Twilight of a Hybrid, стр. 63
Sora led them toward the inner city where they found the towers growing higher, which meant where the most important people had once lived when the city was crawling with life and energy. A city, which grew ten times bigger than the capital city where King Uragiru lived, must have been very livelier than the living beings on the two islands of Shimabellia and Isla Maeli.
Here and there, they would stop for some breaks of a few minutes before moving onward. They trailed slowly through the walkways, due to many crumbled rubble and fallen stones made from clay painted in the form to make the dry clay to look like brick and stone. Pillared clayed bricks lay across many walkways and made it hard to walk over.
One slip and it would have been a broken bone. A brick could easily fall over, and Marina and Geraldus had close encounters of bone fractures. Thanks to Valverno’s tail grabbing them before they could take a stumble forward or backward. Walking uphill and across some fallen structures was a bit time consuming and even more trying to walk downhill. Walking on stones that could slip very easily was like walking on a slobbery hillside with rubber stone and slippery rocks.
The walkway they walked upon was wet. Sounds from water droplets dripped from the top onto rocks like cave water.
Among the people walking for a long period of time, Marina was starting to get exhausted from the walk. “Is it much further?” she asked. “I’ve been walking nonstop now and I need some water.”
Valverno stopped, swirled his body around to face Marina, and raised his hand. A small puff of a raincloud sprouted from the palm of his hand. Then Valverno blew the cloud over Marina’s head and with the other hand made it sprinkle and rain.
The little puffy cloud rained down on the Siren. Since the Sirens are part of the fish family, they needed water to stay hydrated. Sirens could go some days without water, depending on what temperature the weather would be. With the fireballs in the sky and making the underground city roasting warm, Marina’s fishy-scaly skin was beginning to dry. Now with Valverno casting a raincloud, Marina felt at ease.
“I better keep that cloud there for a while,” said Valverno. “I don’t want my wife dying from dehydration, not on my watch.”
“You’re still watching over me? I thought you watching over this girl more than me.”
“I’m watching over you both, equally. You could say I am a family man.”
“More like a family man-dragon-hybrid-demigod,” said Sora.
Marina laughed of Sora’s name calling for her brother. This was marking the first time Marina had shown anything positive for Sora.
Valverno looked at Sora. “Calling me a hybrid now, huh? And you made Marina laugh. Now this is starting to become a family reunion. A family reunion underground, that is. I am starting to like it.”
Sora shook her head and resumed walking. “We’re not that far. It’s just around this corner.” The young female warrior wandered around the furthest corner of three cornered buildings.
Valverno rushed up to Sora, keeping the raincloud over Marina as her skin could absorb the water her skin needed to stay alive.
Sora heard the footing and slivering tail dragging on the ground and walked a little faster. She stayed ahead of Valverno putting some distance between her and the demigod hybrid.
Valverno could see Sora trying to run faster and coming across two more alleys. He saw Sora taking the right alley, so he decided to take the left side and he ran in that direction.
Then Valverno could feel a small flickering erupting in his mind. He could see himself as a child from the long distant past when he and Sora were kids. He could see Sora as a five year old girl running in one direction while he (in a smaller body size of a thirteen year old boy) would run in a different direction.
In this memory, Valverno could see himself running very fast, passing across human figures he was seeing with snakelike, scaly skin instead of the human skin with a mixture of rocks.
At the same time, Valverno could see his younger self running through the same alley, as he was doing in his adult form was running at the current time. Valverno could see this was the same alley he turned in when he was younger: a trip down memory lane. He smiled again, seeing how it was the same alley he went running some ten thousand years ago and swirled around a sharp corner; he remembered doing this when he was a kid and went down this alley toward his old house: he was starting to remember where he once lived. This memory caused Valverno to remember what fun he had with Sora when they were kids.
After making the turn (and seeing the memory ending with him surprising Sora but caught her when the shocked Sora collapsed) at the same time, Valverno dashed down this alley and jump to a roof of a building. Then he would jump to another roof and so on.
After some a few seconds of jumping, Valverno gazed at a big mansion-sized house, nearly looking like the same as Geraldus’s mansion but five times bigger. It also took the form of a castle but without any towers. A single pillar (not a domed tower) stood on the central part of the mansion, and it stood up three hundred feet high.
And there was very little memory of this coming up in Valverno’s mind. He barely had any memory of this building he stopped at: other than him stopping from behind Sora and surprising her when they were kids. Other than those fun-loving memories, Valverno couldn’t remember what this building was supposed to be.
In one wide open corner, he saw Sora come running through the nearest buildings. She halted after running. She turned her head up the