Cai Finley Hall: April 27th, 20XX

I tried my best to pay attention to the lesson, but Esmeralda’s vaguely irritating voice washed over me like an unevenly pitched wave of white noise. It was a battle between myself and the other irritating voice in my head that laughed at her inaccurate explanations of the woods close to the Witch-lands.

On one level, I understood why she would purposefully exaggerate the dangers of that place, after all, my getting caught in witch territory could lead to my being kidnapped, or even worse, interacting with and getting friendly with a witch.

I often got lost in that section of this world since my transporter seemed to have taken a shine to that area and the magic engineers couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It got somewhat annoying to randomly find myself in random spaces when I just wanted to go see Theodulus, but it was also a pretty decent way to train my magic and flight without having so many eyes on me, so I took it for the opportunity it was.

As she went over the different species of vegetation that could make my wings rot off, I completely abandoned playing the part of a dutiful student and withdrew my attention. Instead of the boring and factually inaccurate information that Esmeralda used to scare me into never leaving the castle, my thoughts instead drifted to the happenings of the other day.

I just didn’t know how ‘he’ had taken over the body while Finley was unconscious. It had been a struggle enough to seize the wheels when he nearly killed the human, but I could acknowledge that was because ‘he’ had done most of the work.

The very concept that Aies might be stronger than I was terrifying on its own, but even more potent, was the fear that Finley would find out what had happened and would go to Theodulus to get rid of us.

Us being Aies and I.

Although Theodulus had created us at the same time and we were just manifestations of Finley’s ego and magic, ‘he’ was somehow stronger than I was. Maybe it was because we were male, and he got specialized training every night with Theodulus, but at this point I could feel the danger he posed to me. At this rate, he would be able to go through the awakening process, and once that happened, I would be completely obliterated.

Finley himself was unaware of the tensions between Aies and me since Theodulus had ordered the two of us to pretend to get along when Finley was conscious of us, but the very concept of our coexistence was ridiculous.

We represented two complete opposites of a spectrum that had been slammed into the frail body of someone that hadn’t even reached his second century. Aies and I, as loathe as I was to admit any similarities between my noble self and the beast that claimed to be another half of me, were two halves of a single coin. Pure representations of two distinct ideals that Finley needed to choose between.

As long as Aies existed, I would never be able to achieve the ideals I represented, and as long as I existed, Aies would similarly never be able to achieve his own ideals.

For now, I could somewhat suppress him since Finley used my powers most often and spent the most time in my form, even if it was just for silly things such as purifying the puny amount of magic in his human establishment or making his backpack lighter. At this level, I was even pleased when he used my magic to change his appearance back to that our mother had granted him.

But it wasn’t enough.

The lack of a clear mentor and the encouragement to use our magic put me at a clear disadvantage. I needed to get stronger. Quickly.

Right now, I could barely fight for equality since Finely had yet to go in through the goblin’s awakening ceremony and access his true powers as a goblin, but that was just a matter of time. With the constant encouragement from Theodulus and Aies’s aggressive personality, I feared that there would be a reorganization of the main personality and Aies would overthrow Finley. If that ever happened, then I wasn’t so positive as to hope that he would save me a seat in this body.

It just couldn’t be helped, though; no matter how much magic I could take in and spit out, I was naturally weaker as a male fairy than he was as a goblin. The treatments that Finley got from the fairies and Theodulus were also an unfair advantage that Aies had. The more fun Finley had with Theodulus, the more he would favor that side.

I needed something similar that would motivate him to get connected and invested in this side of the world. I needed something that would help balance out the scales that were slowly tipping toward his acceptance of the goblins as his true heritage.

Tch.

None of this would need to happen if things had gone properly.

The truth was that Finley wasn’t even supposed to exist in the first time.

In no way did the 45% fairy and 55% goblin mix have space for a human upbringing. His natural bias toward the human world and their sensibilities only complicated things more than necessary… but then again, there was probably something in there that I could use.

At the very worst, I would be able to use Aies’s natural disregard toward humans to turn Finley against accepting him.

“Cai!”

Esmeralda finally realized that I hadn’t paid attention to a single word she had said for the past significant portion of time and slammed her teaching book closed. She cleared the board with a single swipe of her wand and wrote a list of ‘homework’ for me to complete before our next meeting.

I did plan on doing all of them so we could continue our charade of being prince and primary caretaker. Since Mei often hung around, Esmeralda had found it more and more difficult to mistreat me. Even most of the staff in the castle looked at her with intense eyes anytime she so much as talked to me in a funny way.

I mentally recorded all the tasks since they were things I wanted to practice anyways and ran towards the courtyard of my quarters. We took lessons in the main building since Esmeralda wasn’t allowed anywhere near my buildings. I had taken apart the spell she had tried to use to ‘ground’ me earlier and had turned it in on its head. It had been difficult and had taken me many days of studying, but I had finally figured out how to strengthen it and invert it so its restrictive properties only applied to its original caster. I was currently figuring out how to cast such spells without having a structured spell already in place to riff off of.

After the diary had shown me how to identify distinct traits in individual’s magic, I had found another route to further hone my magic. Funnily enough, the best way to practice taking spells apart and restructuring them into new ones was by weaving magical threads into clothes and complex patterns. Right now, I was halfway through a scarf. I didn’t know who I’d give it to yet, but I figured it would make a decent gift.

But for now, my main priority was the miniature replication of the obstacle course Mei had shown me. She had generously sent over the blueprints and the fairy engineers had put it all together in the matter of a few days.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

This course was a lot smaller than the original. In fact, it was only about a fourth of the size of the original and was much too small for any grown fairy to use. But that was why I had entreated the builders to make something else for me.

The row of fully mobile puppets stood beside the course, as if waiting for their turn to go through the course.

Strengthening my body would only serve to help Aies, so I had needed to get creative on how to train my magic. Controlling the puppets with animation spells and channeling my spells through their magic conductive cores would work perfectly for this.

I wanted to set it up myself, but a flock of servants had flooded out of nowhere and directed me toward an extravagantly decorated chair for me to wait in. Instead of wasting precious time and energy on trying to convince them to let me do it on my own, I willingly let myself be led toward the chair and watched as carefully as possible.

The General would likely be here soon to check on the setup of the machine. I’d thought she would stop at sending the blueprints to the engineers, but she had gone a step further and had sent notice that she would visit to check on the craftsmanship as made by the craftspeople in the castle.

The engineers had somehow gotten the idea that she was looking down on their skills and had put in extra effort to streamline its design and make it look prettier. I had tried to talk to them and convince them that the general hadn’t been insulting their work, but they had simply waited for a servant to escort me out of their workshop.

I’d also taken to sitting around them and watching how they used their fantastical tools and the spells that they applied to different materials. They had disliked it at first, but after I’d convinced Corin to stop accompanying me all the time, the tension in the air had relaxed enough that they would work while ignoring me.

The craft department was divided into those that worked with the material in itself, and another that worked in studying spells that they could carve into those materials. They would take apart almost seven-line spells in seconds and smoothly apply one after the other into the contraptions that their companions had put together.

Right now, I was working on making a small box that could roll over on its own. I was still a long way from being able to fully carve and animate a puppet like the batch they had provided me, but this was as good of a start as any.

I wanted to show my progress to the General in the hopes that she would be able to point out some application flaws that my engineers might have overlooked but I decided against it. As things were I had already exposed way too much of my abilities to her.

While I appreciated her zeal in investigating how Esmeralda treated me, I couldn’t let things go as far as to get the green fairy deposed. Even though Esmeralda treated me poorly and didn’t teach me anything useful, she left me alone for the most part and spent most of her time in her office dealing with the running of the queendom.

Her dislike of me also worked as a shield against letting other fairies meet me. She refused all invitations for me to visit any families or them to visit me under one excuse or the other. I knew she had told a few of them that I was lagging behind in my studies and others that I was just too weak to leave the castle, but I didn’t really care. All that mattered was that my time alone to do my research and gather my strength was undisturbed because of her efforts.

But back to the General, I knew that she was skilled at putting together spells and manifesting them, so I wanted to ask her if she could recommend any books for me to read on the topic.

There were many papers and pieces on the structures of spells and how they could be built up and be taken apart, but it was something else entirely to be able to borrow the base of one spell and the outer shell of another and bind them all together with the filling of a third.

I knew I could just have asked some of the scholars for the books as well since it wasn’t like the General was the only one with this skill but I also wanted to get closer to ger.

Finley didn’t particularly hold any bias toward her. He thought she was pretty, but he was still a bit scared of her from their first impression. Aies held a true indifference to her and acted like she didn’t exist at all, but I… I liked her enough to pursue and help her build up an affection for me.

Afterall once Finley realized that we would outlive all of his human connections by multiple centuries, I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be returning to someone that didn’t even like us. Well, I knew that she was keeping her distance because we weren’t married yet, and also because of how young I was, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.

All I knew was that out of all the people at her level that Esmeralda had told me about, the general had been the best of the group.

She was smart, and pretty, and was nice to me. Nary a day passed that I didn’t get a gift of sorts from her and I barely had to ask for anything before she found a way to get it to me. Overall, I thought that I could look forward to the two of us getting along well.

I felt the General’s magic touch the boundaries of my building and realized that she had arrived. I got up and flew out to meet her, but I was dragged back into my room to have my clothes changed and my hair done.

In my eyes I didn’t see much of a difference between the golden clothes I’d changed out of and the golden clothes they had put me into, but I knew from experience that my asking would only lead to them dressing me up even more glamorously than before. At times like this it was best to just smile and continue my original journey once they were done with me.

By the time they let me go the General was already at the course.

She had an odd look on her face as she looked over the completed course and the puppets beside it. The engineers had come out in full force to answer all the questions that the General might have. They also came out to intimidate her into apologizing for the insult that they had made up on their own but there was no way the General would ever do anything like that.

The General pulled out her wand and tried to channel magic into it and manipulate its wooden body into moving around. At first, she was moderate with its movements and just made it flit back and forth in the air, but soon she moved into having it do aerial tricks and soon integrated another to work with it.

Seeing her play around with my toys gave me a childish idea, but I figured that acting on it probably wouldn’t annoy her too much.

I took the opportunity while she was distracted and cast the same presence erasing spell I’d used in the past. I simultaneously purified the magic in the air at a fast rate and wrapped a bubble around the small entourage of fairies that had decided to trail after me.

Using that much magic on such a short notice was a bit burdensome, but it wasn’t anything outside of the realms of my capacity.

I got close enough to tap her on the shoulder or touch her wings and startle her a bit but the world suddenly spun upside down and my wings were suddenly relieved of supporting my body’s weight.

In hindsight…

It had probably been a silly idea to attempt sneaking up on a General, especially when she had just returned from suppressing a rebellion in her territory.

There wasn’t much I could do but disable the useless presence erasing spell and put on a large grin on my face while I waited for her to realize that it was just her fiancée and not a hostile enemy.

Her golden-bronze eyes flitted over my body and slightly glazed over as she got lost in her thoughts, but she didn’t let me go. Since the blood didn’t rush to my head as I’d expected, and being upside down wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, I didn’t fight my way free.

Although I could completely blast apart the strand of magic that held me up, I didn’t want to risk hurting her, and I still wanted her to believe that my breaking apart her magic the first time we had met was just a fluke.

I made a mental note of the pattern her magic twisted into and the individual differences in her magic so I could practice replicating it earlier and memorizing it. Although it had been hard at first to find independent differences in each person’s brand of magic, it had become easier once I’d found a trick for it.

While I hoped I would never have to use her magic against her, it was better safe than sorry.

“Gen- Mei, would you mind letting me down?”

She finally came back to the present and registered the bright but uncomfortable smile I maintained on my face. It wasn’t like being held upside down was uncomfortable, in fact I planned to practice hanging upside down more often, it was weirdly calming, and I had to fight off the urge to wrap my wings around myself and go to sleep.

The General slipped a knife I hadn’t seen until now back into her belt and I could only watch in horror as it seamlessly melded back into the thin fabric. I realized two things in one go as she prepared to unravel the spell that she used to hold me up in the air. One was that the knife was probably not the only weapon she had on her, the second was how bad of an idea it would be to surprise her if she was ever stressed out.

“Cai. Why-?”

Her voice was a fun mix of annoyance and amusement. The annoyance probably came from the fear that she could have hurt me, but the amusement won out and a fun smile graced her face. I supposed it was ridiculous that I, someone that to her knowledge had never left the castle without her direct supervision, would try to pull off a sneak attack on her.

“Why would you scare me like that? You could have gotten hurt!”