Flickering Creatures | ONC 2024 | ✔︎

(3) Guile It Favors

While an hour away on foot, Solanum was only half that distance "as the crow flies," as Bryony liked to say whenever Bella delivered messages for her. It would be shorter yet if Bella flew directly, but this had always been the shared secret between them. Only Bryony and Titus knew what drove her to weave over the forest like a drunken housefly, a descriptor that Titus had taken some glee in proclaiming the first time Bella had gotten home and cared to mention the measures she'd taken to avoid her own kin. After that, she'd only spoken about it with Bryony.

When a three-trunked pine rose soft and stately above the forest's canopy, Bella angled her wings and made for a distant mother-oak instead. It would not be the end of the world if she had to face a cousin or two on her way to Solanum, but their interrogations would inevitably delay her, and she had better places to be at the moment. She'd once aspired to visit monthly just to provide updates and keep her extended family off her back. Experience soon made a mockery of that idea. Whatever hope Bella had once held that choosing the path of a familiar might redeem her curse in her family's eyes, it had long since died.

It was just as well, maybe, that familiars outlived their non-magical kin. The position tended to attract two types of creatures: those for whom familiarity ran in the family, and those for whom freedom from kin was part of the appeal. For a young crow fallen from the nest on a Wightnight before fledging age, the dice weighed heavily in favor of the latter.

A cold wind curled beneath Bella's wings. Her gaze twitched downward. A Wight had risen from the treetops some ways below her, shadowing her path on a breeze of its own construction. Bella banked sharply. The Wight struggled to keep up for a while, but soon relented and released its magic. Its light vanished back into the colouring leaves.

Bryony said Bella bore no curse. That being Wight-touched meant nothing unless they led you to your doom. That their magic manipulated the energies of the world, but had little power to cause harm directly. Bella knew the signs of it now—enough to fly over the forest with impunity, and to know just how misguided her family had been.

Another flickering light. This one was yellow; Lumina, not Animata. Bella ignored its brilliant pulsing. The Wight was replaced by another up ahead, again dancing in an attempt to seize her attention. For a moment, it morphed into a crow's form, but the illusion could not hold with the speed of Bella's approach. It distorted, and this Wight too dove beneath the canopy, mingling with the yellow leaves. Bella startled as another crow appeared ahead. This one remained steady. She avoided it.

In another few minutes, a curving flight path brought Bella back into view of the forest road between Hyacinth and Solanum. Flying was easier now; she needed only to follow the winding dip in the trees until a proper gap widened up ahead. The houses of Solanum became visible a moment later, just as the morning sunlight broke over the trees. Bella dove beneath them before it blinded her. She cruised the last hundred meters along the road, imagining herself following in Bryony's footsteps, and enjoying it.

All too soon, the woodsmoke from Solanum's chimneys forced her to circle wide. Bella cruised a lap around the town's center, a cluster of maybe two dozen houses, with more sprinkled through the surrounding forest. Solanum and Hyacinth were once equivalent in size, but Bryony's work in the latter had since drawn enough people to more than double its population. The effect was so strong, old-timers still called their new neighbors "Bryonies," even though after a decade of growth, those newcomers now outnumbered them. Bryony herself wore the title with pride.

The challenge now was finding her. Two hundred people might be small even for a forest town, but it was still plenty enough to give Bella something to search through. She swooped to the nearest house and landed on a windowsill. The family inside went about their morning with no sign of stress; they were unlikely to be the ones housing a member in need of medical attention. The next house proved the same. The search method was imperfect, but unless it cleared all houses without a sign of Bryony, there was no point in more rigorous investigation.