Flower takes a few steps back and is now starting to panic.
“I’m sorry!” she says. “I’ve never really been accepted into a group before. I have no idea what you’re supposed to say in these situations!”
“It’s okay, Flower,” Kate says. “You don’t need to say anything.”
“Oh,” Flower says, as she starts to calm down. “Well, that’s a relief!”
Instead of jumping on the welcome wagon like everyone else, I decide to keep my silence for now and see how things turn out. Daren, who also seems to be in no hurry to rush towards Flower, grabs me by the shoulder and whispers in my ear:
“I don’t trust that banshee, Barry,” he says. “The girl seems nice, but that’s not a good enough reason to assume the same about the evil spirit she’s harboring inside her body. Try to keep your guard up around her.”
Flower is now approaching us, and starts to address Daren.
“I’m sorry, I still didn’t get your name…” she tells him.
“Daren,” he says. “The name’s Daren.”
“You don’t really like me very much, do you, Daren?” the girl asks, with a concerned tone.
“I like you just fine,” he says. “It’s the banshee I’m not very fond of.”
“Oh, lighten up, Daren!” Hadrik says. “What do you think she’s going to do? Betray us all and join the ogres once we get to their stronghold?”
“Actually, that’s exactly what I’m worried about,” Daren says.
“I think I’m starting to understand why Petal doesn’t want to talk to you guys…” Flower says.
“Wait, aren’t you going to ask me my name?” I ask her.
“Oh, no, I already got your name, Barry!” Flower says. “Yours is pretty easy to remember!”
“You can say that again!” Hadrik says, with a grin. “It’s probably also the reason why you can’t throw a rock without hitting at least three Barrys in the Western Continent.”
He then starts laughing loudly, as he usually does.
“Is Barry a common name on the other continents?” Flower asks me.
“Yeah, I’ve met at least two dozen Barrys in my lifetime, and I don’t really socialize much,” I tell her.
“Well, to be fair,” Hadrik says, “my name is also pretty common on the Northern Continent. Especially for giants like myself.”
“You’re a giant?” Flower asks, shocked. “Wow… I guess you really must have been the black sheep of your family, huh?”
Hadrik laughs.
“You’re not completely wrong there, little girl,” he says, “but my family’s opinion of me had nothing to do with my size, I’m afraid. The only reason I’m this small right now is because I’ve magically shapeshifted myself into a dwarf. I assure you that my height is well above average among my peers!”
“I’ve always meant to ask,” Rose says. “Why did you choose to shapeshift yourself into a dwarf and not a human? Wouldn’t it have been easier to fight if you’d kept your body proportions at least somewhat similar to your original form?”
“Remember how I said that my friends call me ‘the dwarf’?” Hadrik asks. “Well, that’s because I spend most of my time drinking with dwarves from the Northern Continent, and because I’m shapeshifting into one more often than not. Given that I’ve picked up their accent and mannerism in the many years I’ve spent in their taverns, I thought it would raise less suspicion if I just came disguised as a dwarf, instead of a human. Plus, I’ve always enjoyed fighting with a handicap, so that’s also a bonus!”
He laughs again.
“If I may ask,” Kate says, as she turns to Flower, “how exactly did you and Petal come to share the same body? I’ve never heard of something like this happening before.”
“Oh, Petal told me that our souls fused together during her awakening, twenty years ago,” Flower says. “I don’t really know the specifics of soul fusion, though. You’ll have to ask Petal about that.”
“I’m so sorry about what happened…” Rose tells her. “It must have been a terrible ordeal for a child to go through…”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong!” Flower says. “The day Petal awakened was the happiest day of my life! At long last, I had someone here with me, to share my world with! You cannot possibly imagine the joy I felt when I realized that I no longer had to live my life alone inside of my own mind!”
“Live inside your own mind?” I say. “You mean to say that you space out a lot?”
“No!” Flower shouts. “I mean that I’m literally living inside my own mind, and I’ve been doing so ever since I was born! Why doesn’t anyone ever believe me?”
“I believe you, Flower,” Kate says.
“You do?…” the girl asks.
“Yes, because you are not the first person to tell me of this,” Kate says. “A friend of mine, called—”
Kate pauses a bit, before she begins to speak again.
“A friend of mine, called Diane, was in the same situation as you, and she wasn’t the only one. Many of the orphans from the Beacon of Hope were like this. The lessathi called them ethereals. People who identify with their souls, instead of their bodies.”
“Their souls?” Rose asks.
“Yes,” Kate says. “Most people don’t even know that they have a soul, because they only use their five senses to explore the world around them. However, the soul, which stores a person’s memory and the very essence of their being, is actually being kept on the ethereal plane, in a pocket universe that is usually referred to as their mind. While the human brain facilitates the interaction between the soul and the body, it is not the sole actor in the creation of an individual’s personality, as most scholars would have you believe. After a person dies, in the same way that their body decomposes and eventually becomes one with the earth, the person’s soul also decomposes into ethereal matter and eventually becomes one with the ethereal plane once more.”
“Hey, that’s not what they taught me in giant school!” Hadrik says. “As far as I know, once we die, our spirits are all supposed to go to the afterlife of whatever god we worshipped during our lives on this plane!”
“Believe what you will,” Kate tells him. “I am merely reciting texts from old lessathi books that I was allowed to read during my time at the Beacon. Or at least the books that they were kind enough to have translated in the Common language. Getting back to the subject at hand, the ethereals are different from other humans, because they experience life from the perspective of their souls, instead of their bodies. Imagine living your whole life inside a giant puppet, unable to get out, forced to use it every time you need to interact with a person from the outside world.”
“I sometimes pretend that I use invisible strings to control my body!” Flower says. “It makes life in here a little more bearable.”
“Most children will instinctively realize that something is different about ethereals,” Kate continues, “so they will usually isolate them from a very young age and not accept them in their groups. Being left alone both in their mind and in the outside world, ethereals are forced to find their own ways to cope with their situation. Some of them will simply start shutting the whole world out, and isolate themselves even further. Others will make titanic efforts to integrate themselves in society, but the social awkwardness that they gained from years of isolation will always stand in their way. Living their lives alone in their own minds also causes many ethereals to develop eccentric personalities and to fixate on a hobby they like until they become exceptionally skilled at it. Diane used to love tinkering with complex devices for hours on end. Flower, I assume that your chosen hobby would be acrobacy?”
“Oh, yes!” Flower says. “I absolutely love it! I used to be in a circus when I was little, and since then there’s rarely been a day when I’ve neglected to train my acrobatic skills!”
“While your acrobatic skills may be noteworthy,” Kate says, “they are by far eclipsed by your natural affinity for magic. Do you know why that is?”
; “I’m not sure… Petal always told me that I am learning magic at a much faster rate than should be humanly possible. Is this because I’m an ethereal too?”
“Yes!” Kate says. “The ethereal plane is closer in nature to the magical plane than the earthen plane is. For this reason, your unique perspective allows you to understand magic much more naturally than the rest of us. Being an ethereal does not grant you magical powers upon birth, but those that are also born as mages are fated to become extremely powerful. This is why the lessathi from the Beacon of Hope made it their mission to capture as many ethereal orphans as possible, in the hopes that their experiments would have a greater chance of success. My friend Diane and her brother were both ethereals, and they turned out to be quite the prodigies.”
“I think I’m finally starting to understand why Petal was so surprised to find me inside my own mind when she first awakened,” Flower says.
“If I were to venture a guess,” Kate says, “I’d say that your unexpected fusion with the banshee’s soul also came as a result of your rather unique circumstances. Normally, a banshee would find the soul defenseless when she invades her host’s mind, but you must have been waiting for her, armed and ready. Given that you had the terrain advantage, she had no choice but to settle for a compromise.”
Flower gasps loudly, all of a sudden.
“Oh no, I just realized something!” she says. “The Beacon you spoke of… and the experiments…”
She pauses.
“Are you an artificial mage?” she asks.
“I am,” Kate says. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh gods, you must have had it so much worse than I did!” Flower says. “At least I had Petal’s experience to rely on when we were being chased down by banshee hunters. She’s taught me a lot of survival tips that have come in handy along the years. Would you like me to share some of them with you?”
“Uh, I suppose it couldn’t hurt…” Kate says.
“Great!” Flower says, as her cheerful smile returns to her face once again. “I’ll try to remember everything I know on the way to the ogre stronghold. Come on, follow me! We can talk more while we walk!”
“Ethereals, huh?” Arraka says to herself, while we start our long march towards our objective. “That’s a pretty cool sounding name. I might actually start using it myself from now on!”
We spent the next few hours following the path that Flower told us about. During this time, Daren and Hadrik started a bit of a competition to see which one of them could tell the most interesting story from their adventures, while Kate and Flower started sharing their similar life experiences with each other, which seemed to bring them a little closer together.
Once we reached the crossroads, around noon, we all stopped in our tracks, and Daren started addressing Rose, with a serious look on his face:
“Rose, I think you should take this path and head to your hometown as soon as possible,” he says. “Don’t worry about us and the collars. We’ll be fine! The sick people in your town are all waiting for you!”
“She can’t leave…” Kate says. “Remember what the leopard told us before we left? If any two of the collars get further away than three miles from each other, then all of us will start to get electrical shocks of increasing intensity surging throughout our bodies. If the collars get more than four miles away from each other, then we’ll all get killed. The lessathi were the ones who originally designed these devices, and this was a measure they took to keep their prisoners in check. Rose, I’m so sorry… I did not know it would come to this. I should have tried to stop you when you offered to come with me yesterday. This is all my fault…”
“Kate, you had no way of knowing this would happen,” Rose says. “Even with this detour, I’ll still arrive ahead of my original schedule, as long as we keep following the direct route we’ve been using up until now. There’s no need to apologize for any of this. We’re friends, remember?”
Not knowing exactly how to answer, Kate simply nods to her, and we all decide to take a small break to eat some food, because we haven’t really eaten much since our imprisonment. After I finish my meal, I notice that Flower, who wasn’t particularly hungry, had decided to make use of this time to practice her fire magic, by shooting fireballs at various rocks lying on the side of the road.
“You sure do like to train, huh?” I ask Flower as I approach her.
“Oh, no, I’m not training right now,” she says. “I just like to blow stuff up!”
“How old did you say you were, again?” I say.
“I’m almost thirty!” Flower says.
“Then why are you always acting like a ten-year-old?” I say.
“Your face is acting like a ten-year-old!” Flower tells me, with a pouting expression on her face.
Unsure of how to reply to such a masterfully crafted retort, I decide to change the subject instead.
“So, uh… What did you do with Arraka?” I say. “I see you’re not wearing the amulet around your neck.”
“Oh, she said that she wanted to socialize with the group,” Flower says, “so I handed her to Hadrik for a while, since he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have an aversion towards her.”
She then points towards Hadrik, who is holding the amulet in his right hand and having a conversation with Arraka about ogres and ways to kill them.
“It’s a shame that I won’t be able to transform back into a giant when we reach the stronghold,” Hadrik says. “It’s been a while since I’ve fought some ogres, and I really miss hearing the satisfying sound of them getting squashed under my feet!”
“Well, at least you’ll get to see the looks on their dumb faces when you’ll be sending their own fireballs back towards them,” Arraka says.
“Actually,” Hadrik says, “ogres are so stupid that I doubt they’d even have the time to realize what happened before they’d get burnt to ashes.”
Both Arraka and Hadrik then start laughing loudly, at the same time.
“You know, I’m pretty good at teleportation magic,” Arraka says. “If you free me from the amulet, I could teleport a few of the ogres here, and we could have a fun little practice run before the main event. What do you say?”
“Nah,” Hadrik says, with a grin.
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Arraka says.
“I’m so glad that Arraka finally found someone she can relate to!” Flower says, looking genuinely happy for her. “I don’t really have a lot in common with her, so we don’t talk all that much, and Petal hates her guts.”
“That begs the question…” I tell her. “Why are you still keeping her with you?”
“I would like to ask the same question,” Kate says, as she approaches us. “Wouldn’t it be better to just throw her at the bottom of a lake and be done with her? I don’t really feel very comfortable travelling with her at my side. Her very aura sends chills down my spine.”
“I… can’t throw her away…” Flower says, with an uncharacteristically serious expression on her face.
“Why not?” Kate asks.
“Because she can free herself from the amulet if we leave her unsupervised. She barely has access to any magic while trapped in there, but with the little she has, she is able to generate a very small explosion as long as she is left alone to channel the spell for a few hours.”
“So what?” Kate says. “If she gets away, then it’s not your problem anymore.”
“Wrong,” Flower says. “If she gets away, she’ll become everybody’s problem.”
“She’s that powerful?” I ask her.
“Yes, she is,” Flower says. “Have you heard of the still winter?”
“Only bits and pieces,” I tell her. “I heard that it was a great war between the lessathi and the stillwaters of this continent, some six hundred years ago.”
“That’s pretty much the main gist of it,” Flower says. “What I’m betting you haven’t heard, though, is the fact that Arraka used to be the leader of these stillwaters.”
“A banshee?” Kate asks. “Leading an army of stillwaters?”
“She wasn’t alone,” Flower says. “She was fused with a stillwater guy, in the same way I am now with Petal. From what I hear, our two cases are the only two occurrences of soul fusion in our history. After what you’ve told me, Kate, I’m willing to bet that this stillwater Arraka fused with was an ethereal as well!”
“Hold on,” I tell her. “Can banshees possess male hosts? I thought they always went for women.”
“That’s because all banshees are female spirits,” Kate tells me, “and in order to minimize the risks during their awakenings, they tend to only possess female bodies so that their magical auras are closer in nature to those of their hosts. I assume that a spirit as powerful as Arraka has no need to take such precautions.”
“That’s right,” Flower says. “Arraka was so powerful, in fact, that it took the combined effort of Eleya and the Creator to put a stop to her rampage.”
“The Creator is that guy who is considered to be the founder of Varathia’s current civilization, right?” I ask her.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Flower says. “So, as I was saying, the Creator and the fox managed to defeat Arraka, but only temporarily. Even they weren’t powerful enough to kill her outright, but they managed to cast a very complex spell on her, which forbids her to possess any of the humanoid races. For the next six hundred years, she was forced to possess only animals, which are too weak for her to be able to use her full powers.”
“So, if she’s already been roaming free for six hundred years, why is she more of a problem now?” I ask her.
“Because of me,” Flower says. “The nature of my magical aura has changed drastically since my soul has fused with Petal’s, and since my aura is so different now from that of any other humans, the spell cast on Arraka cannot identify me as a human being anymore, and therefore does not prohibit her from possessing my body. Even if I were to throw Arraka somewhere far away, she’d just break out of the amulet and find her way to me sooner or later. And then it wouldn’t be all over just for me and Petal, it may well be the end for the entire continent, or maybe even the world…”
Magium: The Mage Tournament: Book 1 Page 20