"Well done," Cheren says, withdrawing his stoutland in a flash of red light.
Rosa's emboar pants heavily, the vestiges of a lava plume dripping past his open maw. She gives it a pat on the back before recalling it.
She looks up as Cheren walks toward her. Rosa's eyes are a blue, soft cornflower on a fair face framed by brown locks. The hair's all wrong though - dark and straight and not at all fluffy, held together by two oversized buns. She smiles, but it's a hesitant one, the kind you give to strangers in the street.
He returns it with one of his own.
"You've grown stronger," he comments, and it's true. The last time they battled, her emboar was just a tiny little tepig. But his mind wanders somewhere else, to winding routes and rolling hills, a person with the sky in their eyes and the stars in their heart, desperate pleas exchanged in a forbidden castle of a falling kingdom.
She holds up her hand, and they shake. Her fingers are too thin; they have no calluses.
"Well," Rosa says, "It's kinda the side effect when you've single-handedly defeated the region's largest cult."
No you didn't, Cheren wants to refute, you are not the hero, but instead he simply nods along. Perhaps, if he listens, he'll learn to forget the sensation of falling in vast, eternal white.
The false truth becomes easier to believe every year.