Once back in her hut, Velvet started clearing the living room, making space for setting up the altar. She didn’t bother to call Udulluay this time, not trusting the devil bird.
Of course, she wasn’t going to do the ritual for the goddess here. The point of obtaining her blessing was that no one else should know about it.
Not even Udulluay.
And I should try to avoid Dianthus, at least until I figure out how he discovered my deal with Frenese. She thought, setting the bells in a circle.
Even when they didn’t have a bad relationship, she didn’t trust him that much. And, even when she also didn’t trust Lothrigern, she at least felt that the Deriliam had the same end goal as her. In part.
But she didn’t even feel that with Dianthus. The guy always felt like he was waiting for something bad to happen. Like the spectator of a show he was part in, knowing the play and participating when he felt like it.
That’s why ‘trusting’ Lothrigern’s fairies was her current plan. Just, not completely.
Like the previous times, Velvet stood outside the bell circle, starting to apply some magic to the bells, who answered with a jingle.
“From the center… to between.”
“From the earthbound…to the fae that travels unbounded.”
“I’m Velvet Consestella Dobastro, and I call for a helpful and pleasant, non-Lothrigern faerie that can take me to an uninhabited place in this world, where no one related to mages is there but me, where it's safe for normal humans to reside and that can’t be located by any spell.”
She needed a place truly hidden from someone like Hasdrubal. She knew that Hasdrubal was searching for the reason behind her chains, and she wasn’t still at the level where she could shake him off with no effort.
But, as long as she made this jump fast, the knowledge mage wouldn’t have time to find her.
As the bells rang, a soft melody echoed in the room, a ripple crossing the air in the middle of the altar, as a silhouette seamlessly appeared.
The fairy was tall and slender, golden hair falling straight down their back, with some strands of hair tangled on their horns, resembling those of a deer.
As clothes were, the fairy wore only a white, peerless tunic, the material probably silk, with a loose collar (the whole tunic was a bit big for the fairy, even when they were tall), which reached their ankles.
If the antlers were something to go, Velvet would assume that it was a male fairy, since all anthropomorphic fairies were either feminine or pretty androgynous, with an innocent and elegant surface appearance. The rest were animals, like the bear she first met, or insectoids, like the pixie.
Like Lothrigern, all the fairies who resembled humans had a delicate and ethereal appearance, but with a pretty bad attitude if one were to cross them.
If one wanted to see a muscular fairy, the closest one would be a bear.
And not the gay kind. For those one should go to Baethylus creations, who were more muscular.
Velvet kind of made up the last point, since she wasn’t sure what beings were created by Baethylus, but, as a Deriliam compared to a blacksmith, His creations were probably buff.
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Back to the fairy, it wasn’t like Velvet cared for their gender, but, if she wanted to consistently work with them, she needed to learn the differences between them.
That’s why, while she was shopping before, she had bought several books about fae, and gone through them already.
With her new knowledge, she kinda expected the fae in front of her to be an Aes sídhe, a fairy in the ‘good’ category. Good as in ‘do not test their patience’, but won’t try to backstab her for the fun of it.
The other fairies she had seen, without mentioning the pixie, were probably a kelpie and a fenodyree, with the ‘damped woman’ being a kelpie, and the bear a fenodyree respectively.
Kelpies were the kind of fairy that drowned and ate humans, and if Velvet had accepted the woman’s attractive ‘offer’, she probably would’ve been dead by now.
Even when one asked for a type of fairy, that was mostly a suggestion, and a mage could get any kind, but fairies had their own set of rules, namely, being a perfect guest while there was a perfect host.
So, even if Velvet ended up calling a dangerous fairy, as long as she remained a good host, the faerie wouldn’t act like a nuisance. They could play some tricks, but nothing too extreme.
In addition to that, one should keep a close eye on what they did and say to faeries, because they took things way too literal. The most known action was saying ‘Thanks’ or something similar, because they assumed that the person was grateful to them, and thus, owed them something.
No one wanted to owe anything to a fae.
But asides from that, doing something like bowing to them or a curtsy was also dangerous, since it changed the ‘equal’ position of host and guest that was in action, making the other party below them.
And fairies made for awful bosses.
“I need to go to a place in this world safe for humans but unininhabited.” Velvet recalled the petition to the fae. “Can you take me there?”
She made emphasis on the ‘In this world’ part, because making a faerie take you to the Fae Realm was very, very easy.
And it wasn’t like that was a problem for her right now, but time on the Fae Realm went slower than time on the Material Ream, with a big difference.
One day there was a year here. And that would give enough time to Hasdrubal to locate her position on the Fae Realm.
The fairy smiled at her before nodding slightly and extending his hand. “Of course.”
Velvet took it, before both their figures disappeared.
She didn’t know what to expect from fae teleportation. Maybe dizziness or motion sickness. Instead, it kind of felt like crossing a door to the outside, with the temperature change and the loss of the fireplace warmth.
Velvet blinked slowly, taking in the new location. A prairie, with short green grass covering all around her, until reaching a precipice.
By the slight frost on the leaves, and the mountains surrounding her, she assumed her location was in Mirel.
“Oh.” Velvet suddenly said, looking at the fairy next to her. “Right, I forgot a warm glass of milk in my house. It will go cold soon, so feel free to help yourself to it if you want to.”
There, the ‘gift’ was complete.
The fairy nodded at her, before disappearing.
Not wasting a moment, Velvet quickly set up a second fairy altar, using a second set of bells. Once again, she started chanting.
“From the center… to between.”
“From the earthbound…to the fae that travels unbounded.”
“I’m Velvet Consestella Dobastro, and I call for a helpful and pleasant, Lothrigern faerie that can take me to the best place in this world where I can fulfill the ritual to obtain the blessing of the Goddess of Darkness without being interrupted, followed or captured.”
The file Dianthus gave her with her information didn’t say that she could call Lothrigern without getting cursed, so it didn’t do her any favor to use the name on her home, where whoever was monitoring her could discover it.
That’s why she first used a non-Lothrigern faerie, and now she used a Lothrigern one.
Even so, she didn't know what to expect. A pixie like the other time, perh-
She felt a slight push, before getting instantly teleported.
Unlike the previous time, this time caught her totally by surprise, less like crossing an umbral and more like getting pushed off a cliff.
A very tall cliff, Velvet realized, as she kept falling down nonstop.
…
No one remained at the prairie for a few seconds, before a ripple grew in the air, a figure coming out.
It was a young girl, around Velvet’s age. Long purple hair fell straight down her back, with a lackluster shine. Her clothes were white, affixed to her body by leather belts. Long sleeves that reached the floor, covering her hands completely, closed by belts too, which made her arms look like two full bags.
Her eyes were big, with round pupils who didn’t reflect light. Instead, if one looked closely inside her eyes, one would see a room, where an old man with a long beard was.
“Ah… She left so soon. So hurried…” The girl moved her arms and legs, trembling, as if she was laughing in silence. Even so, her big eyes remained completely still, not even blinking, looking at the altar remains.
“And I was so so close to getting you, Velvet…” She said, extending the sacs she had for arms forward, her gaze fixed on the altar. Then, she joined the sacs, as if she had clapped.
In a blink, the zone where the altar was was destroyed to smithereens, a crater in its place. Nothing remained, not even debris.
The girl shook her now inflated sleeves, making a clinking sound.
The belts holding the bags shut opened slightly, and a set of crumpled bells fell down, together with a few loose, bloody teeth.
Some of that same blood ran down the corners of her mouth, which she opened, several teeth now missing, the holes where the teeth should be making a strange noise.
As if something had wormed its way inside.
Slowly, the noise went quieter, until it stopped completely; in a moment, the girl raised a covered hand to her mouth, inserting some fake teeth into the empty places.
Looking at the half bitten bells, she spoke, her eyes unchanging. “Those tasted so disgusting, I’m gonna have indigestion…”