Longing

Chapter Ten

Kendo spent the next ten weeks travelling between Olden and Reality to learn magic. Olden looked the same throughout the seasons to the point of being creepy. The weather never changed the landscape. Snow and rain and sandstorms (which came about once in a while to sweep through the outer sectors of Creature's Court) never blanketed Olden. The weather always held within it an eerie incomplete feeling, as if it weren't really there at all despite that it was visible. It was perhaps the only thing in Olden that felt like it was less real there than in Reality. Sometimes it would snow and the flakes would never fall completely to the ground. Instead they would hover just above the heads of the many creatures in the Court (well, those who had heads anyway) and dissolve, leaving not but a drip of perspiration behind. Other times the rain would travel sideways or upward like it was a creature all in itself, but if ever it touched Kendo's skin, there was never any sensation. Still other times the air would adopt a fog that, if Kendo looked hard enough, had a face so soft it was hardly there at all. Oh but if it looked at him, he felt it.

Kendo always carried with him a pouch-full of Fastitocalon scales, jammed in his back pocket. Once he got the hang of it, they helped keep Melanie corporeal while he was out and about in Olden. After attacking magic with a headstrong resolve bordering on sheer stubbornness, he figured out how to control it enough so that Melanie could travel back with him to Reality. It only took him five weeks and plummeting grades in all his classes. Although Wilfred always warned of it, ever since that very first faefolk attack, Reality suffered no more aggressive movements from Olden, at least as far as Kendo could tell. A long time ago that would've made him quit this whole nonsensical magic business, but now that he could see some progress, now that he could actually make things happen, real or not, now he wouldn't give it up for anything.

It was becoming an obsession. Kendo used magic for everything he could think of. If he was late to class and the teacher gave him a hard time, he would imagine up fears and nightmares and torment them. One time this bratty know-it-all cheerleader said he was a freak and Kendo imagined her tongue being tied. She became mute after that and forever suffered rope burn along the top of her tongue. From then on, if anyone spoke to her, all she could manage was a gurgling choke. No one complained. Oh, and the gym coach who always used to yell at Melanie, he mysteriously disappeared. There were rumors that when he vanished all that was left of him was a puff of smoke and the stench of something rotting. The adults didn't speak of it and held a private wake for him, all in secret. Of course, since it was a secret, the whole high school campus knew. It was the talk of the school for weeks.

Oddly enough, despite all the rumors going around about strange happenings, nobody ever mentioned the faefolk. Kendo decided to pester someone about it once and they just stared at him entranced and said, "Faefolk? That's old news. No one cares anymore." He didn't bring it up again, figuring Wilfred or Victor or maybe Olden itself had cast some sort of spell over Mustang's Township High to keep everyone in an oblivious daze.

While Wilfred admired Kendo's determination, he was utterly against using magic the way Kendo was using it, for less-than-admirable purposes. Nonetheless, he couldn't deny Kendo's skill and what the kid did with his abilities was ultimately his own business. After a while Wilfred didn't even seem to mind Melanie's company all that much, though in the beginning he couldn't stand her obnoxious remarks. He said it reminded him too much of Victor. Melanie thought Wilfred's recent tolerance of her was purely due to the fact that she had stopped questioning everything he taught Kendo. What she wouldn't admit to anyone, even herself, was that the reason she stopped being snarky was that she feared Kendo's abilities.

Kendo's talent with magic was bipolar in nature. His spells were either perfect or abysmal. It left a lot of messes in Reality for Grivgas to clean up. Still, when Kendo did make a mistake, Wilfred was always able to reverse it, which Melanie was grateful for.