Yand-Una had used a circle and a pentagram to force the demon inside the circle. The circle used Ssadassar’s name to control it further, weakening it. It would hold the demon in so long as the power from the user who activated it still is connected.
A demon would normally be held by a simple circle in the normal world, but in the spirit world, it requires vastly more power and preparation. Fortunately, the demon wasn’t so powerful, magically speaking, and so it only took as much.
We walked away from the battlefield, and hundreds of meters, maybe kilometers away, the circle would become weak enough for the demon to start pulling itself out of its improvised tomb. Soon after, the demon will be able to break the circle apart. By the time it does – or did – we’d be safe from it.
Misa didn’t take the whole ordeal well when it was over.
‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Ed! I’m sorry!’ She had cried.
When I heard her apologize to me, I stopped laughing. My adrenaline subsided and the feeling of relief that started my laughter went away. I didn’t know how to react to it. All I did was hug her between my arms. She felt like she was my daughter.
In those few seconds, I thought of my life with Martin, I thought of having a little girl for a daughter. I imagined her holding my and Martin’s hands as we walk through the streets. I imagined her crying on her bed, holding on to me. She had the same face as Misa.
‘Why did you come back for me?’ I had asked her.
Between tears and sobs, she answered: ‘I had to. I could leave you for dead. I just couldn’t stand leaving someone in need of help. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to go. I had to help you – someway, somehow. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it.’
‘You haven’t changed, have you?’
‘What?’
‘Your friend? I know about her. I know how valiant you are.’
‘How do you know about that?’
I smiled and pat her head in reassurance. ‘Magic.’
Misa is staying close to Yand-Una, as we agreed, but she’s walking with her head down. She blames herself for putting everyone at risk and for hurting me when she was being manipulated. There’s no way for me to tell her she was indeed the cause of that problem, had she kept walking nothing bad would’ve happened. I could’ve found a way to stop the demon long enough.
But when I think about what would’ve happened to me, I’m not so sure.
We were lucky we managed to stop the demon, but I was lucky too we did. Maybe the demon would’ve turned around to kill me the moment it came out of those rocks. Maybe it would’ve gone hunting me before going back to Misa. Had it seen me as an obstacle right after, I would’ve been dead for sure.
I ought to thank Misa, but now wasn’t the time; she isn’t in the right state of mind.
“So,” began Yand-Una, “this is why you’re in trouble.”
I had nothing to say to that. I understood half of what she meant, but I didn’t know what point she wanted to get across.
“You’re reckless. Your recklessness brought you to strike a deal with a vampire and turned into conflict. You went to the duel because otherwise you’d lose your power and there would be no way for you to defend yourself.”
“It was a torviela,” I answered.
My answer must have been unsatisfactory for her. She was my warden, trying to reign a loose cannon who had somehow escaped retribution. There must have been resentment for being stuck with me, and now that she realized I wasn’t dangerous so much as I was pathetic, she must be feeling pitiful.
“Can’t believe I’m stuck watching over someone like you. They should’ve removed your power.”
Maybe, I thought. That could’ve been a way to end things quickly.
I looked at Misa, she was staring down, but she seemed slightly different. The conversation between the two must have sparked some curiosity. Who knows what she’d think of it without more information on what happened in the Cupula.
“If you stick to me and do what you say, you might get out of this with just a slap on the wrist.”
“Thanks,” I said. But I had no idea what I meant with it. I wasn’t exactly thankful, even if she had offered that advice for my sake. It just seemed like the polite thing to do.
After my warden’s warning disguised as goodwill, the rest of the walk was mostly silent, interrupted only by questions and exclamations of surprise by Misa. She acted like a child discovering something new. With every excited word, she smiled, but would instantly retracted to her usual self and apologized for bothering. We answered her queries, but she would only respond with a shy ‘thank you’ and remain silent before the next outburst.
Between these interruptions, I had time to think about what we were about to do. One thing was saying we were simply going to arrive, talk, and resolve our issues, another would be actually doing that and knowing how to do it.
Dealing with the Fay was a task on its own that demanded more than just sweet-talking. The only reason dealing with Galavant was easy was that he was summoned and had very little leeway. Most likely, Isadal either knew about us coming and had prepared for us, or knew beforehand that we were going to visit him when he gave the order to Caelv to follow and maybe force Jaser into his previous job. The Fay are cunning creatures; they scheme and manipulate mortals in ways we would not consider. Sometimes, the things they do are masked in layers of possibilities, deep enough to let you lose focus on the real meaning behind them.
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Younger Fay tend to be more about action, they are more like forces of nature. With little experience, young faeries act on impulse. They are like children or even teenagers, lacking the sense of depth and foreshadowing their adult and elder Faery have. The older they are, the more powerful and the more complex they become.
The most ancient faeries have existed for such a long time that their existences cannot be separated from the true forces of magic and nature. Their power so intertwined and their mind so abstract, that they could be an entity of their own. It would be hard to separate the Queens of Summer and Winter from actual summer and winter and the phenomena that come with them: the snow, the rain, the heat, and the cold. Even the blooming of flowers and the deciduousness of leaves. Who are we to say that the migration of animals is their will?
Whatever Fay are, they may be as simple as elves that flutter in the forests, succumbing to their nature, to the most complex and unknowable ancient ones how may be the very nature of life, the world, and the universe.
But those are mysteries we will never be able to know; the answers to our questions can only be answered by the beings themselves, and they don’t take kindly to strangers.
And so, we find ourselves at the foot of the regional jurisdiction of the Rain, stylized in the form of a Victorian palace but with modern furniture and arrangement.
Faery may be the forces of nature, but civilization is a new force of change that has shaken and modify nature as well. As much as they dislike accepting it, they know that civilization is a force that has irredeemably changed them to their core. It is now impossible to separate nature and the world from civilization, and thus, it is impossible to remove the radera and human nature in themselves. Their very image has been modified by our minds and eyes.
Sufficed to say, the Fay do not like radera and humans one bit, but they have found themselves needing us.
We walked directly into their embassy, as I wanted to call it. In it, several Faery walked and sat absent-mindedly. When they saw us pass by, they turned to look at us, but they did not say anything or acted in any way that made me think they were displeased. Maybe that was more alarming than if they had.
A sense of urgency overwhelmed me when I strode through the halls. I needed to think of something before meeting the elder Fay.
I had already asked for a favor from another faery, Galavant. When I come to ask Isadal to stop what he’s doing to the others, or even just my nephew, I may have to do something for them too. Galavant has yet to tell me what he wants, but Isadal will likely want something from me right away.
I walked close to Yand-Una and whispered to her: “I need to talk to you.”
She turned to see me, and she looked no more surprised than a dead cat, with her dead-pan face, I realized she had expected this.
“No plan?” she asked after pulling me away into a place that seemed the furthest from any fay. Misa was close enough to hear us, but she tried acting like she wasn’t.
“I tried thinking of something, but…”
“What are you here for?”
“To make Isadal leave my nephew alone.”
“But you don’t want to make a mistake and strike an unfavorable deal.”
“I need to find a way to convince him that anything he has come up with is not fit for my offer.”
“Easier said than done. Faeries already have everything planned.” She paused but continued after realizing that I had nothing to say. “And you have nothing planned.”
“I’ll think about it as it goes…” I tried sounding as confident as I could. “But can you still give me a hand?”
“I’m here to help the girl,” she said almost emotionless.
“What about the other people that are being hurt by Isadal?”
“It’s outside of my reach. I’m an important chess piece, I can’t simply throw myself out for a few people when I could be affecting more.”
“Then use me.”
Yand-Una’s face twisted after I said that. She shook her head, displeased, and walked a step forward to look me straight in the eye. The distance between our faces shortened to only a few centimeters and our pupils locked on each other. There was a moment of a pull, before I moved my eyes to the bridge of her nose. That was her way of warning me.
“This is why you—”
Her scolding was interrupted by the main doors to a hall opening up. From it, a radera stepped out. Between their alien face and the lack of facial coloring, who knew what they were feeling. None of us three could tell from a single glance whether they were angry, but the way they pushed the doors open seemed to say they were at least frustrated.
The attire they wore was slightly uncommon for a radera. They usually wore something similar to twenty-first-century clothing, but this individual was wearing something that looked like a shall that was longer from one side, over a white shirt, and a skirt that was cut short on the opposite side of the shall. The shall was gray and the skirt was black. The combination of colors was a clear sign of an ordained Knight of Artar’ey, a hadtherad on the same rank as Yand-Una.
They looked at us as they walked close by. Yand-Una greeted them.
“Knight,” she simply addressed.
“Wizards,” they responded.
“Yand-Una Grace, Senior Wizard of the Cabal,” she introduced herself.
“Raykhetay’a Shkadaur, Knight Hadtherad of Artar’ey,” they responded.
“This is an official Wizzard, Avarez Edwhite,” she introduced me as well.
“Avarez?!” they exclaimed surprised, and their face turned red. “You…” Then suddenly their face turned blue.
I’ve been friends with Tedet for long enough to figure out that this person was no longer friendly. They did not show animosity, but their blue face was enough to tell me that they were holding back their burning anger from exploding.
“You, Edwhite, you,” they repeated as if wanting to say more but couldn’t.
I took a step back and found Yand-Una stepping aside to look at my reaction.
“You have idea what you cause, daxk eitsukyet!” Shkadaur had just insulted me by using a word that meant something like ‘trash human.’ It was the highest form of insult to a human, and considered a slur by most radera.
The only reason I managed to understand what they had said in their thickest radera pronunciation was thanks to Tedet instructing me in learning them. I knew most of the slurs and insults in radera.
“You and your hokien, Galieta,” they exclaimed with another insult for Tedet, calling him the equivalent of a thrall, a mindless and dirty follower of humans.
It was, clear as day, that this person did not harbor any respect for humans and neither for those radera that accepted us.
“You will pay for what you cause. Are you happy you have guardian dog with you, Avarez? Your head will roll if you don’t.”
Even though I was a little scared, I was also amused by their English. They would’ve been far more menacing if they knew more.
Yand-Una took a step forward and looked down at Ray.
“I’m his warden,” she warned them, masking it as an explanation. “I’m guarding him so he doesn’t cause more trouble than he had already caused. But I won’t let you do anything to him under my guard. You don’t get to choose when he dies, hadtherad.”
“Watch him, warden. Watch him.”
Shkadaur stepped away, but without giving one final glance at me and then at Misa, who quickly hid behind me.
The hadtherad disappeared behind the main door of the building and I sighed in relief.
“My hero,” I joked.
Yand-Una grimaced.
“Thanks for defending me. He said some mean things there. I mean it.”
“I’m only your warden, Avarez. I need to keep you alive for now.”
I scratched my head and whispered another thanks.
“But I hope this worked as a lesson for you. Do you understand, now, the magnitude of the consequences of your actions? Even the Knights are being pushed to a corner due to your involvement. They want you dead for it.”
Vampires. Torviela. Faery. Demons. Tedet’s girlfriend. My fellow wizards of the Cabal, as well. And now the Knights.
“Well, aren’t I popular,” I said and smiled wryly.
None of us laughed.