by Scott Beith
I was quite used to her running away, but never had I been so thrilled to finally see her again, still squeezing her tightly as my only gesture in saying hello back. Happy to know that she was safe and I could return to the palace.
She was still wearing the fancy blue dress I had told her to wear out yesterday, only barely recognisable due to all the rips, grass stains and frayed edges: an expensive piece of clothing she wanted to wear, despite getting it tattered and torn from another late evening of ill-gotten adventures. “Alright, you might’ve been right about the dress,” I said, holding up a bit of the skirt’s torn fabric in my left hand, breaking my brief silence as I accepted that the decision to dress her up nice the day before wasn’t in my best judgment after all.
“Oh, Kya, I couldn’t disagree more. You were right – always fashion before function,” she joked, trying to boost the gloomy mood by teasing me with a moto I had punted to her long before this. “The gnolls told me it was the prettiest dress they’ve ever tried to snack on,” she then quipped, failing to take this whole hazardous situation with any real seriousness.
“Anara, do you have any idea what you’ve put us through? HAVE YOU EVEN BOTHERED TO CONSIDER IT?” shouted her brother, infuriated beyond belief, mostly annoyed at how nice I was being to her after what she’d put us through.
“Don’t patronise me, Arlo,” she spat back. “I didn’t ask for you to come. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself,” she snapped, rather immaturely but quick to her own defence, acting like the teen child she was, but didn’t believe herself to be.
As joyous as it was to see her again, her brother had a valid point. “Anara,” I said, moving my hand onto on her arm considerately, “we had no choice but to come. Your mother forced us too.” My defence of her brother threw Anara off-guard, the seriousness of the situation instantly becoming clear to her.
I wasn’t mad or blaming Anara for what had happened today. Of course, indirectly, she was responsible for everything. But as Arlo had said previously: the gnolls were at fault for all that had happened, and I was only just coming to terms with that idea.
Regardless of my own loyalty to Anara, I knew I had to back her brother on this one. I quietly stepped aside, letting Arlo cast his condemning convictions on her.
“You might have been nimble enough to avoid danger,” he stated, “but we weren’t! We didn’t know where you were, or whether you were safe or not!” he yelled, raising his voice once again, releasing everything he’d been bottling up to say to her since the start of our voyage. His sister stood paralysed as he spoke. “We lost someone today... trying to find you,” he confessed, forcing Anara into a trembling shock.
Drawing the line there, I intervened. “That wasn’t her fault, and you know it,” I snapped at him, standing back in front of Anara. “You said it yourself earlier. It was the gnolls.”
Anara pressed a hand to her mouth in remorse, a painful moment passing between her and her brother before the withered mayor reintroduced himself into the group, approaching us from behind Anara. The lot of us forgetting he was there, listening to the whole unstable convention we were having.
“Forgive my indulgence, my lord,” Rubin said, “but we begged your mother for help.” He locked eyes with Arlo, undeterred from transgressing against royalty. “And nothing – nothing – but this beautiful girl came to us. The turmoil of these past few days has taken much from each of us, and while words cannot express how sorry we are for the one who was taken from you, we lost many more,” he continued, reminding us of the bigger picture. “If it were not for this girl, even more then that would have died.”
“If I offended you, I am sorry,” Arlo told this stranger, attempting to make amends.
“I can’t change what has happened, but I am sorry for what I’ve done,” Anara said, looking at me before continuing. “Truly, I am… but they needed us here – just as they still need us now. There’s a lot of critical people in need of aid in just that house alone,” she lectured, pointing towards the mayors private villa as she tried to sway her stubborn brother’s mind. “I overheard the message myself,” she explained. “Mother wouldn’t risk her soldiers this far out... not unless I gave her a bigger reason to come.”
The prince shook his head in acknowledgment of her clever plan. “And now both of us are here.” Arlo smirked, still annoyed at her but also genuinely impressed by her ingenious strategy to get these people the help they required. He patted his sister on the head. “Smart, sis. I guess Mum has to send the troops here now.”
The mayor spread his hands invitingly as he smiled towards us. “Good, now if all is alright again, I can send a messenger to wait for Camilla’s next arrival on your behalf. For the meantime, please join us inside and take a look at what devastation the gnolls have caused this time around.”
We agreed and entered through the giant arch-shaped doors. Rubin’s house was a red-draped mansion with long dividing corridors and other smaller inviting hallways. Like a hotel made for travelling guests, it had many identical wooden bedrooms. In the main recreational lodge, couches and tables had been hastily thrown into the corner by the canteen tables to make room for stretchers carrying wounded sprites. Locals all surrounding these unfortunate warriors as nurses and concerned family members sat alongside them.
Chandeliers gave a dim glare as the approaching sunset seeped through the thick glass stained windows, providing mild illumination within this congested long front dining room hall.
Anara sped over to a farmer in the corner, who was coughing, pressing a hand to his bandaged wound in an attempt to reduce his pain while he laid breathless on a stretcher.
Anara placed her hand on his wound. The bandage she touched became just as clear and transparent as her glassy hand, vanishing it from sight in order to reveal the man’s infected cut. “Only two people here have infected wounds,” she informed us. “One person also has internal bleeding.” She sat beside her patient, this poor man too delirious to comprehend where he was, although sincerely grateful for her company. “I fear without surgical consult and a resupply of clean dressings, others will relapse too. I can’t do anymore for them on my own. Only Maxwell can treat them now, and I’m afraid without him…” she trailed off, stumbling into a sadness, truly empathetic to their plight. Placing the back of her hand over the man’s feverish forehead, feeling for a rising temperature.
Anara had been learning the medical profession from Doctor Maxwell – the greatest surgeon we had in all of The Borderlands. But all Anara could do without him was use her gifts to offer insight into the diagnosis of an illness, as with that he could use his firefly attendants to offer all sorts of viable treatment solutions.
For with their two talents combined, they were an unstoppable force, able to remedy any injury, regardless of its depth or severity. They had a hundred percent survival rate, so long as they were side by side. But to bring the only doctor we had into an active warzone was not something our queen endorsed very often, knowing full well the ramification if he became injured.
“There’s more than thirty survivors here,” Arlo crudely estimated.
“Uh, well, no. There’s about fifty,” Anara corrected. Counting the square rows of stretchers by the columns.
“And you helped save all these villagers, little sis?” he said appreciatively towards her, forcing a brief smile out of her.
“There was a lot more yesterday,” she admitted, her sad eyes lost in the recollection of the horrible night.
“Some is better than none,” I said, trying to comfort her and give her some closure over her own trauma about last night’s darkness.
No matter how scary my situation had felt last night, Anara would have been recalling something unarguable similar. Only she did it all alone. The courage to push forward and still persevere, choosing to risk her own capture in order to retrieve and rescue the wounded in such senseless madness and hysteria was nothing short of pure heroism. Something Anara and her mother once fought about pro
fusely when she first made up her mind on becoming a nurse instead of an emissary or scout.
I remember once she told the queen that saving an ally was better than killing an adversary, and when her mother questioned such ‘childish philosophy’, she told her mother it was because an enemy so focused on killing someone else was already hell-bent on killing themselves, so there was no point doing the job for them.
The relationship between Anara and her mother was peculiar, to say the least. They were once inseparable, but, through Anara’s adolescence, they had slowly become bitter to one another. A relationship rotting away so slowly that it would be hard to pinpoint when and where exactly it all turned so wrong.
I guess, morally and ethically speaking, the two of them were complete opposites. Anara was willing to invest a little faith into everybody, while Milena could only see the flaws in other people. It was an indifference in belief of who to trust that I believe was the reason for their ever-growing divide.
It is a hostility that continues to grow as they both age, a relationship nearing the brink of emancipation, as this young daughter no longer wanted anything to do with her mother’s love.
“Arlo!” called out a cluster of moving voices from the door behind us.
The injured nymphs’ calm and dormant rest immediately broken as Camilla and half her squadron of officers made their entrance. Doctor Maxwell slipping through the crowd with them, quickly approaching Anara and wasting no time in discussing how best to treat those most obviously unwell.
A place suddenly swamped into a sea of flustered noise as guards fanned out chaotically in all directions, while Arlo debriefed Camilla next to me, explaining what had happened to us throughout this entire ordeal. His voice loud but too muffled for even me to overhear as the rest of the alpha regiment clashed metal boots against thin wooden floorboards as they made their dramatic entrance.
At the doorway, among this cluster, I spotted a novice cadet. His faint silver hair streaks making him recognisable to me almost anywhere. It was my closest friend and Camilla’s only son, Akoni. He leaned against the doorway tucked away in the corner, wearing his typical suit-shirt and pants, with a thin lightweight shiny silver mesh battle vest to accompany it. Some new shiny clean homemade chainmail he and his nerdy tech-boys must have been working on prior to all this. A strong mix of silks and silvery metal blended together in order to cover him and his bulky gear like a high-performance flak jacket that was far better than any noble officer had in their own arsenal.
He stood near the villa’s entrance, doing his best to stay out of the way as nymphs nudged past him. An awkward shy man trying his best not to been seen or to interfere while I wandered over to him wishing the same. He was a happy sight to see. He had an upgraded metal backpack, with new thin metallic boots and a glare of blue, green and purple fire crackling in the vents of his electronic metal wrist bracers. ‘The knight with no name’ the peasants all humbly mocked him, seeing as he was a geeky engineer who had proved his worth through innovation and discovery more than a hundred times over, but still had never been recommended for knighting. One of the great injustices in my opinion, especially when other knighted technicians had achieved much less than him, and yet been gifted with so much more.
He was a mature eighteen-year-old Brainiac, who was so influential and vital to our society that some of us were beginning to speculate that our current king, Akoni’s very own mentor, was too afraid to knight him because it might lead to him eventually stealing back the throne, just as King Helios had done to Akoni’s father nearly two decades ago. In my heart, I doubted that was the truth, as anyone who knew Akoni, knew he was nothing to be afraid of. He was a nerdy anti-social bookworm who, in essence, was probably the coolest person and niftiest friend I had ever met.
There are people out there who might say a glass is half empty, where others might say it’s half full. Akoni was the kind of person who would say, ‘What does it matter when all glasses are refillable anyway’. He was a sweet modest and reserved man – somebody way too smart for his own good. He was a person who could find everything curious, yet nothing mysterious. By trade, this made him appear more like a magician than a technician, even when he tried to explain the logic behind all the miraculous things he could perform using science and technological devices.
He had generic brown eyes and short black hair that made him seem like nothing special, but underneath those eyes and his large dorky glasses – behind pale untanned skin – was a man built to rule The Borderlands. With grey frail tips in the front of his hair, which I believe came from a lack of outdoor sunlight, he always looked thin and scrawny on the surface, but it was his wit and resourcefulness that made him someone who could never be trifled with.
Having only gained muscles from carrying books around all day, his small but heavy-looking knapsack always had exotic implements in it, which made him look a bit like a traveller or a merchant trying to sell utensils not of this world. A mechanic making magic from alchemy was how I thought of him as he sat there twitching a long thin cord attached to a silver pistol that trailed down to his belt and linked inconspicuously into the rocket cylinders protruding out of his dense but small metal backpack.
He was the discoverer of fairy fire: a unique electrical flame only he possessed the power to control. This patented fluorescent purple flame looked something like a cloud of lightning luminously concealed in misty black fumes. A miracle of artificial nature greatly criticized and condemned by most superstitious folk of this region as that of sorcery or evil.
I remember asking him why he even wanted to create a metal-eating flame when we can just build a fire. He replied, ‘Because it just seems foolish that we use a wood-burning flame when we live in a forest’. After that, I never questioned his genius again.
There was no hiding the fact he was one of a kind. His dense and robust carry pack was the first invention to ever offer ordinary nymphs flight from their predators, and, to an ordinary person, it weighed more than a star or a moon. To Akoni, it was somehow as light as a square pillowcase filled with feathers.
“So what does the belt do?” I asked teasingly, knowing everything on him had to have some clever ulterior purpose.
“Well, it holds my pants up,” he sarcastically replied.
“So it doesn’t turn into a laser sighted grapple gun? Or some electric flame thrower?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t needed any of those things since I made my jetpack,” he then comically added, openly sullying himself to make me smile.
Looking at the changes he’d made to his backpack, I quickly realised he was speaking some witty but solid truths. Initially, that backpack was just the generator that could convert static electricity into fuel for his fairy fire magic. But now that he had added two tiny thruster rockets to the bottom of this turbine, I realised he had been preparing for a day like this for much of his adult life
“So you’ve field tested this stuff?” I enquired, waving a hand over his wrist bracer and bulky belt buckle strap. “Your backpack looks even heavier than it did before,” I added.
“Its self-levitating, so technically it’s weightless, so long as I keep it turned on,” he said, commending his own work.
“How long have you been working on this? It’s not going to explode now, is it?” I enquired, more out of mockery than seriousness.
“Long enough,” he responded, with a fair degree of confidence in his own work.
“It all looks very dangerous,” I added, although consequently only adding to his arrogant boastfulness, as he smirked pulling out his holstered side flare gun.
“It’s supposed to be,” he said, lighting its purple pilot flame with his electric hands and activating that small prototype pistol, its barrel chamber spinning with a growing violet glow as I merely shook my head in sarcastic disapproval.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re going to get hit by a rock and blow up this house?” I teased.
“I don’t… Uh. Well, I’m pretty sur
e it’s perfectly stable.”
“Pretty sure?” I laughed, not sure if he was joking or being serious.
He looked down at his invention. “Yeah, no, it’s like at least forty percent safe,” he indecisively remarked, A devilish smile unveiling his mischievous humour.
I should have known he was joking, since he was the kind of person who always did his homework. I remembered back to a couple of years ago when he’d first tried explaining to me what that unique purple flame was and how it worked… something about condensing argon in the atmosphere because it can’t hold static charge, and that by using electromagnetic induction, he could create superheated metallic decay.
His inventions were a real sophisticated kind of science – something leagues beyond everyone else’s understanding. Having no comparable rival, he really was just like his father: an inventor with inventions no one could reproduce, especially when it came to solar technology. His genius was the true reason this boy and his mother were offered redemption after their father’s forced exile.
Akoni was an asset to the crown – the one true hope of us ever being able to restore the Sunspire to its former glory – which begged the question of why Milena or Camilla would risk bringing him here.
“So how did your presentation go?” I asked, pointing towards that purple demonstration gun of his, changing the subject to find out what exactly I had missed back home.
“Uh… well, it was cut short,” he replied. “Was actually quite the scene. All the girls had their attention fixed solely on me for once, and then the prince gets declared missing in action,” he recounted with a chuckle.
“And what of a missing princess?” I asked.
“Uh, I don’t think the girls were too worried about her actually,” he said as nonchalantly as possible, his eyes briefly drifting towards Anara at the other side of the room, where she was helping the doctor.