Disclaimer: Tenkuu no Escaflowne is property of Bandai and Sunrise, all rights reserved. I am in no way affiliated with these companies, or any legal proceedings concerning Tenkuu no Escaflowne. This story has been written purely out of enjoyment, and is not intended to make a profit, steal ideas, or offend anybody. Any similarities between my work and anyone else's is purely coincidental. "Away From Me" song lyrics are property ofEvanescence, all rights reserved.
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"Anywhere" - Chapter 3: Away From Me
By The Last Princess of Hyrule
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"Crawling through this world,
As disease flows through my veins,
I look into myself,
But my own heart has been changed,
I can't go on like this,
I loathe all I've become . . ."
-Evanescence, "Away From Me"
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Much later that night, when the moons were long set and Hitomi was well away from Palas, Allen Schezar approached her vacant chambers. Carrying a tray with leftovers of that night's supper and followed by Princess Millerna, he knocked on the door. There was only silence from within.
"I don't think you should bother her right now," Millerna advised. "She's been feeling really bad since I saw her this morning."
"Maybe she'll feel better if she talks to me about it." Allen knocked again, louder this time. "Hitomi?"
There was still no answer.
"I really think you should just leave her alone for a little while," Millerna said again. "Sometimes having a lot of people hovering around you when you're depressed makes it worse."
She's probably still mad at me about this afternoon, Allen thought resentfully to himself, ignoring Millerna's comment. I shouldn't have snapped at her like that. I should have known she wouldn't have taken what I said very easily. But I had a good point.
Hitomi was far too valuable to be allowed to roam the countryside where she could easily be kidnapped by Zaibach. He couldn't let them take her away like they had taken Celena.
"Allen?" Millerna's voice startled him out of his reverie. "Did you hear what I said?"
"I'm sorry, Princess, I was thinking." He smiled. "What did you say?"
"I said 'let's wait a little while and come back later, after she's had some more time to collect herself'."
"All right." Allen followed her back toward the palace's common area, but couldn't help thinking he would never get a chance to talk to Hitomi.
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Something tickled Hitomi's nose. She squinted her eyes and scrunched her nose in a lazy attempt to relieve it, but the tickling continued. Her eyes still closed, Hitomi reached up to scratch it, and immediately fell off balance. Her eyes snapped open, and her hands shot out to grab the nearest solid object to her, which happened to be Folken's waist.
"What--?" he started. Her sudden action startled him, and the Escaflowne banked sharply to the right.
Hitomi's mind gripped consciousness and she found herself still on the Dragon Escaflowne behind Folken very high up in the air--but not for much longer. They were spiraling in tight circles toward the ground coming up to meet them.
"We're going to crash!" she screamed.
Their sudden descent drove them into a thick forest, and they came to a crashing halt in a mess of leaves, branches, and a large cloud of dust. Hitomi was tossed into a heap of bushes and lay stunned for a moment. As the shock wore off, she struggled to her feet, coughing profusely.
Hitomi stumbled back to the Escaflowne and collapsed against it. Her head pounding and her stomach churning, she tried to look around in attempt to calm her torrential nerves. Dawn had broken while she slept, and the last rays of the sunrise were fading into blue sky. The forest they had landed in was full of tall green trees, and the ground carpeted with short, moss-like grass. There were birds and animals nestled in the branches, but the only evidence to their presence was their chirping and chattering.
Every inch of Hitomi's body felt like an iron nail had been driven through it, possibly because the bushes that broke her fall were full of thorns. After a few minutes, the world stopped spinning around her and Hitomi was able to stand without feeling dizzy. Suddenly, she caught sight of Folken, who had been thrown out across the front of the Escaflowne's armor, and ran to him. "Folken!"
He didn't show any signs hearing. For a moment, Hitomi feared he might be dead, but she immediately pushed the thought out of mind. She could see the rise and fall of his back, which meant he was breathing. If he was breathing, he wasn't dead, just unconscious. Gently, she pulled him down and propped him up against the side of the Dragon. With nothing else to do, Hitomi sat down beside Folken to wait. In minutes she was asleep.
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/Hello?/
Dilandau squinted his eyes and pressed his hands to his ears. That voice wouldn't leave him alone. It hadn't left him alone since it had awakened him hours earlier. The voice was a woman's, and it would have been pleasant to listen to were it not for its redundancy and inability to stop talking for more than five minutes.
/Hello?/
Shut up, Dilandau wished fervently.
/Please . . . someone help me./
Shut up!
/Hello? Is someone there? Please, help me!/
"Shut up!" he screamed.
Everything went silent. Even the twittering forest life quieted at his outburst. For a moment, Dilandau was absolutely still, hardly even breathing, straining to hear any sound. There was none.
A feeling of relief washed over him as he strode to the cockpit of his guymelef and leapt in. Finally there was blessed silence so he could concentrate.
The red guymelef had taken quite a beating in the previous night's crash. The right arm and firing unit had been shredded on impact, and the rest of the guymelef was hardly any better. So much for enhanced alloy, Dilandau grumbled to himself as the cockpit latched closed with a clunk.
Slowly, the guymelef managed to stand, and a shower of debris rained to the ground in its wake. Dilandau still had no idea where he was, or how to return to the Delate. There was no way to get his bearings in this forest, so he decided to walk through it until he reached a town where he could find direction. He turned to what he guessed was north and started walking, leaving a trail of crushed bushes and broken branches behind him.
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The first thing Folken noticed as he regained consciousness several hours later was that everything hurt. The hot sunlight beat down on him, making his head throb and not helping at all to ease the pain. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and looked around.
The sunlight streamed down from directly overhead through an unnatural hole in the forest canopy, which the Escaflowne had made during its crash. Hitomi was curled up beside him asleep, her head leaning against her bag. On the ground a few feet away, a sparrow was pecking at the forest floor, looking for a meal. Folken whistled to it.
The bird perked up its head and looked around, and as Folken whistled again, it spotted him. Slowly, Folken started to whistle a sad old melody he knew by heart, and after a moment, the sparrow began to chirp with him. The two sounds made an oddly harmonious discord, and it was this that woke Hitomi. She stirred with a moan, and Folken closed his lips.
"Mmm . . . don't stop, I like that . . ." she murmured sleepily, rolling over. As she became more awake, she realized what she had said. Hitomi opened her eyes, saw Folken looking down at her, and blushed.
"Sorry," she apologized, sitting up. "I was just . . . I was having a dream, and your song . . ." Her blush deepened. Her scattered excuses were only making things worse. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," he said. "I don't mind."
Rubbing her cheeks with her hands, Hitomi looked up at his face, but it told her nothing of what he was thinking. She wasn't sure whether to be offended or relieved. For a moment, she considered asking what he meant by that statement, but asked instead, "How are you feeling?"
Folken grimaced and sighed, struggling to find a more comfortable sitting position. "I'll be all right." His movement startled the sparrow and it flew off into the trees. "Where are we?"
"I have no idea. I was hoping you might."
Folken shook his head. "No. The wind changed direction somewhere south of the Rang Caverns, so I followed it. I think we might be in the Floresta Mountains, but I really don't know. It's hard to tell by all the forests. They all look the same from overhead."
"Then how can anyone flying ever tell where they are?"
"All of the larger vessels, like merchant ships or floating fortresses, have coordinate maps in their logs plotted with the countries and most cities on Gaea," Folken explained. "Unfortunately, 'melefs don't have logs, not even Escaflowne, so pilots have to carry maps with them. I'm afraid I don't have one."
Hitomi's heart sank as she stood up. A map--one of the many things she hadn't planned for on this journey. "Neither do I."
"I suppose we'll have to keep flying until we find our way." Folken tried to stand, but the strain on his body was too much, and his legs collapsed beneath him.
"Folken!"
Somehow, Hitomi managed to catch him before he fell. Folken looked down at her in surprise, caught by her worried tone. Her face was full of concern. He wasn't quite sure how to react. Few people he knew were ever concerned for him, and they were all either dead or no longer cared--the sudden change was a surprise.
For a moment they stayed like that, entangled in each other's arms, and struck by the situation. But in the feeling of awkwardness that quickly followed, Folken left Hitomi's support and held the side of the Escaflowne instead.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Hitomi asked.
He nodded hurriedly, not noticing her blush as she turned away to get her bag. "Yes, I'll be fine." He tried to take a step, but the ground tipped out from beneath him, and he clutched the Escaflowne for support. Fortunately, Hitomi wasn't watching, and she didn't notice.
Shakily, Folken climbed up to the seat of the Dragon's cockpit. Hitomi looped her bag over her shoulder and followed, sitting a little way behind him. She remembered their unpleasant fall from the sky that morning and had no intention of doing anything that might cause a repeat incident.
"Where should we go?" Folken asked as he struggled with the control cords to get the Dragon ready for flight.
Hitomi took off her pendant and swung it. The stone pointed left and Hitomi indicated with her arm in that direction. "That way," she said. The energist gleamed, and with a crash of tree limbs and uprooted plant-life, the Escaflowne lifted into the air.
"Hold on!" Folken called back as he pulled the right hand cord, turning them southeast. Hitomi scooted up and reached around his waist, praying she'd gotten enough sleep earlier not to doze off this time. With breathtaking speed, the Escaflowne grazing the tops of the trees, they sped away into the wind.
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Around the same time that afternoon, Dilandau was also flying, rushing at ungodly speeds over what he figured was Asturian wilderness. It was some kind of miracle that the flying apparatus on the red guymelef hadn't been damaged in the crash. He realized it worked after several hours becoming fed up by the slow pace of walking.
As the day slowly passed, Dilandau realized that he hadn't seen any towns or villages. Just lousy, miserable trees, and that wasn't even the worst of it. The annoying female voice he thought he'd gotten rid of had returned.
/Can anyone hear me?/ she continued to ask, as she had for the last hour. /Is anyone there?/
Dilandau sighed. This would have been far less annoying if he could see the person who was talking; then he'd have had no trouble shutting them up.
/Hello?/
But now he was beginning to wonder if it was really another person trying to talk to him, or something else entirely. The situation didn't make any sense. If the woman was real, she would have had to be following him, and he'd have known if anyone was.
/Hello?/
There was something strange about the way her voice sounded; it didn't sound like it was coming from outside. There was no other way to explain it, except that it sounded different, like the voice might actually be in his head. If that was the case, maybe there was a way he could talk to it. Slowly, Dilandau tried to focus his thoughts at the voice.
/./. . . Hello?/./
/Hello? Hello?! Is someone there?/ The voice sounded excited. She heard him.
/./Who . . . are you?/./asked Dilandau. It was a strange feeling to form thoughts like this. He felt like he was forming clay in his hands, molding it into a thought, and then smashing it in his palms to form another.
/Who are you?/
/./My . . . name is . . . Dilandau././ he said. /./Who are . . . you?/./
/I'm . . ./ She hesitated. /No one./
/./What is . . . your name?/./
/Nothing!/ Her tone was sharp.
Dilandau quickly lost his patience with the voice. He had a short temper to begin with, and the woman's annoying reluctance to even tell him her name was just as frustrating as her repetitive questions a minute ago.
/./I'm going to ask . . . one more time . . . What is your name?!/./
/I don't know!/
Dilandau groaned. /./How can you not . . . know your own name?/./
/I don't remember./
By gods, this woman is hopeless! Dilandau clenched his fists in frustration and flew on, pushing the guymelef to faster speeds. A serene, grassy field spread out beneath him. If only his weapons were working; he had the deepest desire to torch the peaceful scene in his anger.
/Dilandau?/ asked the woman.
/./What?/./
/My name is Celena./
"Celena!" someone called. "Celena!" A young boy with long, golden hair and innocent blue eyes came into view, smiling. "There you are! Let's go home, okay?" He held out a hand.
The red guymelef lurched and dropped a few feet before Dilandau regained control. "What the hell . . . ?"
The view followed the boy as he entered a tall white manor nestled against a grove of pale aspens, shading the front terrace with their heart-shaped leaves. A tall, graceful woman came appeared from another room, a length of embroidery in her hands.
"Where have you two been all afternoon?" she asked with a smile.
"Picking flowers for you." The little boy grinned and held out a handful of wildflowers.
The woman smelled them delicately. "They're very beautiful. Let's put them in a vase, shall we?"
"Okay!" The boy followed her away and waved back. "Come on, Celena!"
"What's going on?!" Dilandau yelled. "What is all this?!"
/What's happening?/ asked Celena.
"Celena! Celena!"
"What the hell?! Leave me alone!"
/Dilandau?/
"Celena!"
"Stop it!"
The red guymelef spun out of control for the second time in two days, and crashed in an almighty heap into the field beneath. For Dilandau, everything went black.
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"We're leaving here tonight,
There's no need to tell anyone,
They'd only hold us down . . ."
-Evanescence, "Anywhere"
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TO BE CONTINUED . . .
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