A/N: Hi guys! Sorry I've been gone two weeks? My parents had me go to my grandparents' place. Good news though is I'll be updating more frequently now since I had too much time to think there. And as usual, your comments and the subscribers I gained already pumped my heart so fast now. Thanks for the love guys and gals. I promise to work harder for you. Do tell me what you think of this chapter :)

Chapter II

Unseen Barriers, Built and Linguistic

Divide was something very common in Sol Invictus. For instance, the neighborhood that Amber lived in was only one of the very few that housed members of the educated class – ones who strived to climb out of the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The education she invested in itself had not been very easy to even begin gaining.

She wipes her scrunched up brow out of reflex. It was actually very cold in Sol Invictus since she was old enough to set foot outdoors.

The rumbling sky was starting to become a bother and the symbols scribbled on the piece of parchment she had been trying to crack since daylight were beginning to obscure her motivation.

She grumbled to herself.

‘Why does the world have to be so noisy tonight of all nights?’

The rumbling went on, perhaps louder this time. It almost sounded as if there were knocks on her apartment door. That was a strange thought, considering the said door was rarely touched by anybody else but her.

She shrugs the suddenly flooding thoughts off and attempts to focus on her research.

Another round of rumbling could be heard and it strangely went on as if to annoy her and rip her motivation completely off of her work.

‘Damn it all!’

She sighs out of frustration as the rumbling went on and even crisper by the minute. It was sounding very much like frantic knocking now.

And then it hit her.

Amber stiffens in her seat and stares at her door, suddenly finding the seeping light at the bottom very misty with the dust floating up.

Someone really was knocking.

The short-haired blonde immediately grabs the object closest to her hand, which was conveniently a candle holder.

Amber gulps.

A debate quickly developing into an incoherent debate settled in her head as she slowly went for the door. She holds up the candle holder on a beating-ready angle as she grips her door knob firmly.

She waits. In her lifetime, trouble only meant two things: her bestfriend Soojung and… others.

Of course, in this case, when a very familiar voice barked with an unfamiliar burden layering it from the other side of the door, Amber’s eyes almost went for an eyeroll.

‘Damn it, Amber! I know you’re in there! I can feel you cramming work and I’m on the other side of the door!’

So how about that eyeroll?

‘Do not expect hospitality from—‘

Amber almost drops the candle holder as soon as she had swung the door open. It really was Soojung—

—but the frail unconscious stranger slipping from Soojung’s grip was enough to kill any venom she had ready for her friend.

‘W—what?’

‘A little help?’ Soojung says as she tries her best to keep the stranger upright.

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‘So—‘ Amber purses her lips momentarily ‘—you’re saying that she kept half an entire building from crushing you by holding it up?’

Soojung rolls her eyes at the seething sarcasm in Amber’s tone. She furiously dried her hair with a towel.

‘I am not expecting you to believe me. I couldn’t believe any of what happened today either. One moment I am forced to deal with my father’s nonsense and then the next all sorts of surreal happens.’

Amber sighs and shakes her head.

‘I don’t think you’d go through all this trouble to pull a very convincing prank either.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ Soojung answers, flashing Amber a smile that all but fortified the sarcasm in the atmosphere.

‘I just—‘ Amber walks over to the stranger’s sleeping figure slumped carelessly on the lone couch ‘—it’s very hard to digest all of this. Look at how she’s built in the first place! She’s very—‘

‘--thin and frail?’ Soojung almost says in a whisper as she looks at her savior, concern suddenly settling itself in her stomach.

‘I was going to say hot.’

Soojung almost looks harassed.

‘Can we be serious please?’

‘Right. But she is—‘ Amber watches Soojung’s brow rise dangerously ‘—hot. That’s beside the point though. So where do we start? You have to at least have something that we can begin with.’

‘She spoke a different language.’

‘You do know Sol Invictus itself has seventy-six different dialects.’

‘Aren’t you the linguist here?’

Amber’s eyes immediately lit up.

‘How did it sound like? It has to be familiar somehow. I mean I nerd out on you every single day. You should at least have absorbed some of my linguistic nonsense and—‘

‘—okay! Okay! Slow down—‘ Soojung bites her lower lip and her gaze frantically shot from one pattern on the concrete floor to another in thought ‘—probably close to the migrants’ dialect.’

‘Our local migrants? Or the war refugees?’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps the refugees? I guess it was heavy on deep vowels and V’s?’

Amber’s brow scrunched up.

‘This won’t do. I have to hear her speak. Any other leads?’

‘Well—‘ Soojung hesitated ‘—you know those luxury watches downtown? The handcrafted ones? She has one.’

Amber looked very bothered now.

‘Downtown is noble territory. They will not want the migrants, especially the war refugees, anywhere near them.’

‘It’s all I have, Amber,’ Soojung answers exasperatedly.

The duo fell momentarily silent, gazes kept on the stranger.

‘Maybe if we see that watch one more time,’ Amber suggests but doesn’t move from where she stood leaning on the wall opposite the couch.

Catching on, Soojung lets out an annoyed but nonetheless unsurprised sigh.

‘Fine.’

She takes a deep breath and walks over to her savior’s unconscious form.

The silver glint of the watch was peering through the tiny gap where the stranger’s shirt was ed.

Soojung kept the breath she took in her savior’s form. The latter’sbreathing was shallow and quick, something the former had only noticed.

Soojung’s already lifted hand suddenly felt heavy.

It felt wrong all of a sudden to even come close to her.

A low rumble could be heard faint against Amber’s apartment window as the rain fell heavier.

Soojung eye’s fluttered and her heartbeat was rapid for a second. She gulped the forming lump in and reached for the watch—

However, a cold trembling hand kept her from even grazing a fingertip on the watch, setting an unseen barrier high enough to steal a sharp gasp from Soojung.

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‘There are barriers between us and the rest of the life of the worlds.’

A young Jinri snorts at her father’s speech.

The two of them lay on the ashen earth as they watched the grey hues meld with the daylight’s dying orange.

‘You always sound so cheesy,’ she says with a giggle that made her father put his hands down from making a makeshift scope with his hands.

‘Hey, you used to like daddy’s stories about the stars.’

‘The stars are already very beautiful daddy,’ Jinri suddenly sounded sullen. Her father keeps his gaze at his daughter. She had only turned ten, and it bothered him how she had become very quick to feel like he did.

‘I like adoring them with you, my little Jinri.’

Jinri does not say anything for a minute and the air was suddenly very light and unreal.

‘I like adoring them with you too, father.’

The two stayed silent for another few minutes, looking at how the night slowly set its curtain.

The starts were always breathtaking when the night tucked Jinri’s heart in. At this young age, she wondered if she would ever find the stars in a different sky, in a different angle, in a different view, in different hues.

‘Some barriers are meant to be kept, Jinri. No matter how beautiful a star is on the other side.’

Jinri took a deep breath at her father’s words to soothe the forming warmth in her chest.

‘Always remember that, Jinri.’

Jinri closed her eyes, an attempt to fight the tears before they even came.

She hated crying. Keeping her eyes closed kept her from crying, and opening them after winning a fight with her own feelings felt liberating somehow.

However, this time, as she opens her eyes—

The stars had shifted. These were different. There were only two of them and they looked just as startled as she was. Jinri blinked at the sight of them. They shifted once more at the realization that she was seeing them and looking right through them.

‘Some barriers are meant to be kept, Jinri. No matter how beautiful a star is on the other side.’

Out of reflex, Jinri grabs a hand that she just noticed was already too close.

A girl, bearer of the stars and the same hand that almost broke through her barrier, gasps at Jinri’s grip.

Jinri lets go of the startled girl’s wrist like it burned her.

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Both Soojung and Amber stiffen at the realization that the stranger was now awake.

The said stranger slowly pulls herself up as she appears to be taking her surroundings in. She did not seem bothered nor afraid, but the way her gaze held Amber’s moments later suggested caution.

She blinks at Amber and turns to Soojung with her brows furrowed together.

‘Yna oui ymnekrd?’ the stranger appeared to have asked.

Amber almost immediately falls into a messy nerd pile on the floor, mumbling incoherent sounds as she stumbled to her desk. Soojung, on the other hand, barely keeps a squeak from slipping out of upon meeting the foreigner’s gaze.

The stranger rises from the couch with apparent difficulty and faces the girl closer to her – Soojung, whose foot almost automatically steps back. She repeats her question.

‘Yna oui ymnekrd?’

‘I—I—‘ Soojung stuttered. She suddenly felt the other girl’s height a little too overwhelming. She backs away a little more, decreasing the angle she needed to look up at the taller girl.

The stranger lifts her hand with her palm up in front of Soojung.

‘Tuac ed pinh?’ she asks.

Soojung could hear Amber scrambling on her desk. Every sound was important now.

‘Pinh?’ she points at her wrist.

Soojung felt almost exactly as she had back at the alley, only she did not have to fight for her life this time around. She couldn’t move and even if she understood what the other girl was asking her, not even her lips moved the slightest inch given that stayed agape.

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Jinri gritted her teeth behind her lips to keep the frustration in.

She had asked the other girl twice if she was alright, and now she was narrowing her language down as simple as she could. Seeing though as words were failing her literally, she tentatively lifts her hand and uses gestures as she attempts to be more coherent.

It was difficult to understand, but Jinri could see her foot move a step backwards.

Didn’t she just save this girl’s life? Why was she afraid?

In her head were several different promises she made to her father that were now contradicting themselves. Looking at her hands once more, she shuts her eyes close, sealing a persistent memory in her head one last time.

‘Some barriers are meant to be kept, Jinri.’

Indeed, she knew what to do to. She opens her eyes, now burying that one memory with the image in front of her. Some promises are more important.

Jinri reaches for the other girl’s hand.

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Soojung slightly flinches a moment, but she lets the stranger take her hand. The touch was cold, but underneath the pressure of those frigid fingertips was something very gentle. She feels her jaw relax. She lets her lips purse together as she gulps down a form of tension she was not very familiar with.

The stranger keeps Soojung’s hand closer to her and very slowly runs a thumb on her wrist, leaving warmth where it grazed the other girl’s already warmer skin.

Simple as it was, the gesture spoke more than any explanation she and Amber could discover later on. Somehow, Soojung understood.

‘Tuac ed pinh rana?’ she asked once more.

Then Amber’s proud gasp of joy could be heard across the room.

‘I didn’t catch all of it, but she might be asking you about pain somewhere!’ the linguist declares as she waves her translations at Soojung who could barely lend Amber her attention.

‘I know,’ was all that Soojung could say as she looks from the stranger’s thumb on her wrist to her very tentative eyes that she tried to keep shielded with very timid blinks.

Soojung shakes her head, offering the stranger an answer to her question.

The taller girl’s shoulders visibly relax and she bows her head very slightly at the other girl who took the gesture as a form of acknowledgement of her answer. She eventually lets go but Soojung could still somehow feel the fleeting warmth on her wrist.

Amber, who was previously excited about her successful translation, gradually fell silent from babbling on about how wonderful Jinri’s language was and which dialects it was similar to.  

She blinks.

—and in only a minute, she found herself holding back a smirk she knew Soojung would kill her for.

As a little girl who grew up in the middle of social divide, she almost felt irony of her struggle fall and crack open right at the top of her head at the sight before her.