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As soon as I finished introducing myself, His Royal Highness jumped up, and his quick movement forward and sideways put himself betwixt me (my effigy) and the princess (our main body) as he drew his sword. From that, we both knew he wasn’t payin’ a lick of attention to her when she told him to stop tryin’ to protect her physically.
But I can’t really blame him. I could feel the faint air current of the room’s draft on my feathers, and smell the luxurious scents of good tea, fine woods and other luxuries in this room piled deep in expensive things. This body had breath and pulse and feelin’ as good as real, even though it was naught but the old scholar woman’s witchery mixed up with the princess’s blood magic. Even the cutlasses on my hips had weight, and I’m sure they looked plenty real to the Prince. He had every reason to be alarmed.
To calm him, I lifted my palms off the pommels and held them out in front of me.
“Hold yer fire, me boy!” I warned. “I’m no enemy!”
“Rod!” the princess protested, “I said not to panic, remember?”
“Who are you?” he demanded, keepin’ his blade at middle guard and his eyes glued to me.
I scratched the back of my head. “I reckon I just told you, Yer Highness.”
“She did, Your Highness,” the princess agreed. “She said her name was Sirth. But more to the point, she’s me.”
His eyes swam just a bit, clouded with a lack of comprehension. With furrows cuttin’ into his forehead, he opened his mouth, but seemed to be havin’ trouble comin’ up with a response.
“It’s like she said, Highness,” I told him with a nod. “I’m her, from a number of lifetimes ago. I wasn’t no princess, but they more-or-less figured me an airship captain in my day.”
Well, I never commanded anythin’ bigger than a pinnace full of refugees, and after the many months and thousands of miles that it took to reach our home port, my disease had advanced to a point where I could never sail again. But folks other than the lot I carried to safety called me ‘captain’ in my wanin’ days, and the king of our homeland awarded me the rank of ‘Air Commander’, so it ain’t a lie.
He lowered his blade, continuin’ to frown at me but no longer primed for a fight. Then he pressed his lips together and observed. “Ti, you are sittin’ in that chair, so how exactly can she be you?”
“Highness,” I answered before the princess could, “What you see in front of you is somethin’ like an illusion. Except it’s an illusion with the illusion of solidity and weight in addition to sight and sound. It’s not a magic you coulda seen before, so it’s understandable if it’s hard to believe.”
“That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, you are clearly a different person than her, and in a different location than her.”
“That’s not right, Your Highness,” the princess answered. “In reality, she’s right here.”
She tapped her skull, her eyes sparklin’. The princess was beginnin’ to have fun with this.
“The fact that she looks like she’s over there is an illusion,” she added. “And that’s how she’s able to fly out to the Oserian Highlands while I stay right here.”
“If this is some puppet that you’re operating, then why have her look like someone else?” he asked, now just soundin’ perplexed. “Why not just look like yourself?”
The princess gave a huff of frustration. “If I was capable of that, then I would do it, Your Highness. That’s exactly what I would have done if I were still Senhion. She sent out proxies of herself all the time. I do not yet have the skill to divide my own awareness into two.”
“The thing is,” I continued, pickin’ up the job of explainin’ from her, “I ain’t no puppet, Highness. I’m a previous version of her. Like she says, she can’t pay attention to more than one place yet, so she has to let herself from her previous lifetime use part of her spirit. Rather than operatin’ this effigy herself, she’s havin’ me do it for her.”
He frowned, then shook his head. He didn’t get it.
“It’s what I told you before. I’m a previous incarnation of her. They tell me I died seventeen centuries ago. The princess is me, so she has all my memories. When she needs my help, she lets those memories come awake, and it’s like I’m alive again.”
I stepped closer to him, puttin’ a hand o’ caution lightly on his sword arm while the fingers of my other hand reached up to rest on his cheek. With a grin, I told him, “Since I’m actually her, I calculate that means I’m yer fiancée, too. Protectin’ you is my job, so you don’t need this sword to protect yerself from me.”
“Sirth!” the princess protested, with a giggle bubblin’ in her voice.
I’m in my prime in this effigy, before my health crumbled due to sickness, in my mid-twenties by the way this world calculates. I’m a bit taller than the princess, but still shorter than the prince, so at this range he was gettin’ a clear peek down the top of my corset in order to look down at me. I’m confident and sexy and a bit more woman than a boy His Highness’s age is normally ready to handle. Although I’ll credit him with bearin’ up pretty well, he clearly didn’t know what to do with the creature who had suddenly broken through his defenses. I had him completely off-guard. His eyes were swimmin’ again.
The princess’s giggle started up within me as well. I didn’t need to mess with him this much, so I turned my back to him and sashayed away, on a course for the double doors out to the balcony.
I paused before openin’ them and looked over my shoulder. “Princess, I’m only in charge of this effigy when you can’t operate it directly. I might not be able to deal with what’s out there. You need to be ready to take over in that case.”
“I know,” she nodded. “I’ll stay where I can take a nap immediately, if it’s needed.”
I addressed my next words to the other me, still aware and waitin’ on us in the back.
And I’m definitely not ready to fly without an airship. This is where you take over, right?
– Yes. It seems the need for an unreasonably violent woman came sooner than this scholar expected.
You wanna go, old lady?
– Perhaps it might be appropriate to enjoy a spar sometime, but now is not the time.
Right after she spoke, I felt the effigy dissolve into a flock of sparrows, which was a truly bizarre sensation. It felt just like suddenly pourin’ upward like a waterfall in reverse. And I knew she wasn’t actually takin’ the effigy over, just workin’ her witchcraft from outside while leavin’ me connected to it.
As the flock fluttered upward, she made a mild observation, like she was just discussin’ the weather.
– Just like Her Highness, you too could do these things for yourself simply by allowing yourself to expand fully into the spiritual vessel, rather than calling upon this scholar’s aid. With your expanded mentality and this humble one’s memories, you should be able to do this much.
Just like the princess, I don’t feel comfortable with the idea. I’ve grown into more of the vessel before, in order to communicate with my spirit friends from a longer distance, and I don’t much like it. The more your mind expands, the more memories and ideas of other incarnations start mixin’ in. I suppose it could be said, the farther I went, the less I was Sirth and the more I became Little Sen.
But Fan Li already knew why we object to it, of course. What I wanted to know from her was…
Why do you keep bringin’ that up, wantin’ us to do for ourselves? Do you not want to help?
– This small one lived a millennium and a half. Her Highness has barely begun her life, and although you lived longer than she has, you too were cut down long before your time. It can only be an excess of greed, to wish to live more when such younglings have lived so little. Every second I am awake feels like a second I have stolen from you children.
That’s a barrel of bilgewater, old lady. Those seconds belong to the princess, so it’s her decision who should spend them.
– It’s difficult for someone who already lived the full measure of her lifetime to see things that way. Your youthful philosophy doesn’t fit this ancient one’s emotions.
And who you callin’ a ‘youngling’? You yourself said I lived long enough to know my kid was expectin’ my grandkid!
– A woman who had not even reached forty in this world’s years when she died was no grandmother in her soul. In this small one’s view, you were still young. It’s time to switch to faster travel. Brace yourself.
I didn’t exactly have a body at that moment, since my current situation as a vague awareness of bein’ a flock o’ birds was more like havin’ a flying dream than reality. I wasn’t sure how exactly to ‘brace myself’. But then the birds dissolved into a mass of condensed blood and I knew why she had warned me.
The feelin’ o’ knowin’ where I was became the only sensation I had. Or rather, I had that, and the feelin’ o’ rushin’ along at intensely high speed. I think Fan Li had a sense of what was happening outside, but I became deaf and blind for that time.
We flowed through the sky at what the princess would call ‘supersonic speed’, followin’ the landscape at the height a sparrow might feel comfortable flyin’, about a hundred paces. We weren’t pretending to be sparrows anymore, but for some reason, Fan Li stuck to that height. Since she was usin’ Vampire Cloak on us, we would be invisible to most everyone except perhaps an especially sensitive vampire or fairy.
Of course, especially sensitive fairies were exactly what we could expect to find at our destination. Both Lady Serera and the fairy of the Green Tower. So a few miles away from our destination, the blood suddenly reverted to a flock of sparrows, wingin’ along above the forest canopy like natural birds.
The tower was easily visible in the distance, a partially destroyed structure which had long since lost perhaps forty percent of its original height. What was left was still impressive, standing at the summit of a hill rising out of the treetops.
The birds ascended, suddenly climbin’ to an unusual altitude for a species that wasn’t a bird-of-prey. It’s not that they can’t fly that high, but rather that they don’t like bein’ that far from safety, so it wasn’t impossible for us to ascend on natural flight, just very weird.
Then Fan Li morphed the effigy again, without warnin’, and I suddenly found myself standing on a giant lotus blossom that was floating three hundred paces above the ground, about level with the top of the tower.
“You crazy old witch!” I shouted. “What are you thinkin’, just droppin’ me in the middle of the sky like this!”
– Excellent! Modification of the [Sky Lotus] technique to use mana rather than Wood Qi is an unqualified success!
“You were experimentin’?!” I hollered. “What if it hadn’t worked?!”
– Obviously you would have been transformed back into sparrows. Don’t be so cranky.
“I ain’t cranky, I’m pissed!!”
– This scholar could have tried the modification of [Air Step] using Wind and Earth mana in place of Air Qi.
Somehow, I knew that involved stepping on nothing at all, instead of a lotus blossom. But I didn’t want to express any gratitude that she hadn’t done it, because that would have let her off the hook for the stunt she had pulled instead.
– We have company, so compose yourself.
I looked in the direction she somehow indicated to me, and saw Lady Serera and Lady Dilorè ascending from below. I let loose a final string of about twenty oaths, which had no effect at all upon the old witch, then settled myself down to welcome them.
