Welona - Chapter 1

The sky above the treetops was grey, pretty much white in fact. Terri couldn't see much of it between the leaves but every so often the wind swept past and blew a little hole in the canopy that she could see the clouds through. She leaned back against the trunk of the tree she was sitting in and adjusted her thin breeches to cover as much of the ends of her legs as she could. The sun had been be beaming down when she'd chosen her clothes that morning but now, about noon, it was no longer shorts-weather, and hadn't been for a while.

"Terri! You coming in for lunch or are you going hunting?"

The call was a slightly high-pitched young male voice that she'd been wondering when she was going to hear. She clambered down from the tree and jogged back out of the forest.

"I'm coming, Makder." She walked up to him and smiled, adjusting her tunic which had ridden up a bit while she was sitting in the tree. "Too cold to hunt just now. I'll go out for dinner."

"Alright, I'm going to go tell your father. The cook was asking." He nodded at her and his waist creased ever so slightly in a bow. For Makder, of course, that was actually more effort to respect her rank than usual.

"Thanks, Mak," Terri said, but he was already picking up speed on his way back to the castle. She watched his form recede away down the well beaten dirt path that stretched away across the grass of the palace grounds.

She'd covered the two miles from the castle to the forest faster than she ever had before that morning. She drew a stopwatch from her pocket and checked where the little spark of arcane energy had ended up. The inner spark was resting dimly at the top of the dial, but the outer, which counted minutes, hadn't even made it to the quarter-hour mark.

"Freega," she said to it.

The minute-spark dimmed and embedded itself in its place, a purple spot on the fawn stone. She slipped it back into her pocket and made her way at a much more relaxed pace towards the castle. Then the wind picked up again and she groaned as goosebumps rose along her legs. Well, you could never practice too much.

She started a second set of hour-and-minute sparks on the time-keeper and picked up her pace to a jog, getting right into the rhythm of her running by the time she got to the main gate. She puffed a few breaths in and out as the heavily armoured servants opened the gate and bowed as she past.

"Afternoon, Gerel, Yon," she murmured. The guards, as usual, didn't respond, but it was alright. 

They were pretty much under order to act more like enchanted statues than human beings.
She jogged along the courtyard path and repeated the laborious process of waiting for servants to open the main doors for her. By the end of it the sweat was starting to catch the wind and she was starting to feel cold again. She sprinted through the halls and up to her rooms, grabbing some thicker trousers and shoving herself into them.

There was a knock on the door.

"Terriala?" called a much deeper voice than Makder's.

"Yes, Father?" she replied. She tucked her tunic into her trousers and darted over to open the door.

Her father slipped past her into the room. His lithe form just went right past her and was suddenly all the way over at the window on the other side of her bed. Two miles in thirteen minutes was decent, but it was going to take her a long time to match the almost instantaneous movement of her father. To be fair, her father was Berean, the elven King of Tralior.

But she was just as elven as he. She shared his long dark hair, his pale skin, his crystal blue eyes. She was his daughter Why could Makder, her human servant, still outrun her?

The sun, which had ironically decided to show its face now that she was back inside, shone behind her father as he turned round to face her.

"As much as I would have appreciated you taking this opportunity to practice your hunting skills," he began, "I am glad you will be joining us for lunch today."

He stopped talking and started looking her up and down. She grabbed a cloak off the back of a large wooden chair and draped it around herself.

He was still silent so she said, "Makder seemed kind of urgent. He barely said a word before he ran back off here."

Her father nodded. "Good, good. Yes, I wanted to be sure you were coming, so that I could send for your mother from the market."

"Okay... " Terri didn't really know where to go from here. What was going on?

"It is an important day, one's eighteenth birthday," her father remarked. He went silent yet again.

"It is also tomorrow," she said.

"Indeed." He took a step away from the window and Terri was able to see his face in more detail. His brow was furrowed, as usual, but there was a tinge of something other than frustration in his eyes. Was he... sad? He said, "Terri, there is something I have to tell you, something I've been waiting to tell you for the past seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four and a half days. I could tell you now, it is after the strike of noon. But your mother should be here. And Makder too."

"Makder?" Terri's eyebrows shot up. All of this was curious, but what did Makder have to do with anything?

"Yes, this is going to involve him too," he said. He whooshed past her in a blur of dark green robes. She spun round and saw him back in the corridor. "I'll see you both in fifteen minutes, downstairs in the dining hall."

Then he rushed off to the right of the door and up the stairs to his own chambers.

Terri shook her head and sat down in the chair she had taken the cloak from. She slumped down, her head barely reaching halfway up the back. The sun was too bright for her to stare out the window, so she just stared at her feet, her stupid massive clumsy feet that were never going to be able to go as fast as her father's.

After five minutes or so, Makder wandered into her view and stared down at her.

"Uh, you alright, Terri?" He pulled another chair over to sit in front of her and raised one eyebrow.
"I'm fine," she said, "Not excellent, but fine."

He shrugged. "Same."

His hair was also dark, but it was shorter than hers and almost constantly tangled. He was less pale as well, his human blood complexion tending less towards the vampiric look. His eyes were also blue though, if not quite as dazzling as Terri and her family's. She could draw that face in her sleep, having grown up with him, the child of the butler. She wondered if that "same" was him admitting to not being as good a servant as his father.

"You're excellent," she said, "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Same," he said again.

He was staring at the ground beside her chair and Terri wasn't sure whether he meant he also couldn't function without her, or couldn't function without himself...?

"Mak?" She clicked her fingers in front of him.

"What- oh. Sorry." He shook his head. "I guess I'm a bit spaced out too. Just had a very weird conversation with my father."

Terri giggled. "Same."

He tilted his head to the side and raised one eyebrow again.

"Apparently we're getting some big news at lunch," Terri explained.

Mak righted his head and gulped. "Yeah, that's what he was talking to me about. He told me what's about to happen - but I've not to tell you, before you ask. In fact, I probably wasn't even supposed to tell you that... Gods, this is why I'm not excellent."

He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair, getting caught on a tangle and groaning as he tried to straighten it out.

"You can use my comb if you clean it," Terri said.

"Cheers," he muttered, rising from the chair and crossing the room to her dresser. It was made of hard oak, varnished so shiny it was reflective, with a little magical enhancement. She watched Makder stare into it as he hacked away at the tangle. He groaned and muttered to himself but finally his hand yanked away from his head and he took a deep breath, having conquered his hair. He mumbled something to the comb and the hair on it evaporated in a burst of purple energy, a clean activation of an enchantment set on it by Terri’s mother. Then he set it down, wandered back over to her, and thumped down onto the velvet pillows on the chair he'd been using.

"Should we head down?" Terri asked after a momet.

"Probably, yeah," he mumbled, but didn't move.

She sighed and got to her feet, feeling the strain in her legs that she'd forgotton to stretch. "Come on, before I have to order you."

He looked up at her and slitted his eyes. He stood up, his face not far from hers as he continued to glare at her. Then his mouth started to twitch and a chuckle escaped him. He sighed and led the way out the room, down the stairs, along several corridors, and into the dining hall.