you, honey?!"

Her mother’s words are barely audible from where she’s standing, let alone understandable. 

Raeké looks back to the direction of the voice of her mother on impulse while she’s in ambivalence; two simultaneous thoughts converge, becoming one. 

‘Is she calling me?’

‘It’s Mom!’

‘Eh—?’

While she knows nothing about the knife that she’s holding, she tosses it away into the seawater in a split second.

But she tossed it not so far from her; it submerges into the shallow saline and surfaces again.

Her mother shouts again but with louder, longer vocals, embodying the sound of frustration and misery. 

"Rae—ké—!"

Raeké’s feet shuffle toward her mother’s voice on its own, hissing against the sands and leaving the waters.

Her mother shouts once more in lower pitch as she’s strained by a sore throat.

“Raeké…”

As her mother releases more of her voice, she coughs.

“Rae—”

A spark of unrecognized guilt engulfs Raeké’s heart, spreading entirely. 

At the same time, her breath goes stuck and her head goes blank, making her stand there, unmoving.

She mouths this guilt straight away, declining all sorts of other thoughts.

“The guilt…”

“The guilt of my own doings that have caused many of the people of the Heto Palace to be ordered for my search…” 

Around the dark, tall trees she’s facing, she sees a legion of men carrying flames, lighting their path.

At the forefront, the same, shouting mother, calls for her daughter, running and approaching.

“Honey!”

Raeké stands in the same spot there like a stone, while her mother reaches her, kneeling and hugging. 

Raeké’s struck by her thoughts, while mumbling about her mother.

‘Why does Mom even come here…?’

She stays quiet not just because of guilt, but of shame. 

In a single breath, Raesha releases all of her repressed concerns toward her daughter.

“Where have you been, honey? I’m so worried about you. Are you okay—hurt anywhere?”

Raeké’s face turns red, and her tears slowly flock on her eyelids, while she mutters in her head. 

‘Mom… I’m sorry! It’s all because… I tried to…’

And she bursts out crying, while no one hears what she wants to say. 

Raesha pulls her daughter closer to her chest softly, patting her daughter’s back a few times to tone down her cry. 

“Eh—, here, here. Don’t cry, my baby.”

In her mother’s presence, the scent of honey dew that smells soft to her nose, and the touch of the silky cloth textures of her mother’s dress; mostly, these two soothe her daughter. 

It’s Raeké that clings to her mother, curling her fingers over the fabric of her mother’s dress and her cry diminishes as she murmurs:

‘Strange… I feel safe, like she’s someone I’m very close to. Why would I ever feel like this with a stranger?’

Nevertheless, she remains shy and keeps her face sticking to her mother’s chest while sobbing. 

Raesha smiles softly, and once she senses some sort of presence from the seawater, she becomes a little startled.

The presence comes from a knife, and she mutters about it. 

‘Hm—that knife emits some Occult Synthesis…’

Raesha reaches her hand out slowly to pick up that knife, while slightly loosening the hold on her daughter in the warp of her arm. 

‘How—why would such a thing be here?’

She extends her front to reach that knife with her left hand.

But she pauses for a moment with one thought that runs down her guts and with her eyes filled with shock: perhaps, her daughter tried to harm herself, or others.

Then, a strange looking animal with the combination of separate animals, appears from Raeké’s back.

She does that to not show it in front of her daughter and scares her off.  

The animal consists of a sinuously moving, small snake with multiple bird’s wings, skinned in the dark color of space and the glitter of the stars. 

Raesha points her hand toward the knife again, conceals it to clear it out of her daughter’s sight and levitates it carefully.

Raeké wipes her tears on her mother's long skirt with a lot of hiccups.

“Everything’s okay now, dear.”

A tall, burly, armored man without a helmet, and has a tree-root scar around his neck, appears at Raesha’s back around three meters away, while riding a three-headed, six-legged, hovering, transparent horse.

“Your Majesty, Your Highness, sorry for my interruption. May I report in?”

Raesha looks back and nods, letting the man proceed while handling two things at once.

"Speak up, the Sovereign’s General, Khaymi Nan Suga."

The Sovereign’s General dismounts from his horse and proceeds with his report while rendering his hand salute. 

“The Sovereign orders to escort Her Highness back to the Heto Palace posthaste.”

Raesha stands up while holding her daughter’s hand, and she hands the knife through her levitation to the Sovereign’s General while saying a few words.

“I’m informed. Take this for investigation.”