Syfian - Chapter One

Chapter One:

He stood in the middle of a clearing he wished he never had to see again. He knew every inch of it like the back of his hand, yet kept returning to it, hoping he would find something new.

Three days. It had been three days since there had been any sign that Thea was alive.

And so here he was, back at the beginning.

He’d missed Alys death rites. He’d seen the smoke from where he’d been digging through the muck alongside the path. He’d thought he’d seen a scrap of Thea’s coat, but it had turned out to be a discolored leaf.

He regretted not going, but only a little. He had cared for the girl, loved her as his dear friend, but for the love of all Spirits his sister was still missing and he just didn’t have time.

His eldest sibling, Emilia had come out with him the first few days, but then she’d had to attend to the new guardian ceremony. They were assigning Thea another vincace. They’d hoped whoever it was would be able to sense where she was. Vincace and syf had a strong connection in the first few days after the new partner was linked. He or she might have been able to sense Thea.

Problem was, no one knew who this Syfian was. Aspen Catalpa. Her father had been banished from the Seelie Court many years before, and no one had even known he’d had a daughter.

Needless to say, finding her might turn out to be just as much of a challenge as locating his sister. The Tree of Catalpa had given him a general sense of where she might be when he’d touched the carving of her name. A forest, friendly woods that she called home. A green dress, a forester-in-training uniform. A woman, older, with graying hair and kind blue eyes as she cooked dinner on a wood stove, a young boy clinging to her elbow to try to steal scraps.

None of it was helpful. The forest seemed vaguely familiar, but it could have been any of the ones nearby and it was too much ground to cover.

Fortuna, his twenty-five-year-old sister, was searching the southern edge of the border, in hopes that maybe she’d hear news of a Catalpa family living in the area. Their parents remembered what Jirot, Aspen’s father, looked like and they hoped it would help. If worst came to worst, she could always inquire about pointed ears. It wasn’t the easiest to hide those, in his experience.

He felt himself cross over the barrier like a cup of icy water poured down his back. It was invisible, but if he’d been human, he would be staring at a large expanse of water instead of the same clearing he’d been standing in moments before. It was an enchantment the older generation was devoted to maintaining. Anything not born of the Seelie saw Ogygia as an island of the coast of Italy instead of the peninsula it actually was. And none dared even think of visiting.

He wasn’t really sure where he was going anymore, except that he wanted to be away from that place, the cursed clearing. His heart twinged and spasmed as he walked, the matching heirloom necklace he shared with his sister slapping against his chest with each step as if to punctuate the ache.

Time blurred. He trudged through the forest carelessly, trodding on moss and crackling leaves the same. He barely noticed the light fog that trickled in around him, until it was too dense to be ignored.

The further into human territory he walked, the thicker it became, until he could barely see.

“What in Notum?” he muttered, waving his hand through the mist, only to find it didn’t yield under his slender fingers.

When he could no longer locate the ground under his feet, he paused, carefully constructing a weather spell.

“Libtes nibba,” he muttered, tracing a small circle in the air in front of him with his index finger.

Before he was halfway around the rotation, his hand halted mid-air. He frowned, pushing gently forward, but there was kind of force, opposing magic, likely, that prevented him from continuing his spell.

He couldn’t get a grip on it. It was the strangest thing, a casting he couldn’t counter, couldn’t fight-

A hand shoved him forward and he sprawled to the ground, palms and his left cheek scraping against a rock as he rolled. He was on his feet in an instant, fingers* splayed and ready.

There was a short guttural cry that he instantly recognized as belonging to the Rmior, the Unseelie elves.

He threw up a protective barrier, his pinkie’s glowing white hot as he fought to maintain the it against the magical onslaught. He barely missed being struck by a sleeping curse, and some kind of pain casting ricocheted off what must have been a tree behind him. He couldn’t see, couldn’t figure out where the attacks were coming from, he was blind, lost, he was never getting out ofhere-

There was a scream, inhuman, and long as something died to his right. The pressure against his barrier dimmed and he fed it until it flared back to full strength. Another wail, and the fog began to dissipate, it’s conjurer incapacitated.

A flash of leafy exoskeleton in his peripheral vision gave him just enough warning to avoid the knife that sailed towards his head. He countered with a vine growth casting that bound the creature to the tree it hid behind, seeping away it’s life until it was nothing but an empty shell.

It was complicated and time consuming, not to mention draining, but oh so satisfactory.

When he was done, he let his barrier fall, wiping his hands carefully on his tunic.

He didn’t notice the girl until it was too late and she was standing behind him, her sea gray eyes flashing as she appraised him. Which was strange, because he should have sensed her at the least.

He started, flinching away from her. He might have imagined it, but he thought he spotted a small smile curl up the corner of her pale lips.

When he met her gaze dead on, she was all business, slender arms crossed over her chest, “If you can’t defend yourself, why are you in these woods?”

“If I-” he gave a short laugh, “Look, miss, I can take care of myself. I don’t know what happened back there, but-”

“You couldn’t disarm a simple mind magic,” she raised an eyebrow, “That’s what happened.”

There was a tense silence. She was obviously sizing him up, but when he tried to do the same, he couldn’t get a read on her. Her long blonde hair hung past her shoulders in wild waves, twigs sticking out in the back as if she’d been hiking through the woods for at least a couple hours. Other than that, her forester's gear was the only thing that struck him.

A green dress. He’d seen it before, seen this girl. Was she…?

“May I ask your name?” he tried to keep his tone neutral, “I should know the name of my savior, shouldn’t I?.”

Her eyes darkened, “Wrong question.”

She knew, she knew they were looking for her, how did she know.?

He backpedaled, wondering exactly what had given him away when he realized it was his ears, his stupid pointed ears that had put her on high alert. She must have been told by her father that this day would come, that she would be called for and why did he have to use the vine casting? If she tried to fight, he wasn’t going to last long.

Maybe because he was so focused on her, on this girl who was nothing like he thought she’d be and everything he needed, that he didn’t hear the Rmior falling from the tree above him.

His only warning was her widening eyes and then the creature was raking its claws across his chest. He was too surprised to make a sound, to shout or scream or cry, even though the pain drove him to his knees, stealing the air from his lungs, the strength from his limbs and the light from his gaze.

There was a loud concussion of air, and then the fingers digging into his skin were gone, leaving four deep gashes too close to his neck. Crimson stained what had previously been a pale green shirt, leaving it looking more like a leaf browning in the autumn than a spring bud.

The girl’s expression was twisted and concerned, open and vulnerable, nothing like the cruel mask it had been moments before. She knelt next to him, cradling his head as he tilted sideways.

“It’s alright, you’re okay,” she was mumbling, chanting almost.

He wasn’t okay. He’d failed.

His sister was waiting for him out there, alone and scared. She was waiting, and he couldn’t even muster the energy to keep his eyes open.