Meeting the Forest Jaws
> “Schrodie said it was going to be complicated. And there I was thinking something might go wrong.” ~Elizzel
Frein couldn’t make sense of the dark substance. Impossible was one but then, in of itself, the term was contradictory. It glistened like a polished marble and refracted reflections so that half of them were inverted somehow. He could feel Katherine admiring him from the side.
“What?” he deflected. “It’s amusing.”
“You find dried saliva amusing?”
“Dried, light-refracting saliva. Yes.” He ignored Katherine—and Kristel—giggling at him and continued to muse. “If this came from a Jaws Lurking in the Forest, how come it’s no longer acidic?”
“The potency quickly runs out as soon as the Forest Jaws spits it out,” Katherine explained. “Technically, they can prolong and strengthen it by investing more meiyal.”
“If you ignore the fact that it’s saliva, you can make some beautiful things out of it.”
“The saliva isn’t the problem, really.” Katherine surveyed the roots of the tree where she located the substance and found more of them. “This thing attracts minor Nightmares.”
“But I don’t see any Nightmares right now,” Kristel mused.
“That’s because I’m here.”
Frein didn’t give the statement much thought. The prospect of Katherine’s mere presence, her sheer existence as Lady of the Void, repelling Nightmares somehow just made sense to him. His mind was on other things. “Still, it’s amazing that these creatures can also use meiyal.”
“While that’s true, dealing with it is…well, a nightmare.” Katherine signaled for Enza, ignoring her own lame attempt at a pun. “Can you track this scent?”
“Sure, let me check…” Enza mumbled and sniffed the substance. She circled around, tracing her nose along the ground and then in the air until she caught a trail.
“I got it! Follow me!” she barked and started to run. They followed her immediately. Her pace was inconsistent, stopping at one point to confirm the scent and then strutting about for a while before suddenly breaking on a full sprint.
The group went deeper east and away from the Rindea Mountains. The trees were abundantly larger and formed a canopy that covered almost all sunlight. The precious blue rays of the afternoon sun, able to pierce some of the gaps around the branches, formed a relaxing yet creepy display at the same time.
Eventually they found the tip of a black and scaly tail. They followed it all the way to find the head of the dragon lying on the ground. The animals that gathered around her scurried away at their arrival.
“Forest Jaws, wake up,” Frein called out, intentionally leaving out Elizzel’s name like he promised. No response. Instead, he was mesmerized at how colossal the Nightmare land dragon actually was. He was barely the size of its nostrils. The fact that he couldn’t feel her breathing set off alarms.
“It’s dead…” Katherine said.
Frein wanted to confirm this claim for himself but didn’t know where to start. Should I feel for a pulse? Would a Nightmare have one? What was the cause of death? The only thing he could verify was the lack of breathing. That, and that a Lady of the Void’s assessment of Nightmares supposedly had more integrity than most scholars.
He could feel his frustrations building up. Regret got caught in his throat, but he refused to voice it out. How could something this strong, this monstrous die in a place like this?
He looked around, trying to assess, to investigate. It couldn’t have been a predator, or else there would’ve been eaten parts. In fact, there were no visible injury at all. It was as though the Forest Jaws died in her sleep.
“Is it some form of hibernation?” Frein asked, grasping at straws.
“I don’t want to give false hopes, but we don’t exactly know a lot about Forest Jaws,” Katherine replied. “Despite their size, they’re actual lurkers, masters of stealth. If this one didn’t want to be found, it won’t even leave signs for us like the ones we found earlier. Maybe that’s why it died.”
“No signs of attack,” Kristel said, verifying Frein’s observations. “In fact, it looks like it died in its sleep.”
“I’m not sure if I should actually bring this up, but I’ve been warned about this yesterday.” Katherine brought up Sam. The M.O.B.I.L.E., without even any verbal prompts or finger gestures, projected an image of the Lady’s hand holding a piece of paper.
I know you’ll be taking pictures, but for all our sakes, I’ve erased my previous message.
Katherine then proceeded to recall the events that transpired that day which involved the piece of paper telling him about the dead Forest Jaws.
“Frill didn’t tell me anything about this,” Kristel said.
“She has her hands full,” Katherine explained before turning to Frein. “You noticed something.”
“Picture,” Frein said. “Just to confirm, ‘taking pictures’ is a phrase you all use, right?”
“Recording an image, it says here for me,” Kristel pointed out.
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“Same,” Katherine said.
So, it was lost in translation?
No. That seemed too specific. All the books he’d read and conversations he’d had were consistently conveyed to him as though he grew up with it in the first place. This deviation was a first, and coming from a magically semi-self-aware piece of paper, it was too much of a coincidence for him to ignore.
”I know about pictures, but what’s ‘taking pictures’ exactly?” Kristel asked. “Is it the same as recording an image?”
“Yeah, the same as recording an image,” Katherine explained. The two then proceeded to talk about how Frein was able to understand Brymeia’s language, leaving the Visitor to his own thoughts.
It was too vague, too coincidental for him to make sense of it. But it did lead to one crazy assumption.
“What if there’s more than one Visitor?” he asked out loud to no one in particular. It called the attention of the two ladies.
“What if there’s more than one Gatekeeper, more than one Seeker?” he added, predicting exactly how Katherine would try to refute the question’s implications.
The Lady of the Void was at a loss, and so was the Princess of Irista Nation. The two of them frowned at the same time, expressing how absurd his claims were. They didn’t outright reject the idea.
“That’s impossible.”
The direct rejection came from a different voice. A feminine voice so listless and tired that Frein barely even heard it. They all turned to find Enza staring at a treetop near the dead Forest Jaws.
From there was a girl lying on a set of branches that seemed to specifically cradle her. She had pink hair, voluminous and abundant with a length that was slightly longer than her short height. In fact, just by strictly eyeballing it, Frein assumed she might be shorter than the Princess.
The girl moved lazily, rolling over the branch until she completely fell. Much to everyone’s panic, she slowly drifted downwards like a falling feather, as if the pull of gravity had forgotten to take her existence into account. Her sundress flowed like a puff of smoke with a life of its own.
Frein tracked her down, allowing her to gently fall into his arms. Light, or to better explain, weightless. She was slim and looked almost as young as Kristel, if not younger.
Frein leaned her slowly onto the tree she fell from and nudged her shoulder. For some reason, despite her earlier response, the girl had fallen asleep.
After much effort, she eventually opened her eyes, revealing drowsy eyes with differing colors; blue on the left and yellow on the right. She shoved away his annoying hand like a kid asking for five more minutes of sleep.
“You look awfully familiar,” Frein began as he dug inside his brain for the memory of this face.
“You look like Monarch Kristella,” Kristel said and quickly added, “but that’s impossible.”
“Because I’m not Kristella Irista.” Elizzel finally sat up straight, stretching away her drowsiness. “You’re looking at her twin sister, Evangeline Irista.
“But my real name is Elizzel,” she added and pointed at the Nightmare beside her. “More so, I am—was—these Jaws Lurking in the Forest.”
“That’s a faunel’s name,” Katherine implied the question.
“That it is.” Elizzel looked at all of them, regarding each of them—including Enza—with a curious and studying look. She turned to Kristel last. “I didn’t expect the Princess to come along as well. Well, my expectations have been rather off the mark lately. I’m afraid I can’t explain to you why I look like the second Monarch, except that this form was from her twin sister.”
“The second Monarch didn’t have a twin,” Kristel said. Her tone had a hint of accusation.
“She was erased from history,” Elizzel explained. She moved next to the dead Forest Jaws and sat on one of its claws. “I don’t remember the reason why. But the only remaining evidence that she existed, as far as my memory serves, is the fact that I have her form and the personal record Monarch Kristella left in her book.”
While the particular choice of words caught Frein’s attention, he also noticed Katherine opening her Spatiera and pulling out a pristine copy of The Artistic Meiyal contained in a special meiyal-crafted container. Without much effort, just by the sheer care the Lady invested in handling the container, Frein deduced that the book actually might’ve well been the very same Kristella personally penned.
He added that on the things he needed to study later.
Elizzel noticed the book’s authenticity as well. “On page thirty-nine, after the lesson on Milling.”
“Give me a while. We had to seal it for safekeeping,” Katherine explained and found a nice place to sit on before working on unraveling the seal with a complex set of meiyal patterns too advanced for Frein to recognize.
“Why bother proving it?” he asked. It caused Kristel to snap at him. “Just curious, that’s all.”
“It’s because we must consume their meiyal core before we can transform to them,” Elizzel replied. “It’s not difficult to put two and two together considering how I look, but the evidence of Evangeline’s existence should help disprove your accusations.”
She pointed the last bit towards the Princess.
“If Evangeline did exist, you’re still not off the hook,” Kristel retaliated. “It doesn’t get rid of the fact that you murdered someone, not to mention a royalty. Faunels shouldn’t be able to hurt us mortals in the first place.”
“Murder is a bold claim,” Frein and Katherine said in absolute unison. “Avoid making conclusions based on half-stories. Take everything with a grain of salt. The truth we know, the truth we find are often influenced by biases and overblown dramatizations. Sometimes, the simplest answers are the correct ones. And never assume the story is over even with the case closed.”
Kristel was taken aback. “What just happened?”
The two smiled, again, in unison.
“We worked as detectives—investigators of complex cases—back where I came from,” Frein explained. “Well, Kat worked full-time. I was on training before I got here. It’s a statement we use to remind ourselves that not everything is laid out as we see it.
“Most people won’t tell you everything they know, whether on purpose or not.” He crossed his hands and observed Elizzel who studied him in reciprocity. “Sometimes, it’s because they can’t remember. It’s part of our jobs to unravel the truth with utmost and irrefutable certainty.”
“What other explanation would be there, then?” Kristel asked, indignant of her claims. “If she didn’t murder Kristella or Evangeline, what then?”
Frein waited for the faunel to defend herself. She refused. With a sigh, he prepared to lay out his own theories. He understood what was going through the Princess’s head. Once one settled and accepted a truth, letting it go was a challenge barely anyone would even attempt, let alone succeed. Add the significance of a historically renowned icon—or her alleged twin sister—on the case, it was easy to justify Kristel’s adamant attitude.
What can she even do against someone made literally out of meiyal? Frein mused at the thought and stored the question for later. He had to answer Kristel’s first.
“You said it yourself,” he began. “Faunels can’t hurt mortals, so how would she murder one? You can say she manipulated someone else into killing either of the sisters, but that’s another thing we have to prove. Besides, who’s to say they didn’t offer their own core to her?”
“That’s impossible.”
Frein presented himself. “If I can do it, why can’t they?”
Kristel wanted to argue but caught herself. She paused and considered, her face in disbelief. Frein decided to push further.
“Look, I’m not saying that’s what they did. I’m saying that there are a lot of possibilities. And if you cling to one answer, it’ll cloud your judgment. So why don’t we keep a calm mind and look at Kristella’s record first?”
The Princess looked at each of them before gradually calming down. “You’re right. Sorry.”
As if on cue, Katherine finished dealing with the seals. “There, done. What page is it again?”
“Thirty-nine,” Elizzel replied. She was slowly dozing off and catching herself awake before fully tumbling down from where she sat.
Frein and Kristel approached Katherine as she flipped the pages. The thirty-nineth page only had a measly portion of text in it, indicating the end of the lesson chapter. Before any of them could complain, the faunel spoke.
“Use observation Meiyal Art, combine it with Siffera. The words should appear. Sorry, but please wake me up as soon as you’re done reading. We don’t have much time.”
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