>>24611363Dio motions you towards a small, easily overlooked clearing in the thick wood just up ahead. Apparently that's your stop, and while Noivern preps his landing, Dio continues recounting his own tubular voyage.
"We must have chosen the right paths after all, because what lied at the end of that road was something I had never seen before.. A world completely devoid of color, and yet.."
"A blossom.. just like the one you hold now."
"It was a dark red, there was no mistaking it, it was the same kind.. Everything else in the world had been hollowed out, like a damn grapefruit spoon scraped it all out, but this.. It retained everything."
"It probably wasn't a good idea to provoke it, but we did... and in doing so, drew out a vast, wellspring of energy.. It was released in a huge, blinding blur, there was no running from it. It consumed us whole, I felt like my whole body was being torn apart, displaced, and reassembled."
"When I had come to, I was alone, my Ampharos was nowhere to be found. The color had come back, but at what cost? I hadn't a clue where I was, or if I was even alive."
"That's the last I saw of that decaying world, and the gist of how I came to know this one. I never truly forgot about it though. It was always there, somewhere in the back of my mind. I said it was a lost cause, and I /still/ think that, but it wouldn't leave. My mission from the start had been to escape, forget about it, start somewhere new, but I could never really leave it alone for good."
"From the moment I stepped on this earth, my goal was to find my friend and track the origins of the famine, all for the sake of closure. I knew there had to have been someone out there who knew those flowers better than I did,
and what do you know? I was right." 