Luca and Abigail had a great joy looking around, points ticking up fast gave them hope for bagging the first-place prize home. Abigail dove straight to the bottom of creaks and up the trees, while the boy looked around the surface beside rocks and tree roots. A chance windfall of a big purple pumpkin hanging on the antlers of a startled from its sleep Jackalope went straight into his hands, increasing his sizeable count by a whole hundred. The duo gradually went deeper into the bushes, losing sight of other fruit-seekers, yet a peculiar noise started increasing in volume, the boy on alert as the place intentionally shrouded in a blue-red hue changed in his perception from an idyllic grove to a potential scene of murder.
“Do you hear it too?” Luca asked putting his hand to his ear, trying to locate from where it came.
“Yes, sounds like wailing of many people. Part of added special effects for Halloween?” she flew up and looked around, not spotting anything unusual.
“That way.” Luca stated not entirely sure of the direction, but he decided to go check it out, perhaps it came from a mega-pumpkin prepared for students that explored further. He had to cross a dense hedge by force, an easy route absent, the good news that the sound was getting louder, now they both were sure of many women crying, and his initial path didn’t deviate more than twenty degrees from the source. He entered a sea of beautiful flowers growing wildly, even without Abigail’s prompt, he knew to be a habitat of fairies. Walking to the end of the area, he saw a mini-village surrounded by trees, made of interwoven grasses, feathers, flower petals, and twigs to resemble tiny six inches in height nests, serving as dwellings for five inches tall fairies.
At the other end of the village, a young man wearing an exaggerated vampire cape and extended fangs, an outfit similar to Luca’s, stood towering over a group of diminutive ladies corralled together and from whom the crying and wailing resounded far and wide. He just put one of them down and grasped another one, Luca noticed that the one on the ground conspicuously had no wings remaining as she slumped in a fetal position a lot of her sisters were already in.
“What the fuck are you doing here?!” Luca shouted with furrowed brows, the indifferent look on the face of the guy as he briefly crossed the gazes with the confused boy before going back to his business.
“I was looking for pumpkins, but found here a free supply of fairy wings for a potion.” under the disbelieving eyes of Luca and Abigail, he stretched his arm in a practiced move and ripped off a wing of the crying fairy he held, putting it nonchalantly into his pocket.
Luca’s eyes bulged, not wanting to believe an act of such barbarism could be performed without changing the butcher’s expression. The boy looked at the hand yet again starting to stretch, eager to deprive the little lady of her second wing, his heartbeat wildly accelerating the angrier he got with each passing millisecond, each millimeter of that youth’s fingers getting closer to the innocent fairy. Under pure rage Luca’s mind fell into, his body released an exuberant amount of adrenaline, the entire world seemed to slow down and go completely silent, the boy’s vision tunneled to see less and less until a sudden full blackout of his senses.
Seeing and feeling absolutely nothing except the deafening beat of his heart pumping the blood in and out of itself with an intensity that would make an ordinary person’s bloodstream explode on the spot and an incomparable loathing for the man he met only for ten seconds in his life, the darkness before his eyes began to abate after an unknown passage of time spent in that personal state of void. He found himself looking at the ground with wide-open eyes that shone ruby red in fury, brighter and clearer than ever. He inhaled as much air as possible with each breath, feeling an urgency to deliver more oxygen into his lungs. His vision returned, other senses not far away.
A voice overpowered the incessant drumming of his heart, shouting something, pestering him to pay attention, to get his head up and look, finally won as the boy’s motor functions turned back on, his heartbeat slowing down a lot.
“Help, help!!! Anyone, please come and help, I beg you!!!” Luca turned his head up to witness a totally panicked Abigail floating in any which direction and back over the village as she hollered in a desperate fashion and a broken voice. His movement got her attention, ghost girl regained a sliver of sanity and rushed over to the boy.
“Come, you have to quickly carry that man to the school or he will bleed out!” she instructed, worried about what the consequences of this situation can be for Luca, the boy figured out from her behaviour that he wasn’t ‘blinded’ for long, otherwise she would figure out to fly away looking for help somewhere further instead of this disoriented situation.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Let the trash die.” Luca replied icily as he stood up, his angry eyes looking over where the man was before, then following the bloodstain starting from there over to under the tree around twenty meters back where he lay motionless, the tree bark all cracked and fallen off where he hit.
“Calm down, calm down! We have to save him, or you will go to jail!” Abigail had to try and persuade the boy to carry the man near some adult that knows how to stop the bleeding, but Luca ignored her completely. He went up to the one-winged fairy and sat down to pat her little head with a shaking finger. The fairies all looked at him with fear, Luca not capable at the moment of changing his frozen in cold hatred face.
“It’s okay, it’s okay…” Luca repeated like a broken record, not assuring anyone who could see his unblinking eyes filled with hate. Abigail kept shouting about possible ramifications if the guy dies on them, eventually, she made the slightly calmed Luca get up to look at the man. His arm was missing, a steady trickle of liquids gushing out of the stump, and the rest of his body had visibly broken a lot of bones. Luca found no other choice but to acknowledge that if he didn’t carry him back, there was no possibility of recovery. The disgusted boy took the ankle of his victim in his hand and started slowly dragging him in the direction of the school.
“Faster, faster, he can’t die on us!” Abigail nagged and nagged, Luca yet again had to agree with her, no matter how unwilling, and pick up the youth on his back like a sack of potatoes. The boy accelerated with each step, eventually running at the speed of which Abigail could barely keep up flying after, and that only because he was crossing difficult terrain. During the run, he thought at high speed about what to do next, what are the procedures in such cases, if he should forget about it and rip the trash apart into pieces and say screw it to the so-called justice system. Back at the field of temporary tombstones, Luca found the nearest Pukwudgie and threw the man down under his feet according to the sanest plan he could come up with in these five minutes.
“What happened to him?” weirded out by the suspicious behaviour of the boy staring at him square in the eyes with rage, the Pukwudgie asked as he cautiously bent over to check the barely breathing bloody mess on the ground.
“We met a dragon…” Abigail tried to somehow spin a tall tale but got interrupted by Luca’s cold announcement.
“I did it.” the boy simply interjected, taking the grey creature half his size in front of him aback.
“Then… Drop your wand?” the school’s guardian with a lightning-fast sleight of hands took out his sniper rifle aiming it up the boy’s nose and summoned his companions by whistling in a peculiar way as he waited for Luca to completely turn himself in. The boy took out his thick wand and threw it away, compliant with the process if you skip his face that literally told the Pukwudgie he may go violent on him anytime.
“Quickly, send for as many Healers as you can!” Abigail noticed the complete cessation of the slight movement performed by the mortally wounded man and promptly left looking for help to save Luca from the grim fate if he murders someone on school grounds. She also hoped to spread the truth of today’s events as far as she could, to gather support for the boy acting in a fit of emotion. A dozen or so Pukwudgies arrived quickly, the one Luca talked to relaxed and took back his gun.
“We all have potions ready, there is no rush.” the Pukwudgie took out a couple of vials and poured some of them into the mouth of the victim, some on his arm. The breathing resumed violently, the unconscious man throwing up blood on the side.
“Lock this one in the mushroom caves for now, we have to gather evidence and notify the headmaster.” he ordered two newcomers, they nodded and took Luca’s hand each, which looked funny as he seemed to take two ugly, grey children on a walk, they still in a costume of hideous monsters instead of the usual camo.
Luca never came to the side of Ilvermorny in the direction they took him to, he only knew it from hearing about the school’s self-sufficiency. It contained chicken farms, wheat fields, fruit orchards, and so on with growth accelerated by magic. They went in silence through the wooden gate in the middle of an ordinary-looking fence separating the lawn surrounding the castle and the production area, and he could confirm with his own sight this information was exactly true. A big lake in the middle of rolling hills used to the last square inch of available land to grow food unfolded as they spent ten minutes to reach a solid-looking door leading under the hill, meeting nobody on the way as the celebration was ongoing. Pukwudgie opened the door for him and invited him in, then stopped and stood guarding outside after closing it again.
Luca saw the rows of mushrooms occupying a giant, humid and warm space, some of them glowed providing the light needed to assess this. He stepped on the right side of the door and sat down leaning his back completely against the slightly moist wall, looking into the air in front with the still remaining part of anger throughout the night.