"I'm alive?" Avere muttered aloud, sounding utterly baffled and confused.
How did he survive? Did he survive because of sheer luck?
How was it he hadn't even gotten a scratch?
How was it he couldn't remember the time he had fallen downwards, only the thoughts he had had, yearning to quickly test this spell, called feather's grace, before anything bad happened.
Flying was Cades yearning for sure, but in the end, flying was a primal urge for many people, the urge of freedom, of controlling your own life and doing with it whatever you wanted, not like simply walking ahead, not like swimming where one could only swim in water as one could only walk amongst solid ground, and even then, not everywhere, flying was everywhere, air was everywhere, and birds had always been flying even over the greatest of waters, the longest of rivers had served as resting places, the darkest of places as places of sleep.
Nevertheless, despite this obvious desire of both Cades and everyone else, including even Rondel who had been mostly asleep all this time, Avere knew that they first had to survey both themselves and the surroundi-
"Huh" he uttered, surprised.
Why was there a mirror?
Actually, no, the mirror was long, it was clear, it was almost like a dome...
Oh, this must be the liquid, just not red from the outside...
It was as if he was some kind of fly trapped under a mirrored dome only see-through from the outside, a kind of social experiment to see how they would act, not that it mattered to him right now.
Still, he went closer to it, and touched the mirror.
It was liquid, as expected, so he could at least escape if he had to do it, the worst case scenario.
But there was something he found to be even more interesting when it came to this mirror, that being how he was looking right now, Avere never truly having seen his own image from the outside, and then the added confusion that this mirror did not reflect as normal mirrors did, though he had no way to know that.
The mirror did not change the sides of what was seen, it changed nothing, it simply showed one as others saw them, weird, but not known to someone that had never seen themselves in a mirror.
Avere was rather tall, being about 5'10, smaller than both Arges and Cades, having taken more after Rondel who had shrunk in his later years, perhaps having come to the middle of the three numbers, he had silvery eyes with greyish pupils, almost as if he was blind, which he was not, he had an interesting, almost starved face, the shadows being strong and powerful as if he had never eaten in his life, something carried over from Arges who had indeed never eaten within their life, just like Avere, but in his case that life was not too old yet.
He was pale but at least slightly tanned, a leftover from the endless amounts of copious work Rondel had done, always outside, and also part of the many spells he had learned, that being the paleness.
His hair was darkish brown, almost hazel, long and hanging in strands, reminding him of Cades mother, a kind woman from what he was able to understand, and a loss that still hurt despite Avere, the current Avere, never truly having met her.
But what he found more interesting was the rest of his body.
The face had already been rather neutral when it came to the gender, so he had thought the body would be as well, but it was much worse than he thought.
Because, just a few seconds later, he understood, dressed in some kind of sailor uniform with too many belts to count, some kind of sword he would not use as it looked old and chipped, almost as if he was some kind of pirate with dreadlocks who was searching for a hat, he understood that he had no gender right now.
He looked like a pirate, but almost by instinct, he could tell that there was no definite gender to associate him with right now, his genitals, as he now realized, being gone, a new experience indeed.
To be honest, even Cades had expected him to become a woman, this being quite outside of his expectations, but in retrospect, the bodiless person realized, this made quite a lot more sense then simply switching genders, something he would be able to, theoretically do right now.
But what was up with the pirate outfit?
Clanking belts rung aloud as he moved, many different pockets were used to save stuff he didn't even know, but many of them were heavy, he wore heavy leather boots as well, decorated with a metal thingy, however it might be called.
There were at least a good dozen belts, multiple decorating the waist region, but many more simply hanging all over his body, decorating stuff, storing smaller blades, a getup Leyk would certainly have liked due to the amount of weapons, though Avere had no way of knowing that.
Still, he was without gender, and that was really a weird feeling.
When he thought about it again, he had already felt that something was amiss.
In all his memories every person had been driven by something, at least in as good as every memorable moment, whether that be useless or necessary, whether it be in the background or the main theme, so right now, he had not realized it, but he had no real desire.
There was the goal of breaking free, of finding out what was going on, on understanding, on getting revenge, but really, none of those were really desired right now, they were simply his goals, far away, but not something he was consciously working towards in this place.
Rather than that it felt almost as if he was forced to have another desire, a desire that made him turn his head and look towards the flames, finally seeing something else in this weird place, a woman at that.