Chapter 53 (2/2)

Waking up the following morning, Azul stood up feeling refreshed from a night without drinking and decided to once more take a walk through the old city of Shandora, not being able to forget the feeling in the back of his mind. On top of that he had grown fond of the city if he was being honest with himself.

Wandering through the ruins, surprisingly or maybe not, Azul came upon Robin that was standing at the side of the giant bell, reading something that seemed to be written there.

Facing him were old runes or a language that was simply written in that style, completely different from the modern ones of today. As his eyes drifted over the writings the murmuring in the back of his mind grew in volume, increasing into a melody he had heard before, he had the feeling. And yet he couldn't remember where he had heard the whispers...

With a frown on his face Azul turned to Robin not being able to shove the questions to the back of his mind any longer.

”Can you read this?” he asked her, waking her from her own musings, to which she nodded.

”This, Azul, is one of the poneglyphs that I have been looking for to study and learn the history of the ancient past.” Robin said, brushing her fingers over the elegant writings of the poneglyph.

”The ancient times? You mean before the world government?” Azul asked with slowly dawning understanding, connecting the dots that had remained under a kind of fog in his mind.

He remembered now! The whispers, he had heard them before. Once. It was the time when he had undertaken the ceremony to become a journeyman, on top of the mountain in Ishiria. Back then he had perceived only shreds of what was surrounding him as he had been so strongly immersed in his task at hand. But now that he stood here, and the whispers grew in intensity, pounding in his head, as if striking with a metal pole against some kind of invisible barrier that made his head hurt the longer he focused on it, he finally remembered.

Faintly he registered in his periphery that Robin was telling him something but he couldn't understand her as the noise in his head had increased in volume.

With a groan that made Robin turn towards him with a frown on her face, Azul grabbed his head and stumbled away from the poneglyph, trying to escape the noise that was crushing his mind, a kind of pain he had never experienced before. Gazing into himself Azul spotted his soul pulsing with a growing intensity and so while stumbling backwards, Azul dropped against a wall behind him, while Robins face had slight panic written upon it, not sure what was happening to Azul.

”Please, leave me... I... need... to focus...” Azul g.r.o.a.n.e.d out through grit teeth at Robin who after thinking about her possibilities to help him came to the conclusion that she couldn't really do much anyways, and so left him to his own devices, rushing down the steps to search for Chopper. Maybe he knew what to do.

Steam started to rise from Azuls body and the earth beneath him began to slightly crack as he tried to contain the shaking of his soul, but with lesser and lesser sucess, while the whispering and murmuring growing stronger and stronger all the while.

Soon he couldn't surpress his spiritual pressure anymore and with a satisfying outcry of the voices in his head, a resounding boom shook the very foundations of the city of Shandora, quaking the land and sending the birds up in the trees flying away in fear and crumbling the nearest stonewalls into dust, as the pressure kept increasing. Until at one point in time Azul couldn't contain himself anymore and let out a roar in pain and with a thud fell over, succ.u.mbing to unconciousness while the pressure around him increased once more until it faded along with the whispers that had began to fill the air, leaving peaceful silence behind in the deserted city of Shandora...