I awoke far away from where I fell unconscious. That last time that had happened, I ended up in the hospital, then in jail, so I immediately panicked as soon as my eyes opened. Fortunately, Karl was right beside me. While I groped for the handle of my sword and gasped for breath, I felt the soft touch of his tails and the gentle weight of his paws on my arm.

[“It’s alright Blade, the battle is over. You are fine, Swan is fine, everything is alright.”]

I managed to suck in a deep breath and then sat up. Just that movement made me wince. Every muscle hurt, many in ways that didn’t seem possible. My legs were sprawled out, stiff and aching, the muscles pulled taut and bruised. My arms weighed approximately a thousand pounds each, every fiber and vein stretched and sore. My heart pounded harshly in my chest, my stomach was tense and tender, my neck hurt. Even my scalp was complaining, adding yet another source of pain.

But the worst pain was internal. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Someone had reached inside me and scraped every nerve raw, flayed every neuron in my brain, and dipped everything in acid. Except the sensation was distant, like I was just remembering what it felt like when someone did that to me through a haze of time.

It was awful, in any case.

I let out a sound that could be charitably described as a groan, and then heard an annoyingly cheerful voice.

“Hey Blade, you are awake again! You were really fucking awesome, you know?”

Swan was sitting on a lump of rubble, her ridiculously deadly feather lying across her lap, surrounded by a bunch of intricately carved stone cubes and what looked like a lunchbox. She pushed it over to me. “I was starving after everything, and I didn’t do half as much as you! Even after you got knocked out, you just stood up again and kept going! So fucking tough...”

I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about, but the heavenly smell drifting from the lunch box caught my attention. My belly moaned with a fresh and very familiar sort of pain and suddenly I found myself able to move far easier. I ripped open the lid and pulled out a bowl of some kind of pasta thing. Too hungry to search for utensils, I just poured it all straight into my mouth.

It was quite possibly the best thing I had ever tasted, warm and rich and bursting with layers of flavor that all built on each other. I ripped through the rest of the box, eating and eating until it was empty.

Then I leaned back and sighed, too content to be embarrassed. Normally, I would be ashamed to behave like that, but at the moment I was too tired to care.

Swan flopped down beside me. “So, I could use a favor, but you need to promise not to laugh. And I damn well mean it, ‘kay?”

I promised, and she told me, and I tried very hard not to laugh.

“I can help you find your way home from here, sure, but I gotta ask. Why not just call your parents?”

She shrugged. “I did a few times. No one is picking up.”

Swan showed me the phone in question, an old, battered flip phone. After a moment, she added with false confidence: “It’s probably just all the magic in the air. I heard it does shitty things to cell phone networks. My friends haven’t answered, and I know they are alright”

I was too exhausted and confused by how I had gotten here to notice the terror in her eyes. Even with how distracted I was, I did manage to notice that she was nervous. I thought it was the way people got sometimes in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and dismissed it from my mind. She was my comrade, and more importantly, she was just a kid. I wasn’t going to abandon her.

Groaning with effort, I stood up and asked for her address. It was only a few blocks from where I lived, albeit in a nicer neighborhood. I had canvassed there before.

“Let’s go,” I told her.

And then off the two of us set.

At first, I moved gingerly, at the pace of a tired old man, but slowly the bar across my vision began to fill back up and the weary pain that weighed me down began to vanish.

And so we began to walk faster, then to run, and then as we made our way into Thiva proper, we took to the roofs. It was a pleasure to leap from building to building, propelled by our magic through the air, speeding along above the streets we had defended. Below I saw many people waving or raising fists to us, and I returned the gesture.

Swan was even more enthusiastic, doing cartwheels and handstands and elaborate dance moves.

Something about the past few hours itched at me as we hopped from roof to roof, but I chose to ignore it.

What I could not ignore was the damage that had been done to the city. It varied greatly. Some blocks were intact, others were ruins. Shops with shattered glass and bloody interiors stood adjacent to intact properties. It seemed random to me.

But every caved-in doorway and broken window made me wince.

Even leaving aside the devastation from the invasion, I could see the ways the city was falling apart. Roads were cracked and potholed, sidewalks had greenery shooting up through them, parks were unkempt and rusting.

I had loved this place, once.

With effort, I wrenched my eyes up from the slow-motion collapse to the people who inhabited it. Some of them - far too many of them - had been failed, and not just by me and the other Guardians. This had been going on for longer than I was alive.

And there was plenty of evidence of fresh failures. In quite a few places, I noticed familiar shapes being covered by sheets or carried out of sight. There were clusters of mourners everywhere, some glaring up at us, some looking down at the dead, some sobbing and pleading with the air.

Despite the grief on display, there was a festival atmosphere in many places. It eased something in me to see crowds singing and dancing and feasting, celebrating their survival. I heard someone drunkenly raising a toast to a “Glorious Shimmer” at one point. At another, a pickup basketball game got interrupted when the ball nearly smacked me in the face. Swan laughed at that.

I laughed along too, and tossed the ball back and promised that there were no hard feelings. Then, when they started asking for autographs, I turned and sprinted away.

Swan found that even funnier.

The many such sights made our journey far more pleasant, enough that I was beginning to relax. But there was still an itch in my head, a thought I could not ignore.

“Hey, Karl...what happened after I fell unconscious?” I asked softly, letting Swan take the lead for a few moments as we leaped across a cluster of run-down apartments.

There was a long stretch of silence.

“Karl?”

[“I will answer your questions soon, Benny. But please, trust me, this is going to be a long conversation, and not one to have right now.”]

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I subsided, for the time being, and then we made a last few jumps.

“No no no no no no!” I heard Swan cry out, and her eyes were fixed on the block we were approaching.

There were a few neat looking houses, tiny but well-kept. A few of them had been damaged during the incursion. On the street, in front of the damaged homes, were shapes I had become far too familiar with.

No one had gotten around to covering or concealing them. Their empty eyes stared up at the sky, their frozen limbs fell at odd angles, their wounds were ragged gashes of dried blood.

Unwilling to look at such blatant evidence of my failures, my eyes flicked to the mailboxes lining the street, searching for the number she had given me.

I found it. The home was a neat little building, with yellow stucco and a carefully tended garden that took up almost half the tiny front yard. Lying amidst the flowers were a pair of bodies, both with messy wounds on their torsos and faces contorted into rictuses of agony.

Immediately I stepped in front of her. “It’s ok, it’s ok Swan, don’t look, it’s ok,” I pleaded, trying to keep her from seeing, but she darted around me and rushed to them.

I hovered behind her as she wailed and swallowed the useless consolations people had given me when my parents died. I saw people staring and glared at them, the heat in my gaze enough to make them give her privacy.

Eventually, she collapsed to her knees, her transformation vanishing in a flash of light, revealing a tiny girl with red eyes and cheeks streaked with tears.

Gently, I grabbed her shoulder. “Come on kid, let’s get you out of here,” I offered, unable to think of anything better.

As I scolded myself for saying something so idiotic and callous, she nodded. I scooped her up as carefully as I could and turned back to the roofs. There was only one place I could think of to take her.

She cried as I carried her, shivering against me, and I gritted my teeth. I dismissed my pain. It was just sympathetic. She was the one who was hurting.

The journey to my apartment building was brief. Roof tiles cracked under my feet as I sprinted across them while Swan (I couldn’t think of anything better to call her) sobbed miserably. I leaped down into an alley behind my building.

I was not going to enter my apartment in my Guardian form, but I wasn’t actually certain how to de-transform. Karl had done it for me before, but while I had guided Swan across town I had begun thinking I should learn how to do it myself.

But not now. It wasn’t the right time...

So instead I called upon him and he answered, sounding as cool and kind as ever. I could feel his - or maybe my - magic flexing around me, unweaving the jacket and pants and mask, turning them into motes of crimson and silver light that drifted up into the sky. The jewels that had adorned my outfit simply vanished. I stood there in my uniform, except far neater than I had ever worn in.

There were even creases on my jeans.

Swan had suddenly gotten a lot heavier, but I still managed to hold her up, even if it made my arms burn, and she had shown no signs of wanting to get down.

I began to walk out of the alley and towards my apartment, suddenly uncertain if this was a good idea. I knew she had friends, maybe I should see if she wanted to stay with them? I had simply picked my home because it was the first thing I thought of, but I hadn’t asked her what she wanted. Would she even be comfortable? Was I doing the right thing? Was this even legal?

Despite my doubts I kept walking.

The building super was sitting just inside the door, holding a shotgun. He looked exhausted, and had a bloody bandage on one arm. That didn’t stop him from smirking when he saw me.

I suspected he was about to say something very stupid, but then his eyes met mine. My gaze burned, and he shut his mouth and turned outside. “Streets aren’t really safe,” he commented.

I didn’t bother with a response.

I carried Swan up three flights of stairs and halfway through a hall. I had to let her down to fumble with my keys. She still clung to me, although her tears had slowed, along with her breathing.

My door swung open, revealing home sweet home, consisting of a grand total of three rooms. My tiny, chilly bedroom was concealed behind the flimsy chipboard door, but the rest was wide open to us.

The carpet was an ugly gray, the color of a cat’s hairball. It ended abruptly at a few rows of greasy tile and the two chipped counters that made up my kitchen. The walls were a flat beige, concealed by whatever posters and pictures I could scrounge up. The living room/kitchen was reasonably sized for someone who lived alone, and the moderately comfortable couch had been a gift from a friend. The only reason I didn’t use it as a bed was that it was too short for me.

But it was plenty long for Swan. Gently, I lowered her down onto it. She seemed barely aware of the world around her, but I thought she mumbled something like “don’t go” as I pried her arms from around my neck.

I sat down next to her, leaning against the thick arms of the couch. There was nothing else I could do.

Karl appeared next to me, hunching down, tails still.

[“She’s perfectly healthy, but she has had a traumatic and exhausting experience. She will sleep for some time,”] he told me.

I nodded and closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep too, but there were things that were far more important.

“Do you remember what I asked you earlier? About child soldiers? She can’t be more than fourteen. Why the hell did you conscript her into a war like this?”

[“She would not have been Contracted under any reasonable circumstance. It was the only way to save her life, or her Familiar would not have intervened. We are not permitted to act on our own. We identify suitable candidates, we offer them the opportunity to become Guardians, and we support our Guardians. Nothing less and nothing more. I have seen the shows you watch. You may consider our concerns anomalous to the Prime Directive.”]

“Even when it gets people killed? Or forces children into nightmares?”

I was struggling to keep my voice low so I wouldn’t wake Swan. It came out like an angry tea kettle.

[“I am not trying to defend the events that led to her Contract. It was a failure on our part, that we did not expect the Hungry Things to invade so soon, that we did not have adequate preparations. But we did not seek to force her. Only in the last defense of her life did we act.”]

I crossed my arms and stared levelly at him. He was perfectly still, tails fanned out, eyes unblinking. His arguments made sense. They were entirely rational. I could lay out the alternatives, picturing how they would go. Karl and his buddies and their alien creators could have parked a fleet in the solar system, started establishing defense against the invaders. They would need to work with existing governments, or overthrow them and establish new ones. That would go badly.

Or they could simply give people all the power they had, give us full access to the equipment in their Vaults, teach us any magic we asked for. That would go worse.

They needed limits, and filters, and...

“Fine. You messed up, now you have a kid in your army. How are you going to stop this happening in the future? And what’s going to happen to Swan?”

[“More potential Contractees are being found as we speak. Hopefully, there will be enough Guardians not to need any such desperate measures in the future, although reaching such numbers will take time. As for Swan Victorious...there are systems in your world to take care of orphaned children. Her Familiar will help and support her no matter what, and her power will remain hers. She does not need to fight, or even to use her gifts for others. She is as free from obligation as she was this morning.”]

“Power once given cannot be revoked, right?”

I leaned back and thought about it.

If they weren’t going to force her to fight, then a simple solution presented itself. I would need to speak with Swan once she woke up. But there was one final thing to say.

“Could you get her familiar to show itself to me, please? I have something that needs to be said to both of you.”

Next to Karl, a tiny and very strange animal appeared. It was bright white, with black feather markings and green stars scattered across its body. It had beady green eyes and a tiny mouth set on a wide face. Two cat ears rose from its head, and from each ear hung long tail-things that started white and faded to green.

[“My name is Wings. I am the Familiar of Magical Guardian Swan Victorious. Pleased to meet you,”] it said in a musical voice.

The corners of my mouth turned up and my lips pulled back. The expression did not resemble a smile.

“I have heard your arguments, and understand them. I understand your reasoning, your limits, your logic. But I promise you both, if kids keep getting contracted, or if you try and push Swan into fighting, I don’t care that you just ghosts in our heads, I will find a way to fucking end you!”

Swan shifted in her sleep and let out a soft cry. I clapped a hand over my mouth, and both Wings and Karl vanished. She shifted, but subsided, and I let out a breath.

I knew there was more I needed to say. I needed to ask about why I was chosen, what my limits were, who the other Guardians are, how I fell asleep at the mall but woke up halfway across the city. But just the brief exchange I already had exhausted me, and I seized on any excuse I could find like it was a life preserver in stormy waters.

And the universe saw fit to provide me with a lifeboat in the form of a knock at the door.