5. Perri
Perri
“Red fence post!”
Noec scrambled to his feet as Flora took off running, leaving Aonia and Perri in the dust.
“Oh, come on guys!” Aonia shouted after them. “Have some class!”
“Kick his ass, Flora!” Perri cheered.
The wind whipped Flora’s hair left and right, her legs straining for a wider and wider stride, a faster and faster pace. The two raced from across the village, almost out in the field.
“You’re not getting me this time!” Noec hollered, fumbling to keep his feet beneath him. Flora dashed, hopping from rock to rock over the babbling brook.
Two out of three this week, she thought. Not bad, but she could improve that score.
Back on solid land, Flora darted alongside the brook.
She inhaled the fresh breeze as she tore through it, kicking up dirt as she went.
She could hear Noec’s shallow breaths as he closed the gap between them, his lean but muscular figure not far behind.
His stride was now far wider than hers. Be that as it was, Flora was far more determined.
In the road in front of his house, Old Zet’s eyes widened as he shuffled out of the way, his cane wobbling under his hand.
“Lunara blind me,” he cursed. “Move it, Marco, you lazy old cat.”
The fluffy tuxedo cat glanced at his master, unbothered. Marco resumed licking his paw from his perch on the chipping fence.
Flora pushed herself with all her strength, with every final ounce of power that her body would allow. She mustered a burst of speed at the very last moment—but so did he. At the same instant, their hands landed on the red fence post. Their eyes locked, breathless.
“You’re kidding me,” Flora groaned.
“Hey, I’m getting faster.” Noec grinned down at her, the same adventurous grin as always.
Flora slapped his hand off the post. “Doesn’t mean you won.”
“Alright Marco, what do you think?” Noec asked, extending his hand to the cat. As was required in such a situation, Flora did the same.
In the ultimate tie breaker, Marco eyed their hands and raised a lazy paw. Playfully, he bopped Noec’s fingers with his mitten.
“He has chosen!” Noec shouted triumphantly.
“I’m beginning to think you’ve been bribing him,” Flora said with a hand on her hip.
Noec glanced back at Perri and Aonia and pumped his fists in celebration. With a wide grin, Perri returned the gesture. Aonia helped Perri to his feet, his legs wobbling beneath him.
“Florabelle!” Sona, whose whimsical glamor had only blossomed with age, called from the bridge to their left. She walked with an uncharacteristic heaviness from her home directly across Crescent Creek. “Left a bit late last night, did you?”
Flora waved excitedly, though Sona remained stiff. “Yeah,” Flora replied nonchalantly. It had been just before noon when she returned to her bed the night before. “My parents are out of town, so I don’t have to worry about them finding an empty bed in the morning.”
“That should be the very least of your worries, Flora.” Flora met Sona’s dark gaze. “Come.” Sona firmly hooked her elbow through Flora’s. “Now.”
Flora glanced back uneasily at Noec as he covered his mouth, eyes wide.
Sona tugged Flora toward her ramshackle hut, where the inquisitive herbalist studied and prescribed her mostly-natural remedies.
“Sona, I–”
“What have I told you, Flora?” Sona scolded as she dragged her through the sea of clattering beads.
“I–”
“This is more than a matter of just staying here late.” Sona let go of Flora’s arm.
In her eyes was a look that held her accountable, yet beneath the severity was a deep, protective worry.
“You’re here as a guest, Flora, even as much as we consider you our own.
You must respect the boundaries of this world. ”
Flora blinked, frozen stiff.
Sona sighed and continued in a lowered voice, “We exist in a realm of cycles and balance, a balance that the Sleepwalker, of all people, must respect.” Sona leaned back against her desk, preparing to recite the same spiel Flora had heard a hundred times before.
“When a Sleepwalker lingers beyond the natural boundary of midnight, it disrupts the very mechanism that reconciles the flow of time between our worlds, and the door to your world must close to restore that balance.”
“Balance,” Flora repeated the buzzword with a sigh. “I’m trying to hear you, Sona, but…” She slowly crossed her arms. “... it’s hard, when I can’t tell fact from conjecture.”
Sona rocked her head back with a groan. “I suppose your skepticism is my doing,” she commented. Reluctantly, she continued, “But, yes, all I have is conjecture. Because until you’ve seen it proven with your own eyes…”
“... even fact is theory,” Flora completed her sentence.
“No one to blame but myself,” Sona murmured. “Flora…” she sighed. Her stern glare met Flora’s curious eyes. “As much as it pains me to say this…” The cleric inhaled deeply. “... some theories are better left untested.”
Flora raised her brows. From Sona’s lips, those words must have tasted like blasphemy.
Sona rested a thoughtful hand atop a book on her desk, peering at the new arrival Aonia had “borrowed” from the king’s library: The Curse of the Sleepwalker Vol.
6. Most of Sona’s Sleepwalker “research” had been grazed from ages-old textbooks and children’s tales.
Only rarely did she learn anything substantial, at least from what she conveyed to Flora.
Flora looked at the new book curiously, and Sona gently flipped it over.
“Just… be home well before midnight,” Sona requested.
“From everything I’ve read, the only way back home would be to wait for the alignment—a night when the midday and midnight moons of both Earth and Emyre hang at half phase, each mirror reflecting the other’s missing half.
Only then will the gateway open to you once more.
Until then, you would be trapped, and lady Emyre would be your only home. "
“Oh.” Flora looked down, squeezing her arms. “I… didn’t know.”
“It could be years, Flora. Or months. Or days. I don’t know,” Sona said, exasperation leaking into her tone. “What I do know is that the gateway is fragile. It is a privilege that it opens for you at all.”
“Okay,” Flora sighed. “I’m sorry, and I’ll be more careful.” She held up her arm, revealing a dainty gold wristwatch, a hand-me-down that was likely just nickel with golden paint. “I found a battery for this the other day. I’ll wear it from now on.”
“A charming trinket that is,” Sona observed, a glimmer catching in her eye.
The cleric kept a hanging collection of “Earthen oddities”, as she called them.
Among them was an old GameBoy, a wand-shaped princess flashlight, a figurine of an old-school Volkswagen, and Flora’s father’s old MP3 player, hanging by the cord of the headphones.
It almost exclusively played the folk anthems of John Denver and Simon and Garfunkel, as well as just enough disco to keep you from being comfortable.
“I’ll bring a nice watch for you someday,” Flora offered.
“I’d very much like that,” Sona replied, curiously tapping the timekeeping contraption. “Intelligent at no expense to beauty.”
“Just your style.”
Sona looked up. “Well, it’s much nicer than the ‘alarm clock’—whose only ‘off’ switch was being thrown in the creek.”
Flora shrugged. “But… it woke you up, didn’t it?”
A grin flashed on Sona’s lips, and the intensity of her gaze melted away.
“Listen,” she sighed, placing a hand on Flora’s shoulder. “We’re figuring this Sleepwalker thing out together. But I need you to trust me, and do as I say.”
Flora glanced at the curious new book on the desk, whose cover was now hidden.
“What else do you know?” she prodded. “Have you learned anything else, anything that I should maybe be aware of?”
Sona paused briefly in thought, tapping her painted nails on the book.
“Perhaps,” she replied. “But, often what I find is more lore and speculation than useful information. This world hasn’t always been kind to travellers like yourself, and many Sleepwalkers opted to remain hidden. Thus, our knowledge is limited.”
Sona, too, had struggled to make sense of Flora’s presence. Her analytical mind forbade her from accepting any mystery without question. But so did Flora’s.
“I’m interested,” she said. There were six volumes of that book. How could there possibly be so little information in six volumes of books?
Sona sighed. “Well, first of all,” she warned, “I want to say that just because some eccentric authors have ideas of what a Sleepwalker’s destiny should be doesn’t mean a Sleepwalker can’t just live a normal, happy life.”
“A normal, happy life sounds like a decent destiny to me.”
Sona nodded. Plucking a glowing night lily from a vase on the shelf above, she began, “The Sleepwalker, chosen by the goddess Lunara herself, is the keeper of the spiritual gateway that pours souls from both Earth and Emyre into the same eternal well.” She peered longingly at the flower in her hand.
“Without it, our souls remain bound to the earth where they are laid to rest, never to rejoin our brethren in eternity.”
That seemed like a whole lot of vague, symbolic responsibility, but it was nothing new. Flora kept looking at the book. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about... others?”
“Others like you, you mean.”
“Yes. Sleepwalkers.”
Sona paused. “There have been... a number of them,” she replied with a sort of uncertainty.
Sona placed the dainty lily back in its vase.
“Historically, some arrived as harbingers of chaos, inflicting their beliefs and weaponry on this world until they were shunned away.” She sighed, then continued hopefully, “But one or two arrived with good intentions. Much of the medicine, agriculture, and even the machinery we use today were once concepts carried into Emyre on the backs of Sleepwalkers.”
“El–” Sona hesitated. After a moment, she tapped the book and shrugged. “The last Sleepwalker was... an enigma. A hermit. I can’t tell you much about them.”
Sona coughed and glanced over at her cluttered workstation across the room, where an unfinished concoction lay amid a scattering of chaotic notes—some crumpled in frustration—and rows of test tubes, half-empty and splattered with some mysterious purple tincture.
“All that to say,” Sona concluded, “we still have much to learn.”
Flora sighed quietly, a pang of guilt in her chest. “Thank you, Sona,” she said. “I’m sorry for worrying you last night. You have enough on your plate right now.” With a knot in her throat, Flora asked, “He’s... not getting any better, is he?”
“No.” Sona’s expression faltered, her eyes dimming. “Not yet.”
Perri had been battling illness off and on for over a year. What it was, exactly, no one could say. Doctors from Asilia, the capital city of the Asilian Realm, could rarely hold a candle to the cleric’s expertise, but even Sona was running out of options.
Perri would disappear for days, confined to his bed in agony.
Each of Sona’s treatments brought him some relief, but sooner or later, the pain would return stronger than before.
For now, he seemed stable—able to walk and join in with the rest of his friends, if only briefly.
But despite the ever-bright gleam in his smile and the lively energy of his laugh, everyone knew he was fading away.
Later that evening, after Flora had rejoined her three closest friends in all of Emyre, Perri sat in the autumn light with his ashy fingers dipping in the flowing water.
“I know someone who would like this,” he said, pulling a smoothly tumbled pink quartz from the riverbed, the stone catching the sun with a faint glow in his hand.
Aonia, sitting at his side, tilted her head, her dark eyes brightening ever so slightly.
Whatever sisterly connection she shared with Noec, the strength of her bond to Perri had grown even stronger over the years.
She had become his quiet guardian, his constant companion through his unspoken suffering.
“That’s quite beautiful,” she said gently, reaching out as if to take the stone, but stopping herself just short. “Who is that for, exactly?”
Perri smiled, his grin faltering just so, though his eyes remained warm. “I figured you might like it,” he said, offering the stone to her. “Like you say, each one holds a memory.”
Aonia took the blushed quartz, her fingers brushing over its smooth surface. “Yes. I believe this one does.”
The four of them watched as bright fallen leaves sailed through the water.
Noec, who had been silent, sighed deeply. “You know you don’t have to do this alone, right?” he said softly.
“I’m not alone.” Perri’s smile faded just a little. He dipped his fingers back into the water, watching the current tug at the edges of his hand. He added, “I have you all.”
“And we have you,” Flora replied. Both a plea and a promise, she added, “Always.”
Perri nodded, though his gaze lingered numbly on the pink stone in Aonia’s hand.