Chapter Four: I Have a Dream About the Faerie Who Betrayed Me... And Then My Sisters Wake Me Up to Teach One of Them the Basics of Magic: Pearl

"Wendol?"

"Hm?"

"How long have you been in this area?"

He paused and seemed to wonder how he should reply. "I..." He began, but trailed off with a sigh. "...All my life," he confessed. "I... I used to be one of the Sænk'tuori. But we have Warphilia blood in our veins. It's the curse the Faerie Thief brought down on us. We are lovers of battle."

My eyes went wide. "You...!" I gasped, and then wish I still had my wings. "You are one of the rivals of my clan?"

He got up and began backing away. "I left them, I swear! I'm tired of war! I want peace!" His ferret angeli curled around his leg nervously, looking pleadingly at Rita, who stood on her hind legs and glared at him.

I heard a cry and whipped my head around to glare at the Cone flap. I walked to it and brushed it aside impatiently. Chaos and a spear point rewarded my searching blue-green eyes. Chaos and the faerie holding the spear leered tauntingly at me.

"Pearl!" someone called.

I clenched my fists at my sides as Wendol stumbled out. I lifted my head arrogantly with all the pride I could muster as the deadly point hovered at my throat.

"Ah," the Sænk'tuori warrior sneered lightly. "High Faerie Sean Sint'tœxna. Why don't you return home like a good Chirou, hm? Your parents will be delighted to see you, especially with this catch." He tapped my chin lightly with the spear, but I still felt blood trickle down my throat.

"You betrayed me, Loner," I snarled. He looked at me with mocking eyes.

"That I did," he said smoothly. "And all the more foolish you are for buying it."

"Pearl!" the call came again, but from a different voice.

Who'd bother calling for someone on her deathbed?

"Pearl-Shæna! Wake up before you kick the rest of us to death!" Amber's voice commanded. My eyes snapped open. I bolted upright, my hands flying to my throat; a strangled sound escaped.

I looked up at my sister, shaking.

Amber met my gaze and nodded, knowing—or maybe just guessing—what I'd dreamed.

"You don't understand," I rasped, my voice half-annoyed, half-sleepy. The Chirou and my other sister glanced at each other, puzzled. Amber merely smiled and flicked my forehead. A bubble of sound popped against my ear, saying, "You think I don't? How do you think I felt after the attack? How do you think I felt when I couldn't find him? How do you think I felt after you took the clan and left? How do you think?"

"Ow!" I protested, rubbing my forehead.

"Get up, it's a new day," she retorted, "and we need to teach Crys some magic."

(}|{)

"So what do I learn first?" Crystal asked.

I glanced at Amber, who looked at a loss, for the first and what would probably be the last time.

"I dunno," she muttered. "It's kind of like math, the basics are so basic you don't know where to begin."

"All I need to know is how to change forms, right?" Crys put in logically.

"Well... I guess," I replied, still not completely sure. "But I haven't had to think about Chyfting for a really long time, so... um..."

"Chyfting is like adding one plus one. Or, more accurately, one hundred plus one hundred. It's a bit more complicated, but we still don't have to think about it."

"Then what's one plus one?"

We glanced at each other. "Er... I guess... using your skill?" Amber murmured. I shrugged and started giggling.

"What?" Amber demanded.

"I don't know, but something about this is funny," I gasped, trying (and failing) to stop laughing.

Amber snapped her fingers at her side, repeatedly, impatient. "We could start with physical exertion," she muttered to herself.

"Physical wha?" I parroted.

"Physical exertion. Make her spar with you or Sky or something. She needs to be able to hold her own for a while."

"Spar?"

Amber laughed. "Mock-fight."

"Sure..." I muttered. The ten-plus æzha I had spent away from Amber had apparently had a very large effect on my now limited vocabulary. After all, Amber was the walking talking dictionary that taught everyone around her, even Mom and Dad, new words.

"Then we'll start sharpening her senses: I wouldn't be surprised if she's got below average senses, since she was raised as a human," Amber continued to herself. Crystal was fuming behind her: I could almost see smoke coming from her ears. "Sorry, Crys," she added, sensing Crystal's anger[1]. "And after that... we can extend the Sœlïnku with Spark... and then we can Chyft. Chyfting needs a strong connection between faerie, angeli, and the seven senses."

"Seven? I thought there were only five," Crystal wondered.

"Humans think there're only five. Faeries believe in seven: hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste, logic, and intuition. The last we consider most important of all. I think some humans call intuition the sixth sense, but that's beside the point," Skyler explained, somehow perched on Crystal's shoulder in his saker falcon sky-chyf[2]. I blinked at him in surprise: he wasn't there when we started.

"So, sparring first?" he asked, fluffing his wings and flapping clumsily to the ground to chyft back into a faerie under the bundle of clothes Amber threw over him with a practiced accuracy. "I can start!"

"Yeah, you do that, and I'll see if I can find any textbooks from the old Complex [3]," Amber yawned, and trotted off to where the wreckage of the old faerie learning place. "You stay there," she added to me, "and watch Sky and Crys."

"They need watching?" I grumbled to myself, but slumped against the nearby stone wall of some old burned building that Amby hadn't bothered restoring and watched the two faeries fight anyways.

My first thought was that Crystal was surprisingly good at fighting. My second thought was that the Chirou was obviously going easy on her. My third thought was that the Chirou was extremely skilled with pretending that his opponent's hits actually landed. Then Amber came back, her arms full of a huge variety of books that she dumped at my feet before plopping down and trying to sort them.

"Lex 4... 3... 7... 2... another 3... 10... now that I think about it, I should finish studying...." she muttered. She glanced from the pile of books to the one in her hands, a 0-lex Chirr's Guide to Beginning Magic [4], and flipped the paperback book open to a chapter I saw was titled, "Introduction: The Faerie's Angeli." Amber could always absorb herself into any book, no matter how simple, although she'd once told me a long time ago that she would automatically rephrase the sentences into "more complex stories and plots."

As hard as I tried to keep up with Amber's pace of reading, it just wasn't possible, especially since I was reading upside-down. I did manage to start the first paragraph, which was a quote from some old faerie professor of some long age ago: "Thy Ænjeri's Purpose is to keep its Færyi alive, e'en whence its Færyi's spirit has left thy original Færyi body. Such was discovered by thy once-majykal beings now knownst as Human, whom had committed a Forbid'n act cursed by the Færyi Thief...." The rest of the chapter, I guessed, was devoted to explaining that weird quote and the thoughts of other old dead faeries like the one that was quoted.

"Just by the way, it's a preface you're reading, not the actual teaching material," Amber commented absently, flipping the page before I could even finish the rest of the quote, which ended less than a quarter of the way down the page in a larger size than the rest of the tiny text. "And this is a Plexer's Edition." [3]

"Sure, I'll just go back to watching the Chirou play with Crystal." And I did. Amber glanced at them.

"When d'you think she'll notice that her blows aren't reaching?" Amber wondered dryly, returning to the book with an absent-minded spin of her fan.

I shrugged. "When she figures out that the Chirou's not getting bruised even though she's 'hitting' him a lot."

Amber sighed and flicked the pages to the actual "teaching material," as Amber had called it.

"Fudge it, this isn't gonna help us teach Crys magic," she grumbled suddenly, snapping the book shut and placing it by the thick, single 10-lex textbook. "Wish you coulda at least brought Shui back safe, he taught me everything complex didn't. But then again...." She paused and seemed to think something over.

"Then again?" I asked, still watching the two Chirr play.[4]

"It's nothing," she dismissed, reaching for another textbook and placing it on a stack already four books high. "Let's just hope we can teach Crys properly."

By the time she'd finished sorting the textbooks, which was about twenty minutes later, Crystal and the Chirou were still at it, though while Crystal was sweating a ton, the Chirou had moved barely two steps since the beginning of the fight and therefore was still breathing normally. I saw a spark of shock in Crystal's eyes.

"Amby~" I grinned, "I think Crystal-imæ figured it out."[5]

"Y'know, for once you're right," Amber murmured, adding, "And don't call me that."

"I don't get it. You know I'll always call you Amber, so why don't you give up trying to get me to?"

"Habit. Oh look, they're stopping."

She was right. Crystal had flopped onto the ground in exhaustion; the Chirou helped her up and slung her arm over his shoulder to carry her back to where we were. He managed it easily.

I blinked lazily and realized that I didn't know his name. "Oh, by the way, what's your name?"

He stumbled in shock, and Crystal lost her balance. Amber blew a puff of air at them, keeping their feet on the ground so that the Chirou, at least, could stay standing.

"He's Skyler. His angeli is Cirrus, who we normally call Shiro," Amber said, looking at me with a weak impression of her Eye that still made me shiver and glance away uncomfortably.[6]

"Skyler, Shiro, Cirrus, Chirou, got it," I said in a rush, hoping she'd stop glaring at me like that.

She glared at me for a few seconds longer, and then turned her attention to the Chirou.

"How did it go?"

"For starters, Crystal only noticed about two minutes before we stopped that she wasn't actually hitting me. I'm honestly surprised she noticed at all, since most faeries I've been put up against in complex had no idea that they kept missing," Skyler said, carefully setting Crystal down against the wall I was leaning against (I scooted away for reasons best known to yours truly). "She also lasted pretty long—longer than I expected. I think she took human martial arts, but that's nothing compared to the original art. We could start with endurance training."

"That works," Amber grinned. "C'mon, Crys, I wanna see how long you can run."

Crystal grumbled and picked herself up from the ground with some difficulty, clawing at the wall. Her angeli slunk out from a nearby shack and rubbed her whiskers against Crystal's skirt. "Can I get something else to wear?" she muttered, plucking at the skirt. Amber handed her a mirror wordlessly, and Crystal traced the grooves carved in the frame absently. I edged away nervously. The last time I'd been around Crystal and her mirror, I'd gotten my skin darkened and I'd been burning up for days on end. Not literally, but all the same, it gave me a week's worth of discomfort, and it didn't help that Crystal had scared me to basement L and back. Good thing I like swimming, it helped a lot....

"Denim shorts," I heard her mutter. Skyler hurriedly turned around. "Not that short. A little longer. And a backless shirt."

"Try black," Amber suggested quietly. "Best color for thieves."

Crystal shrugged and said, "Black, then. And I said backless, not front-less. No, not the pants, the shirt." She sighed. "What happened to my other mirror? It read me like a book."

Amber thought for a moment. "Hm. I think its still in the castle.[7]"

Spark sighed. "What do I do? I don't want to just sit around waiting."

Shiro came out of a nearby building through a tiny hole in the wreckage. "You could come on a tour with me. We've been here for about twenty æzha, and I still don't know every little hole I can fit into."

Spark leaped forward eagerly and followed the tiger-angeli into the ruins.

I wondered how long it'd take for Crystal to learn, but then I started dozing again.

"DON'T YOU DARE GO BACK TO SLEEP ON US, PEARL-SHÆNA!"

End Notes:

[1] ...sensing Crystal's anger. —I had to stop myself from putting chagrin instead of anger, since it's Pearl talking. Now, if it Amber were speaking, you bet she woulda said chagrin... her (and my) vocabulary's huge like that ^.^"

[2] sky-chyf —chyfting is changing forms, and on that logic, chyf is the actual name for it.

[3] Complex / Plexer's Edition —As I (should have) explained back in chapter two, a Complex is a faerie school, so there are other words that come from the word, for example, complexity (grade level, or lex for short) and plexer (teacher).

[4] Chirr's Guide to Beginning Magic / Chirr —I've mentioned that Chirou is Færese for "young male faerie", and I'm pretty sure I also said that Chiræ is Færese for "young female faerie". On that note, Chirr is simply "young faerie", translating Chirr's Guide to Beginning Magic into Children's Guide to Beginning Magic.

[5] Crystal-imæ —imæ is a Færese honorific for little sister (like hyrie is for High Faerie); imœ is little brother; inæ is big sister; inœ is big brother. In these cases, æ and œ are pronouced differently for each honorific, as are the i's; thus, imæ, imœ, inæ, and inœ are respectively pronounced eye-muh, eye-moh, ee-nay, and ee-naw)

[6] ... looking... with... her Eye.... —I mentioned in Chapter 2 that Amber's Evil Eye wasn't actually linked to magic, but just like an intensified, more disturbing version of a glare... didn't I? I think I did, but just as a reminder (since I really doubt you people go back to reread), here the explanation is again.

[7] "Hm. I think [Crystal's mirror is] still in the castle." --I am fully aware that Crys used her mirror last chapter to get the lot back to Haven, but I think I'm going to change that to someone ('m not sure who ~O) successfully Warping them to the land-entrance. (CHANGED)

Sera: phew! finally! i had a hard time figuring out what to teach crys.... =_=

Lily: ...hasn't this been done for a while?

Sera: um, yeah, but i've been trying to keep the chapter lengths to at least three or four thousand words... and this one's only about 2,500 (UBER FAIL DX)

Lily: O_o i dun think i've heard you say that before.

Sera: well, you've heard it now

Lily: review, pplz!

Sera: yeah that! and if ya don't, i'll set crys loose on ya!

Crystal: and make me do what, exactly?

Sera: o-or i'll just get amber to blow them away... meep! -hides behind lily-

Lily: whuzzamatter?

Sera: well... you remember how crys used to experiment with her mirror on me...?

Lily: ah. right. whatev. review, peeps!

EDITED 04-21-09, 08:24PM