Estyr

Chapter One

“What’s up birthday boy?”

Jack heard as he stowed away his books in his locker. He turned around to find Laura smiling at him together with a bunch of her friends. She twirled in her finger, a lock of her long curly blonde hair as she tilted her head to the side. She had her chest pushed out just slightly enough to catch his attention but not enough to make the action obvious in any way. Had he himself been any less perceptive, he’d have ogled her ample chest without knowing that this was exactly what she was going for. As things stood, he still did ogle her ample chest but fully knowing that this was exactly her intent.

After many attempts to corner him in secluded corners of the school and use her charms on him, she must have decided to go with the public approach. Being the captain of the basketball team at Elmswood high, meant that Jack was the fancy of more than a few girls. Laura was one of them. This for him was both fortunate and unfortunate. She was the captain of the cheerleaders, and by far the meanest of the bunch.

He wasn’t yet sure whether it was this trait that allowed her to sit squarely at the top of the female pecking order of the school or her looks. He couldn’t dispute the fact that she was attractive. Neither was he ignorant of the fact that despite being an absolute bitch, most if not all of the guys had fantasized about having her as their girl and other more lascivious activities involving her.

Her fancying him was fortunate in that it kept all the other girls away. She had marked him as hers, and none of the other girls wanted to be in her crosshairs. The last girl Laura had gone after had had a mental breakdown and transferred out of the school. No one else was bold enough to risk garnering her wrath, not even for him. This, to him, was perfectly okay. It allowed him the small favor of not having to turn a whole litany of the girls that were after him.

On the other hand, it was unfortunate due to the fact that she was the definition of relentless. For the past six months, he’d rebuffed all her advances to no avail. At first, he’d been candid with her that he wasn’t really into her. But as time would prove, he might have been more successful trying to talk a stump into moving. It was almost as if she went deaf whenever he was trying to explain to her that he was indeed flattered by her attention but wasn’t interested. She would just breeze past his rejections as if they’d never happened.

“Think fast!”

His hand had risen up ready to receive the ball before he’d even processed what he’d just heard. The force with which the ball hit his open palm only served to remind him of the dual relationship he had with the one who threw it. Elliott, the former captain of the basketball team, was the only other guy in school taller than him. Standing at six feet six inches, he was taller than students and teachers and even the non-teaching staff. He had thick red hair and a pale face with small beady eyes. His nose was slightly crooked where Jack had broken it. Not only was Elliott tall, but he also had the brawn to match. He was almost two hundred and forty pounds of pure muscle. This was partly why he thought he could intimidate him into stepping down as captain of the team.

But what advantages he gained in size, he lost in speed and reaction times. Given the kind of training he’d been put through almost all his life, Jack didn’t suffer these same disadvantages, despite the fact that he wasn’t that much smaller than Elliott. He stood at six feet four inches and weighing in at two hundred and twenty pounds. Elliot was an exemplary player but Jack was much faster and nimble than him and had a reaction speed that made Elliott look lethargic. This made the two of them a deadly combination on the basketball court but not much else outside of it. After a string of games, where Jack outperformed him, and one particular game when Elliott made a number of reckless mistakes that would have cost them the game had Jack not made up for them, Jack was made captain of the team.

Elliott didn’t take too well to being ousted from his position as captain. He’d followed Jack from school as he walked home the very same day the title had been granted to him. At an opportune moment, when Jack was alone, Elliott had sprung on him from behind intending to pin Jack against the wall of the building beside him. Unfortunately for Elliott, Jack had been fully aware of the fact that he was being followed from the moment he left school. Given how proficient he was in combat, it didn’t take long to drive the point him to Elliott that despite the size advantage he possessed, a fight with Jack wouldn’t go his way.

The next day Elliott came to school with a few stitches on his face and a fabricated story about how a couple of muggers tried to get the jump on him and how they’d gotten the worst of it. When Jack didn’t contradict this version of events or out him for the bare-faced liar that he was, he gained a grudging friend. They didn’t exactly like each other, but Elliott respected Jack and had in the weeks to follow, come to accept him as captain. This had been all there was to it until Laura entered the picture. Like many other guys in the school, Elliott was smitten.

However, unlike most of the other guys after her, he was athletic, a member of the basketball team, and actually good looking. So it was especially frustrating to him that Laura wouldn’t give him the time of day owing to the fact that she only had eyes for the guy who’d taken his spot as captain of the basketball team. Jack had on many occasions tried to tell Elliott that he wasn’t interested in Laura. It had done nothing to help the situation between them.

It was only after about a month of telling Elliott that he wasn’t interested that Jack realized that this only exacerbated the whole situation. It was only a further blow to his pride that he couldn’t win a girl from a guy that wasn’t even interested in her. From that point on he’d just kept quiet about the whole issue. As such, theirs was a relationship of grudging respect with an undercurrent of resentment from Elliott met with stoic indifference from Jack.

The ball in his hand was a manifestation of that latter unspoken side. The ball had been thrown hard enough, that had he not had the reflexes to catch it, it probably would have concussed him. As it is, his palm was smarting from the impact on his palm. While he clearly hadn’t meant for it to be so, the little stunt only served to put up an impressive display of his reflexes for Laura and her entourage.

“My birthday isn’t for another two weeks,” He finally answered looking at Laura as he bounced the ball across the floor back to its owner whom he hadn’t acknowledged quite yet.

“I know,” Laura answered simply as if it was dumb for him to even point it out. Jack fought the urge to ask how she knew. He hadn’t told anyone his birthday date let alone that it was coming up. He dreaded to think that she had read his student file or gotten one of her friends to do it. If she had, then her crush was fast moving into the obsession category. “That’s why I got my friends to help. We are going to plan your party,” she stated. “There is no way the captain of the basketball team’s eighteenth birthday isn’t going to be the event of the year.

“Um, It’s a birthday, not a coronation,” He answered with a bit of ice in his voice. He didn’t appreciate how this felt like she was just informing him rather than asking him whether he actually wanted said party or not.

“With us planning it, it might as well be,” she answered with a smile. Once again, Laura displayed that uncanny ability to completely ignore any negative feedback from him as if it had never happened. Judging by their exchanged glances at one another, her friends had picked up on his tone of voice. She however gave no indication that she had. “My parents are never around, so obviously it’ll be at my place,” something about the way she said the first part of the statement caught Jack’s attention, though it quite clearly hadn’t registered on anyone else’s radar.

He had seen both her parents once a few years back at a parent-teacher meeting. Both of them dressed expensively, her dad in a three-piece suit and her mother in a dress that looked like it would cost an arm and a leg to buy. It had occurred to him even back then that, this was what you wore when you were going to close a million-dollar deal not to go see your kid’s teachers. There was an air of stiffness about them and by the way they each kept glancing at their expensive watches, they clearly couldn’t wait to get out of there. Was it pain that Jack had heard in Laura’s voice because her parents were never around?

“Sorry,” Jack said not letting himself get sucked into whatever drama that small window into her mental frame of mind had revealed. “But I’ll be having a small celebration with my mom, same as I’ve always done. It’s kind of a family tradition” he lied.

“Boring!” Laura declared without missing a beat, crowning the word with a dismissive eye roll. “Our party will be a thousand times better than any dinner your mom can cook up, trust me,” she said emphatically as if she was actually saving him from having to go to the dinner. “So, you going to be there?” Her self-confidence would be amazing if it wasn’t so annoying.

“Of course, we’ll be there,” Elliott finally got tired of standing on the margins and walked up to Jack throwing an arm around him as he flashed his best smile at Laura. “We’ll all be there,” he went on to add. “No way the basketball team misses its captain’s birthday,” Elliott quickly stated when it seemed like Laura would object to his attendance. This new caveat that the whole basketball team would be there, however, seemed popular with her friends and so Laura to let it lie. Having gotten the consent she desired, even if by proxy, she flashed him a smile before wordlessly turning and walking off. Soon as she was out of sight, Elliott took his arm off from around Jack and wordlessly walked off too.

Jack wasn’t all too bothered by the prospect of the party, he had no intention of attending it and that his mind, settled the whole matter. Locking his locker he started out the school headed for home.

*******

Jack was walking home. Not because he couldn’t get on the bus or hitch a ride home with one of his friends, but for the simple pleasure of it. For most of his life, Jack had been too sick to do much. Up until a little after he’d turned sixteen, he was always fatigued, like something inside of him was sapping all the strength out of him. It would be especially bad in the night and mornings. What exactly it was he was suffering from he’d never known, none of the doctors he’d been taken to could explain why he had the symptoms that he had.

It was bad enough that in school he wouldn’t be allowed to participate in PE lessons, let alone join any teams. His mom, however, had never seen his ailments as an excuse for him not to exert himself physically. If anything it meant the exact opposite. From the time he was six, his mother had trained him in martial arts. He’d never known his father. All he knew was that he was a great soldier and that he had died in war. She’d always made it plain clear that she intended to see him grow into the soldier he was.

He’d been pumped full of the hero stories of his father as a kid. They had been a massive motive power for him to train as hard as he could. Not only because he wanted to live up to the titan that his father had been made out to be but also because his mother seemed to actually believe that he could be as great as his father. She was the only one that didn’t see him as a sickly little boy. She saw him as the great warrior that his father was. He’d never wanted for that to change, so as hard as she pushed him, he pushed harder.

Some of the stories about his father he now knew to be false, like the fact that dragon blood ran in his father’s veins, or that he once fought a whole army on his own and won. Some he doubted like his ability to track down anything even on the faintest of trails. Some of them he had no reason to doubt, such as the fact that he always fought to protect the innocent and those he cared about. Also, that this was how he died, fighting for what is right and protecting the ones he loved. All of these stories, however, still held motive force for him.

Even despite feeling like he would lose consciousness most of the time due to his lack of strength, in the training sessions with his mother, he’d always given it all he could and more. She had taken him through hand to hand combat and training with various wooden replica of weapons. It and always been a marvel to him just how good a fighter his mother was. She too had been a soldier, and that was how she met his father, on the battlefield.

Her mother fought like a bird flies or a fish swims. She made every move seem not only flawless but natural. She moved with a nimble precision that sometimes made him doubt that the woman was actually thirty years older than he was. When it came to weapons, her mother didn’t use weapons, she made the weapons part of her. Where the weapon ended and she began was by no means clear. While most people with weapons used them as their primary means of offense to try and hurt their opponents, she was the main means of offense and whatever weapon she happened to have at the time, was only an aid in the task. She’d always taught him that reliance on any outside items whether they be armor or weapons was a crutch that could be used against him in battle.

He’d been mediocre at best and absolutely pathetic, if he was being completely honest. His sickness has made it so that it took him twice as long as it should have to learn anything. Given how smart he was, his problem hadn’t been conceptually getting what his mother had been trying to teach. It was getting his muscles to comply that had been the uphill battle. Even when he did get them to comply, he couldn’t do it with anywhere near the same degree of precision and fluid grace that his mother could. This had always been a source of deep frustration for him. It left him feeling almost betrayed by his own body.

It was one of those rare occasions that he was glad that his mother was different. While she had never said anything about it, the closest explanation that be got through an internet search, was that his mother was likely autistic. She never displayed emotions of any kind. Given that he had always been punished when he did wrong and rewarded when he did right, he knew that his mother did indeed have the whole range of human emotion, she just didn’t seem to know how to express them. Her expression was not blank but rather, neutral. An austere expression that spoke not of ignorance of what was going on, but a quiet calm observance of everything.

Jack suspected that it was this also that made her patient enough to bear with him in his training. She too knew what it was like to have a difficulty that she could do very little about. He’d never seen anger or even frustration at his inability to learn fast on her face. While she wasn’t exactly a cheerleader for him, he’d appreciated her lack of frustration with him much more than he minded that she was almost never encouraging. She pushed him as hard as he could go and never wavered from teaching. If he failed the first time, she would calmly instruct him to, “Do it again.” If he failed the second time, the instruction would be repeated and would not stop until he finally got it.

The first time Jack managed to land a hit on his mother during training, was when he was twelve. Six years after his mother began training him. The circumstances around it had also been special. Something odd had happened when he hit puberty, his disease seemed to disappear. He was just as energetic as any other kid and able to move with speed and strength that he didn’t possess before. For a whole week, he’d been unable to stop smiling. Wherever he needed to go he ran, something that had been absolutely impossible for him to do before. He’d play games with the other kids, pushing himself as hard as he possibly could at whatever he did. Even when he was absolutely exhausted, he still felt giddy, like he was walking on clouds. This kind of exhausted was way better than the fatigue he’d grown up with. The burn in his muscles was by orders of magnitude much more preferred to the complete lack of energy he’d felt before.

This new vigor and enthusiasm he had was also shown in his training. That whole week he’d pushed everything he’d ever been taught to the limit of this newfound strength and speed. It was owing to this that during their Friday evening training session with wooden staffs, that Jack managed to whack his mother across the temple, hard. Later on, he’d actually been surprised that all she did was take a few steps back and not much else given how much force he’d put into the swing. But at the time he’d frozen up dropping the staff in horror at what he’d just done. For the first time ever, shock crossed his mother’s expression.

They’d held each other’s gaze for a second before his mother launched on him with a flurry of attacks against which he was completely defenseless having dropped his staff. All the while, she’d been angrily asking him why he’d dropped his staff instead of pressing his advantage. It was the first time that his mother had ever gotten angry at him during training. She made that wrath clearly felt with an onslaught like he’d never had from her. Despite using every technique he could muster to evade and counter her attacks, by the time the training session ended his whole body was in pain with several painful welts across his body.

That evening, he sat shirtless on one of the tall seats at the kitchen counter, his mother tending to his injuries. She used a thick pasty concoction that she usually whipped up for such purposes. It was a foul-smelling, but he’d long since gotten used to it. She’d been using it on him since forever. Besides, whatever it was that she put in it, it was very effective. It would clear cuts and bruises and every other sign of their activities overnight so that he wasn’t left answering awkward questions to teachers and such. But it wasn’t the foul-smelling paste that he made this particular night stick in his memory. It was the odd expression that his mother had had as she tended to him. It was the first time he’d ever seen the expression on her face. She seemed to be completely unaware of it, but on her face was a small smile of pride. His mother was proud of him!

A few days later, his disease came back with a vengeance. He’d woken up extra early in the morning as had become his new habit, ready to jump out of bed with the same boisterous energy he’d had the previous day. Instead, he barely moved. He laid there completely immobile unable to even move a finger. He’d tried to shout for his mother in panic, but all that came out of him was a feeble exhale. By the time his mother came to check up on him an hour later, he was completely convinced that he was paralyzed. He’d been unable to do anything other than turn his head slowly from side to side. Tears had been streaming down his temples as fear consumed him.

While being continuously fatigued had always been something he struggled with, he’d always had the bliss of ignorance. The mercy of not knowing what it was like to be normal. He’d never had the knowledge of just exactly what he was missing out on. He’d never known what it felt like to walk fast let alone run. He’d never known what it was like to play a sport, let alone be part of a team. As awful as his state had been, it was all he’d ever known. To give him a taste of all that he could possibly do and be and then have it be taken away, was a trick too cruel that life had chosen to play on him. It was three days later when he managed to push himself off the bed. Another two weeks before he could go back to school, slower and weaker than he’d been before.

Two months later, his mother had him training once again. Jack couldn’t think of a moment when he’d loved his mother more than when he’d slowly walked back into the house from school and had found a practice sword on the kitchen counter and a note for him to meet her in the basement. Despite being hit harder by his disease than he’d been initially, Jack pushed himself even harder than he’d ever done before. That note from her rekindled the dying embers of his will to rise above the sickness. To not make all the faith that she had ever had in him be in vain. His determination paid off.

Unlike before, where no matter how hard he pushed himself he always felt weak, this time he could fight back against the fatigue and weakness by pushing himself to the limit. Before, when he pushed himself beyond a certain point of exertion, his vision would become blurry, he’d feel nauseated, he’d feel like he was on the verge of losing consciousness. Now, the harder he pushed, the more he felt the weakness recede. His vision would become clearer, he’d become more coordinated, his instincts sharper, his reactions much faster. Rather than feeling like he was about to lose consciousness, he couldn’t have been more conscious and keenly aware of his surroundings.

It was nineteen months later before Jack was once again able to land another blow during one of their sparring sessions. Unlike the first time, however, this time he didn’t stop. Once again, it was with a staff that he’d managed to land a hit. After a sharp hit to her right elbow, her hand had reflexively straightened letting go off her staff with that hand. Before she could secure her grip on the other hand, Jack swung hard and knocked the staff out of that hand leaving her unarmed. The tables were turned from how it had been the first time and without hesitation, Jack went all in as his mother had made clear he should have done the first time. Unlike how it had been with him however, by the time the practice session was over, he’d only managed to land one other hit. In fact, it was more of a graze than an actual hit. It was in sessions like this that she showed him just how far he still had to go before he could consider himself even a shadow of what she was.

Jack had continued to push until by the time he was turning sixteen he was all but healed. Unwilling to have himself be inactive, he’d joined the basketball team just to add to the challenge, after the grueling basketball training sessions he was usually subjected to on the days that there was training, he’d still go home to spar with his mother. He’d also come to find out that despite always pushing him as hard as he could go, she’d been holding back a lot. The better he got, the more his mother allowed herself free rein to go as hard as she desired. Nowadays, if he didn’t bring his absolute best to every training session, she made sure he regretted it.

Jack came to a stop outside his house his eyes drawn to the luxury sports car parked outside Mr. Phillips' house. Mr. Phillips was their neighbor from across the street. A tall, wiry, bespectacled accountant in his early forties who had gone bald early. While it was not one of those ridiculously expensive cars, it was well out of the range of anything an accountant could afford of his meager salary especially given the fact that he had two kids in college for whom he was paying. Mr. Phillips lost his wife five years prior to a grizzly road accident involving a drunk driver who also died on the spot. As far as Jack knew, he hadn’t seen anyone else romantically since.

It wasn’t that Jack was a big car fan, in all honesty, he knew very little about them. His ailment as a child had made it so that he couldn’t develop that many outside interests. Between school and the daily training sessions with his mother, he barely had enough left over to drag himself to bed let alone nurture an interest in cars.

Something about this car, however, held his attention. Somehow, Jack knew that despite the fact that it was an exquisitely designed locomotive, it wasn’t anything about the car itself that kept his attention fixed on it. It was its… ‘aura'. Jack couldn’t explain it, but it was as if the one who’d last driven it, left a trace of their… essence in the car. That was as close as Dan could get to define what it was that he saw when he looked at the car. At last, Dan dismissed it with a shrug and a small smile. Mr. Phillips was a kind man, if he’d found someone new, then Jack wished him all the happiness in the world.

“I’m home,” Jack called out as he walked through the front door.

‘Welcome back,’ was the simple reply that had always met those words. Today however silence followed his words. Jack walked into the living room to find his mother standing at the window with the curtain discretely pulled back looking out. Jack, without having to ask anything, immediately knew exactly what had her attention. What was more interesting to him was the fact that his mother had taken notice of it. Her mother was by no means a nosy woman. If anything, she was on the other extreme end of that scale. She barely interacted with any of her neighbors except under special circumstances such as a wedding or a funeral. And even when she did interact with them, she was very economical with her words.

Their neighbors didn’t mind this at all. It only took a few interactions with his mother for one to quickly realize that she was different. People didn’t react all too well to one from whom they couldn’t read emotion. Some thought her to be psychopathic, others thought her to be mentally challenged, a good number just thought her to be insensitive. It didn’t jive too well with people when they cracked a joke with you and barely got a reaction out of you or when they shared supposedly scandalous gossip with you and you did a perfect imitation of how a rock would react to the same news. Their neighbors were all too glad to give his mother a wide berth and she seemed perfectly okay with it. To find her standing at the window looking out at the neighbors was indeed a very odd thing.

“Get ready,” was her brief words to him her eyes never leaving the window. Something about the way she said the words made it seem almost as if she meant more by the words than ‘prepare yourself for the training session.’ Her expression which had always been carefully neutral, gave Jack the impression that she didn’t like the fact of the car that was parked across the street being there. What possible reason why that would be, Dan didn’t have the faintest idea. With little more than a shrug, he walked upstairs to change. He was in his room, pulling a black vest over his broad chiseled torso when he heard the doorbell ring…

*******

Even as she stood on the threshold of the house, she couldn’t help but feel like she was about to step into a lion’s den with an especially predatory lion. The man, Mr. Phillips was smiling brightly as he approached her offering greetings to her like to a long lost old friend. It was immediately clear to her that she was in no way hidden from her. Her masquerade would and had worked on most people she encountered. The way she remained stiffly still even as Mr. Phillips hugged her already told her that this wasn’t even close to how they usually interacted.

Under any other circumstances, she would have taken the time to study her mark, learn enough about them to enable her to carry out a successful deception. But as things stood she was running out of time. Despite the fact that she hadn’t been able to garner any solid evidence for it, she also suspected she was being followed. A bitter taste filled her mouth when she once again thought that eighteen months before she had been no more than a few miles from here. Since then she had been to all seven continents in forty-three different countries in search of him.

How she had failed to pick up on him the very moment she crossed over, she now didn’t know. At first, she assumed that the moon blade commander that had been assigned to care for him, had put strong protective spells around him to keep him and his power hidden. But now that she was here, she couldn’t sense even the slightest bit of the magic of a protection spell, or see any of the runes it would require. There was no protection spell around either her or the boy upstairs. This only added to her confusion given how little power she could feel coming from either of them. If the boy upstairs was their only hope, as her masters had said to her, then they were doomed.

Despite this grim thought, she got the feeling that she was indeed in the right place. Given the way she was looking at her, the woman from whom Mr. Phillips was now withdrawing as he released her from the somewhat awkward hug, was not in any way deceived. But given who she suspected the woman was, this did not surprise her. In fact, it would not only have been a surprise to her but also lowered her opinion of the former commander of the moon blades if she had succeeded in deceiving her with such a shoddily put together deceit. Still, she kept up the ruse by smiling benevolently as Mr. Phillips tried to introduce her as a long lost niece from his sister who lived in Pittsburgh.

“Shut your puppet up,” the words left commander Izora through gritted teeth.

Had she been any less trained, the fear that suddenly ran an icy finger across her heart would have shown on her face. Commander Izora voice made it clear that the woman before her was not one for games. Her voice held delivered a threat without them having to be verbally uttered. If this thing went sideways, there was a very real chance of a few dead bodies being the result. Despite the fact that she couldn’t sense a great amount of magic from the woman, she somehow still didn’t like her chances against her.

Mr. Phillips' expression, had at the time had been talking to about how fortuitous it was to learn of a new family member that he hadn’t been aware of. The look of confusion that had crossed his expression at her interruption, slowly faded into an inertly blank expression as she finally gave up the charade. Instead of compelling him to fabricate her identity out of thin air, she instead made it so that he was essentially blind and deaf to all that happened around for the next few minutes. He would hear and see everything, but none of it would register in his mind.

“Speak anything of our world to him and you die! Use magic in his presence, any form of magic, and you die! Lie to me in any way and you die” Commander Izora went on to say. Even more scary than the words themselves, was the fact that the words were spoken calmly. The words were to the speaker statements of fact, not threats.

“Am I to allow him to listen in on our conversation?” She asked calmly nodding towards Mr. Phillips.

She regarded Mr. Phillips, quite clearly deliberating what to do about him. If she ceased all magic, Mr. Phillips would come back to his senses unable to remember the past few hours, why, and how the hell he’d gotten here. “Come in,” she finally said after a while, stepping aside to allow them in. It seemed she had wordlessly allowed her to go on manipulating his mind. That was the much she could do.

Directing Mr. Phillips to enter before her, she followed him inside. Despite not being sure whether it would do her much good against the commander given her reputation, her guard was all the way up. Her magic was at the ready in case she needed it. “How did you find us?” was the first question posed to her soon as they were settled in the sofa

“By looking very hard,” she answered. She had been taught how to get through interrogations without lying or giving out any important information. The glare that came her way from the former commander of the moon blades, however, told her that using those tactics would be a quick and easy way to get her tongue cut out. She reached deep into the pocket of the black duffle coat that she had on and produced it. Resting on her open palm was a set of nine clear colorless marbles. Eight of them formed a circle while the last one sat in the middle. At present, the one in the middle was glowing a warm orange hue as if some light source within it had been turned on.

“Who sent you?” The former commander of the moon blades.

“No one you know?” Despite the glare that met her at this non-answer, it the truth, and so she did not venture to change her answer. Her masters were hermits before the war began, living lives of privation and seclusion.

“That item,” she said glancing at the pocket into which she had put back the device. “It requires that you have something belonging to the one you wish to track before it can put you on their trail,” she said. “While I left before the real battle began, I doubt that the castle itself, let alone anything that belonged to any of the royal family remained,” she said. “Neither he nor I have been back to our home realm since we left, so I will ask again, how did you find us?” Commander Izora asked. It was fast becoming clear that she wouldn’t settle for half-answers or allow her to glide over any details.

“His mother’s blood?” She answered.

“She lives?”

It was the first hint of emotion other than anger and suspicion that she had seen on her face. There was a fearful note of hope in her tone of voice. It was written in her features, she was afraid to hope that after all these years, the boy’s mother could still be alive. Her lips together slightly, hating to be the one to deliver the news to her. However, given how the hope withered from her eyes and the look faded from her face, she had already picked up on the small gesture her mouth had made and its implications. “She’s dead.” Commander Izora surmised.

She shook her head in the negative before squeaking in a voice barely above a whisper. “Worse.” Whatever was going on in her head, this time the commander did not let it show on her face. So she went on. “Sydrar warped her mind,” she explained her voice low. “She serves him now.”

Again, there was nothing to read from the commander’s expression. She remained still and silent for a whole minute before she spoke again. “When was this?” she finally posed in a voice that seemed to have consciously been stripped of all emotion.

“Eleven years ago,” she informed her.

“They survived seven years,” Commander Izora murmured more to herself than to anyone else.

Her jaws clenched hating to correct the assumption she had made in that statement. “Only she did,” she corrected. Commander Izora's gaze turned back to her. “Only his mother made it seven years after you left,” she said.

“The boy’s father?” The commander asked.

“From what I’ve heard, he lost his life protecting his wife on the very same day you left our realm,” she said. “The only reason she survived those seven years, was because of him and his sacrifice,” she went on to say.

There was another stretch of silence before she finally turned back to her. The anger and suspicion were back. “How did you get His mother’s blood?” she posed. “What you’ve done with Mr. Phillips here is a neat trick. The fact that you are not struggling with the effort of maintaining the grip you have on his mind, means that you actually are good at it. But I’ve seen Queen Elysia in battle. If she has been fallen to the darkness, how exactly did you get her blood?” Commander Izora. Asked her eyes narrowing at her.

“I can’t tell you,” she answered.

“You will if you do not wish to die,” came the cold reply.

She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand,” she said emphatically. “A few of us set up an ambush for her,” I was to get in her mind and put her at ease, and make her slow to respond. All we needed was to make a single cut and then we’d disappear before she fully came back to her senses,” she explained. A bitter smile crept across her lips. “Needless to say, we were in way over our heads,” she said. “I woke up several hours after the failed attempt to find all of my allies… slaughtered,” She closed her eyes forcing out of her mind the image of what she’d woken up to. “And a vial of full of her blood in my closed fist,” she said.

“How did you know it was her blood and not that of one of your allies?” Commander Izora posed, clearly unmoved by the recollection.

“She left a note,” she said fishing out another item from her pockets. She placed a rather large glass vial on the coffee table between them. Inside the vial was a thick crimson liquid that she was sure the commander would easily recognize as magically preserved blood. On the glass itself, were the words ‘Find Him' etched into it. The words glowed a bright flame orange as if they’d been made by hot metal and hadn’t yet cooled. Yet the vial itself wasn’t in any way hot to the touch.

It was clear by the way her gaze lingered on the vial for a while that she recognized her former Queen’s script. “Her blood would have helped you track her, not us,” Commander Izora said, raising he gaze back to her. “So I will ask you for the last time, How did you find us?” The temperature in the room dropped as not only her words but her gaze, made it clear that Commander Izora wouldn’t ask a fourth time. If she didn’t like her answer, this time, things would go south fast.

“The veil,” she said explanatorily forcing her voice to remain calm. “The divide between realms, not only does it not allow us to see or interact with other realms. But it also prevents magic cast in one realm from affecting or being affected by people, things or events in another realm,” she explained. “You are right that using Queen Elysia's blood would mean that the device would only track her, but only if I was in the same realm as she was,” she clarified. “When I crossed over to this realm, use of her blood wouldn’t track her as the veil wouldn’t allow it,” she laid out.

“And so it would find her next closest blood kin,” Commander Izora put together.

She nodded once in the affirmative. “What I can’t understand is how you’ve kept him hidden for so long.” She said. “I’ve been in this realm for close to two years searching for him, I couldn’t pick up a trace of him anywhere, I was even a few miles from here a year and a half back and still the device remained inert. I’d all but given up on the search when a week back while I was in Peru the device started to glow,” she said. I was completely convinced that I’d that you had protective spells that prevented you from being tracked and that somehow, the spell had broken or lost its effectiveness or that one of the runes that held it together, had been tampered with in some way,”

“But now that I’m here, I can’t see any runes or anything that would hold a rune for as long as two years. I can’t sense any magic either,” she stated. “So how did you keep him so well hidden all this time?”

Silence met her question as the commander regarded her for a long while before speaking. “Do not mistake the fact that you are still breathing to mean that I trust you,” she spoke in a dangerous tone of voice. “I don’t know or like you and at the slightest excuse, I will kill you,” she informed her in a matter of fact tone. “Now tell me, what do you want with my…” There was an unintended pause as commander Izora caught herself. “Queen Elysia's son?” she posed.

It was her turn to be quiet. Her gaze dropped to the coffee table as if the answers she sought could be found there. This owing to the fact that it was a question that she wasn’t sure how to answer. “He is the son of the most powerful warrior and witch our realm has ever known,” she said then paused. “I, together with many others including those that died to see this plan succeed, believed that wherever he’d been hidden, the prince would be just as powerful as either of his parents. Heck, if he’d been even half as powerful as either of them, he’d be our best chance to deal with Sydrar,” she explained the next part of what had been their thinking. “He together with the legendary commander of the moon blades, who had once before stood against Sydrar and prevailed…” she paused letting the statement hang in the air.

“Disappointed by what you found?” Commander Izora's voice showed neither a positive reaction to the praise or a negative one to what was being implied.

“While I wouldn’t challenge either of you to battle,” she said. “Let’s just say that from the amount of magic I can sense from either of you, I don’t like either of your chances against Sydrar,” she said quietly not meeting her gaze.

“Were you followed?” Came the next question from the commander, neither her voice nor her expression showing any reaction to what she’d just been said.

“What?” She hated how her voice sounded more like she was denying what was being said rather than actually seeking clarification for what was said.

“You went on a suicide mission to obtain the blood of the most powerful witch in existence and somehow you came out alive with a note to asking you to find him,” Commander Izora spoke in a cold analytical voice. “If Queen Elysia is now bent to Sydrar's will, as you say, have you entertained the possibility that it is Sydrar himself that wants him found?” She posed. “That perhaps he, same as you, believes that the child would be his only viable opponent?” she posed.

“But he has far more powerful warriors wizards and witches among his ranks than myself, why not use them?” she countered.

“You assume that he hasn’t tried before?” came the reply. She fought the burning desire to inquire further, it was already clear from commander Izora wouldn’t be divulging any further information as far as that was concerned. “Perhaps this time he needed someone that the legendary commander of the moon blades wouldn’t kill on sight?” she went on coldly. “Someone who could possibly convince the commander and Queen Elysia's son to go back to our home realm where Sydrar has the advantage?” She explained.

“I… I thought,” she now felt incredibly naïve for not having considered this possibility.

“You thought that some part of Queen Elysia was still there, that she was still redeemable,” Izora put together.

The way she saw right through her made her feel even more ashamed. After all she’d been through, she should have been the more paranoid of the two of them. She’d allowed wishful thinking to warp and affect her perception of reality. “But if Sydrar has sent others after you, then he already knows where you are, why would he need to follow me?” She further countered already knowing that it looked bad that she wasn’t willing to answer the question directly.

“Maybe because I usually find those he sends long before they find us,” came the cryptic reply. Again she found herself fighting the urge to question her further, she already knew she wouldn’t be getting any more than the cryptic answer. “Were you followed?”

She knew that an answer in the affirmative would not be met kindly, possibly even garner wrath from the commander. An answer in the negative would be met with skepticism. If on further probing commander Izora concluded that she was lying, the consequences would be even worse. The only problem was that she herself wasn’t sure what the answer was. For a few weeks now she’d had the unshakable feeling that someone was following her. She’d employed every trick that she knew on how to ferret out a tail and come up empty. Still, the feeling that she had unwanted eyes on her had remained. She was perfectly aware that every second of silence only made the answer seem more self-evident to the commander. Yet, for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to say she wasn’t followed.

“Hello, Mr. Phillips?” Both their eyes turned to the boy as he came to a stop at the door to the living room. She glanced at commander Izora who even without looking back nodded imperceptibly. Rather than releasing the spell she held over Mr. Phillips, she instead modified it to one where he could hear and respond normally to everything but still stick to the story she had had him fabricate about her. All this happened within a second so that there was no awkward pause between the greeting and the response.

Still, a look of confusion crossed his expression. He knew something was off…

*******

“Oh, hi,” Mr. Phillips answered jovially. “How have you been?” he continued.

Jack paused regarding Mr. Phillips. Confusion etched itself onto his features as once again he saw it. He couldn’t say what it was as he wasn’t exactly ‘seeing’ as much as he was getting the sense of. Though it wasn’t anything visible, the best way he could define it was an aura. Almost as if he was marked by something that couldn’t be detected by any of his five senses. But a new sense, one that he’d, up until this moment, been unaware that he had, was picking up on it. Whatever it was, Jack got the sense that the aura was doing something to him. It wasn’t harming him in any way that Jack could detect, but it was quite clear that he was being influenced by it.

“Are you okay Mr. Phillips?” He asked. He was aware that the question came across as odd, given that he hadn’t shown any signs of distress as discomfort. But given that he himself wasn’t sure exactly what it was that he was perceiving, this was the closest he was going get at what it was he was seeing.

As Jack had expected, Mr. Phillips' brows knit in confusion. “Uh, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” He posed with a slightly bemused smile.

A few seconds passed as Jack tried to put together in words what it was that he was perceiving. When he couldn’t find the words to explain it, a simple smile crossed his lips. “I guess it’s just been a long time since I last saw you this happy,” He said.

“Well, Mr. Phillips has just learned that he has a niece that he never knew about,” her mother interjected causing Jack to turn to the other person in the room.

Jack had never in his life had the experience of being enamored by the beauty of a girl. Not that he had never seen a beautiful girl before, he had. But he’d always found himself almost indifferent to it. Their beauty was something to behold but nothing more. It didn’t faze him or affect him in any of the ways he’d heard described in romantic movies and read in romantic books when he came across them. He didn’t feel his stomach tie in knots or any butterflies flutter. He never felt any self-consciousness or suddenly lose the ability to speak coherently. To him, it always felt like he was almost seeing them from behind a glass or a veil. All that was different with this girl.

She had deep wine red hair that reached somewhere down the middle of her back in length. Her eyes were a piercing jade green, they scrutinized him with the same level of intensity as he was doing her. Her cheekbones sat high on her face just above her dimpled cheeks. Her full luscious lips despite not having no lipstick of any kind on them, still appeared naturally pink. His gaze shifted lower, but before he could do any further visual discovery of the feminine form before him, his mother spoke.

“Perhaps you’d like to roll your tongue of the floor and pick your jaw up before saying hi,” she said.

It might very well have been the first time that Jack could remember that he blushed as he threw a glance at his mother before turning back to look at the girl. He’d obviously been wrong about Mr. Phillips wanting to introduce someone he was going out with to his neighbors. Now that his senses had come back to him, something else immediately became clear to him. It was her. The sense that he got of someone having left their, for lack of a better word, aura, on the car outside, and on Mr. Phillips. It was her, that he was sensing.

None of it made any sense to him, but there was no doubt in his mind as to what he was sensing. Given how hard it would be to phrase a question to her about what she was doing to Mr. Phillips without coming off as completely crazy, he went with the easier option. “I’m guessing that car out there is yours?” he asked nonchalantly despite being genuinely interested in the answer.

A brow arched on the girl’s face, an amused smile playing on her lips as she regarded him. “Most people start with ‘hi, how are you,’” she said. “But yes,” she added her smile widening a bit when he appeared flustered. “It is mine. Why?” she posed.

“It’s a nice ride,” he complimented. He kept his voice neutral despite having gotten the confirmation he sought. Something more was going on with this girl than met the eye. He’d have to keep a close eye on her to find out what it was. As things stood, she didn’t seem to be targeting his mother and as such he wasn’t all too worried.

“You train in swordplay?” She posed her eyes dropping to the practice sword in his hand.

“Yeah, a bit. My mother mostly trains me,” he answered. Most guys would be ashamed to tell a girl that, but he had seen her mother’s skills both with and without a weapon. He had enough respect for her and all that she had taught him that the statement aroused no shame in him.

Contrary to what he had expected however, there wasn’t a look of amusement or mocking that he was trained in his fighting by her mother. In fact if anything, there was a look of both recognition and respect from the girl.

“Wait for me in the basement, while I see Mr. Phillips and his niece out,” His mother spoke.

Jack got the distinct impression that this was both an instruction to him and a dismissal to the girl and Mr. Phillips. “Sure thing,” he said turning around and heading for the basement where they trained.

*******

Her heart sank when she heard his greetings to Mr. Phillips causing her to turn and look at him. Just like Commander Izora, there were no runes on him. There was no spell masking his true power, he had no great magical abilities. He was, in fact, weaker than her as far as magical abilities went, in fact laughably so. This was the son of King Reigad and Queen Elysia? She found herself questioning mentally steeling herself to fight off the waves of despair threatening to wash over her.

She had immediately picked up on it the moment he looked her way. He was attracted to her. That, however, was the last thing on her mind. What she needed right now, was someone who could help them in the fight against Sydrar. Given the complete absence of magical power that she could feel coming from him, this most definitely wasn’t that person. He was physically impressive, there was no denying that, but without someone with powerful enough magic to contend with Sydrar, it was pointless. Had she had any other option, any at all, she probably would have gotten up and left without another word.

She was, however, woefully short on powerful wizards or witches at the moment. Even more so, on ones that weren’t trying to kiss up to Sydrar and garner favor with him. Worse still, those that were actually willing to stand up to and fight. There was also the fact that it was her masters that had put her onto this mission. She was to find and bring back the son of King Reigad and Queen Elysia. As such, she didn’t get to pick whether she did this or not. She would be dishonoring them if she defied their orders and given that she owed them her life, she would never even dream of doing so.

Whatever plans they had for him, however, they were no doubt contingent on him being as powerful as his parents if not quite a bit more. They would no doubt come to the same conclusion that she had. If this boy was their only hope, then they were doomed. Despite all that she felt on the inside, her outside demeanor showed nothing of it, instead, she gave a neutral, somewhat ‘happy-to-meet-you' kind of expression.

“I’m guessing that car out there is yours?”

It was an odd question that caught her somewhat off guard. It was only now that the odd way that he’d been looking between her and Mr. Phillips came to her attention. She felt a slight sense of dread, considering that commander Izora had strictly forbidden her to use any magic before him. Had she somehow done something obvious enough that even someone unaware of magic could pick up on? She kept her calm replying and even managed to fluster him a bit when she pointed out that he hadn’t even greeted her. When she agreed that the car outside was hers, he gave a generic compliment to it. She could, however, see it in his eyes that she had confirmed something for him.

She got the cue when commander Izora told him to wait in the basement that she was also instructing them to leave. She got up, and with Mr. Phillips walking ahead of her, she walked towards the front door through which she had come. She came to a pause on the porch and turned to regard commander Izora who was right behind her ready to close the door behind her. “Why didn’t you kill me immediately?” she posed. It was an odd question to ask but she had heard of the commander’s reputation. If she was still alive, it wasn’t out of mercy or hesitation from the commander. There must have been something that made she was hoping to get by keeping her alive.

“Do not mistake the fact that you’re still breathing to mean that I have spared your life,” Came the cold but calm warning. “The option still remains open to me.”

“I know,” she calmly answered knowing that the words were indeed true. “But that still doesn’t answer my question,” She pressed.

Commander Izora silently regarded her for a while before speaking. “If you are here, then that must mean you also have a way back home to our home realm,” she more of asked that stated.

She nodded.

For a second, commander Izora got a faraway look in her eyes before speaking. “Jack has gotten too powerful, he can’t stay in this realm much longer...

*******

Author's Note

Chapter Six up on my Patreon (the link is on my profile). Please consider supporting my work for as little as $2.

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