Where was he?
It was utterly dark.
His body felt weirdly relaxed, as if covered in some kind of relaxing substance, actually, as if covered in the slime he had once used to play with back when he had been a mere child, no older than eleven, though, when he thought back on it again, that wasn't really that long ago...
Right, he was not that old, or at least a part of him wasn't...
Actually, what was he?
He was not Rondel, that was for sure, that part of him was perhaps the most distant out of all, he was not Arges, that was the loudest part, a part desiring new things to happen, mostly pain, but he was not exactly inclined to listen to that part...
So, was he perhaps Cades?
Out of everyone in his head right now he felt Cades the most, he felt the hate for whoever destroyed his world, his home, and most of all, his plans...
It was kind of ridiculous really...
Cades himself might not have been able to understand it, but after his family the second thing that he despised the most about ehetria's fall was not the end of his friends, not that he really ahd many of them anyways, not the pain of his people, that was only a guise he had worn at first due to the sheer pain he had worn around back then...
What Cades hated that much, it was the disruption, it was the destruction of his plans, the fact he would not get to be what he wanted to be, as if a country went to war and a child in medicine school was lost and in another country where what they had learned was legally useless, as if they had spent hundreds of thousands to be qualified just to become utterly unqualified in the end.
He hated the destruction because it affected himself, not because it existed.
....
How had Cades not realized that?
Perhaps because he realized that, perhaps because of that very fact, it was fairly clear to him that he wasn't Cades, actually, he was probably closer to him than to the other two, but just not exactly him, kind of funny really.
He remembered another name though, despite not even knowing where it had come from, feeling inclined to adopt it, at least for now, just like back when Leyk had temporarily been called Lich, though he had no way of knowing that yet.
Yes, he was Avere, someone new, someone born both of Cades and not Cades, though in the end, he was still Cades, just not Cades... huh, it really didn't seem like it made sense...
It was similar to the ship of Theseus where a ship became so old and damaged that it had to be disassembled everywhere but is rebuild at the same time, until, in the end, the ship consisted of completely different materials and was not the true ship as before.
But this was different, it was as if in the reverse, as if he had been build out of damaged parts from not just one but three ships, each with their own stories and wildly different designs, following the design of only one ship, fitting weirdly well, the design of Cades ship.
Right, but for now, he should probably stop laying down, though it did feel weird, as if he was in bed, but the bed was cold and soothing, yet warm and welcoming, the perfect state in the opinion of both Cades and Rondel, though Rondel preferred it slightly warmer due to the fact that cold felt colder the older one got because of the slower blood flow, though Arges didn't even really know what a bed was, he was truly the weirdest out of them all...
For a moment Avere almost felt as if he had been snarled at, but the still pushed himself up, not through the body, but almost through swimming, not even really realizing they had been breathing under the goo all this time, a nice bit of knowledge to retain for later on, in case he ever had to be stuck in here again, something he wouldn't be entirely against.
In truth he didn't even know whether he was swimming up or down right now, simply following a weird call he had never heard before, though, in some way, Avere himself had never heard anything before.
He was striking his legs over and over again, he was repeating motions with his arms to get out of here, though he was a bit weirded out how he knew of this for a moment before he remembered that this was knowledge retained from Rondel, Cades having had wings for most of his life and never truly having learned how to swim without them, wings being a big help when pushing the water away, allowing one to almost glide through the waves if they had the right posture.
Over and over again he tried to escape, but somehow he felt as if he would never reach the top of the weird goo that seemed to be red from the inside, and the outside, though the second thought was just an assumption.
Hmmm, actually, something seemed amiss with the way he was thinking from time to time as well, as if he was being the reader of a story and the story, his very thoughts, his processes and ideas, were almost being read to him, as if he was reading his own intent, but that wasn't too important to the current him who wasn't even sure if he was swimming upwards, or, much less likeable, downwards, towards an even longer ascension later on.
Gravity didn't really seem to exist in this place, and as he attempted to start counting or guess how much time had passed during the swimming, he also didn't know about that, something that didn't seem so rare from what he remembered due to Cades memories, having heard about such disorienting magic many a time before, be it mainly from books.