The dimness of the hallway lifted entirely, revealing the twisted decor of Nezethar's quarters.
There were skull chains nailed and bound along the edges of her door, a faint purple glow hidden beneath it.
On the same door was a big sign reading 'Do not enter unless you wish to die!', colored in black to maintain the same visceral bleakness that she'd been aiming for.
Ghastly heads peeked out from the hallway walls, mixed expressions of humor, depression, and happiness drawing a peculiar sense of eeriness that stole the breath of the heroes.
"You must know, the ones before you are the esteemed heroes." The king boomed, motioning his hand back towards the heroes as if they were to be beholden as mystical creatures.
"I must know...? Your Majesty, I have known of them since I exited the womb--prophesized of their triumph as soon as I could walk, and I have prepared for this day as long as I have breathed."
Nezethar's sarcasm was a harrowing contradiction to the king's stagnant monotone, almost poking fun at him.
"When it comes out of her mouth, 'Your Majesty' has little weight," Rowan muttered, looking at Liora as he'd said it.
Liora laughed into her balled fist, turning away from everybody else in the room.
"Well... still, I would urge you to act more professional in the presence of our future saviors." The king replied, sneering at her indifference.
"Hah, you think I haven't gone through this exact moment hundreds of thousands of times? Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
The king shook at the seams, violently clasping his fists and gnashing his teeth as his veins began to pop out, his face red with indignation.
The power in his limbs made Rowan feel as if the hallway itself were going to collapse to his might, small cracks forming in the ground below, but as quickly as he was red with anger, his complexion had returned to a peach, the tension in his fists gone.
"Well, if you are as confident as you are, then I'm sure it's fine to leave them in your care." The king said calmly, stepping forward to squeeze her shoulder.
"Why, of course, Your Majesty." She said with venom, smirking with an endearing dominance.
The king stepped back to retract his hand, turning around to awkwardly face the heroes.
"I wish you heroes the best of fortune. May your foretelling be ones of gallant victory and blessing."
The king grunted a happy tune, waving his cape as he walked past the heroes.
None of them wished to speak up, perhaps dumbfounded by the scene that had just played out before them, but all understood just how confounding hearing their future fortunes could be.
As the king's shadow slowly disappeared into the void, Nezethar turned her attention to the heroes, hands on her waist.
"Well, kiddos, it looks like it's just you and lil' old me." She sung, tipping her torso just a few inches lower to mimic a bow.
The hallway was still somewhat dimmed in the shroud of black, so Rowan couldn't quite recognize her figure, but he could still tell that she had a fairly impressionable figure.
"So, what now?" Lucien added, rolling both of his hands forward, palms facing the ceiling.
"To start, I'll have to assess you guys individually." She said, one hand leaving her waist to now reach for Lucien's face, "although, fortunes aside, you look like quite the cutie."
Before she could make contact, Lucien jumped back with far more vigor than when he'd originally assailed Corien.
"H-hey, what do you think you're doing, lady!"
The one to speak wasn't Lucien, but Kaia. She'd stepped forward with fiery ambition, adopting the same stance she'd used when pummeling the robed men and Corien.
"My, my, no need to get so worked up, Lady Kaia. You must know that cougars such as myself find thrill in flustering young, innocent men such as himself. It becomes a bit difficult to control myself, sometimes, so do excuse me if I overstep."
Nezethar turned her hip, her rump sticking out to such an extent that even in the dim, Rowan couldn't help but sneak a few peeks.
Kaia, on the other hand, was left unconvinced by her faux innocence, now fully inflamed by her remark.
Her flames peaked with such intensity that the surrounding concrete and stone became embellished in flame, her fury a bringer of mass destruction.
Before her seething had the opportunity to reach its target, however, Lucien quietly pushed Kaia out of the way, her maddened expression twisting into one of startle and disbelief.
"I'll be equitable enough to ignore your provocations, but I do urge you to get on with whatever it is we must do. I'm sure I'm speaking for everyone when I say that we've had a long day, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could offer us our fortunes in a timely fashion."
Nezethar's smile faded, being replaced by a concealed frown.
She removed both hands from her hips, crossing her arms as she stepped back a few paces.
"Well, aren't you the boring one? Perhaps my assessment of you was wrong." She said, wagging her finger at him. "You know, you'll never get a girlfriend like that."
Lucien's cool, icy persona was immediately dispelled, his eyes furrowing and nose contorting into an expression of anger or frustration.
"Hey, you don't know a thing about me!" He yelled, his left foot projected out in front of him as his fists were balled.
A deep smirk ran across Nezethar's face as she returned her hand, the length of her nails popping out to Rowan as she simply held her hand out in front of her.
"That's not true, Sir Rowan." She stated, her voice deeper--thundering across the halls enough to make Rowan feel the vibrations of his cochlea. "I understand that for your entire life, you've wrestled with abandonment issues. Whether it be your mother dumping you in a back alley, your adopted father beating you blind every day, or your only friend disowning you to--"
"Enough!" Lucien yelled, his hand trapped in Nezethar's as she'd caught his slap, Rowan hearing the smacking of skin.
Lucien's face shifted through three shades gray, his anger dissipating to reveal remourse.
"I... I understand who you are now. Please, offer us our fortunes." Lucien said, pulling his hand back and clasping his wrist.
"Well then," Nezethar purred, smiling at Lucien as she turned around to face her room. "You first, pretty boy."
Her hand was waved, pointing at the room basking in purple while she traced a circle with the movement of her hips.
Lucien was frozen, the clarity of his expression lost within mixed feelings of attraction, disgust, and reservation swirling inside of him all at once.
Elias walked forward, pulling Lucien along with him as he approached the door.
"Come on, now, Lucien. We should get your fortune checked! Who knows, you might be the most likely to get rich, or something like that."
The rest of the heroes stepped forward to follow suit, Rowan and Liora having to cover their eyes from the sudden shift in ambient light.
It was only after a few moments that Nezethar turned her shoulders, peering over the heroes as she'd raised her hand forward perpendicular to the floor.
"No, only Sir Lucien may enter. I can't have anybody else being in the same vicinity while their fortunes are told." She said, blocking the door with her body.
Lucien looked on at her with a solemn dejection, hesitant to immediately trust being alone with the woman.
"And why is that?" He asked, crossing his arms to at least somewhat maintain his appearance of strength.
"Do you know the allegory of the armadillo-bear and the hare?" She inquired, aloofly placing her hands behind her head.
Lucien sat still for a couple seconds, one eyebrow raised higher than the other as his right eye squinted with question.
"No, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me regardless. Although, in my world, armadillo bears don't exist."
Nezethar almost broke her composure from the incongruency of their worlds, the further extremities of her top and bottom lips breaking to heave small streams of air.
Despite the humor she found in his comment, however, she withheld her giggle, finally continuing her thought.
"A sad thought, really. I think of it as one of the more entertaining stories of this world." She said, her eyes looking down as if she truly did feel bad for Lucien.
She spun around, pacing forward with her eyes trained on the purple glow of the room ahead of her. Her hands were outreaching, making sure that she was the center of attention.
"Once--in a village long since forgotten--there was a hare. A hare, that, as talented as he was, was unsure of his future. He asked his mama of what was to become of him, and do you want to know what she said?"
Lucien looked up as if he were going to open his mouth, but Nezethar quickly cut him off, continuing her speech.
"She said, 'you, my son, are going to be the greatest farmer'. Of course, Mr. Hare didn't want to farm, so he went left and right, asking all the other villagers. Do you want to know what they said?"
Nezethar asked it in just the same style as she had previously, so Lucien didn't try to answer this time.
Swiftly, she looked back and glared at Lucien, pointing her index finger at him.
"Hey, that wasn't rhetorical. It's rude not to answer someone when they're speaking to you."
Lucien's expression straightened even further than it'd been before, unamused by her inconsistency.
"And what did they say--"
"They said this!" She yelled, cutting in before Lucien could finish. "You, my boy, will grow up to be: Just. Like. Us.
Now, the hare didn't want to become just like the villagers as they were an agricultural bunch, and the hare hated farming, so he went to the village elder--a tortoise--and asked the same question.
The hare was wildly advised against this, however, because the tortoise was said to have precognition, and his readings would always happen, no matter what. You know the only saying, ignorance is bliss.
But, wow, this question of what his future held was eating away at the hare, so much so that he went against the advice of the villagers anyway, and there he stood, in front of the millennia-old tortoise.
The hare asked his question again, and the great old tortoise, so ancient that his movements came once every hundred seasons, told the hare this: 'You will grow to be king of this ecosystem; your strength, jump, and speed transcendent over all."
Now, the hare was overjoyed, how could he not? He was just told he would be king of his world, subject of no one. And best of all, the future is infallible.
And so, he ran amok, telling everyone in his village of his future. That he'd be king. That nothing could stop him. That the elder himself had foreseen it.
Some laughed, thinking it a joke. Others smiled, wishing him well. But one creature did neither. It listened.
The armadillo-bear.
The Alpha of the western ridge. Thick, scaled back like armor. Eyes that never blinked. Breath that boiled the ground. It heard the whispers, and in them, it heard a challenge.
Not by name.
But by title.
There could only be one king.
And so, without roaring, without marching, without warning--it moved. It didn't strike the hare. No, not yet. Otherwise, it risked fulfilling the prophecy. After all, strength is forged through pressure. Instead, it struck everything around him.
The stream he bathed in ran black. The crops that fed his mother withered. The burrow where he laid his head caved in from below.
By the time the hare realized what was happening, it was too late. He hadn't been hunted. He'd been disarmed. Unmade before he ever became.
All because someone else had known what he would be.
All because the Alpha had listened."
The room was quiet, some heroes looking on in exasperation while others could only keep a straight face as they pondered on the contents of Nezethar's story.
"And what does any of this have to do with us?" Kaia asked, her nose still crinkled by the agitation in her face, her voice similarly etched with annoyance.
"Well, you see, while the allegory is just meant to teach kids not to count their fortunes too early, it's actually pertinent to time as well." Nezethar responded, softly grinning at Kaia. "You see, if you envision an individual's time as a raging river, how much could you envision yourself impeding its flow with your hands alone?"
Kaia sat still for a second, raising her hand to her chin while raising her left eyebrow ever so slightly. "Not very--at least for anybody who's not me."
Nezethar chuckled at Kaia's muse, but she quickly refocused her attention back to the topic.
"Okay, well, for all except you, it's not very easy to stop a river's flow. Typically, the nature of a river is to ruthlessly flow to a single endpoint, ignorant to external interference. But you see, in the same ways water is malleable, so too is time. The constituents of time heed to the machinations of space and the very laws of causality, so one could exploit these to influence time. To make it easier to envision, one could dig a burrow deep in the ground to change the very direction of flow, changing its endpoint. That is equivalent to the dangers presented by telling others of your fortune, risking the shifting your future. "