text: "Are you sure?", Ahia said, her lips trembling as she was about to cry. "Are you even aware of what you're putting on the line?" "I wish I was." Kagros put down the binocular. His leather boots unbearably squeezed his feet, but whenever he even wasted a thought on loosening them, Bluni's voice echoed in his head. "If you ever lose your boots, they will disappear. Bring them to Meriman, she knows what to do with them. Do not *ever* loosen them." These were the last words that had left Bluni's mouth before her eyes had fallen to emptiness. Bluni. She had only been twenty-one years old, and out of all the people who could have possibly fallen victim to the attack on Bomitut, it had to be her. *I love you, Kagros, I love you forever.* Kagros's heart began beating faster and more loudly. Bluni was dead. Nubron was dead. With him and Ahia, the Bomit tribe had picked just the worst two persons to track down Aluttar, and even so, they couldn't be one hundred per cent sure that Aluttar was really the one who had destroyed the village. "I'm starting to doubt reality", Kagros broke the minute-long silence. Ahia's eyes were already turning red. "This can't be real, you know?" "I don't wish this to be real either", Ahia squeezed out with a pain-tainted voice. "No, it's not what you think I mean. I mean, of course we are in the real world. This isn't a nightmare we can wake up from. But someone is playing a game with us." "What game?" "Don't you see? We're forced to infiltrate the town the woman I loved the most came from. The woman I wanted to marry, have children and grow old with. And all of this because they want us to dig around in the old secrets of the single richest family in Saborian history, the family your brother married a daughter of." Understanding covered Ahia's face. "Now that both my girlfriend and your brother are dead", Kagros continued, "they think our rage will thrill us to annihilate whoever they want us to think is the culprit." "And they'll kill us if we don't", Ahia concluded. "But I still don't want to walk into this town and put my nose into something I have to right to see", Kagros tried to justify his doubts. "As I said, they'll kill us if we don't do this." "But what if Aluttar is innocent? What if they've just sent us here to find out about terrible secrets that have been kept hidden for a reason?" "I won't get back to the village empty-handed!", Ahia shouted, now furious. "I will find and kill whoever is responsible for Nubron's death!" Kagros didn't let her annoy him. "Would Nubron want that? Would he want you to kill a person just because you've been made think they are the culprit?" "Wouldn't your precious Bluni?", she countered. Ahia was sure that Bluni would have wanted Kagros to do exactly what they were planning on doing in this very moment. "No!", Kagros shouted, clenching his fist. "You have no idea about what she was like!" "Do you?" Slowly, her voice turned back to calm. Kagros kept breathing heavily instead of answering. He worked as hard as he could to keep the tears from wettening his face, but miserably failed at it. Ahia realized what she had done to him, walked up to him and put her hand on his arm. "Look, Kagros, I don't want to do this either. But my fear for my life is greater than the fear of what might happen if we do what we've been told to. Yours should too." The sunrise covered the hills and forests around the town with a spooky veil of mist.