~ Episode Three ~

Warriors of the Star:

The Start to Eri’s Unwanted Destiny

It couldn’t have been real. There was no way. Eri pondered this, sitting cross-legged on her bed as she stared into her reflection in the closet mirrors at the foot of the frame. She hadn’t moved from this position since dinnertime, and all she could do was replay the events of the library on an endless mental loop.

The explosion…

…The giant snake-thing with insect eyes…

“We’re friends aren’t we? Why would we lie about something this heavy?” Evan had made the statement earlier that afternoon, after she’d woken up at Shinji’s house. It was a statement that hung with Eri for longer than she would have expected. Longer than she would have liked.

We’re friends, aren’t we?

“I don’t even know you…”

Thoughts of Mackenzie’s hurt expression flashed across her memory.

“I thought you were my best friend…”

Eri mashed a fist against a tearful eye, sniffling.

A sudden bang at the bedroom window jolted her attention. Eri watched, frozen with horror as the frame rattled to life and began a slow ascent along its sticky track. Winter air gusted into her bedroom.

Shinji poked his head into the room. He blinked, glanced around, and found Eri staring at him, horrified, from where she sat on her bed.

“Hey,” he said.

“Shinji?!” Eri scrambled off the mattress to meet him. Doing so in such a hurry, she banged a knee against the edge of her nightstand and crashed into him. Her outstretched hands mashed against his face, shoving him backwards out the window. “What are you doing here?!”

“Agh! I came to see if you were okay! You left in such a hurry—”

“You can’t be climbing through my window!” Eri exclaimed. “How did you even get up here? What if my dad or Noah sees you?!”

“They didn’t. I used the vine trellis—”

“You what?!”

There was a knock at the bedroom door.

“Go home! I don’t wanna talk to you!” Eri hissed at him under her breath. Shinji ducked out of sight just as Helen Seruma entered her daughter’s room with a basket of laundry balanced on one hip.

“I have some clothes for you, Gingersnap.” Helen set the basket down on the floor by Eri’s closet. She was a tall and slender woman of Irish descent, with long raven curls and fair skin to match. “Is everything okay? I thought I heard a crash. Oh, you remember Nana’s coming tomorrow, right? Make sure your trundle has fresh sheets on it for me?”

“Yeah! N-no problem!”

Helen blinked at her daughter, just then realizing Eri was halfway out the open window. Flecks of snow blew in, melting against the hardwood floor. “Eri, what are you doing?”

“Ahh … nothing! Just – needed to clear my head a little bit, that’s all! Ah-ha-ha-ha!”

“You’re letting the heat out. We know how your father is about that. Come on, Gingersnap, close the window and put your clothes away. Gonna catch cold if you’re not careful…” Helen slid back out into the hall, leaving the bedroom door open ajar.

Eri let out a heavy sigh. She rose to a stand, crossed the room on hasty steps, and clicked the door shut. She leaned against the frame, pulled a few strands of hair down over her eyes in scrutiny. “…I wish she’d stop calling me that.”

“What, ‘Gingersnap’?” Shinji asked, straddling the windowsill. His freckled face still glowed with the indents of Eri’s hand prints from before. He leaned back outside to reel in his backpack by its straps. The thing looked like it weighed a ton. “I – oof! I like your hair.”

“You’re still here?” Eri glowered at him, trembling fists clenched at her sides. “Go home. I’m still mad at you, you know.”

“Figured.” Shinji lugged the backpack over to Eri’s bed. With some struggle, he heaved it onto the mattress – slightly mussing up the perfectly-made Hello Kitty sheets in the process—and began to root through the contents within. “You forgot something at my house when you stormed off earlier.”

Eri’s instinct called her attention to the school project left neglected against the wall at the foot of her bed. There was a small tear in the edge of her rolled-up Dirty Thirties Bristol board. “What are you talking about?”

Shinji reached into his backpack with both hands and carefully worked to free whatever was weighing it down. In an instant, all anger Eri felt for him gave way to a numb state of awe and confusion.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

The object could have easily been mistaken for a psychic’s divination crystal—or in Eri’s case, a giant snow globe or one of those plasma balls from the Toronto Science Center. She gazed at the myriad of color streams that swam almost fishlike within the glassy, dark-tinted orb. The mouth of Shinji’s bag fell away like snakeskin, revealing a volcano-shaped base. It looked like it was carved from obsidian.

Shinji carefully turned the flickering object in his hands, revealing the opposite side of the base that encased it. Eri gazed upon the face of a lion, forever frozen in mid-roar.

“…Shinji, what is that thing?”

“A Monster Dowser,” he said, simply enough like it should have been obvious. “A specially-crafted tool made by our ancestors to help combat the Black King of Leola Kingdom. Evan and I use it to track Monsters who’ve returned to seek out the Child of Destiny. It works like a radar, kind of.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, careful to set the Monster Dowser on Eri’s night stand. The sight of it sent an icy shock through her. A dull headache dared to throb alive. Shinji tugged his backpack between his knees and rooted deeper within. He removed two more items: a tiny pine box and a small glassy red orb.

Eri swallowed hard and edged towards him on timid heels. “…So today really happened?”

“That’s what we were trying to tell you, yeah.”

She hesitated to sit down next to Shinji, but exhaled a bated breath and did so anyway. Her added weight on the mattress caused the glass orb to roll between them within the creases of her blanket. “I can’t believe it…”

“Start believing. As I was saying earlier, the lineage we belong to dates back seven-hundred years. Starts with five holy knights who initially fought King Sufocus and his Monsters. They were called Star Warriors—each represented one of the five pagan elements of balance.”

“Knights, huh?” Eri pondered this in relation to her recurring dream.

“Sure. I’m related to the Warrior of Earth—Arissa Lockhart. She was Princess of Demoria Kingdom, from Atrea Continent—now part of Europe,” Shinji explained. “Evan’s related to the Warrior of Water—a sea-faring minstrel named Faran Coyne.”

“Of course the water knight would be a sea-faring minstrel named Faran,” Eri murmured.

“Today we realized your friend Thompson belongs to the Air bloodline, a descendent of Relina Weiss—a priestess and psychic.”

Eri picked at her fingernails. “Guess I’m related to one of these Star Warriors, too?”

“Yeah. Fire,” Shinji replied, quickly—but didn’t elaborate. “There’s one more, the Warrior of Spirit—a French mercenary named Obiere Laroche. We still don’t know who his descendant is, though.”

“Oh…” Eri nodded, trying to understand all of this. She found the glassy red orb now beside her and let it roll into her hands. It was smooth and cold. A solid weight despite the fact it was about the size of a tennis ball. “What’s this thing?”

“That’s a Monster Orb,” Shinji told her. “Or, Mon-Orb for short. Silly name, Evan’s idea, but it was all we could come up with. When the proper incantation’s invoked, Monsters—or, Kenah’dai, as they are natively known—turn into one of these after we weaken them enough.”

“…You mean—This belongs to that Monster that attacked us today?”

“...It is the Monster that attacked us today.”

“W-wait—for real?!” Eri lifted the thing to eye-level, squinting. She shot Shinji a bewildered side-eye look. “...It's like a Pokémon ... But how?”

He shrugged. “Just part of the magic we possess. I don’t really know how it works—just that it works. We can use these Mon-Orbs against other Kenah’dai. Lets us and our weapons use the Sealed Monsters’ abilities.”

Eri barely registered the explanation, too numb to really process anything that sounded straight out of Mackenzie’s favorite Japanese cartoons. She turned the Mon-Orb in her hands until an engraving of a stone snake faced her. Its etched image was curled in on itself and reminded Eri of a chest-burster thing from one of those Alien movies Noah loved so much.

…An ouroboros devouring its own tail…

“So—this is your room, huh?” asked Shinji.

Eri blinked up from the Mon-Orb and found him gazing around her bedroom with an almost absent-mindedness about the actual reason he was here tonight. Shinji took a gander over one shoulder, chuckled at the sight of Eri’s beloved Regina Lepue plush toy leaned against a couple of pillows. “Didn’t know there was merch from that series.”

“There isn’t. Mackenzie made it for me,” Eri murmured. “For my birthday last year.”

The second and most obvious thing Shinji noticed was the poster of Shirley Manson and her band-mates from Garbage, making goofy faces in the street, hanging over Eri’s desk. The image was from their debut release.

Garbage was secretly Eri’s favorite band of all time, their two albums to-date stashed safely away in her vanity drawer. Her mother hated the look of the poster amidst Eri’s other more tame and “properly feminine” possessions, but it had been a Christmas gift one year from Noah, who’d introduced her to the band in the first place.

Shinji’s attention shifted to a short bookcase beside Eri’s desk crammed with Super Nintendo and Game Boy games, alongside some novels and decorative knickknacks. On top of the bookcase sat a tiny white TV hooked up to a Super Nintendo riddled with stickers; a single controller wrapped in its own cord leaned tucked at its side. Eri’s copy of Final Fantasy II peered at them from its current home in the cartridge slot.

Against the adjacent wall rested an oak vanity by the bedroom door. A tiny collection of parental-approved music – mostly composed of Genesis, The Go-Gos, Boston, and the Hip – stood against the mirror, propped upright between a small CD/Cassette player and Eri’s favorite strawberry perfume.

“This setup is similar to how your old bedroom looked,” remarked Shinji. He gazed up at the ceiling for no real particular reason, then let his eyes fall back to the Monster Dowser glowing away on Eri’s nightstand.

“Um … you think so?” An uneasy feeling squeezed around her heart at the comment. She shifted away from Shinji, uncomfortable by the intensity of his interest in her things—her personal sanctuary away from the rest of the world, let alone away from her family. Her coveted Garbage albums called from their hiding spot in the vanity drawer. “Hey, um—are we done here? I still have a lot of homework to do, and stuff…”

“Hmm. Actually, looks like you’re in luck.” Shinji took the Monster Dowser into his hands and brought it to her attention.

The swirls of neon within its darkened orb left light trails behind Eri’s eyes. Therein, she could almost make out pictures … outlines … a forest where an old windmill stood. The image flashed to life, brighter, then faded into nothingness.

Shinji peered at her with a penetrative stare. “Looks like your training as the Warrior of Fire begins tonight.”