Rest

As soon as your eyes behold your beautiful elven friend Blythe, your legs give out and your vision goes dark. It’s about time all that adrenaline ran out, you think. You vaguely sense your body hitting the ground. I’m amazed I lasted that long.

…

When your consciousness regains itself, the first thing you notice is the feel of something messing with your hair. It feels like fingers, lightly brushing it around. Next you take in the sound of a crackling flame, and the dull glow of oddly white firelight pulsing through your eyelids. Finally, you hear a person, likely the one brushing your hair due to how close they sound, start humming a tune. It’s a song you recognize: one from Earth that you liked before dying and being sent to a new world. While normally this would be grounds to question whether everything was a dream or not, you know that’s not the case. Mostly because you still feel like shit from fighting that monster.

You open your eyes, revealing the lovely elf Blythe knelt beside you. Her hand comes down from your hair to rest over your cheek, and she smiles sweetly as she continues to hum. After a little while, she loses the tune and leans in to kiss you instead.

“Where did you hear that song?” you ask after she pulls away.

She gets a sheepish look on her face, and then places a finger over your lips. “From here,” she says, apparently meaning from you. It takes you a moment, but then you remember whistling the song the morning before the monster village incident. You hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but clearly Blythe was listening. “I thought that hearing it might bring you some comfort,” she says. “Do not try to move. You are severely injured.”

“How long was I out?”

“Only for a few minutes.” Blythe pulls out her bedroll and lays it next to you. She then awkwardly shimmies you onto it, which causes you a lot of pain, but you don’t let it show. She’s trying to help, after all, and now there's a layer of soft material between you and the hard floor. “Rest a while longer. When you feel like you can move, I will endeavor to dress some of your wounds.”

“Aren’t you curious how I got hurt?” you ask.

She pulls out a piece of bread and hand-feeds it to you bit by bit. “There will be time for that. For now, sleep and recover your energy. I will look after you.”

…

The next time you wake up, you feel cold. When you open your eyes, you can see that Blythe has stripped you out of your armored doublet and gotten an early start on tending to some of the cuts and bruises you took on during the fight with the tentacle beast. She’s currently sitting nearby, crushing some different herbs by hand and mixing them together. The look on her face when she’s done says that she’s not happy with the result, but she brings it over to you, regardless.

“Oh good, you have awoken,” she says. “It is meant to be finely ground, but these herbs together are known in Elethwren as a revitalizing blend. Please,” she says, before loading the two handfuls of crushed plants into your mouth in bite-sized intervals. You chew dutifully, knowing full-well the power of Blythe’s salad bowls. Once the last bit is swallowed, you raise yourself up onto your elbows. Balancing on one arm, you reach with the other around Blythe’s head and start to pull her towards you. She’s surprised by the move at first, but halfway in she eagerly closes the rest of the distance on her own, pressing her lips to yours. She places a hand on each side of your head, both to hold you in the kiss and to help stabilize you as you balance on a still very fatigued arm. “Kissing you feels so good,” she says after you pull away and return to resting on both elbows. Her words are backed up by a dazed expression and heavy breathing.

“We’ll do more than kissing again soon, I promise,” you say. You then raise yourself into a sitting position. “First we need to find Lia and get out of here.” After sitting still for several seconds with Blythe practically panting at you, you say, “Didn’t you want to finish stitching me up?” That breaks her out of her lustful thoughts, and she gets to work patching up all the places she couldn’t reach before with a combination of random cloth wraps and some kind of salve you assume she made herself. I thank my lucky stars the first member of my fantasy harem was raised in the forest, you think.

When she’s satisfied, you slide your doublet back on over all of her hard work, and she helps you stand. “Now,” she says. “Please tell me what happened before we move on.”

You tell her everything that happened to you from the moment you touched the doorknob and entered the labyrinth. She tells you that she met the same hooded figure as you, and that the torch riddle is indeed tied to an old myth, like you thought. You almost ask her to tell you the story, but now isn’t the time for that. You tell her how you met up with Lia, how she told you about the door needing three keys to open, and how you figured out the multiple choice question on the plinth with her. You tell her about the tentacle beast: how it grabbed Lia, how it sucked you in and spit you out by the white torch, and how you defeated it despite losing your {if@ sword = true}sword{elseif mace = true}mace{elseif spear = true}spear{endif}. Finally, you show her the marble-like eye that you obtained after killing the thing. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have any insights as to its use, so you stow it away in your rucksack once again.

“And that’s everything,” you say. “You’re all caught up.”

“Very well,” she says. “Now it is my turn.” She feels around for something in her rucksack for a second or two before coming out with an object about the length of her hand. It’s an old-fashioned golden key. “I also found a glowing plinth. It had a question of a similar nature to what you described finding with Ms. Lia, and I obtained this key from it.” She hands you the key, entrusting you to hold on to it. “I believe I know the location of the final key, as well. I was approaching it when I heard the roars of the beast and came running to investigate.”