Daniel
Cassie’s fourteenth birthday, their first fight with the mages and then a wild beast, Paul’s transformation, nearly two days of running, three days in the house of the Tool-spirits, a huge battle with Verglas and his crew… what happened to Rana—it had all happened in such a short span. Enough stress for a whole year had been crammed into a week.
What he saw when he looked at his crew frightened him.
Cassie sat by herself—she would nod off and wake up in strangely deliberate cycles, refusing to lay down and take a nap, making Daniel think she was up to something. Lea levitated above them on her Caramboles, engrossed with making the floating marbles orbit one another. Kenta brooded as he prepared dinner. Paul’s helmet made it hard to be sure, but the young man appeared to be staring at nothing. Wendi lay watching the sky in a melancholy haze. Rana was around here somewhere.
Point being, nobody spoke with one another. It was completely unlike them.
Sure, they’d read on their own or watch a show privately on a Shew Stone screen from time to time, but they often did those things together—and silence never persisted this long. When was the last time he and Kenta played ‘Go’ together?
He understood. Their ‘normal’ was completely dismantled. Daniel had given them space once they were no longer being followed—a little time to process everything—but waiting here too long wasn’t good either.
His responsibility as their leader, whether he wanted it or not, was to keep them safe and steer the ship. While he liked to think they could handle their problems on their own, the truth was… they were all missing a critical aspect in their lives. Mentorship. Wisdom. Guidance. Simple advice.
They must turn to each other for these things.
Despite a year of searching, they hadn’t found their guardians, and they wouldn’t anytime soon. If Daniel didn’t extend his hand and pull them out of this slump, how long would it take them to work things out on their own?—If that were even possible?
Plus, if he were honest, Daniel really wanted someone to talk to about his own stuff.
He closed his Shew Stone copy of ‘Leading Teams (And Other Small Groups)’ he’d gotten from a Radio World library. Who to start with? His feet were already carrying Daniel in Rana’s direction, leaving a trail of dead grass in his wake. He simply followed the crashing and thudding sounds of mock battle to find her hiding spot.
Yet as soon as he made his way towards her, the noise ceased. Was she done, or had she heard him already? Impossible. Nobody but Cassie had ears that sensitive. Daniel pushed his curiosity aside as one more mystery that may or may not be answered in the fullness of time.
When he reached the stream bed, she stood watching for him in a neutral posture. Their eyes met, and he felt an instant of fear seeing her in warrior toad form—half expecting the terrible shining red of monster lights to appear again.
Those two silver eyes, patterned like beautiful mosaics, had been there before and after the red had come and gone. Rana was fully herself.
They stared at one another for a moment. She wore no clothes, but there was nothing naked about the barely humanoid hill of muscle towering over him. He couldn’t read the expression on her wide-mouthed, bald toad’s face, just the intensity of her bright eyes.
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Still, there was something majestic about the strength and utility of her body. Daniel noted the orange and black splotches on her abdomen as striking rather than alien. Rana was his friend. He was intimidated, but he trusted her.
“Hey,” he said.
After another moment’s hesitation, she answered, “Hey.”
It was so strange hearing the girl’s deepened and gravelly yet recognizable voice.
“I heard noises. What’ve you been doing?”
She shrugged her massive shoulders. “Training.”
“Mind if I watch?”
Rana twitched with inscrutable emotion, but she made no move. Annoyance? Was he already pushing her too far in this delicate time?
“Sure,” she said, and deliberately resumed where he must have interrupted her.
She threw her whole body into a devastating punch that might have downed an elephant. Rana followed it with an equally severe kick and, as she proceeded to shadowbox, he realized that level was this form’s baseline.
It seemed rude to speak with her so focused, though that’d been his intention in coming. Instead, this could be the perfect time to practice his Eye of Ruin.
He’d thought of that magical ability as a nameless natural talent until recently. In the past, he’d Seen how his magic interacted with others, inspected his wounds, and sensed what he could and couldn’t do with his Ruin powers. Then he’d learned in a dream his Eye could be used constructively by finding and improving weaknesses.
The Power of Good Criticism. Or so he’d hoped without a chance to try it out. Now Daniel turned his Eye on Rana, taking in details he’d missed before.
Sweat covered her; she’d been at this for some time. Rana switched up shadowboxing with an incredible leap higher into the air than he’d ever seen her go. She landed on her legs in a crouch to absorb the force of the fall. Thump. She cartwheeled, shot her tongue to wrap around a tree trunk, and swung herself into a boulder. Rana flipped in the air, landing on her feet again, and sprang from the perpendicular surface to zoom over the ground.
She executed everything well. Frankly, Daniel had trouble finding anything to criticize. However, as she continued through other acrobatic feats, practiced fighting with her elbows and knees, then pulled a huge rock out of the streambed, something occurred to him.
“You’re good at this.” She grunted in response. “And you’re not making it up as you go along.” There was a strictness and regularity to her form. She wasn’t training; she was drilling a kata. “That’s a real fighting style. It’s like you’ve been practicing this your whole life.”
Rana said nothing, ignoring him as she continued.
Then, Daniel finally spotted something. “You know, if you lean back another degree, you won’t overextend your leg in that position.”
She snapped a look at him so fast it made him take a step back. “I didn’t mean to be rude! Sorry, I was trying to be useful.”
Rana slowly blinked and returned to her routine a few steps back. Then she actually used his advice and experimented with the adjustment! He was so relieved and happy he spoke again. “Just wondering, where does someone learn drills for a form they don’t yet have?”
She flinched. It was slight, but he noticed it because of his Eye’s acute focus.
Rana put her foot down in the stream to roll a stone towards her and onto her instep—then flicked it into the air.
Incorporating Daniel’s pointer flawlessly, she kicked the stone as it fell and launched it at blistering speeds with a whip-crack report. Legs magically strong enough to propel her three-hundred-pound body a hundred feet into the air applied all that force to a three-pound stone. Faster than any pitcher’s throw, the rock whistled over the plain like a bombshell before it exploded into shrapnel against a boulder a football field distant.
“It’s none of your business, Daniel.”
Never, in all the time they’d spent together, had she reprimanded him that sternly or even come close to losing her temper with him before. He was stunned. And more than a little ashamed.
Daniel had thought the answer obvious; that it might get her to talk about her brother—Bufo the toad, who’d been her mentor in the Traveling Orphanage—but he’d obviously touched on something sensitive instead.
Is Rana the kind of person who works out her issues physically?
He wasn’t sure, he hadn’t seen her do something like this before, but the past week had been unlike anything they’d dealt with. All Daniel could do was hope throwing rocks made her feel better.
Maybe she wasn’t that angry after all because Rana then shrank to half her size—the clothes of her raiment magically reappearing as she became a girl again. “Let’s go back.”
Belatedly, on their way, Daniel remembered he was supposed to get her to talk about yesterday. This was going to be harder than he’d thought.