Editing Godhorn Tech:Volume3 Chapter7 (section)

===Between the Lines 4===

Those sisters could not remember how long they had lived like that.

They had no idea if they had ever had a comfortable home to live in.

Their first memories were of curling up together in the cold alleys. They had watched as so many people walked by without so much as a glance. Abandoned children were far from an unusual sight in their country.

For better or for worse, the extreme environment of the desert forced people to cut the fat and live rationally. The days were blazing hot and the nights freezing cold. They had been forced to do whatever it took to survive there.

They had never known their parents.

They had truly believed they may have been born from one of the buckets or sacks lying around in the alleys.

They had only learned of cooking when they were entirely fed up with the sourness of whatever they could find in the buckets.

They had only learned of clothing when the rags wrapped around them had lost all color.

They had never learned what a bath or a bed were.

It had not been a happy life.

They had assumed that was how their lives would always be.

They had expected to eventually grow weak and die together.

But that had all changed one day.

A kind priest had told them they were special, chosen by the sacred ruins.

The twin sisters were invited to the large temple, where they were given hot food to eat and a hot bath. They were given priestess clothing made of a material they had never before experienced, they were taught to read and write and otherwise educated, and they came to realize how wrong their previous assumptions about the world were.

Their desert nation was reliant on water.

There were no wells or rivers. Dig as deep as you like, you would never find anything.

The water that supported all their lives came from the mysterious ruins scattered across the desert. The nation only really protected the select few who could make a mental connection with the ruins and gather water from them.

And it turned out Acacia Flightheart and Ixea Flightheart had the most suitable wavelength for that.

Thus, they were given the Executive Ground, the desert nation’s prized Godhorn Tech.

So the girls could not abandon the nation that supported their lifestyle, the people who relied on their power, the priests who trusted their talent, or the Godhorn Tech and ruins that gave them such value.

But.

What was it they had really wanted to do, back when they stared up into the night sky from the frigid back alleys?

They had said they would do anything to survive. They had lived day to day by digging through buckets in the back alley. They had no memory of their parents and truly believed they may have been born from one of the buckets or sacks lying around in the alleys.

But no matter how hungry, cold, and weary they were and no matter how much they had resented the invisible presence they could sense in the stone ruins, there was one thing they had never wanted to do.

They had never wanted to wield a tool of killing.