There was a woman looking onto the fire, surrounded by a circle of medieval buildings, four streets in each direction freed of them, the ground looking as if thousands of people had stomped atop it, and she was simply there, surrounded almost by raging pale flames.
The same call he had felt before, many times and yet never once, was originating from her, his mind going blank for a moment as he seemed to feel both great dread and melancholy, as if he had spent his whole life trying to do one thing just to learn it was completely wrong from the start, as if he had spent his whole life solving one question with an endless answer just for someone to come and create a way to solve the question endlessly faster.
Still, Avere slowly stepped closer to her as the surrounding world became more and more silent, only his steps, with thick boots that seemed to be reinforced with some kind of material making a sound each time he took a step.
Then, finally, as he was merely a few feet away, looking besides her, in the distance, where there seemed to be a medieval bakery from what he could tell, something he could really use right now, she turned around.
She didn't look special.
If at all then she had a wise look on her, looking as if she knew many a thing Cades would like to know, as well as Avere, she had a black lab coat with thick material, a body similar to that of a child with a weirdly round face that still managed to look utterly starved and old.
Being at leas thirty she looked as if she both belonged here, due to the way she acted when finally looking at him with the same eyes he had right now, and didn't, due to the simple reason she was wearing an elegant lab coat and standing in front of that palish white fire.
Her hair was black, actually, now he realized, she was completely without colours, as if taken out of an old picture and added per editing into a new one, she was monotone and looked lost, but she also looked very mindful and present, she was like a ghost, but he wasn't scared, or rather, it, Avere, wasn't scared, he was a bit weirded out by the genders still.
She opened her mouth, and as she began talking, Avere began feeling almost guilty for something he could never even have helped with, something he had no idea about.
"Hello, I'm Lila, and you are?" she asked, calm, but somehow sad and regretful for something he was certain she should never have to regret, as if something was amiss with justice and her life that he yearned to fix despite being unaffected by it.
"I am...C- Avere..." he said, almost having said Cades because he was just so stuck in trying to figure it out with the memories and experiences of the person he had originally been, long before all this crap had happened and split him so far he didn't even know himself.
"So you will soon experience my end...."she said, almost as if it was her posing the question, not as if she was the one being asked, or the one understanding, as if she was still eternally sad and lost, something he still had no way of fixing.
But he had to ask what she meant, he couldn't get lost in what she was saying, as if something was pulling him in, as if he was stuck in some kind of trance, he had to tell her, to ask her what she meant.
It took him a bit of force, his mind seemingly starting to stutter, but in the end he was able to pose his first real question.
"What do you mean?" he managed to ask, stuttering slightly and hoping for an answer that might never come., but also moving slightly from place, starting to walk around the woman in an agitated way, trying to hide both his being sorry for her fate and his nervosity.
She however, still solemn and sad, a kind of tear being stuck atop her left cheek as he now realized, eternally unmoving and existing just to prover her mood, a mood she seemed to be stuck for all of eternity, answered in quite the annoying way as Avere thought.
Simply shaking her head, long black hair moving weirdly fast she turned around.
Her backside pointed to him, now much closer, and somehow different than before, he could see many cuts and holes through which grey skin was visible, definitely caused by something, but difficult to tell without the wounds as he realized.
Despite this however, she benched over, resting one knee onto the ground that was covered in ashes that were just as colourless as herself and picked up a book, burned and damaged beyond recognition out of the searing hot flames.
There had once been letters atop the leather material covering the entire thing that seemed to have protected it so well it had survived the fire, a material he'd very much like to know about if it was some kind of manufacturing technique.
Finally, she turned around and stood there for a moment, unmoving, caressing the book in her arms and brushing off parts of the ashes with her hands, not caring that it smelled as if she was burning her own flesh, small pieces of smoke going up into the air and a horrible sound filling the air, the endlessly hot book proving it's temperature, until, it suddenly went cold.
Be it only for a moment, the fire went out, the book went cold, as it was many years ago, and she looked at him, sad, very sad, as if she had lost a big part of herself, finally doing something he had already been kind of expecting.
Avere sighed as he stretched out his hands, knowing fully well what she was about to do.
And indeed, still with her eternally melancholic face, she pushed the smouldering book, now as cold as ice for some reason, into his hands, and he felt himself grasp it as the world began to turn blurry, lost, changing, unclear what was going to happen and he felt himself vanishing once more.