Tyl sighed as we reached our destination: the shriveled remains of what appeared to be a Runeblossom - A very large, very rare carnivorous plant that was created by reckless use of earth magic back before the sundering - and a simple headstone marking a hand-dug grave. She had insisted on telling the last part of her story from where it all ended. I stepped closer to the plant after she assured me that it had been dead for years (Us "normal" humans take no chances when it comes to this stuff). It appeared to have been ripped open from the inside, but before I got a chance to get any closer, Tyl spoke up.


"When I came to, I was no longer underground: I was inside this plant here.I felt around in the dark to see if anything was still damaged from earlier, but nothing was: its insides were covered in the same liquid that Ko's "Stomach" had been, and I was rapidly healing up. Although it was dark, I could tell that something was....different about me. My hair had changed colors from black to green, there was a softly glowing tattoo on my right shoulder, and (most importantly) I could see!"

I turned and looked at her as though she were crazy. "What do you mean, you could see? You were blind before You met the Earth God?"

"No, I wasn't blind. My first bit of Blue Magic was a stronger version of the Gorgon Stare that I learned by eating Medusa. The drawback to it, however, was that everything I looked at for more than two seconds began to turn to stone. No way to deactivate it, no incantation....there was nothing I could do but blind myself so that I didn't accidentally petrify a normal person." She looked over at the headstone briefly, then looked back. "It was one half of Medusa's Curse, passed on to whoever held her greatest ability. When I came to deal with Ko, she sensed the curse on me, and set this whole process in motion to remove it. Medusa was her enemy too, after all."

Before I could ask her why Ko hated Medusa (as if she could read my mind) she said "I'll have to tell you about that some other day. Back to the story at hand: My curse was lifted, and I could see, but I was still trapped inside this plant here. I couldn't break out when I first came to, so I decided to wait until the healing finished and then break free." She shook her head. "How was I to know that it would take so long to finish? By the time I was strong enough to rip this monster open, more than a hundred years had passed, and the Academy had written me off as killed in action. Which, as it turns out, is what actually happened: This plant here's roots drew my spirit out of my old body and used its own stomach to grow me a new one."

She quietly stared at the headstone for awhile before I mustered up the courage to ask my last question. "So, that headstone...."

She cut me off before I finished my sentence "Is mine, yes. It was a strange occasion, burying my own remains, but there was no one else to do it. My Family (which is still around, by the way. My brother managed to keep the family tree growing and our Sword Style Strong, even if he was weaker than me.) refuses to accept that I am who I say I am, and no one other than the Monster Queen on the second isle and the Four Gods have lived long enough to remember me. So I changed my last name to "vi Ko"(of Ko) to remind me of who I have to thank for my life.

The way she said that last sentence made it seem like she had been dying before Ko reformed her, but I decided not to press her on it. Instead, I simply said,

"Shall we go back to town? Drinks are on me!"

To which Tyl replied with a happy smile:

"I'll make sure you regret that!"

Before racing me all the way back to town.
__________________________

Finishing this series off with a sketch! I colored it. c:

I think I'm getting the hang of this "tablet" thing! Next up on my "to do" list is the epilogue for this story (which will probably just be a drawing done of the Storyteller and a new Character Page.), a Tsukiyo Origin Story, and a Vermillion/Azul Background Story. Seeing as how I came up with these characters months ago, I hope their stories will be worth the wait (#Gabe Newell)

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