¤ Single Digit Hours of Morn

‘Just as I thought.’ Rei’s voice woke Silver up. Opening bleary eyes, she saw Rei standing next to her table together with Jaysen, a slightly amused expression on his face.

‘The lady slept the entire night here?’ Jaysen said, amazed.

Silver sat upright slowly, massaging the crick in her neck. ‘Seems like it,’ she croaked, the sour taste in her mouth making her gag. ‘What time is it now?’

‘Around seven in the morning.’ Jaysen beamed, his light blue eyes shining.

‘You have no right to be so cheerful. It’s too early.’ Silver resisted the urge to chuck a nearby scroll at his jolly face. It suddenly dawned on her anyone actually that chipper in the single digit hours of the morning could possibly be animated by a Charm of Undead. Instead of calling for a cleric to exorcise this dangerous spirit though, she buried her face back in her arms again and tried to get back to sleep.

‘Come on, Silver.’ Rei tugged at her sleeve. ‘If you don’t wake up now, we might miss breakfast.’

‘Pffbt.’

Jaysen exchanged a look with Rei. ‘What now?’

Rei grinned. ‘This calls for some good old “direct intervention”.’

The next thing Silver knew, Rei and Jaysen had caught her under the arms on either side and hauled her upright on her feet. ‘OI!’

‘Ssh, my vociferous bird of paradise. Silence in the library,’ Jaysen whispered exaggeratedly in her ear.

‘At least get my books!’ At Silver’s resigned hiss, Rei gathered up her journal and the few scrolls around it before the two guys dragged her off to the residential wings to wash up for breakfast. ‘Just wait, you two. I’ll get back at you.’ She started to imagine the various ways one could inflict torture on a Librarian and a bandit.

Preferably, it would involve the use of lots of rope, a good dose of Master Solomon and a place far far away from the ground.

‘Until then, dear damsel, I’ll just settle for you being awake.’ Jaysen’s smile widened that impossible degree. ‘I’m hungry, and I was brought up well; we can’t start eating without the lady.’

Near the end of breakfast, a green robed Apprentice Librarian came up to the three, clutching a stack of manuscripts. ‘Are you Ad Lib Silver?’

Silver was nursing her second cup of hot strong coffee, still a little grumpy from the rude awakening. ‘No, she still wishes she was asleep.’

The young boy looked at Rei and Jaysen sitting across the table, confused.

‘That’s the evil Lady Silver speaking. I think you can deliver your message to her, she pretty much shares the same wicked mind as the real Silver.’ Jaysen said helpfully, before going back to his nearly empty plate. ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite. Much.’

‘Um.’ The Apprentice shuffled backwards a little at the death glare the girl shot Jaysen over her coffee.

‘I can’t believe I still let you follow me around for my Project.’

‘You know you just can’t resist me, my exquisite diamond.’ But since Jaysen was in the midst of swallowing half a Hotdog at one go, the proclamation sounded more like a Wild Boar being sat on by a Balrog. Silver glared even harder at him.

‘Yes, she is Silver.’ Rei decided to save his junior from mental breakdown.

‘Master Solomon sends you this.’ The boy set down on the table a part of the stack of manuscripts that he was carrying, and then backed off slowly before taking to his heels as if the Bains from the Lava Dungeons were after him.

‘Thank you!’ Jaysen called after the Apprentice. Silver only mumbled something about unintelligent juniors, before dragging the stack over to examine it.

‘Joy,’ Silver said unconvincingly, still not completely awake. She poked at the thin stack. ‘It’s Salmer’s journal.’ She went back to searching for the treasure called Wakefulness at the bottom of her near-empty coffee mug.

‘What’s up with her?’ Jaysen whispered in a low voice to Rei. ‘She ought to be really excited about the journal.’

‘She’s like that sometimes, ever since we were young. Who can ever comprehend the alien species of girls?’ Rei shrugged. ‘Just wait until the coffee kicks in. She’ll be alright then.’

And he was right, though Rei had failed to mention how long it would take for the caffeine to start working its magic. Without the threat of being late for a ship ride or that of a vindictive fairy lady sorceress, Silver continued to be grumpy for two more hours. When Jaysen asked her why, ‘By right, your life expectancy should have hit the basements of this Library when you decided to drag me down here by force. I’m letting you off easy,’ was her only reply before she started to shuffle half-heartedly through the stack of facsimile pages.

But it could not be denied that her mood did lighten that miniscule, helpful degree as they read through the latest instalment of Salmer’s journal.

At least, when a group of rowdy Apprentices had passed by while talking raucously, she had not scared them enough to leave them emotionally scarred for life.

œ
¤ Where To From Here?

The razor sharp spearhead of the Redemption slashed downwards through the still air, the slight girl that wielded it spinning around, letting momentum carry her through before moving the spear up with two hands to thrust it at some invisible enemy.

It was a dance of death she performed, the Redemption drawing arcs of light as the girl moved through the drill with quicksilver grace.

Up, circle again, then-

‘Aurora.’ A voice shattered the silent trance she had worked herself into. Someone was standing at the doorway, his tall shadow falling across the floor to point at the lone girl in the middle of the room. She jerked the spear back, every one of her muscles screaming as she aborted the thrust and transformed it into a sweeping motion with one seemingly fluid movement.

She looked at the person in the doorway, the Redemption whispering into a halt in her right hand.

The room was quiet, Salmer suddenly realised. Ever since Aurora had came into his life, the boy never remembered a time when a room with her in it was quiet. She would greet any newcomer exuberantly, and then proceed to maintain a stream of cheerful chatter.

And yet, this girl that was dancing death in the empty room, this girl now looking at him silently with blank dark blue eyes, her face solemn as she held a heavy Redemption spear in her right hand… this girl did not seem to be Aurora.

‘Brother Salmer.’ She finally said, the familiar nickname sounding strange in the new, tired voice that she had now. It was as if she had lived too long, and found speaking a distasteful practice that took too much of an effort.

‘Aurora. I guess you are feeling better now?’ Salmer stepped forward despite himself, approaching the slight figure that was standing in the middle of the wide room that served as the Academy’s warrior training grounds. ‘Wing and I went to see you in the medic’s hall, but Edel said you already left.’

‘Yes. There was nothing else Edel or any of the other medics could have done for me. And since I am still excused from lessons, I might as well make better use of my time.’ The girl lifted the Redemption slightly with one hand, the perfectly balanced spear a comfortable weight in her hand.

In her months at the Academy, Aurora had frequently invaded the training grounds to spar with the warrior students, to keep up her training at the hunters’ and just to work out the itch for a good fight. Her weapon of choice was always the Redemption, which surprised all of her sparring partners. The petite mage did not look as if she could even lift the spear, much less fight with it.

But fight she did, her innate agility making the spear a deadly weapon in her hands. Even the Academy’s Weaponsmaster, a grouchy old fairy with a leg lamed from an ancient war, admitted grudgingly that Aurora was a match for any of the warrior students that he trained, any time.

There was more of the unfamiliar silence now in the small space between them. The girl looked away from Salmer, her carefully blank eyes examining the sturdy shaft of the spear. ‘Are you not going to ask me what happened when the spell hit me?’

‘I was not sure if you would tell.’ Salmer replied hesitatingly. ‘You look so unhappy and distant, Aurora.’

‘I apologise for that.’ She replied, her tone still weary. ‘It is not everyday that you suddenly wake up, and realise that you remember every single thing of a time you thought lost.’

‘Would you tell me, Aurora?’

The girl Salmer called Aurora looked up from her Redemption. ‘I owe you that, I guess.’

‘There never was a debt between us, Aurora.’ Salmer’s forehead creased with confusion.

‘That’s good,’ she replied simply. ‘I seem to recall so many debts, all of the sudden. Not that all of them are mine, though. Some are owed, to me.’ Her dark blue eyes flashed as she finished her sentence.

‘From your… Before?’

‘Yes.’ The girl sighed, and started to walk to the side of the room. She sat down near the foot of the wall, the Redemption spear laid tenderly across her crossed legs. Salmer followed her uncertainly, and once he was settled down next to her, she sighed again. ‘What a place Before is.’

‘How is it like?’

‘Eternal sunshine, fantastic buildings that embrace the air, gardens of sweet flora, beautiful immortals with wings and long golden hair.’ She started, her voice a jaded singsong. ‘I remember you said you always wanted to see Orbis, Brother Salmer. Now, I know that I have seen it.’

‘But…How did you-’ Salmer stopped speaking. The image of the broken and unconscious Aurora he had found sprawled before at El Nath’s gates came to him, and he remembered the twin gashes at her back that stained his arm red with blood. The old wives of the village had called her dark blue hair and uncanny blue eyes ‘unnatural’. Why did I not see this earlier?

‘In my Before, Brother Salmer,’ The girl murmured now, her head bent as she caressed the Redemption in her lap. ‘In my Before, I wasn’t a mortal.’

Salmer could only listen, transfixed as she told her foster brother about what she remembered, of the long ago days when she was only a fairy child running wild in the sprawling gardens of Orbis. The fairy child continued to run wild in those gardens even as she grew older, and in a twist of fickle Fate, met the King out on an idle stroll and charmed him with her intelligence and idiosyncratic ideals.

Her words took Salmer back years before he was born, to show him the awe-inspiring court of King Kranz, with vaulted ceilings and the elaborate dais with a golden throne and the five plain chairs. She painted pictures, of a fairy court full of lying smiles and smiling deceit, and of a fairy girl embroiled unwillingly in the web that tangled all fairy courtiers by her unorthodox appointment as Advisor.

Her voice growing softer, she recalled the short span of days she had lived in the Academy, as part of the team that was sent by Kranz to inspect the progress of the Academy and its students. And then, that one night when the moon was round and bright over Ossyria, and when auroras danced across the sky…

It was one that fateful night, when one fairy girl had overheard a fellow Advisor’s conspiracy by chance, and failed to escape detection.

“I could never erase from my mind the vision my Aurora created then, of her desperate flight to escape Verchiel, and her subsequent entrapment in a dead end. The dreadful promise that was whispered so lovingly and tenderly in her ear, before a headlong fall down the side of the tower, the cold night air howling past her as she rushed to meet snow-covered earth and ripping her useless wings into a thousand shreds!

At first, I was shocked that the Headmaster, no, that anyone at all, could be capable of such deeds, but Aurora had told me calmly that there was very little fairy courtiers would not do to ensure the success of their climb to power.

‘Are you still immortal, now?’ I asked her, after I had found my voice. She shook her head. She did not know if it was Verchiel’s spell, or her near-death experience, that had robbed her of that immortality.

But her wings were gone, shattered the day she came to me as Aurora, and she was immortal no longer.”

‘Where will you go from here?’ Salmer asked again, trying hard to keep his voice from shaking.

‘Where indeed.’ The girl grasped the Redemption spear and got to her feet. She looked down at Salmer, cradling the spear loosely in her hands as she stood at a warrior’s ease. The light was at her back, casting a shadow on her face that obscured her expression.

But the low fatigued voice she now replied in held a grim inflection that made Salmer afraid. ‘I go, to reclaim my debts.’

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Links to previous chapters:
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[Reposted due to capricious vandalism by unknown idiot. We are not amused.]