“So how are you feeling, dear?”  Ignoring Le’Nara, Lady Morningstar walked over and gently felt Michael’s forehead as she lightly probed him with her magic.

“Like I got ran over by a semi,” Michael muttered, “and it pushed by stomach up through the roof of my mouth.  I’m starving!”

“A semi what?” Cocking an eyebrow, Lady Morningstar stared at Michael for a moment in concern.

“It’s… umm…”  How the hell was he supposed to explain what a semi was?!  These people had never experienced Earth like he had!  “Umm….”  As he struggled to come up with something to say, his mother stared at him, eyebrow starting to twitch at his delay.

“It’s a secret project I was working on back at the other school,” Michael suddenly lied.  “I had this great idea which might revolutionize merchant travel as we know it!”

“Oh really?”  Leaning to the side, Le’Nara was now the one staring at him.  “Tell me this great idea.  We are partners after all!”

“Umm…  Well, it’s still in development,” Michael stalled.

“That’s okay,” Le’Nara insisted.  Even his mother sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for him to elaborate.  “If you’re fall enough along with the project to have a name for it, you can tell us about it,” Le’Nara insisted.

“Fine.”  Slumping his shoulders in defeat, Michael wracked his brain on what to say.  Stupid other-worldly knowledge!  All it ever did was be a pain in his ass!  Taking a deep breath, he decided to just make something up as he went, and hope it all turned out okay.

“What’s the biggest problem with merchants losing money?”  Michael asked all at once.

“Bandits.” Le’Nara answered, his mother nodding her agreement.

Crap!  Alarm bells went off in Michael’s head, but he had to press on anyway.  Stupid bandits!  “Nope.  It’s sitting around doing nothing, once they get to town,” Michael insisted.

“That’s not right,” Le’Nara corrected, frowning.  “Merchants do a lot of work when they reach towns.  Buying, selling, trading.  Really, that’s when they’re the busiest!”

God dammit!  Why did she have to be an expert on such matters!  “Now wait a moment.  Quit interrupting or I’ll have mother numb your mouth like you did mine!”  Blinking, Michael suddenly realized that his wasn’t all numb anymore and he was talking just fine.

“I fixed you,” his mother told him, smiling slightly at his puzzled expression.  “Now, go on dear.  You were saying?”

“The biggest problem,” Michael went on, “is the time a merchant has to spend loading and unloading goods from their wagon.  They could bring a whole load of turnips in town, and it’d take them all day long to unload them, and then another day to load potatoes and head back out to sell them.”

“Those are haulers, not technically merchants,” Le’Nara corrected.

“My idea was to build semi-wagons,” Michael boasted, finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  “Image this!”  Sitting upright, he waved his hands majestically and shaped a little chaos magic to make a shimmering illusion in the air.  “A hauler”, he made certain the emphasis the proper word, “comes into town with one wagon.”  His magic painted an image of an old man riding a strange looking wagon into town.

“He drives to the warehouse where the turnips are going to be stored and redistributed from.” The illusion showed the old man riding through town and stopping at a large warehouse.  “So he hops down, walks around back, unhooks his wagon, and then pulls over and hooks to another one already loaded with the turnips.”  The illusion started to illustrate his point, until Le’Nara waved a hand through it.

“Stupid Michael idea,” she told his mother.  “You’ve kept him sheltered too long from the real world!  Only an idiot would think something like that would work.”

“Wha…  Why?”  Michael stuttered a few times, turning to pout at her.

“The horses,” Le’Nara explained.  “Even if you could just hook up one wagon to another, the hauler couldn’t just turn around and leave again with the new wagon.  His horses need time to rest before going back out.  Any idiot who’s ever been around a hauler’s wagon knows that.”

“Well fine!”  Snorting, Michael leaned back against her chest and crossed his arms pouting.  “I’ll sort something out.  I told you it was a work in progress!”

“So am I going to die?”  Suddenly changing the subject, he turned to stare up at his mother.

“No dear.”  The corners of her mouth twitched furiously up and down as she tried to resist the urge to smirk, and her eyes danced merrily, filled to the brim with amusement.  “You’ve already did that.  Remember?”

“So why do I still feel so crappy?”  Michael pouted, looking up at her with wide, puppy-dog eyes.  “And will I ever get any food?  Or am I going to starve to death after coming back from death?”

“You’re not going to starve,” Lady Morningstar assured him, half chuckling.  “Crystal is waiting for some fresh soup and light food to be fixed for you in the kitchens. She’ll be along in just a few short moments.”

“As to your feeling crappy, as you so elegantly put it,” she shrugged. “That’s simply from where I skinned the first few layers off your soul.”

“You skinned my soul?!”  Blinking in shock, Michael stared wide-eyed at his mother, his hunger momentarily forgotten.  “How?  Why?  Isn’t that a no-no?”

“Like you’re one to talk,” she laughed!

“Well….”  Blushing slightly, Michael lowed his head and didn’t say anything more.

Reaching over, his mother gently patted him on the top of his head, ruffling his hair lightly in the process.  “There’s a large difference in what I did and what you did,” she assured him.  “What I did was much more similar to what you did with the sword Le’Nara left back at her home.  As if she thought I wouldn’t notice it, or something.”  Lady Morningstar half snorted, giving off a ‘who does she think I am’ type feeling.

“I can tell you used a small portion of your own soul and placed it elsewhere,” Lady Morningstar informed him, gently lifting his head so he’d look at her again.  “I don’t know exactly why, since that item isn’t here, but I trust if you did it, it was for a good reason.”

“It was,” Michael assured her softly.

His mother simply nodded, asked no questions, and accepted him at his word.  “I did something similar,” she informed him, waving her hand and working a little magic.  Several large metal bands appeared out of nowhere, falling from thin air to clank and bounce on the bed.

“Your soul’s in those,” she informed him, pointing down to the shackles.

“Why?”  Reaching down, Michael picked up one of the plain steel bands and examined it in his hands.  Cool and smooth, the wrist shackle tingled slightly to his touch, allowing him to sense a part of his own essence in it.

“Two reasons,” his mother assured him.  “First is so the girl Crystal won’t go crazy and self-destruct.”

“Crystal?  Crazy?”  Dropping the shackle, Michael turned his whole attention back to his mother again.

“She might,” Lady Morningstar confirmed.  “You might as well, though I think the risk is quite small.  As a child of mine, you have a thick, strong soul.  I don’t think you’ll crack or break at all.”

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“But Crystal will?  Why?” Concern was obvious on Michael’s face as he wracked his brain to try and imagine what the problem might be.

“Her soul was merged with yours,” his mother reminded softly, waving a hard to push the door shut to the room.  “In case she comes back while we’re talking,” she explained.

Changing the subject, she suddenly asked, “Where do you think angels and devils come from?”

“The heavens or hells?”  Michael answered, somehow not thinking that was what she was looking for.

“They do,” she agreed, smiling slightly and patting him on the forehead again.  “But what process creates them?”

Glancing over at Le’Nara, who just shrugged in return at him, Michael shrugged back at her.  “No idea,” he admitted.

“When a human dies, their soul travels to the heavens or the hells,” Lady Morningstar explained, “as judged appropriate by the Goddess of Death.  Dark souls to hell, bright souls to heaven.  

“Once in the hells, the souls are tormented and fight with each other, where eventually one soul will consume the other.  This is the birth of an imp.”  In full lecture mode now, Lady Morningstar was sitting firmly upright and using her ‘this is how it is’ teaching voice.  “The strongest soul becomes the heart of the imp; the weaker soul becomes the flesh.”

“Driven by hunger, the young demonling seeks out other souls and other imps to consume – though at some risk to itself.  Should a demon ever feast upon a soul stronger than its core, that soul may eventually come to possess the body and take control.  It’s why many demons will kill knights or other strong-willed individuals, but not consume their spirit.  The strongest spirt inside a demon is the heart of that demon, and the one in control of the rest which form its body.

“Angels work the same way,” Lady Morningstar told them, waving her hand slightly back and forth, “though not quite. They tend to find others who follow the same beliefs as them, and then they work together in harmony without all the gnashing, biting, and constant struggle for dominance.”

“What’s all this got to do with Crystal?” Michael interrupted, as he tried to follow along, but failed to see the relevance.

“I’m getting there, dear.”  Laughing, Lady Morningstar gently patted him on the head again.

“Sometimes, with people, two souls are so closely matched, or love each other so greatly, they begin the process of merging even before death.  These spirits are called ‘truly married’, though sex has nothing to do with it.  Two men, two women, a man and woman – hell, even all six of them if their spirits are strong enough and committed enough – can reach out and begin to merge even before they die.”

Michael’s eyes opened wide as he was beginning to make the connection.  “That’s what I did to me and Crystal?  To Mongo and Tiffany?”  

“It is,” his mother confirmed, nodding her head in agreement.  “It’s truly a forbidden practice – such eternal manipulation of a soul, corrupting the natural development and growth of one – so I wouldn’t tell a lot of people what you did.  It’s also forbidden to undo such a bond once it gets formed, no matter how it came to be.

Lady Morningstar explained, slowly and enunciating each word separate so they couldn’t be misunderstood, “You and Crystal were growing together into a single being.  Your flesh had been destroyed and your soul had fled into her body.  The two of you were merging and becoming a singular being – a living spiritual being.  The process would’ve obliterated your memories, erased who the two of you were before, and left only a single confused being behind – uncertain who it was, how it came to be, or what its purpose might have been.”

“Living flesh and dead souls don’t mingle together well, even in the best of circumstances,” she warned sternly.  “And this wasn’t the best of circumstances to begin with.  Your souls hadn’t reached out to each other willingly, making a natural connection over time.  You’d forced that bond with your magic, and the repercussions of that forcing were rippling between your souls as they tried to merge and alter her body to make it more angel-monic.”

Le’Nara was the one who interrupted, asking, “Angel-monic?”

“I’m not entirely certain what to call what she was becoming,” Lady Morningstar admitted.  “Without the influence of the heavens, she wouldn’t have become an angel.  Without the influence of the hells, she wouldn’t have become a demon.  The only difference between the two is the type of soul which forms the core of them, and the realm upon which they were created, you know,” she elaborated.  “There are such things as Hell’s Angels, which are nothing more than demons born in the hells, which last control of their core to a powerful, bright spirit.  Fallen Angels are the same – nothing more than an angel which was possessed and lost the battle for its essence to a dark spirit.”

“But Crystal,” she mused, lost in her own thoughts for a moment, “Crystal was being born here, without either angelic or demonic influence shaping her growth.  I really don’t know what the two of you would’ve became.”

“So how’s she going to go insane?”  Michael interrupted.  Worried, he wanted to make certain not to stray too far off topic with just speculation.

“She had shared part of her soul with you,” his mother explained.  “She was merging souls with you, and then suddenly – even though it’s completely forbidden and we did our best to stop it – a foul creature of chaos ripped the two of you apart.”  She paused for a moment to half wink at Le’Nara, who nodded back in understanding – it wasn’t their fault what the fairy had done!

“Souls torn, ripped, shredded, and such become quite unstable,” Lady Morningstar explained after a moment, all serious business once again.  “It’s truly hard to predict how they’ll react or what might happen with them.  The young lady might be strong enough to bounce back and be fine.  She might start to crack like glass on a hot day and her soul might simply shatter and self-destruct.  The loneliness of not having your soul with hers might drive her over the edge and make her murder everyone in town.  It’s impossible to predict what the future holds for her.”

“And how the hell are these shackles going to help?”  Michael asked, picking one up and staring at it hopelessly.

“The shackles won’t,” Lady Morningstar declared point-blank.  “Your soul inside them, however, will.  Put those on the young lady and you can maintain a similar connection through them with her, without actually having to share spirits.  It’ll allow you both to naturally grow together…”

“… only if it’s meant to be,” Le’Nara interrupted suddenly, half pouting.

“Only if it’s meant to be,” his mother agreed.

“So why are there two sets of shackles?”  Looking down at them, Michael frowned slightly to himself.  Surely he wasn’t expected to wear one, since it was his soul in them, and he couldn’t imagine Le’Nara ever in a set of shackles.”

“That, my dear boy,” Lady Morningstar said with a laugh, “we’ll get to after you eat.”  Stretching, she eased up, walked over, and opened the door.  “Come on in my Lady Crystal.  Michael has something for you.”  

Walking out, her light laughter echoed down the hall behind her.