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Only moments after I decided to leave the fiend to Aenëe and the Dragonized Mirna, he vanished in a cloud of smoke, disappearing from my fairy vision just like how Trisiagga had exited our first meeting, on the road in Atianus.
Ordinarily, teleportation is not a thing on Huade. There are shadow passage techniques that can mimic it, but those use a process that is easily visible to fairy sight. Portals into a different space, like passage into Sky Ocean, are immortal engineering feats that employ interdimensional techniques outside the scope of Huade’s magic. Literally blinking out of existence just isn’t an available move.
The demon’s sudden disappearance caught both Aenëe and me off-guard, but Mirna reacted without hesitation, plunging her claw into the ground where he had just stood as if it were water.
As she let out a loud roar, a massive wake of Darkness rushed at her from out of the distance. Somehow, her action was dragging something to her, back through that same ‘water’. It arrived, and she rose up on her rear haunches, triumphantly hauling the struggling fiend out of the ground by his neck. Grabbing his shoulder with her other claw, she gave his body a sharp twist…
I felt a moment of terror, fearing a repeat of the explosive result after I suddenly killed that first asura in Ilim Below. But not every demon reinforces their demonic mana with blood magic, since that isn’t the only means they have to convert the mortals they devour into strength, and not every demon who does have a blood core rigs it with a booby trap in case they are killed. Perhaps Mirna prepared some defense in case the fiend exploded, but if so, it turned out she didn’t need it.
The fiend went limp instantly and dangled from her outstretched claw like a rag doll. She cast the corpse back to the ground. As I had done with Trisiagga, Aenëe immediately cremated it. It’s a necessary step with demons, for whom death is not always permanent.
Then the dragonkin looked straight at me, and I heard her voice in spiritual speech.
My Lady Xa-Ne, could you send somebody over with my cloak? If I go over there, I will panic the horses.
I suppressed my reaction to three simultaneous surprises. First, she had just used a spiritual voice. Second, she had just spoken in Ancient Fairy. And third, she had called me Xa-Ne, the Ancient Fairy word for that language. It was originally X’ne, the Elder word for Elder, and she had clearly intended me to hear it with that meaning.
Looking to an Army lieutenant to my left, one of the members of Ged’s protective guard, I asked, “Where is Lieutenant Mirna’s cloak?”
She and the others soon retrieved it, and I carried it across to where the dragonkin stood watching Aenëe roam around the field, cremating other demon corpses. At least half of the aerial demon wave had perished in the effort to screen the fiend’s presence, and their bodies lay scattered across the pacified battleground.
The fight had carried the two a long distance from Ged’s group, so it was a considerable hike, but with the soldiers nervous from the aerial attack, I stayed on foot. When I finally reached Mirna, a Dark mana substance poured out of her chest, spilling onto the ground and soaking into it, then a curtain of darkness rose up to surround us. The view outside dimmed and turned monochrome, not black-and-white but more like sepia tone photography. It was an amazing thing to witness in real life.
People outside can only see a wall of Darkness, Mirna explained. I’ve done this so that I can return to my human form.
The four-pace-tall dragon-like figure began to shrink. Her skin remained reptilian for the first half of her transformation back to womanly form, but I learned why she needed the privacy after that. Her scales began vanishing while she was still condensing, turning almost entirely to human skin while she was still shaped like a beast, and she became fully a nude woman while she was still close to three paces tall, albeit one without much of the chest she had started with.
It was the opposite of her beastification process, when her skin became reptilian before her clothing vanished, and her hair and breasts melted away after she had already begun to assume a draconic form.
She fully returned to her original size, perhaps three inches taller than me, before her breasts finally swelled to pert, nicely-rounded C cups, her hair grew out, spilling to her mid-back and her brows and lashes reformed. The final stage further delayed her from reaching for the cloak in my hands; it appeared that, also unlike when she became a small dragon, returning to human required her to remain still while the process completed.
I smiled, admiring the rather lovely view as I handed the garment over. “It’s a shame you always cover yourself up, Miss Mirna.”
To my surprise, the normally meek woman’s reply was a derisive snort as she drew the cloak across her shoulders. “I’ve lost count of how many fairies have tried to seduce me, My Lady. You can save your breath.”
I grew a slight blush as I realized how she had heard what I had intended simply as an honest compliment. Her face and body really were quite lovely, in the same league as my elven maids. Her skin did have patches of reptilian scales in a few spots, but they were very fortunately not located where a manga artist would have chosen. They decorated her shoulders and her outer thighs, while the artist would have used them to barely cover up naughty spots like those perky tips that had the color of pale roses. I could really imagine sinking my fangs into those…
She gave out a low chuckle as she drew her cloak closed, and I realized I was staring. As I cleared my throat with embarrassment, she nimbly buttoned the top two buttons, then stepped right up to me and whispered into my ear, “I’ll consider it in a few years, but right now you’re still a child by my standards.”
My blush deepened as she stayed pressed against me long enough to give me a kiss on the cheek. The extra three inches gave her proximity a stronger feeling of intimacy.
Today sure was my day for getting embarrassed in public. First a mid-air orgasm, and now this. Thank goodness nobody witnessed those moments other than the ones who caused them.
She finally had mercy on me and backed away, drawing the hood of her cloak over her head. The screen of Darkness fell away.
Trying to deflect a bit of shame, I protested, “You were just a school girl yourself, two months ago!”
She let out another low chuckle. Who was this woman, and where was the shy maiden hidden in her cloak who could barely say three words to me?
“I was playing one in order to guard His Highness the First Prince, My Lady,” she replied as she gestured for me to come along and began walking back toward said prince. “Normally, I stay near the king, but King Owen decided I should protect His Highness Prince Gerald instead. His Majesty keeps a strong fairy by his side, after all.”
I blinked in surprise, since the fact that ‘Lady Sasara’ is actually the fairy Deharè is a secret, but of course, someone of a magic race might have senses like a fairy, and know perfectly well who Mother actually is.
“So, for the record, I am considerably older than I appear,” she concluded.
Magic beings do not age. That’s what makes us ‘non-mortal’. Once we are full-grown, we live with a youthful appearance until something kills us. Mother has to deliberately disguise herself to appear older, because otherwise she barely passes as my slightly older sister. By the time I reach seventeen or eighteen, we should look exactly the same age, as do Serera, Amana, Mára, Feraen, and every other female fairy I’ve ever mentioned. The men look slightly older, perhaps twenty, but other than that, they’re all eternal late teenagers. All the growth a fairy does after that until she’s recognized as an adult is internal growth of intellect, magic and spiritual strength. I’m preempting that thanks to having recovered the maturity of my past lives. Once my body catches up in a year or two, I’ll be in every respect an adult.
So of course, the same standard applies to a magic being like a dragonkin. There was no way for me to judge this woman’s age.
“Then, just how old are you?” I wondered as I walked beside her. “I mean, I thought your race died out before the Ancient Fairy age. Is it possible that you have survived since then?”
“I believed likewise about your race, My Lady Xa-Ne,” she replied with a mischievous twinkle in her voice. “Shall we reveal our secrets to each other?”
“My secret is… really complicated,” I confessed. But then, because I really wanted her to fess up, I confided, “But it involves reincarnation, plus some very special circumstances to my birth. I’m not sure if I should reveal the specifics just yet.”
“But you really are a Xa-Ne?”
“I say ‘Elder’ in Ostish,” I replied. “The Braysians use the Ostish word ‘Strega’ for my kind.”
She just watched me without commenting, waiting for a real answer to her question. She wasn’t going to let me off the hook.
I sighed. “I was an Elder in a previous life. In my current lifetime, I am a fifteen-year-old Fairborn, but I seem to have the same constitution as an Elder. My father was a vampire, so somehow I have inherited both fairy and vampire characteristics, even though only vampire women should be able to give birth to vampires. But both fairies and vampires…”
I caught myself, again unsure of how much ancient knowledge I should be spreading around, but she supplied while nodding, “Both fairies and vampires are the descendants of the Xa-Ne. I know, My Lady.”
I blinked in surprise, then reminded myself that she was already as extreme an anachronism in the modern world as an Elder like me. A slightly more extreme anachronism, technically, since the dragonkin were supposedly wiped out many years before the Elders.
She was silent for a while, then asked, “Is it the work of Heaven? Surely, a hybrid of fairies and vampires who has all the characteristics of a Xa-Ne who just happens to be also the reincarnation of a Xa-Ne cannot be a coincidence.”
My lips twitched, then I said, “I will reserve that information for now, Miss Mirna.”
Then I halted, forcing her to stop as well, because we were starting to get close to the command group. “So what’s your story?”
She quirked her mouth. “I have a lot of questions left. I am pledged to protect the Royal Family, so I will pursue all those answers eventually.”
“I’m a royal knight!” I protested.
“As am I,” she replied with a wry smirk. “And I am many centuries your senior, little girl.”
I pressed my lips together, then protested, “I feel as though I’ve answered as much as you need to know for the moment.”
“Then just answer me this, my pretty little Xa-Ne,” she said, although she did so while nodding in apparent agreement. “I happen to know that an Elder’s masters dwell beyond this world. Can I trust that those masters mean my liege well? Is it Heaven’s blessing or Heaven’s disfavor that you are near him?”
Her tone had suddenly taken on a very deadly edge. This woman, charged with Ged’s protection, was considering whether she should eliminate me. I pursed my lips, thinking carefully about how to answer.
