The Art of Guessing

Chapter Two

"Follow you? What?" Kronos follows me over to the table.
"Hey, Dad!" I weave through the crowded mess hall once more.
Kronos grabs my shoulder. "Your dad?"
I push his hand off. "Trust me on this," I sit next to my dad. "I have a soldier, it's his day off," I gesture to Kronos, who watches me with interest. "But he's also got nothing to do, and I told him what I was doing, He wants to help,"
My dad looks at Kronos and back at me. "Oh... I don't know, Cassandra, your mother's things..."
"I'd be the only one to touch those, I swear. He'd just be moving the old file cases,"  I make an X across my chest with my fingers.
My father's eyebrows come together as he thinks about it. I don't look at Kronos, I watch my father until he looks up. "I'll bring you your lunch at noon, now get to work,"
"But what about breakfast?" I ask, Holding up my bagel with a puppy-dog look on my face.
My Dad's a sucker for the puppy-dog face.
"Eat your bagel, but then it's straight to the attic, Alright?" He sighed.
I beam. "Okay!" Taking a bite of the bagel, I look at Kronos. "You can sit down, Soldier," He's looking at my father. His eyes wide for a moment before realizing I had spoken to him. At this point, the others had started to look at him. "Say... What division are you from, Boy?" The older soldier asked.
I coughed loudly into my bagel. Of course the others wouldn't recognize him!  "Sorry- Wrong pipe," I wheezed.
"I'm a transfer, from Banamé, I just got here with some other trainees a few days ago," Kronos lies flawlessly. "I'm a bodyguard for the brother of a council member," He adds, waving his hands as he speaks. "I'm just here to clean up on some of my combat skills,"
The younger guards light up. "You're from the capital?" one asks, he's got blonde hair that's beginning to thin.  " But... if you're from the capital, then why aren't you all, like..." The other wiggles his fingers at Kronos. "Glitzed up?" He asked.  The blonde one gasps and then looks annoyed with the other. "Dude, Brian, you can't just ask people why they aren't glitzed up! Not okay dude,"
I find the whole exchange kind of amusing.  My Dad does too, he chuckles at the two.
Kronos laughs too. "I'm not really the 'Glitzy' type, that's more the citizens," He gives them a crooked grin.
I finish off my bagel and step out from the table. "Let's go... Kaleb," I tap his shoulder. He freezes. "Kaleb?" I ask.
"S-sorry, Yeah, let's go,"  He stammers. He strides out the mess hall and I follow closely behind. "Why'd you call me that?" He asked as soon as we were out of earshot of anyone.
I shrugged. " Just the first thing that popped into my head, and it's not like Kronos is a normal name," I noticed he'd somehow managed to look paler than he already was.
"Popped... into your head," He repeated.
"Yeah, why?" I noticed myself asking that a lot today.
"It's.... Ah, it's nothing," He runs a hand through his hair again. 
Didn't seem like nothing. But I didn't know the guy well enough to press the issue. We walk in silence for a moment before he turns. "Where do I go?" He asked.
"Oh, here," I lead him to the door to the stairwell. As we climb the stairs, I begin to think of the potential dangers of being with a strange man alone. I've worked countless times with other soldiers for the same reasons. Though Kronos was far stranger than the other men I'd worked with.  I glanced back at him, he was watching the back of my head intently. He raised his eyebrows when I turned my head to look at him. "So... Was any of that true? What you said in the mess hall.." I elaborated.
"Some of it," Kronos shrugged. "I was in Banamé, and I did work as a bodyguard for a time,"  He sounded slightly winded. "Been a bird for too long," He muttered.
"So you worked for a councilman?"
"Councilwoman,"  He corrected.
I passed the door to my room and jumped for the string that dangled just out of my reach. "So... You worked for... Can you help me?" I ask exasperatedly.
Kronos reaches up and pulls the string, a cascade of dust rains on top of us.
I cough until the dust clears, I look at Kronos and he looks at me, I can only imagine that  I look as ridiculous as he does. He's covered in dust, his black T-shirt now tan on his shoulders. The dust was in his hair, some had collected in his goatee. I can't help it; I laugh. I laugh very hard. He begins to laugh too, we laugh for a solid thirty seconds before we manage to calm down. I stand up straight again. I look up at the ceiling. "Well, crap, The ladder..." I fall into a small fit of giggles again. "The ladder's broken," I get out. "How're we gonna get up there?" I asked him. He looks at me. "Aren't you forgetting something?" He asked.
"Uh.... You're majorly tall and can hoist me up there?" I try.
"No, I can fly, Cassidy," Kronos reminds me, in a swirl of dust, he flapped up into the attic. A split second later, his hand reached down. "Can you reach my hand?" He asked.
"How can you possibly expect me to reach your hand?" I ask, reaching up anyways. I was short, by a long shot. "Oh! Hold on, I think I have a stepping stool in... My room..."  He had come back down, two massive oily wings sprouted from his shoulders.
"Hold tight," He gives me about half a second to register before jumping back up. "Don't- Why- Why?" I push myself away from him.
"We had to get into the attic. " He looks around. "Daniel's here," He elaborates.
"Yeah, okay," I scoff. "All that's up here is boxes."
"That's all part of his hiding," Kronos goes over to my mother's boxes. "He's in here somewhere," Kronos picks up one of the boxes.
"Hey!!" I shout, going over to him and snatching the box out of his hands. "These are my mom's things!" I turned the box away from him.
"Oh? So i suppose that means I can't touch them?" Kronos looks over them.
"Nope," I looked them over. "Why would your friend be in my mother's things?"
"Well... That's kind of hard to explain..."
"We have the time," I deadpan.
Kronos pauses to watch a spider scuttle across the floor. "Do I have to?" Kronos smashes a spider underfoot, whining like a child.
"Explain it or I'm not helping you," I place the box down once more.
Kronos sighs. "Alright, prepare for a long explanation,"
"Talk while you work," I hand him a box from the file corner.
"Oh great, a slave driver, just like Daniel,"
"You want my help?" 
"Fine!"
Kronos put the box nearer to the attic hatch. "Daniel is trapped,"
"How so?"
"Have you ever heard of Tarot Cards?" Kronos looked at me.
I give him a puzzled look. "They're, like, those future reading cards that mediums use, right?"
"Yeah, well, He's trapped inside one of them. There's a lot more like him, but I'm not really concerned about most of them at the current moment. Anyways, he's held in a sort of... suspended animation. At least that's what scientists are calling it in the non-magic world, these days. So he's inside this card, but he can't get out without assistance,"
"You?"
"No, You," Kronos takes another box. "I have a tie to him. I'm his familiar. I can't set him free," 
"Is there a reason he's trapped? I mean, no sane person would lock him away without reason," I debate.
"Sierra is not sane," Kronos bites out.
"Councilwoman Sierra?"
"Have you ever wondered why there are no powerful witches left? Why She's the only powerful one there is? Because she locked all the good ones away, and tortured the rest to insanity or melded them into something not human," Kronos spat.
I blink, surprised at his rage and even more perplexed by his reasoning. "So... Daniel opposes her?"
"He's the only one who stands a chance at defeating her,"  Kronos nods. "But we need you to set him free, first."
My only response is to remain silent and process. Now that I thought about it, there weren't any powerful witches born for generations. The only one I knew of was a traveling witch named Baba, and she wasn't exactly rumored to be perfectly sane, either. "Say what you're saying is true..."
"It is," Kronos insists.
"I gotta ask again, why do you need my help?"
"I can't really say, you're supposed to figure it out on your own. Don't ask me why, but I will tell you this..." He sets down a box. "It's dangerous, what we do,"
"Why does that matter?" I ask. "Will setting him free put me in danger?"
"Not from him, he'll protect you. He's a good kid at heart, but he's got some issues," Kronos shrugs, he sets the last box down. "I'm going to assume we need to put these downstairs somewhere?" He looks at me.
"There's a storage shed just outside, we have to carry them to that," I explain. "So how do you think we should go about fixing the ladder,?" I swipe my hands on my shorts.
"Hmm... well, it looks like it's just..." He steps on it tentatively and the ladder clatters down the steps.
"Well, great," I groan. "I mean, I know you can fly but no one else does, and it's best they don't," I let my head fall back, looking at the ceiling. I didn't recognize the patterns up here, It was strange.
"Can we drop the boxes?" Kronos tries.
I look at the boxes. "I don't know.... Oh! You get down there, and I'll hand you the boxes, and when they're all down there, I can go ask my dad for a shrinking crystal, so we can move them easier," I offer.
"That's smart, but wouldn't it be easier to just go ask your dad for the crystal now?" Kronos raises an eyebrow.
I blink. "Yes...." I say after a few seconds of him giving me a smarmy smirk. I look down. "Can you get me down?" I ask.
"Yeah, here," Kronos walks over and holds out a hand. "You remind me of an old friend, She's not really one for flying, either. I'll lower you down,"
It's my turn to raise an eyebrow. "She? Quite the ladies man, are we?" I take his hand anyways.
He looks through me for a moment, lost in thought. "...No, not really," He smiles down at the ground, though his eyes look sad.
Must've struck a chord.
He lowers me as far as he can before letting me fall the last half-foot. I point at him. "Promise you won't touch those boxes of my mom's?" I ask.
He nods. "You'll probably shrink me if I do, so I'll behave," Kronos nods, then he asks; "Why do you trust me?"
I pause for a moment. "I think of myself to be a good judge of character," I begin to make my way down the stairs. Why did I trust him so much? I mean, he was right about the whole shrinking him thing. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a Raven familiar and that his name was Kronos, He was centuries old- Okay I did know some things about the guy. That still didn't explain why I put so much of my trust in him... not an hour ago I didn't trust him. Something in my... I don't even know where- told me he could be trusted.
Not to mention I did think I was a good judge of character.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, lost in thought, I almost run into my dad. "Dad!"  I clap my hands together. "I was just about to come find you! I need a Shrinking crystal,"
Dad looks down at me. "A shrinking Crystal? What for?"
"It just makes moving the file cases a lot easier to move," I shrugged. "That and the ladder broke while I was climbing down it," I half-lied.
"You're alright though?" Dad looks me over.
"I'm fine, Kr-Kaleb is stuck in the attic though," I catch myself before calling Kronos by his name. 
My dad's facial expression becomes confused. "Sometimes I wonder where your priorities are, Cassandra," He puts a hand on my head and messes up my hair. "Let's get Kaleb down first, then we'll see about that shrinking crystal,"
I push his hand away and attempt to smooth down my hair. "He can get down, you saw how tall the dude is!"
"Honey, the ceilings are ten feet tall,"
I pause. "Well, if he hangs by his hands and drops down, he'd drop two feet at most," I debate.
"Go get the ladder," He smiles faintly at my argument.  "Can't have a capital soldier injured from a twisted ankle,"
He turns and goes back into the hallway. " I'll get your shrinking crystal," He walks away.  I go the opposite way. As I walk farther away, A chill shoots down my spine, goosebumps rise in my arms. I pick up my pace, I get to the utility closet. Opening the door, I swear I see something move out of the corner of the eye, but with the light off, I can't be sure if it was my imagination or not.