It's been a while since we've checked in on Byleth and Sothis, hasn't it? I hope you lot haven't forgotten about me already! Just kidding, but you deserve an explanation nonetheless. As it turns out, I'm about as good at micromanaging multiple works as I am sticking to a schedule. One look at my recently updated works proves that. See, it just so happened that Feb-Mar was a perfect storm of significant dates, all of which I wanted to commemorate with a piece that consequently took time away from my commitments here. Little did I know, the world decided to set itself ablaze in the interim and the resulting quarantine's left me with enough time to continue fecklessly pursuing my restless dreams from where their wispy trails last left off. Thank you for your continued support. We're but a few chapters away from the thing with the thing.
Word count: 465 words.
.85 - Byleth and Sothis and the Abyss
"I've been seeing them more often as of late," the professor reads from a forgotten tome. "Together, whenever time allows, for however long it allows. Words cannot express the happiness I harbor for them, and yet..."
Byleth turns the page, his fingers careful not to tear anything.
"While I would not dare tread in the light that shines over them," he pauses, his brows furrowing. "One cannot deny the pang in my chest whenever I see them lost in each other's gaze. She's never smiled so greatly, so potently. Seeing it fills me with such warmth—such burning, blazing warmth; a greater hellfire I've not yet seen..."
What follows is lost to time, prompting Byleth to turn the pages for something legible.
"When they indulge, I hear a name I've not heard before. It slips from him as though it were always there, and she responds in kind as though she always bore it. She does not use it with others, and in my restless research for its source, all I could unearth was a novel whose lead shares the moniker. I can only surmise that in their time alone, they've..."
A desecrated page prevents him from finishing the book, the rest having been ripped directly out of its spine.
"Something the matter?" asks Sothis, peeping away from her own bygone book. "You look as though you've seen a ghost!"
Whatever reservations he holds over the tome are cast aside, at least for the moment, as he humors her. "If you had it your way, I doubt I'd ever look at anything else."
She makes a face, a cheeky one, before beckoning him over. "Take a look at this! Its cover claims to be a bestiary of Fodlan's insects, but its pages contain little more than diatribes about things with which your silly church has done away with. This 'distance viewer' piques my curiosity the most. Lenses are fine when they aid a mortal's enfeebled sight, but combining them together? A recipe for blasphemy, the archbishop decrees! And this sticky black water, do they have so little faith in their own followers that they would think that they would all devolve into chaos and strife over control of the substance? How very, very enlightening!"
"Still cooped up in here, are you?" a voice tears Byleth away from his friend, and by the time he looks back he finds nothing but a book on the ground. "A sprawling underground world—and you only go as far as the library. Maybe it's my skepticism, but I wouldn't trust any of the books in here as far as you can throw them. Still, they aren't half bad if you're in the pursuit of decent fiction."
Byleth leaves the book behind to regroup with the others, not fully convinced.
