Hugo's eyes fluttered, heavy as though weighed down by a deep sleep that hadn't finished yet. For a moment everything was dim and unfocused, and abnormally, he felt that his body was unusually light. It was no longer fatigued with pain and exhaustion despite his earlier injuries.
'Uh.. where am I?? What happened to Azdin!?'
He was just fighting, and then he got hit in head quite badly.. so he was knocked out? Was he hallucinating then, or maybe he had actually died?
Everything was truly odd, but once his eyes finally stayed opened and focused, some things began to make sense at once.
He froze. It wasn't that he had found himself in a unfamiliar place.. he recognised it all too well, actually. It was that he was wondering how he ended up here once more.
The sky stretched endlessly above him, a pale washed-out grey veiled by thin layers of drifting clouds. They moved slowly, almost lazily, but through that haze a single sun burned quietly. Not so close that he could touch it, but it wasn't too far either. It appeared to be teasing him with just how out of reach it was.
At his feet, the surface resembled water, perfectly still and glass smooth, reflecting the dim sky in a way that it should have rippled. Even with his own weight added on top of it, it held firm and unshakable.
But what was truly eerie about it, was what laid underneath those waters. Far deeper than it first appeared, Hugo could make out countless shapes of pale figures, all far too familiar to him.
They were bones. Countless, innumerable bones of all kinds of beings, both humans and creatures alike. They laid there, reaching upwards with their fingers extended toward the surface of water he stood upon, as if they tried to climb out. But they all failed nonetheless, so now they stood their motionlessly.
'This place is.. why am I here?'
This was his Soul Sea. A place he had visited very often in the past.
It had been a while since he came here, the last time was just after they had escaped that horrible place.. from those creatures wearing human skin.
Hugo didn't even know what they were. If they were a cult, if they were being paid to disect them by higher powers, or were just a group of deranged madmen. They didn't speak to him very often, yet somehow they had a whole lot to say. Most of the time it was just intelligible nonsense though.
'So they were just madmen then.'
They were a strange bunch indeed.
So whenever he found himself alone, to retreat from the darkness of that hell, he'd come here. Despite the silent crowd beneath his feet, this place granted him something the living world rarely did.
It was only here and being next to her, that he ever found himself to be truly at peace.
Thinking back to those times, memories of her began to fill his mind again. Filling the stillness like water seeping into cracks.
He could almost hear her again. He could almost feel the warmth that used to come with it, but the memory of that warmth only made the cold even sharper, as well as the hollow space that it had left behind deep in his heart.
He missed her. He missed her so terribly.
'Tyr..'
But those thoughts quickly soured. He was reminded of how weak he was, and how futile everything is.
"Back then, when we were escaping. If only I had been as strong as Azdin then she wouldn'tve gotten hurt like that."
Yet again, his name found itself coming out of his mouth. And once more he hated himself for even thinking about it. He admired the strength he possessed, and was completely awe struck by it. But at the same time he hated him more than any other person in the world. Even more so than those people that had taken him to that hellhole of a torture den.
While those people had caused him great trauma, he could say without a single doubt in his mind that Azdin had delt him his greatest pain. Forcing him to kill someone he treasured himself.
And it was because of that, he found it in himself to be incapable of forgiving him for making him do what he did.
'...'
But that was the Azdin of the past. Truth be told, he had no clue as to how to feel about him now. He had simply forgotten everything, the pain, the trauma, even the scars on his body had seemingly vanished out of the blue. It was as if he had become a completely different person, which wasn't wrong in a way.
But still, they shared the same face, the same body and soul. Even if his mind had regressed by god knows how long, he was still the one that made him kill Tyr.
He hated him, but every time he brought the old him up, he always had that pained look on his face. Every time he saw it, he felt something complicated. It was an emotion that he couldn't quite explain with words.
Which is why..
'I don't know anymore.. Do I truly still hate him?'
Earlier he had slipped up in his fight too, not because he was weaker, but simply because he was startled from seeing Azdin hurt. He had witnessed countless people dying around him in that battle, and it wasn't the first time that he had witnessed such bloodshed either.
So he should've just ignored it, won and then come to help him afterwards. Or maybe that would've been pointless. The second he would've tried to save him, Roswell would've snapped his neck already in retaliation.
The moment he was grabbed, his fate was sealed, so he shouldn'tve cared what happened to him afterwards. And yet that was not the case.
The confusion weighed him down as his certainty fractured under its own weight. It was then that he began to wonder what Tyr herself would've done as well, as she was always the more relaxed of the three.
The moment he thought about that, something changed in his Soul Sea.
It was as if the world itself had been holding it's breath, waiting for this exact desire that something shifted in the atmosphere. This was his Soul Sea, so he was able to sense the change at once.
"Hey."
A voice echoed behind him. In this place where he should've been alone, someone else had appeared too. But that wasn't what scared him.
It was the fact that he recognised that voice, that was what truly terrified him.
Slowly turning around to meet it, his hands shook terribly as his eyes widened in shock, while in his heart, numerous other emotions clashed together in a strange struggle.
He hoped that it wasn't what he believed it to be, but he also hoped that what he heard was real. He feared both of those things being true as well, and yet he couldn't help but feel his expectations rise and fall in kind.
Finally though, he turned around and met the figure in the eyes. And what he saw, made all of his doubts crumble away completely.