by Mark Albany
“I’m talking about you, delicious morsel that you are,” she said with a chuckle, leaning forward into my vision, until I was sure that she was almost coming up out of the water. “I know you’re confused, but this is the part where you say something nice about me.”
My numb hands still holding onto the bowl suddenly lost purchase and it dropped into the water with a splash. Not the loudest of noises, but it was enough to shock me to my senses as I fell backward, landing on my ass and blinking at what I’d just seen. I wasn’t sure if it was even real.
No, it was real. While fading, I could still feel that presence in my thoughts. No voice remained, but as it pulled away, or was forced away, there was a sense of annoyance in her.
I clenched my jaw, gulping hard before pulling away. There had been a pull from her, and honestly, I didn’t quite trust myself to go back to the stream. She was gone, sure, but I had no idea what might bring her back. No sense in risking it, not even to retrieve the bowl.
I moved away quickly, not daring to look back as I headed into the house.
3
Norel was making a habit of coming into my room without knocking, almost like she was hoping to find us entangled in training again, but this time, all she saw was me sitting on the bed, with Aliana pacing furiously in front of me, her wings fluttering incessantly.
“I have news,” Norel said, looking confused and a bit disappointed as she moved closer.
Aliana snapped out of the deep thought she had been in to look up at her sister. “News?”
“Yes,” Norel said. “Though I sense you two have news of your own?”
“Indeed,” Alaina said, her voice soft and shaking a bit. “Grant, tell her what you were telling me just now.”
“I… right,” I said, hesitating a bit before gathering courage. “I think I saw the dark djinn earlier today.”
“What?” Norel asked, looking skeptical. “How is that even possible? I’ve put so many wards around this place that we might not even need walls anymore.”
“Even so, she manifested herself to me. Interestingly enough, through my reflection in the water.”
“Wait, the dark djinn is a woman?” Norel asked, tilting her head. “Are you sure—”
“Yes, I’m sure it wasn’t just my imagination,” I said, having had a similar discussion with Aliana previously. “She was small, with black hair, blue eyes and pale skin, dotted with freckles.”
“Doesn’t sound familiar to me,” Norel said.
“Me neither,” Aliana said softly.
I looked between the two, scrunching my nose in concentration. “It seemed like she was connected to me, in my mind. She talked about how she was looking for someone and mentioned something about me having had a trinket that bound one of her kind to servitude, or something of the like. Like that was what had allowed her to reach my mind.”
Norel opened her mouth to say something but rolled her eyes. “That reminds me, what did happen to the trinket that was supposed to bind my sister to you, Grant?”
I tilted my head. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time, though my mind immediately went to the first time that Aliana and I had been together in our little cave. “I released her from service to me. It was uncomfortable. I wanted her to be free, and apparently put enough behind that wish that it broke her binds. Her bracelets disappeared. I still have the ring, though,” I showed her where circled my right forefinger.
“Ugly fucking thing,” Aliana muttered.
“Be that as it may,” I said. “How can she connect to me through something that’s supposed to be bound to another djinn entirely?”
Norel tilted her head but then shook it in quick succession. “While we do need to investigate this further, I’m afraid this isn’t our only concern. It would appear that Cyron has come out from licking his wounds and is using magic. Very powerful magic, and out in the open as well. At least one noble has been killed. Nobody is willing to stand up to say that it was Cyron without a doubt. The emperor has personally made a decree for investigation, and has set the Official to the task.”
“The Official?” I asked. “Why? I mean, yes, if the noble were in the higher echelons of court, that might call for the Emperor to take personal action, but to set the Official on it? That’s like taking a sledgehammer to an annoying fly.”
“Be that as it may,” Norel said, looking annoyed at having been interrupted. “What Cyron is doing is dangerous. There are other nobles calling for him to be put in a warded cage, and that is leading to a lot of unrest among the gentry.”
I nodded, taking a deep breath. “How can we turn this to our advantage? While having the rest of the nobility on our side for once is excellent, I can’t imagine that the Official would want us to be interfering with his investigation.”
“Agreed,” Norel said. “There is a lot of potential and opportunity for our cause with this, but we can’t act too rashly. I’ll look around some more tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m fucking starved.”
With those words, it seemed like my body was reminded of the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. As occupied as I was with everything happening, it had just slipped my mind. My negligence returned to haunt me, it seemed, as I could hear my stomach growling.
“Come,” Norel said, pretending not to have heard it. “The staff have prepared a meal for us. I wouldn’t trust the two of you with preparing a meal without burning the only house I left down to cinders.”
“How do you know? That a meal is prepared, I mean,” I asked as the three of us moved out of the room and headed to one of the dining halls.
“This is my house, Grant,” she replied with a knowing glance and a playful smile. “I know everything that happens within these walls.”
The smell of roast duck and beef ribs as well as vegetables, fruits, breads and cheeses greeted us as we stepped insid. The servants stood ready to pour us drinks as we sat down. While they had mead ready for Norel and Aliana, I was happy to see the rich red wine that she’d procured for me instead.
I wasn’t ready to indulge in any conversation for the first few minutes of the meal, starved as I was. It was all I could do not to make too large a mess to be cleaned afterward. I had been a servant once, or near to, and I knew how they must feel as they watched me eating, almost anticipating how deep a cleansing would be needed afterward.
“So, Norel,” Aliana said after we’d all finished our first serving and I was starting on a second. “I know you have to maintain the illusion of being human, but why do you keep to it when we’re alone? I am left without choice in the form that I have to take, obviously, but I would be willing to bet you’re not.”
“You mean besides the human servants that populate my house?” Norel asked after politely dabbing her lips with a napkin. “It’s a matter of habit, really. I’ve needed to fit into human society for so long that I’ve grown accustomed to looking like one. Do I wish that I could join our kin in their self-imposed exile instead of running about with the humans? Yes, but at the same time, there is a vast array of pleasures to be found in the simple act of just being human.”
“Wait, self-imposed exile?” I asked, forcing myself to gulp my food down before speaking. Norel had lectured me long and hard about my manners, and I wasn’t looking forward to another one. “You mean there are more elves out there than the two of you?”
“Three,” Norel corrected in an icy tone. “And yes, but that is a subject for another time and another place. One with fewer ears listening in.”
I looked around at the staff who were doing their best to be invisible and nodded. That would be a touchy subject to broach with so many humans in attendance who thought elves were a thing of the past. They had to know that Aliana wasn’t a human, but actually addressing the topic in conversation was a different topic entirely.
Aliana stepped in to defuse the tension. “I’m so sorry, sister,” she said in a quiet voice, leaning over to wrap her arms around the woman in a tight embrace. “I
wish I could help.”
“You are,” Norel said, returning the hug with a surprising amount of passion. “Just by being here with me again, you are.”
I smiled but looked away quickly. It was a personal moment between the two women, and I didn’t want to intrude on it.
I was happy to see that sun was rising over a sky almost completely lacking in clouds. Sleep had come with some difficulty, and I found myself awake almost before dawn.
While I wished I could have slept in longer, it would have been a pity to miss such an amazing view. It was similar to the view I’d had in my room in Vis’ manor, but richer, somehow. I could see the lake in the distance, and the forest not that further. With the sun rising over it, the deep purple of night clashing with the yellows and oranges, I couldn’t help but smile. The world was crumbling to pieces, it seemed, and yet the sun rose like it had every day before today. I inhaled deeply, feeling the cool morning breeze fill my lungs, knowing that my peaceful start to the day was about to end. I wasn’t sure how, but I was turning before I heard Aliana climbing out of bed.
She rubbed her eyes, stretching for a moment. It was an interesting and most engaging sight, I realized, watching her wings opening and stretching with her. They were a part of her, and I adored them as such, but I found myself wondering just how they came to be so injured and ragged that she wasn’t able to fly with them anymore.
It was a personal question, and despite everything we’d been through together, I didn’t want to press her for answers. When she wanted to tell me, she would.
“What?” she asked, moving over to wrap her arms around me and look out into the same view I’d been enjoying a few seconds before.
“Just… Nothing,” I replied.
Again, I was aware that she knew when I was hiding something now. It was one of the interesting aspects of being this closely bonded with someone. At the same time, she knew I wasn’t comfortable sharing with her just yet and seemed content with accepting that for now.
We stood there, enjoying the silence, each other’s company and the view for a few long minutes as I stroked her hair tenderly.
“We need to go back to the library,” she whispered softly into my bare chest.
“Why, so you can use your words to get me in the mood again?” I asked with a small grin.
She chuckled but poked me gently in the ribs. Ticklish as I was, it was hard not to jump away from her. She giggled in response, but her businesslike mood returned quickly.
“No. Well, not only for that,” she said. “We need to find out what Cyron has in mind. What he has planned. There are only a few uses for a dragon’s eye in the world, almost none of them good. We need to be better informed about what he might have planned next or find ourselves thrown when he surprises us.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “And you think we’ll find what we need in the library? Remember how humans all think that dragons are things of fiction.”
“No need to remind me,” she said. “But at the same time, not all humans believe that. There might be some kind of hint as to what Cyron was planning then that would give insight into what he wants to do next. I refuse to believe that his attacking the nobles like this is just some sort of random lashing out. There must be a purpose to it, and I intend to find it.”
I nodded. “Should we inform Norel of our plans?”
“She has already left the building,” Aliana said, looking up at me. “She had business to attend to in the city.”
“How—”
“She isn’t the only one who knows everything that happens in this house,” Aliana said with a small grin.
“So you know that she somehow manages to sneak into my room whenever we’re having sex?”
“Like I said, she’s just waiting for an invitation,” she murmured, pressing a kiss to my chest. “And for that matter, so am I. But we have more pressing matters at the moment.”
We were soon on our way out of the house. Aliana had decided against taking horses, or even a portal directly to the library. The latter since there were more people in the library now than there had been the last time we visited, and the former because she thought horses would attract too much attention. She had a cloak to hide her more prominent features and used that perception field to keep eyes away from us as we moved through the streets.
Cyron’s actions hadn’t gone without notice from the rest of the people, I realized. The streets were in a state of chaos. People were arguing and even fighting in the streets, needing the Lancers to break them apart. Still others had loaded their possessions onto carts and were either hitching them to horses or pulling them themselves, all aiming to leave the city before the destruction reached their doorstep.
What I heard from them only raised my concern. A couple of nobles’ manors had been burned to the ground, with magic considered to be the cause. One of the more disgusting sights, I realized, was in the marketplace, where crafty merchants were grasping at the opportunity provided and were selling a vast array of useless charms and trinkets they said would protect the users against any and all magic attacks.
“Are those…” I started to say.
“Completely useless?” Aliana completed my sentence for me, looking as disgusted as I felt. “Utterly so. These men are preying on the fears of others for profit.”
I ground my teeth. “I wish I could say I was surprised, but from what I’ve seen in our history, it’s not an uncommon event to see insects like these crawling out into the sunlight when shit starts burning.”
Aliana shook her head and kept moving toward the library without saying another word. While what she was feeling was utterly clear to me, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what she was thinking. If she was starting to reconsider her defense of a race that would do this sort of thing to their own kind. Or maybe that was just a reflection of my thoughts?
I shook my head, pushing forward with her until we reached the doors of the library. There were a handful of guards standing outside, but they seemed like they were too occupied to notice that two people being hidden from their vision were entering the building they were supposed to be guarding.
Then again, I guessed they had bigger problems to deal with. The more skilled and professional guardsmen would have better things to do than keep watch over an old, dusty library.
I wondered when these people would understand just how dangerous the knowledge contained within the library was. Honestly, I could only see two alternatives when that happened. Either the library would be burned down by an angry and fearful mob, or it would be immediately cordoned off for the use of the Emperor and those he trusted. It depended on who found out first.
For the moment, their neglect became our ally. Aliana’s perception field allowed us to move through the various sections of the library without being noticed by those few scholars that were frequenting it.
I could honestly spend my whole day here and not notice the passing of time until a candle was needed to continue reading. I loved the pursuit of knowledge and the smell of old paper. While the dust was a bit of an annoyance, I could live with it to experience the crackle and feel of paper on my hands, like it was resisting my attempt to find the secrets found within. It was difficult to remember that we were actually here for a reason and needed to find something specific.
We found ourselves hunting through the sections of the library that were used the least. They covered magical history and its use, and were generally considered less than accurate depictions of historical events. I could see where the idea came from. There seemed to be a lot of embellishment in the minds of those who wrote the events down.
Yet, over the past few months since I’d met Aliana, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t a lot less embellishment than previously thought. There truly were mystical and magical things in the world. In a time when magic was more commonplace, especially when there were race wars over the use of it, there were all sorts of opportunities for all kinds of powers to be used that might seem unreal
istic when a few generations removed.
The hours passed quickly, and even my enthusiasm was waning in light of the sheer volume of material we had to go through. My interest in the various details was quickly turning into skimming through everything that we were reading just to get through all of it. I hated the fact that what we were doing was making me hate reading like this but at the moment, my mind was numb from all the information I’d been cramming into it.
“I think I found something,” Aliana said.
I looked up, blinking a few times as I realized that the sun was already starting to set, making the lighting inside rather painful on the eyes. I shook my head and rubbed my eyelids until I could feel them again before moving over to see what Aliana had found.
She, of course, still looked like she always did, which I was starting to find annoying in the best of ways. Her eyes, though, spoke of exhaustion.
“This scroll has the various prophecies of a rather obscure divinatory from a couple of centuries ago,” Aliana explained, showing me the older piece of parchment.
“Did you happen to know him?” I asked, smirking at the thought that it was a very real possibility that she might have actually met someone from a couple of centuries ago.
“I never met Alfonse in person,” Aliana said, lifting an eyebrow. “Though I heard a great deal about him over the years. Even among magicians, divinators are never really taken that seriously. It is technically possible to look into the future, but the very action has the possibility to alter events, causing a spiral effect that gets worse the deeper into the future that someone looks. They are generally confined to looking into past events, while their so-called prophecies are considered to be just the prediction of cause and effect without actually peering into what is going to happen.”