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I was still a little salty about the way Sen and the others had been pushing me around. I had a couple sisters back on the plantation, and these seniors reminded me a lot of them.
My sisters were at most only distant blood relations, but they raised me. They had been around puberty when I was a baby, not sufficiently older than me to be ‘mom’ or ‘auntie’, so they became ‘sisters’.
As my guardians of sorts, they looked after me, although I often felt more like they were pushing me around. They even nagged me while I was pregnant. But somehow, no matter how much I resented them, I always knew they wanted the best for me.
I felt the same aggravation now as I had back then, with the senior incarnations all on my back and Sen constantly in my ear, but a thought dawned on me as I sought out Alwain. She couldn’t kill me, nor could anyone else in this world where I existed only as an alien ghost, but she sure could kill a lot of people I was beginning to care about. I had not only Sen’s connections to many of them, from when she was among them as Lady Tiana, but now I had formed connections of my own.
My success in this effort mattered to me. Suddenly, I wasn’t just running an errand for the ‘big sisters’, the older incarnations. I had a need to not let any more people die.
<It’s good that you understand,> Sen agreed. <Although, I think, down inside, you already did.>
<Wasn’t that just your thoughts affecting me?>
<Hard to say,> she admitted. <But I actually don’t think so. You showed some serious game face when you threw yourself into that fight with Lilte. I liked the fire in your eyes at that time. I saw resolve worthy of a royal knight.>
<Couldn’t that have been you as well?>
<No,> she replied bluntly. <I was just along for the ride, sitting in the back seat, having fun taunting fairies. The fire was all you.>
I blushed, remembering the arrogant things she’d made me say, and decided to drop the subject.
During this conversation, I had been drifting casually through the woods in the general region held by Alwain’s group. Yes, I had various senses I could employ, but I had the idea this wasn’t the sort of entity I should peek at using supernatural abilities. I don’t know if this was an idea that leaked across from Sen, or just my own hunch, but I decided to just be an immaterial [Blood Effigy] drifting through the woods, only sensing at a natural distance with the basic perceptions, which weren’t exactly sight, that the effigy gave me.
In that form, I wafted past the ogre couple and a few others of their kind, and a handful of lesser fairy warriors like the one who had attacked earlier. I found an area held by gnome warriors, and a group of human-like beings I suspected might be one of the forest monster species that Tiana had only encountered in books. They reminded me somewhat of the orcs that she had encountered in the past, but they were different, somehow.
Along the way, I passed both magic and monstrous beasts on four hooves or four paws or sometimes more, from a variety of species. Some were probably trained animals, while others were sentient warriors in their own right, but they were of all kinds.
Alwain had forged an army out of a broad range of the Highland denizens. I even encountered a troll at one point. He was just sitting on a boulder, looking surly but not really threatening to do anything. Trolls can be dangerous, but often they are just like this, sitting on rocks, imitating rocks. From Tiana’s knowledge, I knew there were cases of royal knights or adventurers encountering trolls who had moss and grass growing on them from sitting in one place for so long.
Passing by an endless variety of such beings, I was beginning to feel like I had seen Alwain’s entire militia by the time I finally found her.
I’ll admit, I don’t know what I expected. Somehow, in my mind, it seemed like the local fairy queen– I mean, the fairy queens of my old world, not one like Lady Tiana’s step-grandmother– should be regally holding court among the hedges and copses of this dense forest.
She did choose the right place to set up shop. She was conducting her work within a stone circle like the one I had seen last night. This one was of taller stones, about the height of a grown man, and no trees or tall vegetation grew in the enclosed circle. At the center stood a box made of stone slabs, upon which…
Well, in a word, she was blacksmithing. She was hard at work, repairing weapons for her people. Not exactly the job normally done by the general, or a queen of the forest. She wasn’t even vaguely dressed for this work. Or any kind of work, other than being queen. A silvery dress matched her silvery hair, not a raiment like a fairy but heavily mana-infused gossamer thin layers of cloth that swirled and waved with her movements as she hammered away, blowing fire on the metal with her breath like a dragon instead of working over a forge fire.
I had not been able to hear from a distance what should have been the pounding clangor of metal on metal, but as I approached the stone circle I recognized why. Instead of a [Realm of Silence], she was muting the sound of each hammer blow with a mysterious Wind technique. It was probably not a spell, just her Will exerted upon the mana in the air to suppress the noise.
She finished the work and then blew her breath freezing cold, actually quenching the metal with it.
<That’s… I wanted to say that’s impossible, but I guess I can see how she’s doing it.>
<Why impossible?>
<The heat capacity of air isn’t sufficient to quench near-molten steel. You need to use a medium with high specific heat, like water or oil. But I guess she’s pulling it off through heavy manipulation of Wind and Fire mana instead.>
A whole stream of alien knowledge flooded into my mind, about metalworking and forging, that baffled me.
<Weren’t you some kind of storyteller?> I demanded. <And then you were a royal knight. Why would you know all about forging steel?>
<Well, Robert always did have a good understanding of physics, and he was a scholar of literature, not a ‘storyteller’. But I think his grasp of physics and technology came from somehow channeling Daq R’mion, anyway. He had a good grasp of how things worked. Now, hush. We can hear from this distance, so let’s pay attention.>
At Sen’s urging I drifted up to the very edge of the circle. The Lady of the Red Tower had handed the sword she’d just repaired over to its fairy warrior owner and now turned her attention to her next customer.
That one, a sylph-like lesser fairy with eagle’s wings, an amazing mane of white hair and a tunic that seemed to be made out of nothing but beads– fretted as the Lady of the Red Tower inspected her weapon.
“My Lady, are we going to be able to drive them off? They are too strong!”
<Wow,> Sen observed. <I know you’re still just a lesser, but where’s your fairy pride? You won’t evolve if you don’t find your attitude, girl!>
<Considering how many fairy knights she’s been facing today, she isn’t wrong to be scared,> I objected.
Alwain used some different Wind and Fire combination to quickly retouch the edges of the girl’s spearhead. Then she made the keen edges glow with light before re-tempering them with a lighter version of the same quenching technique.
“We face two opposing groups,” she explained, giving the warrior an assuring smile as she handed her spear back. “We only need them to damage each other enough that they both must leave. Our only job is to ensure the damage doesn’t spread further into our territory.”
<So the reason she interfered in the fight was that the fairy knight battles threatened to encroach into land she cared about,> Sen mused. <I had wondered why she didn’t just sit back and watch us kill each other.>
Without any warning, Alwain’s hand rose in my direction and a massive blast of fire flew out at me. I expanded the [Blood Effigy] into a blood mist only just in time to avoid my ‘body’ being disrupted.
“Where are you!” she demanded. “How dare you eavesdrop?”
What tripwire had I triggered? Perhaps it had something to do with the stone circle, since I had drifted right up to its edge. But she clearly had suddenly sensed me despite the non-corporeal state I’d been in. She was facing where I had ‘stood’, her hands spread forward with her fingers curled like talons, Wind dancing in one hand while Fire spun in the other.
My instincts screamed that I wouldn’t last a moment if I reappeared in the same spot in anything that could be taken as a fighting stance. This was a hundred times the danger of facing Lilte. Maybe Durandal could protect me, but I had a feeling that attempting to summon him right now, without my [Qi Sword] materialized, would end in failure. I was pretty sure the method that Fan Li had set up to allow him to reach my location was dependent upon the sword already being active.
If she was going to be this instantly hostile, I couldn’t take any half-measures, and I needed a successful negotiation for the sake of the people behind me. So I gambled on the one plan that seemed like it had a chance of success.
The blood mist had spread out in a wide umbrella above the stone circle, and I was nearing the point that the effigy would fail, so my senses of the area were fading. While I still could, I picked a spot to her right, inside the circle but back far enough to not pose a threat to her. In that place, I materialized in a knight’s kneeling pose, head bowed.
“I come in peace, My Lady!” I declared loudly before she could turn and direct her fiery weapon on me again.
The fireball did not arrive, to my relief.
<You’re getting a bit bold, little girl,> Sen noted with an approving tone. <Well done.>
After a bit, she wondered, “Vampire? No, something different. You’re with those fairies protecting the mortals.”
“I… have something in common with vampires, My Lady,” I admitted. I decided honesty would work the best with this one and stated, “Like them, I am related to the Xa-Ne. I think you are old enough to have heard of them. Perhaps old enough to remember them?”
She did not respond at first. I finally looked up, unable to contain my curiosity. The puzzled frown on her face said that I had at least switched the conversation away from the topic of killing me.
“I do remember the Elders,” she finally stated, flatly. “And I distinctly remember them all dying. And you are certainly not one of them. Are you claiming that you remember them too?”
Well, I couldn’t be one hundred percent honest, so I elected not to explain in full. But I said, “I certainly do remember them, but I’m not claiming to have lived in this world that long, as you have.”
“Are you telling riddles now? Is there a puzzle I have to solve?”
She sounded annoyed, so I rushed forward with my explanation. “The fact is, I am not a living being, My Lady. I am an entity from the distant past who comes here in the service of the Immortals who watch over this world. The same beings whom the Xa-Ne served. You saw me as vampiric because I employ a blood magic technique to manifest in the mortal world. The Xa-Ne also used such magic.”
If she remembered the Elders, then she had lived more than ten thousand years. She would have known far more than the typical modern inhabitants of Huade. If I had guessed right, none of what I had just said would be outside her experience by much.
“For something claiming such august origins, you seem terribly nervous,” she observed with a dry tone. “If you are so amazing, why do you appear to be fearing for your life?”
I shook my head.”Not my life, My Lady. You cannot kill me, because I am not alive. But you can disrupt my technique and drive me out of this world temporarily, which would cause me trouble that I need to avoid. I’m here to protect those people you were fighting, so I ask you to lend me your ear to discuss this situation.”
Her face was a blank mask, a perfect ‘poker face’, I think the expression is. She observed me while giving no hint how she was taking my story.
“What could we discuss? They are not welcome here.”
I don’t know if it came from me or from Sen, but I thought of an angle and jumped on it. “You have made that abundantly clear, My Lady. They already understand it well. But the other group believes they own this territory, while our group considers it to belong to you. Wouldn’t working with us be more beneficial to your people?”
