.
We didn’t want to alert any Berado observers to the fact that we had left, so Dilorè enjoyed a ride in my arms again on the return to Lisrau Mining Town. Fortunately, the rain had ended by the time we departed. Not that rain can impede fairies, but it does make the flying less pleasant.
I was flying back to Lisrau Castle Town first, and then up Lisrau Valley to the Mining Town only because flying directly would be a pain. A monolithic bulge called the Giant’s Fortress, forty five miles north to south and twenty five miles east to west, sits between the Amaga valley and the Lisrau valley. The Great Trading Route of the Tabad runs from Lisrau Mining Town in the upper reaches of the Lisrau valley southward, down into Berado territory on the eastern slope of the Giant’s fortress. Lisrau Castle Town guards the pass for the ‘Western Route’ that passes through what used to be Gado tribal lands and no-man’s-lands and now belongs to the Berado, between Lisrau and Amaga territory on the western slope of the Giant’s Fortress.
Those two routes already run at altitudes above two thousand paces, and they are the paths around the mountain. The Giant’s Fortress itself rises like the shell of a titanic Galápagos tortoise to an altitude four thousand paces higher than those paths, rivaling the Great Wall that lies to its west. I can fly higher, but it’s bothersome and tiring to climb to that altitude. I would rather just fly around it.
My cousin only allowed me to get away with pretending nothing had happened until we turned at Mt. Alul and began following the Great Wall northward. That’s when she nuzzled my ear and whispered, “So, Your Highness, if you finally lost it, does that make you fair game now?”
With my cheeks coloring, I warned her, “I could just drop you right here, you know?”
“I’ve got a pretty good grip on you,” she answered without batting an eyelash, and then kissed my cheek. “And we’re easily high enough for me to grow my wings in time. You need a better threat.”
I rolled my eyes. “I probably need to talk to you about this, I guess. Technically, I haven’t lost anything.”
“My nose says you two definitely did something.”
“You’ve got quite a nose there, My Lady.”
She nuzzled my ear again. “It’s particularly attuned to certain fragrances. I’ve trained quite diligently.”
“Please train more practical skills.”
“What’s practical depends upon one’s point of view,” she declared primly.
I sighed, then got back on topic. “I’m hoping we did enough. She wasn’t eager to… fully lose her maidenhood either.”
“I wasn’t aware that there are degrees to this matter, Your Highness,” she said, her chest jiggling with suppressed laughter. “Mortals are more complex than I realized.”
My cheeks growing warm again as I realized I was going to have to get more graphic– at least ‘more graphic’ from my Tiana perspective– so I explained, “We cuddled, we kissed, we… caressed. But the most erotic act we performed upon each other was… kissing each others’ bosoms.”
I think the old Tiana would have killed herself before admitting to this much. I had made considerable progress overcoming her reticence on these matters. I hadn’t made it as far as Robert’s level of comfort, but this was growth, darn it.
She frowned, and I thought she was about to insist we turn around and fly back so I could do it properly, so I hurried to say, “It was her choice. She touched herself while in my embrace, and she did it enough to…”
I couldn’t say it, and my ears felt like they were on fire, but Dilorè drily filled in, “The term is ‘climax’.”
Looking away, I confirmed, “… yeah.”
Did that count? It didn’t count, right?
She giggled. “How terrible! While you were holding her, you wanton hussy!”
“I’ll drop you…” I warned.
She put a hand on my cheek and turned my face toward her, then claimed my lips for a brief kiss.
“Your Highness, it’s alright to be the way you are. It makes you fun to tease, but there is nothing wrong with choosing to remain celibate. Rather, it’s somewhat admirable that you cleave so well to your convictions.”
Then she raised and wagged an imperious finger. “But there is something wrong with killing yourself with guilt over something so minor.”
I looked away, frowning. “Can you not just kiss me out of the blue like that?”
“But I like how your lips taste,” she said, innocently. “I’ll bet Sidis does, too.”
She shook her head, then observed, “It’s possibly enough to complete the charm process and release her, if it felt to her that it was something you two did together. Psychologically, it would have been far better for her if you two had allowed yourselves to give care to each other’s needs properly.”
My frown stayed. This woman just didn’t understand what was bothering me. That girl hadn’t been in that state on her own volition. I had twisted her mind with fairy powers that I could now see were the same as the vampire powers I worked so hard to avoid using except for the absolute minimum that my survival required.
She looked back into my eyes, and stated, “I cannot honestly say whether you have done enough to cure her or not. Although, if you did not cure her, you at least put her in a better state to recover naturally. We’ll be checking up on her, anyhow.”
“It’s good I left the talking stone with her,” I mused. “I’ll get the mate back from Allia when we get there. I wonder what sort of range it has, though?”
“Probably unlimited,” Dilorè judged. “You hadn’t noticed? It uses a light-magic spirit stone for the connection. The wind magic is only to relay the sound.”
I jolted slightly. “It’s a second-level magic tool?”
She nodded. “And that’s a real Light element spirit-stone at its core. Not one of their jury-rigged ones.”
I would definitely be bringing it back to her when I went back to check on her in a couple days. That was far too expensive. I wanted to know how that tribe was affording all the tools I was seeing there. I know a mana spring is a metaphoric gold mine, but still…
My cousin had made me feel a bit more confident about Sidis and her prospects for a healthy future, but I still wanted to talk over my concerns with her. I was still thinking over the things she had said earlier.
I asked, “My Lady, earlier you spoke of how my vampire powers could have turned on while I was using [Seduction]… did you realize the real significance of what you were saying?”
She tilted her head. “The real significance?”
“You might not have noticed, but you were saying that vampire and fairy powers are the same powers.”
Her eyebrows bunched. “I’m not sure if I would go that far…”
“Don’t you already know a reason why you should go exactly that far?”
She gave me a sidelong stare. “A ‘reason’. As in actual evidence?”
“Well… it’s evidence for me, but you have at least heard testimony about it.”
Before recently developing an interest in becoming a fairy knight, Dilorè had spent nearly a century traveling with her grandmother Somire, exploring the Eastern Continent in detail. To Somire, it’s a centuries-old obsession with a complex and little-known land that turned her into a sort of field scientist. For Dilorè, I now knew it was probably a search for her daughter. Now that I knew about her daughter, it occurred to me that her career change to become a fairy knight might be an indication she had discovered where that daughter was and planned to go rescue her, or wreak vengeance upon the fairy that stole her away.
But the point here was, she has a very scientific way of looking at things, probably due to that century of investigation. I was careful with my answer, because of it.
“What is this testimony?” she prompted.
I pursed my lips, realizing how much I would have to explain. “You mentioned my ‘remarkable ancestry’ the other day to Allia.”
“Quite. Your father was the first vampire, and your grandmother is a demigoddess. Put another way, your great-grandmother is a goddess.”
I nodded, “I suspected that was the part you knew. Why are you forgetting about the remarkable ancestry that I share with you?”
She blinked. “What we share is the Fairy King for an ancestor. Your grandfather and my great-great-grandfather.”
I sighed. “Go one more generation.”
After a moment of thought, she said, “You’re referring to the Fairy King’s claim, that you are the reincarnated soul of my great-great-great-grandmother.”
For a moment, I was thrown by the sheer number of ‘greats’, until I remembered that Dilorè’s grandmother Somire is my first cousin of equal generation. Dilorè is my first cousin, twice removed.
I am my own great-grandmother, so yes, she had the right number of ‘greats’
“That’s correct. In my first incarnation, I was an elder. I died ten thousand years ago, right at the dawn of the fairy race. At that time, I had lived four thousand years, on a Huade where neither fairies nor vampires existed yet. I was a member of the species that gave birth to both races.”
Dilorè nodded, frowning to herself. “I’ve heard of reincarnation, of course. It’s a common belief among Dorians. And there is anecdotal evidence of people remembering past lives.”
From Senhion, I knew that the reason more people remember past lives here on Huade was that most people here are living their second or later lives. Earth is a ‘seed world’ where almost everyone in the population is living their first life. Huade is farther up the ladder, having mostly multi-lived souls, although not advanced enough for most of them to remember prior lives. Only occasionally do people awaken to prior life memories the way that Talene did.
Dilorè frowned. “But why would you have to wait ten thousand years to reincarnate?”
“No. I had several other lives between. In my life previous to this, I was a normal human in a world completely different from this.”
She shook her head. “Even though mortals are so different from us?”
“I’ve been many different things. I don’t know how many different species I’ve been, since I can’t remember all my lives. But what is important is that I can remember enough of my life as Senhion– your great-great-great-grandmother– to say that she was a member of the most powerful monster race that has ever existed on Huade. Vampire and fairy powers are the same powers, inherited from that monster race.”
She stared at me as if trying to decide whether I had gone mad.
“That’s impossible,” she insisted. “Fairies and vampires aren’t even the same biology…”
I continued, “Your ancestors bonded with their servants using a spiritual connection founded upon vampiric feeding. That’s the reason fairies cause people to become fairy-touched or fairy-charmed. Fairies can’t feed on mortal blood, but as our remnants, you still have the spiritual portion of our ability to bond with mortals and be fed by them.”
She looked down at her hands with a perplexed frown on her face.
“I had heard of Stregas before the King told us about you,” she admitted. “And I’ve heard they needed mortals as servants, although I’ve not heard of it being the same as vampiric bonding.”
“My memories are dim and ten thousand years old, so I didn’t put all this together until you spoke about it earlier. Once I remembered, I could see the truth. The state of being touched and the state of being in blood bondage are both incomplete versions of Elder servanthood, because vampires and fairies are both incomplete Elders. Vampires lack the strong spiritual strength that fairies possess and can only make the blood bond, while fairies lack the ability to feed on servant’s blood to complete the state of servanthood, leaving their victims touched but disconnected. The state of being charmed is identical to both species. The only difference is whether we use it to obtain blood or sex.”
I had an important reason for telling her this. I needed to regain full control over my Elder powers, which meant I needed to master the portion of Elder techniques that I couldn’t remember, but apparently survived among the fairies. So I needed a fairy who didn’t think I was too young to learn about them. I couldn’t wait a century or so for the older fairies to think of me as something other than an infant.
With luck, I could recruit Dilorè into that role. But, for now, I needed to let her mull the idea over for a while. I decided to stop talking and let her do so.
