Hermi's face went blank before it twisted into a grimace of sheer confusion. The words coming from the boy felt like heavy stones being dropped into a shallow pool, splashing and making no sense to her mind.
"Eternal... what?" she managed to ask.
"The Eternal Verdant," Aionos provided, his voice flat.
"And you are... balancing the... what?"
Aionos remained perfectly patient, his posture not shifting by a single hair's breadth.
"I am the Balancer of the Universe."
Something in Hermi's brain snapped. The only thing that caught in her mind within that cryptic speech were the same words she had once heard from Ettore: the Witch, and the conditions.
But Ettore's version was the Witch of Calamity, not some Eternal Verdant she had never heard of, presented as what this strange child called an 'employment opportunity'. She decided then and there that this must be a hallucination or a dream she must urgently wake from.
She planted both palms on her hips.
