The Ten Guardians: Sacrifice©

Chapter Ten: Players on the Board

Izreea let the stone she held in her hand to communicate with Jareth drop against her chest, not bothering to tuck it behind her shirt. It was Jareth’s shirt, actually. She often slept in his shirts when he was away at night, but she wasn’t overly romantic about the concept. She would do it even when he was home on occasion.

“They are baggy and comfortable,” she told herself while subconsciously lifting the neckline to her face while inhaling his scent through her nose.

Izreea was sitting in the attic of their two-story house. She had rushed here when she realized Jareth was calling her with the scrying stone. She had been asleep when he had called, and there was no chance of her running from the loft of the stables to the attic of their two-story house in time, so she had created a portal to step directly into the attic. She didn’t like traveling via portals; they were a risky magic with far too many accidents, but she wanted to see Jareth’s face.

She could have communicated with him in the stable using only the scrying stone around her neck, but she wanted to see him as well, which could only work if she used the scrying pillar in the attic. Using the pillar and stone with such proximity generated enough power to create a visual image of the two communicators. It did have a limited range, but she had another day or two before Jareth was too far away for communication, and with any luck, she would rendezvous with him before then.

Jareth was unaware that she and Jonathan had planned on her coming along on the journey, which is why she had put on a show of missing him when they had left the other day. She had made just the right amount of arguments about coming with him before conceding to his “logical” reasons for her to stay behind.

The truth was all his logic and puffery were an overbearing concern for her safety, which was simply ridiculous. She was a dardwain. As raw as it may make some humans, she was naturally stronger in magic than most of the High Elders. Not to mention that before becoming a diplomat for her people in Dule Van, she was a Night-Stalker. As a Night Stalker, she intentionally hunted twisted ones like revenants and lycanthropes who murdered her people.

Sometimes she thought she missed the hunt. Following trails with her sejuar, her hunting companion, for days or even weeks. The freedom of nature, communing with the earth and trees, letting them guide her as they hunted. The memories of fondness would fade into revulsion as she thought of the victims littering their quarry’s lair. The stench, the blood, and the knowledge that they were most likely still alive when the feeding had begun all came back unbidden.

Then she would remember the madness of revenants they had to fight. Their deformed and broken bodies ranged in power and intelligence, an unknown danger for every hunt. The lycanthropes would transform into your sejuar or even into yourself. As you fought, you would question yourself, question your victim, whether you were killing your sejuar or going mad and killing yourself.

“I’m sorry, Ferin,” she whispered to the air, wiping a tear from her eye.

Izreea mentally shook off the dark thoughts and the regret and looked around the attic. Half of the attic was used for storage, with crates and chests stacked neatly, all organized and cataloged for easy access. She wished she could take credit for that, but like most Elders, Jareth was fastidious about his possessions. She still remembered waking in the middle of the night shortly after they had been married to find him reorganizing the attic to accommodate her contribution to their … “stuff,” as she liked to call it.

The other half of the room held a small workbench for spells requiring physical ingredients. The bench was against one of the vertical walls, and mounted to the wall above it was a doorless cabinet filled with little cubby holes half as wide as a hand and about a hand span deep, all holding containers with powders and small ingredients for enchantment. Enchanting physical items wasn’t common magic, but that is how things like the ethereal necklace came to be. Normal items like necklaces, stones, rings, anything really, could be combined with spells and physical ingredients like metallic dust, powdered roots, or enchanted paint or thread.

The center of the room had a decorative iron pillar. It was black, curved, and looped out of the floor until it was half as tall as a man. The curves of the pillar reminded Izreea of a vine crawling up a pole in a random pattern. There was a large circle around the pillar filled in with a dozen stars and two planets, all white and hollow with just their outlines drawn. The circle, stars, and planets all appeared to be made of chalk, but if you touched any markings, you would find them stuck to the ground as if they were painted there. There was a black stone about the size of a fist at the top of the pillar, nestled between three prongs that held the stone so it appeared to float in the air.

She knew the pattern very well. The magic for its creation was common among her people and a vital communication tool for Night Stalkers on the hunt. She also knew the patterns would rotate when the device in the center was activated. She had no idea why but it was always amazing to watch. It wasn’t as if it glowed or floated or anything like that. The chalk-like markings just crawled in a circle like the movement of the skies.

Izreea realized she was absentmindedly rubbing a piece of straw through her fingers as she thought and knew it must have come from her clothes. She was still covered in straw, sticking out of the folds of her skirt and hair, and somehow a feather or two had found their way down the back of her shirt.

She walked over to a closed access door on the other side of the room, just in front of the tower of “stuff.” The door was flush with the floor, and difficult to see if you did not know what you were looking at. There was a covered latch you could step on to open the door, which would swing up, opening on its own using a wound spring embedded in the floor. It was difficult to close the door due to the spring, but Izreea preferred this to the large folding stair assembly she had seen in other attics.

Izreea squatted by the panel covering the latch and pressed down on the far-left side of it, making the right side flip into the air. She stood up and pressed the latch with her foot to release the spring which would open the door. She tapped the horizontal panel with her foot as it opened, knocking it closed again.

The hole in the floor showed the top of a circular wooden staircase that ran to the bottom floor with a brief landing on the second floor. Izreea walked down the stairs, grabbing a handle on the underside of the attic door as she walked. The handle was to help her pull the door shut against the spring hinge, and although successful, she still had to use her full body weight to close the latch.

She continued to the second-floor landing and found herself in a long hallway with one door on the far-left side against the left wall and one on the far-right end against the right wall. This hallway divided the second floor of their home in half, with the right side containing a spacious sitting area with a large couch and a matching loveseat by a tall fireplace. There were end tables on either side of the couch and a writing desk in front of a large ornate window with a wonderful view of the castle where the school was located. This section of the second floor was a loft overlooking the house’s main entrance, located next to a short flight of stairs that led to the main level by the front entrance.

The left side of the hallway had two large bedrooms separated by a shared bathroom with two entrances. One of the bedrooms belonged to her and Jareth, and the other was for guests but could be converted into a nursery if needed.

“Maybe someday,” she whispered to herself.

Although she did desire a child, and sometimes that desire ached within her, she would not let the subject haunt her and affect her mood day in and day out. What happened would happen, and she could only hope and live. She knew she was possibly deluding herself but shook the moment off.

She stopped to gaze through a massive window in the right wall of the hallway. The window ran the entire length of the hallway and appeared to be divided into two halves at its center, each half showing a different landscape. The right half was the view of someone standing high on a hilltop overlooking a small village next to a large body of water. The sun was beginning to sink over the horizon, and she could see the rippling reflection of its fading celestial body in the waves.

The left half of the window showed a deep greenish-blue color, with the occasional bubble floating past the window. It was always slightly unnerving looking through a pane of glass and seeing nothing but water, but the magic was sound. Because of the fading light from the sinking sun, it was difficult to see the massive underwater city that was her family home. The village above served as a gateway to the city below, as well as a trade center and a guard house.

Izreea could well remember her rotation in the village whenever it was her turn to occupy a trading booth, guard the entrance to the city, or strengthen the magical coral walls that make up the barrier that keeps water out of their city. The jobs were shared by all. Even the queen and king would take turns in simple working clothes, their true roles only recognized by their people.

The window had been a gift from Jareth for their first wedding anniversary, so she could see her home whenever she wanted. She did not believe it was a real window, but it was always easier to be simple with magic than complicated.

Izreea turned from the window and headed to the left towards the bathroom, specifically the bathtub. She knew she would not find the opportunity for a bath for some time after they left tomorrow morning, so she wanted to enjoy a nice long one now.

“Where did my taffies end up?” she absentmindedly said to the air as she opened the door to the bathroom.

She was met with a wall of steam; she was so taken off guard that she inhaled the hot steam deeply, which gave her a fit of coughs. As she coughed, she heard the shrill cry of Jonathan’s bird-like voice, a noise he hated and only made when he was startled.

“Who in the green-eyed heaven walks into a bathroom without knocking!” Jonathan demanded to the air.

Izreea froze in her tracks, disbelief completely numbing her for only a moment before the anger came. “Green-eyes” was a human slang for dardwain, her people. Although she had rarely met anyone in Dule Van who showed true contempt for her as a dardwain, she knew some places in the world where her people were feared, enslaved, or even hated. Izreea often asked her mother why people felt that way for their people, but all she said was, “Bigotry courts stupidity.”

Although completely true, it still did not answer the “why.”

Jareth tried to explain the hatred as well. His perspective was that people exaggerate and twist stories and facts for entertainment, so much so that the original facts are forgotten. This inaccurate information is passed down to ignorant generations who turn it into false truths. These false truths create fear, which inevitably leads to blind hatred.

Although his explanation was eloquent and probably true in some ways, Izreea found more and more reasons to believe her mother. Humans, well, some humans, were just ignorant, stupid buffoons. Regardless, she was not about to believe that Jonathan, an accomplished Elder of the most popular arcane school in the continent and a member of her own family, was that stupid.

There was a reason why the druid in the garden called her “Founder,” more specifically, her people as a whole, but still. Izreea silently shut the door behind her to keep the steam thick inside the washroom, then bent forward until her hands were on the ground. She continued bending forward. She seemed to repeatedly bend and fold over herself, her body twisting and shrinking as she continued to fold. After a moment, fur began to replace her clothing, and the folding and bending seemed to slow as the transformation ended.

The entire process only took a few seconds, but shapeshifting always felt like hours were passing by. When it ended, Izreea was sitting on the ground as a white cat with blazing green eyes. She could have changed the color of her fur or her eyes if she wanted to, but she was trying to make a point.

“Is someone there?” Jonathan asked into the nothingness, sounding much more uncertain than angry now.

Izreea knew Jonathan liked to take steam baths, where the steam would gather on his feathers, and he would use his beak to spread the moisture around, washing his body under his feathers. She wasn’t entirely sure if the steam was healthy for birds, but it never seemed to negatively affect him, so she said nothing. Jonathan never put water in the actual bathtub. He preferred to stand in the bathtub while filling the sink with water and using magic on the water to create steam.

Izreea delicately and silently walked to the back of the bathtub near the wall and placed her front paws on the tub’s rim before slowly raising her eyes until she could barely see over the rim. Through the steam, she saw that Jonathan had returned to cleaning himself with his back facing her. She gently jumped onto the side of the tub before stretching with her paws into the tub as far as she could to prevent the noise of her landing and then dropped in.

She stalked up until she could breathe on his neck and then screamed at the top of her feline lungs, “I’LL SHOW YOU THE GREEN EYE’S HEAVEN!”

Jonathan’s reaction was worth everything! He spun around so fast he lost his balance and fell, squawking and flapping about, all the while making pure animal sounds in his fright. As soon as he saw a cat, he tried to fly out of the tub, but he was covered in water on and under his feathers which weighed him down, making him smack into the side of the tub. He slid to the bottom and whirled in a blind panic, sheer terror oozing from him.

For the briefest moment, as she crouched in the tub, appearing ready to pounce, Izreea thought of something. Jonathan was a bird. Cats probably were a real problem for him. How did he deal with that sort of thing out in the world?

Izreea’s thoughts were interrupted when she realized Jonathan’s panicked bird noises were no longer just noises. Although he breathed like he was having a heart attack, mixed with his bird noises, were words of power. Suddenly Izreea ’s fur was smoking, beginning to catch fire in three separate locations.

She batted at her fur with her paws, burning her paw before realizing how silly it was for a cat to do something like that. Cats would run and burn. She tried dousing the fire with basic magic, but Jonathan’s words of power were quite strong, most likely because of how panicked he was. She needed time to cast the necessary spell to cancel the flames, but the flames were spreading too quickly.

She quickly began transforming back into her normal body, unfolding and changing until she stood in the steaming shower with flames flickering off her pants in two locations and the back of her shirt.

She fell to her knees and turned on the bath’s faucet, not caring where Jonathan had gone, and shoved the burning parts of her clothing under the water, but the flames burned on! The flames moved and flickered with the weight of the water, but they did not go out! The only thing she accomplished was wetting her clothing around the flame, which did seem to stop it from spreading. With panic welling up in her, she stood up, ripped her burning clothes off, and threw them on the tile floor outside the tub.

Standing in her small clothes, she stared at the slow-burning pile of clothing on the floor, rubbing her arms and shivering from the cold water she was covered in. As she stared at the clothing, the fire suddenly winked out, and all of the steam and smoke in the room funneled itself into the bathtub drain in a brief tornado.

As the last wisp disappeared, a towel lifted off the rack on the wall and floated to her. She immediately knew Jonathan was at work and looked around to find him sitting on the edge of the sink with a wing completely covering his head. The towel floated to her in an almost direct line, moving slowly as if by an unseeing hand.

Izreea took the towel out of the air and wrapped it around herself before turning to face Jonathan. He still had a wing over his face, and she cleared her throat once. He cautiously took his wing from his face and did a little hop to turn his body and face her directly. She knew this meant he was embarrassed but most likely still ready to defend himself from any accusations.

She folded her arms over her towel and struck a pose, the one all women seem to have inherited as a mastered art from birth. Soaking wet and in a towel did nothing to dampen the effect. As she glared at him, he continued to hop back and forth as the silence dragged on.

After almost a full minute, he quietly whispered.

“I’m … sorry … I called your people green-eyes. I meant nothing by it. It’s just slang, and it … slipped out,”

Izreea made an exasperated noise.

“Slipped out? You, of all people, should know better! I’m your brother’s wife, and we live in the same house!”

“I know! I know!” Jonathan said loudly, apparently tired of being contrite.

“Then why in the ocean did you say such a hateful-”

“Why do we always say and do stupid things to each other, Izreea? Because we hate this arrangement we have! I hate being a bird, you hate babysitting a bird, we get frustrated, and we fight!” he shouted.

“I am not your babysitter, you ungrateful swine! I have tried for years to help you become a human and welcomed you into our home! I have never asked you to leave or warded the house from your entry, even with your ridiculous and completely unnecessary lightning effect you love throwing about as you appear out of thin air!”

“I like a little showmanship now and th-”

“You caught my hair on fire!” she shouted.

“One-time Izreea!” he shouted back.

“I’m done, Jon. I’m done trying to save someone so self-absorbed they can’t think of anyone but themselves. I was exhausted after maintaining that ethereal spell all night and setting all of those traps. You could have tried picking up the seal on the boy’s time spell to give them more time, but you left. You left, and I had no idea where you had gone, and I was so tired, and I didn’t have a choice!” she sobbed.

Her tears flowed freely as the emotions she had been keeping at bay overwhelmed her.

Arguing was a form of stress release for Jonathan, something that had always been a source of contention for him and his brother in their youth since Jareth was the exact opposite. However, Jonathan now realized that the argument he thought he and Izreea were having was completely different than the one Izreea was trying to have with him, and he was still a little lost as to what she was talking about.

Izreea stood openly weeping into her hands while standing in a towel, soaking wet, shivering, with her clothing lying burnt on the floor. Jonathan opened his mouth and chose his words very carefully.

“Izreea, I realize now that some things happened that I was unaware of. May I ask what you meant about not having a choice?”

Izreea looked at him with her tear-soaked face and emotionally explained.

“The boy’s spell seemed so easy to cast and hold open. I arrogantly decided it would be simple to maintain it and maybe buy them some more time. I picked his infantile seal and took hold of the spell, but Jon … that was the strongest spell I have ever seen! It was so strong … and it was just too much for me. Maybe if I was fully rested, I could have held it open, but I had been using magic all night long, so I was exhausted. I tapped into my mathenetal to hold it open.”

A soft sound of wonderment escaped Jonathan’s beak, and then he sadly sighed as full understanding dawned on him. She had used part of her supply of stored magic to hold open the spell, the same supply that she had been storing for decades to have a baby that, for some reason, wasn’t so easy to create for his brother and his wife.

 Jonathan had gone straight to bed the moment he thought he was no longer needed, not even thinking to check on Izreea to see if she needed any help. He was indeed tired from the night before, but she had been channeling the ethereal spell for hours, so it was understandable that she was more tired than he was.

“I’m sorry, Izreea. I didn’t know you needed help. You are right about me being selfish. I should have asked if you needed help before I left.”

Izreea had regained control of her emotions and was wiping her face as she straightened her back.

“It’s fine, Jon. I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t blame you. I made the decision, and I only used a few months of magic. I’m just a little emotional about the topic, that’s all.

Jonathan didn’t know what to say, and the silence started to become uncomfortable.

“Want a hug?” he said, stretching both wings towards her.

His face had as close to a smile on it as his bird face could make. Izreea laughed through her final tears, a laugh of release. As much as she hated to admit it, crying usually made her feel better afterward.

“Yes, but I don’t want to crush your hollow bird bones, so I’ll settle for a bath instead … and … thank you, Jonathan.”

“No problem, dearest Sister,” he said with a bow.

“Oh, and Jonathan,” Izreea quickly said before he could vanish or fly away. Then without another word, she gave him a look and pointed to her pile of burnt clothing on the floor.

After a few seconds, Jonathan rolled his eyes, an impressive display with bird eyes.

“Oh, alright, I guess I started that one. I’ll fix your clothes,” he said.

“Thank you, Jon. Just the pants, please, the shirt is an old one of Jareth’s, and I doubt he’ll miss it,” she said.

Jonathan nodded once, and he and the burnt pile disappeared. After a moment, there was a single tiny crackle of electricity where he had been standing and where the clothing had been on the floor.

With a laugh and a sad shake of her head, Izreea stopped the drain and started the water running. Then she remembered her taffies were in the dresser of her room and went to grab them to enjoy as she soaked.