Follows Don’t Loose Your Head.
It didn’t take long for Urda to gather that he was no longer in Destiny City. The absolute darkness was a dead giveaway. Confusion hit him first, then concern because he was trying to power up to help Abby deal with whatever was on their tail…
And now he was here.
It felt…familiar, somehow, and instinctively he knew where he was though he’d never actually been to his homeworld before. While it was tempting to push the button whenever he saw it, back then he was more worried about not being able to get back for whatever reason, and getting grounded for missing curfew, so it was justified as far as he was concerned.
“Bit me right the a**, though, didn’t it,” he said as he pulled his phone out and tried to hit the button to go home. When nothing happened, he tried again, and in fact he tried a few more times after that before finally tucking his phone away. No sense in wasting any more time on something that was clearly not going to work, so the Senshi took a breath and turned his focus to finding a solution to his current situation. His eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, and when he looked around he realized that he was able to make out the silhouettes of his surroundings.
All around him, save for what barely passed as an opening, were branches. Tangles and tangles of branches.
The senshi scrunched his brows together and stepped toward the nearest wall, lifting a hand to rest against it as he closed his eyes. It was warmer than he thought considering how cold it was all around him. He felt energy, life of a sort. Just a sliver of it, but it was there. Waiting, it seemed, for him.
Silently crying out this whole time, he couldn’t help but feel, while it waited all this time for him to finally come home.
A tear slipped past before he could help it, and before more emotions bubbled up out of him as he connected with the space he opened his eyes and lowered his hand. After gathering himself up again, he gave the wall a gentle pat.
“Better late than never, though, right?” he said gently, and then glanced toward the opening. It was the only way out of where he was currently standing, so he walked toward and eventually through it, making his way into another little space with another little opening.
He followed what seemed to be some kind of a path. In the darkness it felt neverending, twisting and turning yet somehow there seemed to be only one right way to go. Or maybe it was just that he could only see the one opening each time he entered a new space. The size of each new space seemed to be growing, he noted, though regardless of how big it got he was still able to find the opening without much trouble.
Oddly enough, he knew where he was going, though he had no idea how or why. Well…he had a thought as to why, though it’d been so long since he’d seriously given his senshi life any thought that he hadn’t fully processed the idea of being reincarnated and having a past life. He’d heard that others had memories from that life, though he had yet to have any of his own. He had plenty of time to think now, though, and whether he wanted to or not that was just naturally where his mind had wandered off to.
What could have happened if he had stayed in DC? Would he have done this sooner? Would he have had to do this at all? Would his family be okay? How would he be doing at school? Would he even be alive? Would he know more senshi and knights? Would he have had to grieve and mourn the loss of anyone in the war?
It was weird to think that he might have made it this far only because he had moved away in the first place…
As he went, and for reasons he had a feeling had nothing to do with the thoughts that were coming to him (though those certainly weren’t helping), he felt a restlessness begin to stir within him. Something was off, and he knew it. He couldn’t place exactly why–likely owing to the fact that this was his very first time here–but he just knew that there was something completely wrong with his homeworld..
In the darkness, Urda had lost all sense of time. He had to stop to rest a few times, he had no idea for how long he’d been walking already but he knew he couldn’t stop now. For however long he was walking, the effort would be wasted if he stopped now. Not to mention, his pride wouldn’t allow for it. So, he simply followed his instincts and continued on down the path, all the while fighting against the growing restlessness as best he could, until finally he made his way into a cavernous room.
He knew it the instant he walked inside…this was it. Why it took so long, why the path had gone on almost endlessly until now, he had no idea. Was it supposed to be some kind of test of endurance? Patience? Will?
All the same, this was the room he was meant to find, the room he needed to be in to fix…all of this. Whatever it was. Because that restless feeling had calmed slightly. Or at the least, it stopped getting worse. He took a breath as he looked around. This room somehow seemed darker than all the others, but at the same time he felt a bit lighter here.
Better.
Urda slowly walked further inside, eyes narrowed as he tried to make out what was directly in front of him.
It was pitch black darkness, but he could swear there was something there.
Eventually he reached a hand out as he went, not wanting to walk into or onto whatever it was and potentially ruin it somehow. He moved carefully, intentionally, and then he felt the tip of his fingers suddenly resting on something.
And then a rush of energy surged through him, from the tips of his fingers and quickly, through the rest of his body and into every fiber of his being. It shook him to his core, and he was forced to close his eyes as he crumpled to his knees. Eventually, after it passed, he opened his eyes to see that the room was now very dimly lit by falling, glowing petals, and the first thing he saw was the enormous tree directly in front of him.
A Blackthorn tree, no doubt.
Urda took a long moment to gather himself before finally standing again, and glancing around. Now that he was (barely) able to see, he first noticed exactly how big this space was. It was a huge clearing, though curiously there was a very high ceiling that seemed to be made of those same tangled branches that he saw when he first got there. Apart from that all he could see was just grass all around him, and the Blackthorn tree at the center. It was fully grown, standing several feet tall and sporting its spiny branches, though they were all barren.
It looked…different.
“It’s petrified,” he said, the thought having come completely out of nowhere and surprising even him. Much like how he knew the path, he just knew this little bit of information as well, and honestly?
He was starting to get a little bit scared.
The fear ebbed a bit, though, when he reached forward and rested his palm against the trunk of the tree. It was warm, much like the wall had been when he touched it earlier. Closing his eyes again, he focused on the sliver of energy that was flowing, as it had been earlier, and as he did he could hear a gentle rumbling, as though something were pushing its way through the ground, behind him.
It felt like some scene out of an obscure video game, he thought as he opened his eyes and turned to see the old chest that now sat there. Naturally, he knelt down to open it, hoping to find something valuable or informative.
Instead, he found a selection of old, dirty, rusted over tools. They seemed perfectly normal, he thought, but when he reached down and touched the first one he noticed that the petals seemed to blink for a second before becoming just a tiny bit brighter. He inspected it before moving on to the next tool, and with each one the petals grew brighter still until they were twice as bright as compared to when they first started falling.
“Maybe now?” he said as he tucked the tools away and closed the chest. It slowly moved back into the ground then, and before he knew it there was nothing but undisturbed grass where the chest had been. It took him a moment to process that, and he took another moment to tuck away the memory of how he summoned the chest in the first place, before pulling his phone out and trying again.
As soon as he was gone, darkness once again consumed the heart of his wonder.
1566 (gdocs)
