Finding my Parents in Another World-Chapter 56: (Zoe) Spear of the Goddess

"Yes, allow it. Do not resist."

Zoe felt the words of the Spear reverberate within her, getting stronger and stronger as the weapon rocketed towards her. Almost half-heartedly, she raised a sand barrier in front of her, hoping to block the Spear.

The hope was in vain though. The Spear went through the wall like it was made of cheese, destroying even the sand prison she had constructed to defeat the Holder in its path.

Then it stopped. Right in front of her. Hovering in the air.

Zoe wasn’t sure what to do now. All her muscles urged her forward, wanting beyond anything to touch the Spear, feel it’s power through her muscles.

She tentatively reached forward, at the last moment looking once towards AD on the side. The robot cloud stood off to one side, hovering above the ground. The face of the cloud, was as usual blank. But somehow, for some reason her mere presence there calmed Zoe down somewhat. Maybe it was because of her assistance in the recent fight against the Holder, but Zoe felt more friendly towards AD, more comfortable with her around.

Shrugging, she reached her hand forward and grabbed the Spear.

.XX.

She was falling.

For a long time that’s all the sensation Zoe could feel.

Free falling through a ocean.

No, that wasn’t right. There was no water around. Just.....nothingness.

The utter and complete darkness around her threatened to suffocate Zoe. She grasped around, trying to use her magik, trying to do anything, grab onto anything to slow her descent. But her magik didn’t work, there was nothing to hold onto. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Eventually, after what felt like centuries, Zoe slowed down. She still couldn’t see anything, let alone the bottom, and even though her eyes should have already adjusted to the darkness, there was nothing all around her.

She kept slowing and slowing though, until she stopped. She gingerly felt about. There was nothing around her. Nothing beneath her feet yet somehow impossibly she was still standing.

How did she get here? She couldn’t remember. The last thing she did remember was touching the Spear, feeling for an instant the surge of power within her. And then nothing. And then she had woken up here, falling through nothingness.

Zoe couldn’t tell how long she was there, in that darkness, that suffocating nothingness. Time had almost lost all meaning to her. But it started flowing again, when she heard the sound again.

It sounded like a small kid laughing. Or crying. It was the first sound she had heard since falling down, the first sign of another person down there. She raced toward the sound, desperate, like a traveler stumbling upon water in the barren desert.

She put her hands out, like a blind man, feeling her way trying to find where the sound was coming from. The laughing sound kept repeating, growing more cheerful and celebratory by the moment. As she came closer to the sound, Zoe realized that it was actually more like two children playing together.

In an instant, the darkness around her dissolved into a green expanse. She saw a small village up ahead. Everything looked ethereal, as if she were dreaming. But in this case though, Zoe felt more like a visitor in someone else’s dream.

Still almost in a daze, Zoe slowly walked forward, towards the village. There were several huts dotted in there, but no humans as far as Zoe could see. But she could hear the same sound of two children playing, reverberating over and over again in her head like a record.

When she came close enough to the first hut, she finally saw the source of the laughter. One boy and one girl were running around in the open field behind the hut in jubilation. They had sticks in their hands and it seemed they were playfighting.

"Down with you evil demon!" The girl shouted playfully waving his stick at the boy, who mocked falling down on the ground.

"Curse you hero! Aaghhhh!" The boy said still on the ground, and the two of them burst out laughing again.

"Hi there." Zoe called out cautiously. As she expected nothing happened. It was clear that neither the boy nor the girl could hear her. She was watching what seemed to be akin to a memory.

The memory of the Goddess....?

If so was the young girl a young Goddess? Zoe scrutinized the face of the girl. As with everything in this dream, the girl’s face was ethereal, as if she were looking at it through a filter. But it was also a normal face of a child, nothing godly, inhumane about it.

Zoe frowned. This didn’t make sense. Does this mean that the Goddess was a normal human being? And also if this was the memory of the Goddess, who was the boy?

Zoe shook her head. She needed to compose herself. She was jumping to conclusions too fast, with too little evidence. There was nothing to support the fact that anything she was seeing right now was related to the Goddess at all. The only reason she had even assumed it was because this sequence had started with her holding the Spear of the Goddess.

Wait and watch.

Zoe turned her attention back to the two playing kids. They had stopped frolicking about now, lying on their backs on the grass looking up at the sky.

"Do you think they will ever come back, Zoltran?" The girl asked eventually.

"It doesn’t matter." The boy, whose name was Zoltran, answered glumly.

The girl sat up straight. "But do you think they will be back?"

Zoltran pursed his lips. Even at this age, his face was contorted into a fantastic expression of grief that broke Zoe’s heart. What on heart could happen to a child this young for him to be able to make that face?

"And I’m telling you Sarah, it doesn’t matter! Whether they return or not doesn’t change the fact that they left us here!" He said turning around.

The girl stood up now, her face furrowed in disappointment. She looked over to the horizon. Zoe followed her gaze. As far as her eyes could see there was just grass and grass all around. But then she saw it. Slowly in the distance there was a mountain.

A moving mountain.

Zoe rubbed her eyes to make sure she was seeing it correctly. But the sight didn’t change.

There was a huge mountain in the distance. And it was slowly, ever so slowly getting bigger.

That is no mountain.

But however much Zoe tried, she couldn’t see what it actually was. She was sure it was a living being, and she was sure it was huge, but other than its vaguely mountainous shape, Zoe couldn’t make out anything about it.

"Does Apocalypse approach?" Zoltran asked, still lying down on the ground.

Sarah nodded serenely. "It never stopped."

"And it never will. No matter what the elders said. They can’t even reach Apocalypse, much less end it. If we stay here, we will die as well."

"I am not leaving without my mother." Sarah said defiantly.

Zoltran sighed and sat up. It was clear that this wasn’t the first time these two had this conversation.

"What do you suggest we do then? Sit here and wait to die?"

"We won’t die. The elders will protect us. My mother will protect us." Sarah said, still defiant.

Zoltran sighed and then lay back down on the ground.

It happened so fast that Zoe almost lost her balance and stumbled back. The green pasture, the peaceful village, the serene atmosphere changed suddenly. In an instant Zoe found herself being surrounded by burning huts. The same village she had been looking at was now torches completely. There were human beings crucified on crosses throughout the village. Smoke rose up in the air all around her, and the greenery had been turned to soot and ash.

Zoe walked forward in horror, looking at bodies of men and women alike strewn all around.

And then she saw it and screamed involuntarily.

In the very center of the village were two crosses, different from the rest. Different in size as well as the bodies crucified there.

For they were children.

A single look at the boy’s face confirmed him as Zoltran, the boy just now smiling and laughing. He had been crucified on the cross as mercilessly as the adults, his face morphed into agony.

But beside him, Sarah was almost unrecognisable. Not only had she been similarly crucified but her face had been burned alive. It was only through her locks of golden hair that Zoe was able to identify her.

In front of the two corpses, the ground had been defaced. A single word written again and again.

APOCALYPSE

Zoe fell on her knees and retched. She had barely known these two kids, she had only seen them for less than ten minutes. Yet their sudden, brutal death shocked her to the core, left her feeling sick more than she ever had.

"Yes my child. That is what we face. That is what we must defeat. That is what I offer you. Now surrender yourself to me. Surrender yourself and feel your anger, your horror, your indignation come to life as magik itself."