Cades currently sat in a vast area of nothingness, the fire long since having burned away most of the forest that had been hiding, also greatly damaging the occasional puppet that tried to come towards and kill him, as if they, the normal ones, would ever be capable of doing such a thing.
He had been sitting here for some time, waiting for Manug, who was still alive, to recover, both from Cades 'attack' and the exhausting fight against the mage that had taken everything out of the archer, whether he himself had realized it in that moment or not.
After some time he had felt his mana being blocked again, but this time he was easily able to solve it, perhaps it was being perpetuated by his usage of the mana, probably so, but Cades was fairly able to hit himself with lightning, not nearly hurting as much as the first time, though the healing had long since stopped, but after about half a hour of waiting it had recuperated and was ready to activate once more, all the while he just sat there, as previously mentioned only rarely standing up and taking care of a few stray puppets that had found their way to him.
Only once was there a stronger puppet, a knight covered in armor, but he was quickly dismembered and served as a kind of research object, hadn't the body disintegrated as soon as it died, perhaps because the being in control was scared of him, a understandable fact when one began to really understand that all of those that served as puppets had lost, unknowing as to how they should obsolve themselves from the weakening, but Cades hadn't, Cades had found out the weakness of the.. weakness.
And perhaps because of that very fact the sickness, if it even had a consciousness, which Caes thought of as very likely, had begun panicking, it had stopped strategizing, pulling the stronger ones somewhere else and sending as many of the weaker ones away, to the place where the two monsters that had been ripping apart its defences were located, trying to hold them back while it recuperated the consciousness of some of the warriors, especially the mage and the hunter, both of those had worked together as a team after all.
The sickness loved them, it adored them, they were the first ones to fall to its might, the ones that fell long before it arrived here, long before the tree on which it resided and grew was uprooted by the formless hand made of mist and put here, like a simple weed that besmirched the garden of a god.
It was actually kind of ironic, the sickness had to spread its intent out over a large area, or at least its influence, which had an intent, and while the sickness itself had been capable of defeating beings that had most likely been much more powerful than him, it could not do so without anyone to control, which meant that it wanted Cades to quickly come closer, he could feel that as well.
In all honesty, Cades had quite the gift when it came to identifying intent, he had after all even been able to ever so slightly do it before, such as when he instantly came up with a likely meaning for the paintings in the first of the temples he had visited, and all of this resulted in him practically hearing everything the sickness, or weakness, or curse, or whatever one might wish to call it, from this far away, from so far away that it would take him about fifteen minutes running there, even at his greatest speed.
But finally, with both of them having recuperated and the sickness slowly calming down and preparing to fight against them with their strongest weapon, the last defence, the being so strong it couldn't leave its lap, the archer awoke and Cades began to talk while the sickness was intently listening.
"The weakness wasn't a curse, it was a magical sickness, I'm sorry for that, but it was needed."
This was delivered in a simple manner, collected and wise, but in truth Cades had felt bad and offput for quite some time, panicking and wondering what he would say, after all, he never had many friends, the only ones he had even made at the new school had been Nelia, who was everyone's friend, though he did feel like she specifically wanted to be his friend, and Mangel who came with Nelia, in a kind of package deal.
What he said was also not entirely true, he could've probably been quite a bit more careful when burning the inside of Manug's lower regions, but he didn't really care in that memory, and neither did he now, and perhaps he found it kind of funny, after all, to many a sentient being such a surprising thing was funny, no matter what.
There were even ancient ehetrians, (and even ancient humans) that made such jokes, across all different cultures, all kinds of worlds, and yet almost everyone found such a thing funny, though Cades had quite the underdeveloped sense of humour and definitely did not find it as funny as many others would've found it to be.
Nevertheless he could feel, even without having to sense or interpret the intent oozing from Manug that the archer was quite satisfied with the way Cades had handled it, but he was quickly shut up when Cades began to talk once more, now in quite the commanding voice that, now that he began realizing it, probably sounded a whole lot different to Manug who, after all, didn't speak his language.
"No time to go, we have to go forward, towards the great tree, the orange stuff at the stump is probably the source of all of this.."
He had said this in a weird tone, actually, the entire sentence itself didn't fit in, but to the current Cades who was stuck in a kind of never-ending thought-process it was actually laughable, all of it.
Of course he was worried about Manug, ever so slightly, especially now that he had began to really recognize him as a living being and not just as a tool, not just as 'the archer', but overall he was really just stuck in a kind of equilibrium, even when Manug nodded and the two finally stood up and started running towards the endlessly skywards extending tree.