'I reek?'
He had a perplexed expression on his face as he tilted his head slightly and tried to sniff beneath his shoulder, and immediately after that, he lifted it up with a sour face.
'Damn, I smell horrible.'
With his horrible scent still lingering in his nose, he looked at the two elves and tried to compose his face. He had no idea what he was supposed to do at this point, but if they bothered to heal him, then it meant that they wanted something in return.
But he didn't plan on being the one to get the conversation going, so all he did was stare at them in silence until Luna finally spoke.
She still gave him that awfully disdainful gaze.
"What are your affinities?"
He stared at her for a moment and then tilted his head slightly, a bit confused.
"What do you mean by my affinities?"
She raised an eyebrow at his question while a subtle frown appeared on Essie's face. They both glanced at each other for a moment and then turned back to him.
Essie spoke.
"I think he might be a bit more lost than we thought... How about you try another question? There has to be something he remembers."
Luna sighed and shook her head; then she slowly walked closer to him. Now only a few feet away from him, she got down on one knee and looked him straight in the eye.
"What is your name?"
Instantly, he tensed up at the gaze of her silver eyes, and he struggled to speak even after hearing her question. Though it was only for a second, without even realizing it, he blurted out a few words.
"Starless, but you can call me Shining Star."
He gulped and tensed up even more. He had no idea what those names were and why he even called himself those; it all felt strange.
Meanwhile, Luna leaned back and then glanced at Essie with a firm gaze.
"He shares an affinity with stars."
Essie glanced at him for a moment and shrugged.
"Well, can we get to know what his abilities are?"
Then she took two tentative steps closer.
"He also possesses an aura of divinity, which makes my mind ability useless against him."
Moon... Star stared intently at the elf kneeling in front of him as he quickly absorbed whatever information he could from their little dialogue. He was strangely calm for someone who had just been transported into a strange magical world after a train accident, but that didn't mean he wasn't screaming inside.
Affinities, aura, divinity—the strange boy he had been dreaming about called Nuel; he also had fragmented memories of a woman who called him Shining Star, and what made it even crazier was that every single word sounded familiar.
Though he didn't want to bring himself to even begin to imagine that possibility, while he was still in thought, a new set of memories began flooding his mind.
He found himself in the same ivory town, but it was different this time. He knelt on the ground, crying as he stared at corpses and destroyed buildings, with raging flames slowly engulfing what was left of the once-pristine town.
After that, more dreadful memories began coming to him, memories that weren't his. He saw himself clawing at his face and then staggering into the woods. After that, he got shot in his shoulder, chest, and abdomen with arrows by an archer dressed in a white cuirass, and he ran away in a bid to escape her onslaught.
That was a group of soldiers who began chasing after him, and then he gazed at his biggest surprise, a sunburn crest on their cuirass. That was the last thing he saw before he descended into the darkness of the abyss.
His whole body trembled as he muttered.
"The Church of Light."
He lowered his head and brought his hands to his face, his fingers trembling as he struggled to resist the urge to rip at his own face.
"It was the Church of light!"
Luna quickly leaned forward and grabbed hold of his hands, prompting him to look up as her eyes shone with an ethereal glow. He felt a strange warmth soar through him, and then he slowly calmed down.
She stood up and glanced into the darkness, and after a few seconds, her gaze slowly trailed to the single torch burning with a warm blue light a few feet away from them.
"Well, at least we know where he hails from."
And then, she walked to it, and with a single swing of her foot, broke off the torch from the base where it was lodged in the ground. She grabbed it and lifted it slightly above her head.
"And I think you and I can both agree, sister, that this boy poses a great threat to both of us, far more than the chasm ever will."
Shining Star glanced at herself for a moment, and then slowly looked away, staring emptily at the rocky ground.
'Man, talk about plot.'
He was now back to himself and was finally able to piece things together. It turned out every word he heard and dreamt of being familiar wasn't as strange as he imagined it because he now knew why they were.
The last memories that had come to him were the last pieces of the puzzle, and there was no mistaking it; he was currently in the body of one of the characters in his favorite novel, the main character's best friend named Star.
'This is all a dream, I'm sure I'll wake up soon, probably in a hospital... But still, I can't help but want to get away from these two as soon as possible.'
Of course, he knew how the plot of the story played out, and though he didn't want to take anything serious... at least not yet, he knew who the two elf sisters standing before him were and what they were capable of, and what's more, Luna had deemed him a threat.
'Well, thankfully we're inside the chasm. Given their affinities, they're probably just as weak as I am at the moment.'
Well, though he posed a threat, it was only his existence as a human being that was a threat to them given the history between his race and other demi-humans. And he didn't have to worry much since the three currently shared the same goal: getting out of the chasm.
Normally, scaling the walls would have been the best idea, but considering the nature of the gorge he now found himself in, it probably wasn't the best idea. What he... or rather, Star had fallen into was a rift in space, which meant that they had to find a rift leading out of the abyss they were currently stuck in.
Luckily, though it had only been descriptions, he had a faint idea of what the chasm was like. If anything, once he spotted a recognizable area, he would be able to lead the way out of the boundless darkness.
While he was still thinking, Luna, with the torch firmly held in her hand, walked past him, and Essie swiftly followed behind her, leaving him alone in the darkness.
He hissed and watched as they disappeared into the darkness, and then he stood up and followed behind them, his only guide being the faint blue light that remained glowing in the distance.